Placement On Sight & Sound Top 50 Movies List: #28
SPOILERS AHEAD
Well, if anyone thought Blue Velvet, with its plot that hinges on a human ear in a field and Dennis Hopper's crazed baddie, was too weird, Mulholland Drive is not gonna be the movie for you. I would have really loved to see this movie in its theatrical release, as I'm pretty sure audiences would have been left bamboozled at best and likely asking movie theater attendees for their money back in an angry fashion. Me? My main reaction once Mulholland Drive was one of being impressed by what an absorbing experience David Lynch had concocted, even if I needed to do a little reading up on Wikipedia afterwards to fully figure out what was going on in this movies final scene.
Mulholland Drive starts out by exploring the two extremely different worlds of two equally different people. Betty Elms (Naomi Watts) is an aspiring actor who's just arrived to Los Angeles to stay at her Aunt's house and is fully entranced by the possibilities offered up by this new home of hers. By contrast, Rita (Laura Elena Harring) is a woman whose just been involved in an automobile accident and now has no memory of what happened to her or how she could have gotten in such a predicament. She takes up shelter in Betty's aunt's house just before Betty arrives and it isn't long before the hopeful actor-to-be discovers this stranger residing in her Aunt's home.
Betty, it's pretty clear, is an optimistic and kind-hearted individual with not a cruel bone in her body and is all too eager to help out her newfound pal. The two do some sleuthing to figure out her identity while the movie takes various detours into other plotlines that allow David Lynch to reinforce certain themes or even just play out types of atmosphere and tones. There's an elastic quality to Mulholland Drive's narrative that doesn't adhere to conventional narrative structures in the slightest. This a feature film that zings all around with little to no connective tissue to bridge the disparate plot elements. Instead of coming off as scattered though, Mulholland Drive instead comes off as constantly transfixing and unpredictable in all the right ways.
I'd compare watching Mulholland Drive to getting into a pool filled with cold water; at first, it's more than a little disorienting as your body and mind adjust to circumstances that are far from the norm but it isn't long before you not just adjust to these unusual surroundings but become engrossed in them and never want to leave. There is a method to the seeming madness of Mulholland Drive, one that becomes clear once one does reading into the various interpretations the film has taken on. What's great though is the film still works plenty well on its own terms even without knowing those academic elucidations. The individual scenes of bizarreness are so riveting and unique in their own right thanks to the utter level of commitment David Lynch pours into such gonzo material on a writing and visual level.
There's this scene early on of two detectives in a breakfast diner that shows the level of camerawork craftsmanship one can expect (and gets) from the rest of Mulholland Drive. These two detectives talk about a nightmare one of the two men has had recently involving the both of them interacting in this same eating establishment and then, appearing from out of the blue comes some kind of horrifying figure. There's this uneasy but subdued sense of tension in the scene just from the dialogue of the on-edge detective alone and since the unpredictable nature of the movie has already been established up to that point, one never knows what might just appear in the frame next. Keeping the viewer on their toes is something David Lynch accomplishes with incredibly regularity throughout Mulholland Drive by way of having only brief glimpses of madness enter this more mundane world. But those glimpses, no matter how brief, are enough to get one on edge.
Amidst all this craziness is a legitimately sweet and well-crafted relationship between Betty and Rita, one that blossoms from helpful friendship to one of a more sexual and romantic nature in short order due to the immediate eclectic connection the duo share. In a movie that is full of anger, hate and fear, these two's relationship serves as this quietly uplifting anomaly in the world of Mulholland Drive. A woman in need of help to recover her past and a woman whose a stranger in her new home meet by random chance and manage to work hard and help each other out. Both Naomi Watts and Laura Ellen Harding are so excellent at portraying these two and their individual contrasting demeanors that compliment the other so well, it really makes the relationship between the two lead characters seem like one of those things that must be too good to be true.
Which, turns out, it is.
The final twenty minutes or so of Mulholland Drive reveal that all that has transpired before now has merely been fiction. There is no Betty, but there is Diane Selwyn (also played by Naomi Watts) whose in a relationship with Rita that's on the rocks. Turns out Rita is the lead in a movie Adam Kesher (Justin Theroux) is directing and Rita and Adam are carrying out an affair. Other supporting characters in the movie (like Coco, Betty's landlord who is really Adam's mother) show up here further revealing the level of duplicity in everything one has seen before. While I was distracted by trying to figure out if Diane was also being played by Naomi Watts, it's a bold narrative decision. This isn't just a reveal that "it was a dream all along" but rather an undercutting of the one element of joy in this movie's entire world.
What seemed like a euphoric relationship that provided a sharp contrast to the more deceitful characters is merely fiction. While David Lynch has refused to talk explicitly about the meaning behind the various avant-garde and stylized tendencies that comprise the majority of Mulholland Drive, the actors in the film have freely talked about their own interpretations of various plot elements of the motion picture and I'm personally totally onboard with Naomi Watts reading of this section of the film, which is that the Betty and Rita fantasy was something conjured up by Diane as an idealized vision of her world, one where she and Rita love each other and she can be a savior-like figure to a girlfriend that is now in the process of abandoning her.
This concept also adds further layers to already engrossing stylized sequences seen earlier in the movie, like recurring segments focusing on the endless hardships of Adam Kesher that consist of him losing his job, his wife and his power as a filmmaker, none of which involve Betty or Rita in any way shape or form. These individual scenes are already interesting on their own (especially a nighttime rendezvous with a guy named The Cowboy, who is totally bad news if you see him twice after their initial conversation), but they garner new depth when you apply the idea that this is all Diane's sick fantasy wherein she can exact revenge on the man who stole her girlfriend away by putting him through endless ridicule and torment.
Again, since David Lynch refuses to speak on the movie proper, we'll never know if this is exactly what's supposed to be occurring in Mulholland Drive but it speaks to the power of this movie that its abstract imagery and esoteric story structure that its individual scenes and pieces can work so well on their own merits while also inspiring such a wide degree of interpretation that could easily fit into the film proper. I'm sure I'll be thinking about various way to interpret Mulholland Drive for ages to come now and I'll certainly be contemplating the endless amount of positive aspects found in such a beautifully distinctive movie like Mulholland Drive which is one of those motion pictures as bold in its storytelling as it is thoroughly riveting.
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