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Mulholland Drive****

Not long ago, The New York Film Critics named Mulholland Drive the best film of the year, and it certainly is the best American film I've seen so far this year. David Lynch has often struck me in his earlier films like Blue Velvet or Wild at Heart as a highly talented, but also as a highly problematic, at times even maddening director. Blue Velvet had brilliant moments, but it resembled Buñuel for adolescents with its hero hiding in the closet like a voyeuristic boy scout and spying on what the big bad grownups were doing. Wild at Heart, which forcibly dragged the machinery of The Wizard of Oz into a story about a guy and girl on the lam, seemed to me disastrous.

But Mulholland Drive is a real masterpiece. Although Lynch in the past has often shown a fondness for setting his pictures in "typical" small American towns--towns that often make Winesburg, Ohio look like Gopher Prairie--his most recent work takes place in Los Angeles, whose environs seem far more suited to his peculiar Weltanschauung than Lumberton. It is not only that Los Angeles is the center of a whole industry based up the manufacturing and marketing of illusion, but as numerous writers have observed by now, illusionism is basic to the city, as if it were the abandoned set for some movie that never got made.

The film has a plot that nearly defies summary. At the beginning, a young woman (Laura Harring) runs from the scene of an auto accident on Mulholland Drive overlooking Hollywood. She takes refuge in the apartment of an older actress who is obligingly going off to shoot a movie on location. But there is a hitch, since the tenant has invited her niece Betty (Naomi Watts) to stay there while she tries to break into the movies. When Betty discovers the intruder, who is suffering from amnesia and does not remember her name or the events of the night before, she reacts sympathetically and proposes helping her uninvited guest to rediscover her identity.

From that point on, the narrative becomes more involved, developing into a series of parallel stories that introduce a host of characters including a neurotic young man who relates a nightmare to a highly ambivalent acquaintance, a brash young director, his unfaithful wife, the pool repairman with whom she cheats on him, a murderous pimp, the emcee of a bizarre late night club who might have walked out of Thomas Mann's Mario and the Magician, and an enigmatic character named Cowboy. Nor should I overlook Coco, the manager of the apartment house where Bette moves in, played by the stalwart MGM veteran Ann Miller.

Some of these stories are clearly interrelated, but others have a less evident relation to what serves as the narrative axis during most of the action: the quest of Betty and Rita--as the guest spontaneously names herself after seeing a poster for Charles Vidor's Gilda in the aunt's apartment--to unravel the mystery that surrounds the latter's past. But let the viewer beware. Lynch is a director who likes to pull the rug out from under the feet of the unwary. Just when it would appear that he has explained everything away towards the end, he audaciously puts the movie into reverse, refusing to obligingly assemble the pieces of the puzzle into a tranquil domestic scene.

Mulholland Drive is a completely accomplished motion picture, which is something of a rarity these days. Laura Harring and Naomi Watts are quite effective in their roles, as is Justin Theroux, who plays the cheeky director Adam Kesher, but even the small parts like Cowboy (Monty Montgomery) have been impeccably cast. The film has been seamlessly edited by Mary Sweeney, and Angelo Badalamenti has contributed a score that superbly reinforces the movie's ominous atmosphere and  that would have done credit to any great film noir of the 1940s. 

Lynch, who if I am correct was trained as a painter, has always had an extraordinary eye, and he has been better than well served in Mulholland Drive by the cinematography of Peter Deming and the production design of Jack Fisk. But Lynch understands the difference between visual style and  mere pictorialism. Among its numerous strengths, Mulholland Drive is a real vindication of mise en scène. Unlike Quentin Tarantino's wretched Pulp Fiction, in which there is neither rhyme nor reason to why a shot looks the way it does, in Lynch's film there is a sense of aesthetic necessity to every composition.

The least one can say about Mulholland Drive is that nothing in it is quite what it seems at first glance. In his review of the film in the Los Angeles Times (10/12/01), Kenneth Turan rightly spoke of trompe l'œil. But in a certain way, Mulholland Drive might be called trompe l'œil squared. The film noir genre that Lynch taps into itself made a considerable use of ruse to lead both the characters and the audience on false trails, but Lynch adds an additional degree of complication absent from the older genre. In it, at least one of the trails turned to be true. Or, to use an analogy more appropriate to the painterly metaphor, one of the views opened out into a "real" landscape.

That landscape might be a safe harbor (as in The Big Sleep) or a dead end (as in D.O.A), but it was always there to validate the quest of the hero. Not so in Mulholland Drive, any more than in Alain Resnais and Alain Robbe-Grillet's Last Year at Marienbad. What to say of a façade that combines fake doorways with "real" ones that lead nowhere except back to the façade itself? Yet it would be wrong to see in this nothing more than a demonstration of self-referential aestheticism or willful mystification. Lynch has not just tapped into the film noir genre, but into the collective fears that always stirred uneasily beneath it, fears that are perhaps more relevant in the USA of 2002 than that of the 1940s.

In spite of its considerable density, Mulholland Drive is polarized between two complementary episodes. The first of these is the dream narrative related by one character to another in a coffee shop in which the narrator's bad dreams come true, the second the visit to El Club Silencio where everything is an illusion. But in the world in which "Fear and foreboding are universal," in the magisterial words of Theodor Adorno in Negative Dialectic, which is the more frightening possibility? That everyone's worst nightmare will turn out to be true? Or that everything will turn out to be an endless dream? Not a dream from which sleepers will awaken to a vision of the Truth as in the Platonic myth of the cave, but fall into a bottomless abyss of non-being.

In a roundtable discussion in the Los Angeles Times, Alejandro González Iñárritu, the director of Amores Perros, rightly lamented the lack of narrative experimentation in American movies. No one, I hope, woould level that complaint at Mulholland Drive. Memento took a step in the right direction in distancing itself from the sclerotic conventions of film narrative bound to realistic fiction and drama, but Mulholland Drive makes a far more radical break with them. It is no small tribute to Lynch that when I went shopping after having seen Mulholland Drive, I had the an uncanny feeling that the film was simply continuing.

Production data courtesy of The Internet Movie Database

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