Mulholland Dr. (2001)

#6: Mulholland Dr. (David Lynch, 2001)

I saw Mulholland Dr. when it was new, as it happens with a couple of virulent naysayers, who walked out of the theater with me infuriated, sputtering, and ranting—this was it, they declared, they were through with David Lynch, who they believed meant no good whatever, who in fact they had come to believe was actually laughing at them, sounding a theme by Lynch debunkers heard now for decades. I mumbled something to the effect that maybe I had liked it a little more than they did, but the last 30 minutes were indeed so confounding and seemingly such a capricious slap in the face of anyone invested in the story that I was simply in no position to start trying to marshal my thoughts on it. The air was too thick with imprecations.

I'm not immune to such experiences myself—that could as well have been me walking out of Natural Born Killers or The Color Purple or The Usual Suspects, movies I disliked intensely for their various violations of good faith and intelligence and above all for their pandering, pretentious low-mindedness. I'm not even willing to take another look at them. But when the best-of lists for the decade started rolling out with Mulholland Dr. so frequently in such high position I knew it was time to take a look at that one again.
 

It turns out, I think, that it's pretty much exactly what it looks like—a brew of mystery and acid mockery of Hollywood with a tacked-on ending. Much of the first part was intended as a pilot for a TV show that never came to be—ABC again, evidently deciding once and for all with this that they don't trust Lynch and his intentions any more than my one-time movie-going companions (though I will say that I'm doubly grateful to the broadcast network for giving it a try, both for this and for "Twin Peaks"). That explains why bankable stars such as Robert Forster and Lee Grant get such relatively limited screen time here. The expectation was that they would be significant players in the TV show.

Characterizing the ending as "tacked-on," however, simply doesn't do justice to what Lynch has accomplished here. I read Richard Wright's Native Son decades ago and haven't returned to it since, though I still intend to one day. But I was struck by a throwaway line in it that I have carried with me ever since, in which the sleep-deprived protagonist says that he likes to go to the movies in the afternoons because they make him feel like he's dreaming with his eyes open.

Movies are a nearly perfect analogue to dreaming, and dream sequences have a long and respectable history within narrative filmmaking—in many ways it goes all the way back to the very beginnings with the proto-science fiction exercises of George Melies, back at the turn of the last century when Little Nemo was a favorite comic strip. Certainly by 1939 entire movies could be characterized as extended dream sequences and no one would find that the least bit remarkable of itself.

But I'm not convinced that anyone ever has done dreaming with as much veracity as David Lynch does it in Mulholland Dr. This isn't singing scarecrows, this moves and feels like what happens to me at night in my sleep, the hallucinatory dislocations and discontinuous developments and absurdities and the tenor and textures and even the forgetfulness and blank spaces of dreaming are all over it, sometimes even at the complex level of dreams within dreams within dreams (that's how I read the Winkie's scenes, as in the first clip at the link: Betty's dream interpretation of a dream she knows Rita has). That's ultimately how it makes sense to me, as colluding, colliding dreams—and the fact that Lynch could throw together 25 minutes that somehow brings that into such crystallized focus leaves me almost speechless (although in fairness I have managed about a thousand words here).

I think anyone can agree that the first two hours amount to a perfectly charming and perfectly mysterious, atmospheric, and insanely engaging kind of Nancy Drew whodunit by way of daytime soap (albeit with teeth and claws), not a bit difficult to follow even with its odd twists and turns. Betty (played by Naomi Watts, who is brilliant across the length and breadth of this) is new in Hollywood from Deep River, Ontario, bright-eyed and setting off on a promising career in the movies. Rita (played by Laura Harring) has amnesia after an attempt on her life is inadvertently thwarted by an auto accident that she walks away from. Betty tries to help Rita get her predicament sorted out.

Along the way Lynch surfs a number of Hollywood's most standard and familiar tropes of genre: mystery, noir, melodrama, TV soap, horror, suspense thriller, even westerns and exploitation pictures (not to mention expressionistic doppelgangers and elements of both Persona and Vertigo), mixing them all up just deftly enough to keep the entire production entertaining even as the tension and momentum build inexorably.

Then the blue box falls and, in a way, you're on your own. The momentum is still there, you can feel it, it's like a vise on your head, with the stakes higher than ever. But the meanings have begun to shred, seem impossible, maddeningly slippery, fluid, elusive. Why do they all have these new names? These new roles? What changed? What's different? Why are all these things happening now?

The answers are there, for those who insist on seeing this as a puzzle movie (if anything, I think the most apt comparison is a Magic Eye picture) and for those who submit to it patiently, though not everyone may agree on the specifics of the answers, nor even, perhaps, find themselves capable of rationally communicating all of them. Nor, indeed, feel that the effort is sufficiently rewarded. That's the way it goes with dreams. That's a point of view too.

"I'm scared like I can't tell ya."

"A man's attitude goes some ways to the way his life will be. Is that something you might agree with?"

Phil #6: Sweet Smell of Success (Alexander Mackendrick, 1957) (scroll down)
Steven #6: The Rules of the Game (Jean Renoir, 1939)

I like Mulholland Dr. a lot but I lobbed it up pretty high for effect—thus it always stayed #6 even with things moving around it. I wanted it high but not in my top 5. On the latest version of my list it's currently at #27. If I hadn't known before we started this countdown, I soon found out what a dim view both Phil and Steven and many of our commenters hold generally of Lynch (and even though Phil picked The Straight Story for his #41) so I'm sure I felt a little defensive as I wrote, which probably comes through here. Mulholland Dr. is easily the most baffling of all my favorite movies and I'm not talking about the confusing plot points, but rather how unpredictably it affects me. It seems so silly sometimes, and other times I'm convinced it's the best movie I've ever seen. I can't think of any other picture that affects me to such extremes.