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.