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

Scott Thill

This where it gets fun.

When I got lucky enough to meet Lynch and proffer some long, drawn-out theorization masquerading as a key to the mystery of his oeuvre, he answered my ramblings with a flat, "No." It was a tough lesson but it was one well learned. He qualified his abrupt statement explaining, "Sometimes the intellect can get in the way, sometimes you just have to turn it off and let everything come out." And I think this is the only productive way to get at what he does when, in situations like that which occurs in the fractured parts of Mulholland Drive, he irrupts convention in favor of complexity, linearity in favor of the webbing that most of his characters seem to get caught up in.

When Mulholland Drive turns on a dime into this netherworld of mystery and violence, it really careens. Betty takes over the role of Diane Selwin, the woman who Rita thought she might be, only to find herself on the outside of a collapsed love triangle

Two blonde peas in a pod. The line between Betty and Rita begins to blur.

and at the mercy of her own frustrated desire for Rita, who has become someone named Camilla Rhodes, a starlet whose ascent connects nicely with the shady urgings of a pair of mobsters featured earlier in the film. That might seem like a serious detour, but it's just a minor taste of the twists Lynch conjures up, especially in the imagery department. Playing with shadow and noise, he hitches his audience to Diane's shoulder as she is jerked from one event to the next, all stops and starts, rewinds and fast forwards, until she is placed on the mirror side of Betty's narrative. Only this time, instead of being aided by the elderly couple who can't wait to see her on the silver screen, she is hunted into screaming darkness and the blunt end of a pistol by them.

And this uncompromising savagery is Lynch's finest attribute -- who else could take the sweet and kind elderly and make them his barking demons? For all the protest that the film's egregious violence and brutal sexuality will possibly engender from gays and lesbians -- much less your run-of-the-mill, KPAX-watching straights -- Lynch's fascination with the body in pain resinscribes the real cost of the mythmaking machine of Hollywood. As we watch Camilla and Diane come apart in the end of the film as quickly as Betty and Rita come together in its beginning, we return inevitably to the border that the actual Mulholland Drive represents -- the difference between Hollywood, the geographical area and the symbolic term, and the rest of the world. "The director didn't take too kindly to me," Diane squeaks as she breaks down watching said director and her ex-lover Camilla tongue each other across the table, words which speak volumes about the cost involved in any sort of emotional investment in the world of Mulholland Drive.

Which is the film's ultimate and refreshing gift. Where there have been a slew of films since the beginning of film that have lampooned or criticized its apparatus -- such as The Player,

Wait! Where have I seen those curtains before? Lynch employs the Man in the Red Suit for another otherworldy role, an omniscient Hollywood mogul.

Sunset Boulevard, Get Shorty, among others -- none have taken their time beating it into a bloody pulp as much as Mulholland Drive has. Lynch has laid bare the culture of the image's fever dream more capably than any of his predecessors, a thought that didn't hit me until the late hours of my second night after viewing the film, his frightening and meaning-laden visuals bouncing around my mind and out onto the pillow. Kind of like that piece of gray matter Mulholland Drive's nameless evil figure -- huddled around a campfire in a back alley behind Winkie's -- stuffed into a wrinkled paper bag along with a puzzle box that held the answers to the mysteries of Rita's past, Betty's future and why those kindly elderly are really possessed by malice and brutality.

So give it to Lynch -- his films stick with you that way, if you let them. If you think you know everything about narrative convention, character development and story arcs -- to the point that you've developed the endlessly criticized "formula" common to most entertainment -- then he was probably skewering you when he dreamt up this latest fugue state. But if you still go to films to see something new, even new to Lynch, then Mulholland Drive is the latest installment in what has so far been a truly innovative, daring and original bending of the rules from a director who always wanted to be a world-famous painter.

Does that make sense?

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Scott Thill -- a media fanatic who finds the time to write on everything that does not include the words "boy band" -- is a gainfully employed dotcom editor currently finishing his first novel, The Dangerous Perhaps.