The Not-So-Straight Story: David Lynch's Mulholland Drive (con.)

Scott Thill

"We'll Be Watching For You On the Big Screen"
No matter what you may think of Lynch, there is hardly any doubt that you'll see another movie as bizarre yet bizarrely familiar the rest of this year. Mulholland Drive shares an affinity with other recent L.A. Noir films, such as the fascinating Memento or the more conventional L.A. Confidential, in that it is hardly in the dark. In fact, the Hollywood that Lynch parodies and paraphrases is sometimes a sun-streaked world full of optimism, power, and power plays, as well; that much we have seen before.

So it doesn't seem to jar our sensibilities when Rita, the aforementioned femme fatale (Laura Elena Harring) is stopped by her chauffeurs at gunpoint and forced out of the car in the film's beginning. Nor is it strange when an automotive accident releases her dark secret -- a la Cloris Leachman in Robert Aldrich's equally twisted noir masterpiece, Kiss Me Deadly -- into the world, particularly into the life of a doe-eyed naïf named Betty (Naomi Watts in a virtuoso performance).

Faces and mirrors, fractured identities: Laura Elena Harring catches the eye of Rita Hayworth on a poster for the film noir classic, Gilda. Then she steals her name.

Unable to remember her life before her accident on Mulholland Drive, Rita accepts the intrigue-hungry help of Betty -- who finds both Rita and her secret life fascinating. At once, the film looses these two feminine detectives -- the first of their kind unless my cinematic memory fails me -- into the wild side of Los Angeles, including a shadowy entertainment multinational run by a wheelchair-ridden mogul -- Michael Anderson, the backwards-speaking, dancing Man in the Red Suit from Twin Peaks -- and members of the underworld, two-bit hustlers who kill for money and black books with the phone numbers of every player in Hollywood, black magic soothsayers and washed-up divas, and after-hours art installations of indeterminate spiritual value.

And that's just for starters.

Like Lost Highway, Lynch's Los Angeles prequel to this latest flirtation with dream noir, Mulholland Drive takes its time setting everything up -- scenes drag on seconds longer than you think they should, conversations seem to take more time than they normally would, revelations come to you before they come to the characters. Unlike Lost Highway, however, you don't have to suffer as much through this method -- the unfamiliarity of these new faces put more emphasis on the machinations behind the words. Indeed, in Lynch's films, the near anonymity of the actors seems to have the biggest payoff for the audience, a point that many who have criticized the lack of depth in his characters may agree with.

One of the other reasons that the movie may start slow is because, as most people are aware by now, Mulholland Drive was initially envisioned and shot as a television program; the relationships between all of the characters -- who are indeed connected across the matrix of the film together -- don't ever become utterly clear, whether by design or default. The only early glimpses of a rationale behind this madness is when Betty is bade goodbye at LAX by an elderly couple whose incessant grinning and cackling recalls that of the devious presence Bob from Twin Peaks. And that's if you're a LynchHead. If you're a newcomer to his strangeness, the early stages of the film and character development may very well seem strained.

"Now I'm in This Dream Place"
But by the time Rita and Betty stumble onto the first casualty of their investigation lying dead next to pieces of her own

Who can you trust when you're a blonde transplant in Hollywood? Your quirky Lynchian neighbors, of course. The dual roles of peripheral characters hold many clues in Mulholland Drive.

brain, the film leaps into hyperdrive and out of its narrative vein, doubling back onto itself and out into storylines unseen. Expanding on the "fugue state" psychosis Lynch and co-writer Barry Gifford employed for their protagonist in Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive's second act detaches characters and story arcs, sending the film into a frenzied rush of imagery, events and faces, all which seem to work their way back to the film's beginning. Or middle. Oh hell, or end.

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