"Ah, but I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now."
My Boog Pages
Monday, May 13
Never Do This
I watched Mulholland Drive by myself late last night. What a great movie. David Lynch can manufacture suspense out of anything. Take an early scene, where two men are talking in a diner. One of the men confesses to the other that he's had dreams about the diner. The other man, apparently his psychiatrist, urges him to tell the story. In the dream, everything's just like it is now, but he's scared, and the psychiatrist is there too, and he's scared. And there's a man out back, and he's doing terrible things. So the psychiatrist suggests they go there and look. And they do. And it's far more shocking and disturbing than it has any right to be.
There's been a lot of talk about what the movie "means", and while I can't explain everything that goes on, I think the general outline is clear. Note: SPOILERS AHEAD! DO NOT READ UNLESS YOU DO NOT PLAN TO SEE THIS MOVIE!
The first part of the movie is a dream. A woman is saved from murder by a chance car crash, but she's injured, and wanders into the night without knowing who she is. She hides in a vacant apartment and is discovered by the new tenant, an aspriring actress from Canada named Betty. Betty's dialog is very stilted; she speaks like she's in some 1950s "a star is born" movie. Together they set out to discover the other woman's identity; in the meantime they dub her "Rita". The only clues are a huge stack of money from her purse and a mysterious blue key.
At the same time, a director is casting a new movie. He's ordered (in no uncertain terms) to use a particular girl as his female lead. No explanation is given, but in a truly menacing encounter with "the cowboy" it's pretty clear he'd better do as he's told. Meanwhile, Betty has auditioned for her first part in a different movie, and blows everyone away. Later she learns that the movie will probably never be made because the director is a has been.
Even later (skipping over a bunch), Rita wakes up in the night, mumbling in Spanish, and leads Betty to a theater called "Silencio" where they view a bizarre performance. The performers are apparently speaking, playing music, singing, but they're not. The sound is recorded, and the performers continually break the illusion. Even so, Betty and Rita are moved to tears by the performance. Betty reaches into her purse for a tissue... and finds a mysterious blue box. Rita unlocks the box with the key.
Then the dream ends. Betty is not Betty at all but is an actress named Diane Selwyn. She's awakened by a girl she's traded apartments with, who has come to pick up some stuff. As she does, Diane notices a blue key (not the same one) on the table. She begins to have a series of flashbacks that relate her relationship with another actress, Camilla, who is Rita from the dream. Camilla steals parts, sleeps with her director, and freezes out Diane. Diane finally decides to kill her. She hires a hitman, who explains that when the deed is done, he'll leave a blue key where they had agreed. There are several more scenes, then Diane, pursued by an elderly couple who she's been seen with earlier in the film, runs into her room and kills herself.
The dream is Diane's recasting of events to make herself the heroine, to make Camilla dependent on her, to blame her own failuers as an actress on mysterious forces, despite her obvious (in the dream) talent. When she unlocks the blue box (that's it in the nightstand when she grabs the gun) with the blue key that means she's killed her lover, her conscience rushes out and pushes her to suicide.
It's hard to believe that this was ever intended to be a television series, although it's clear that this is true. Some actors, like Dan Hedaya and Robert Forster, appear once and never show up again. David Lynch added thirty minutes of new material (obviously including the two lesbian love scenes) and managed to wrap up all the parts. But really, this is a movie that doens't depend on a neat resolution for its power. In a world filled with violence and perversity, his stuff still has the power to shock and disturb us. It's also a testament to his talent that he could get away with something as ambiguous as this is. In anyone else's hands, this would be a pretentious mess, but instead he turns it into a nightmare love story with an unsettling end.
In a way, it reminds me of Barton Fink, another mystery that is really about Hollywood, and doesn't necessarily have any meaning beyond its effect on the viewer. These are films that are not meant to be figured out, they're meant to be felt. The lyrics don't make sense, but the music makes you want to dance.
