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MULHOLLAND
DR.
Warning
- contains SPOILERS
The
two stories appear to have been folded into each other, in a Mobius strip,
with some details overlapping and some not. What gives? Is there a right
solution, which only David Lynch knows (and much more clever, diligent
film critics than myself will have figured out)? Several possibilities
exist…
1)
It was all a dream… This is the most consistent, encompassing explanation,
but it does not take us very far. It simply reduces all phenomena to the
same flat, invented plane.
[Phillip
Lopate]
…
the second half of the film is even more Borgesian in its circularity
and more hallucinatory in its imagery than the first. And yet the film
leaves one with the uneasy feeling of having missed the crucial element
that will put all questions to rest.
[Amy
Taubin]
Film
Comment, Sep-Oct 2001, pp49 and 54
How
much more explicit could David Lynch possibly have been in Mulholland
Dr.? Perhaps he could have flashed on screen a title card, reading:
“Everything you have seen so far is a dream,” but that wouldn’t be his
style. There’s little ambiguity that the first of Phillip Lopate’s ‘several
possibilities’ is correct: after a disconcerting ‘jitterbug’ sequence,
the camera roams over a pink pillow, then dives in. “Now I’m in this dream
place” comments the ‘character’ who later introduces herself with the
line “My name’s Betty” only to be told (by the local psychic) “No, it’s
not!” The dream ends when The Cowboy sticks his head around Betty/Diane’s
bedroom door and says “Time to wake up, pretty girl.” The ‘clues’ are
dotted throughout the film – even the title, which Lynch makes such a
point of showing in its abbreviated form, thus representing ‘Mulholland
Dream’ as well as ‘Mulholland Drive.’
But
nearly all viewers and critics prefer to see the film as a baffling puzzle,
a ‘Mobius strip’ that can’t be resolved. David Lynch has made such
a movie – it was called Lost Highway, a film that made no sense
at all which ever way you sliced it. Mulholland Dr is very different
– despite occasional spooky-scary-sinister moments, it’s basically a comedy,
as are most Lynch projects. That isn’t enough for some, however – they
need Lynch to be deeper than that, to be an intelligent artist,
one whose themes can and should be analysed, agonised over in search of
Taubin’s ‘crucial element.’
The
imagery in Mulholland, for example, is so crudely Freudian
(locked boxes = female genitalia, etc), that Lynch surely must
be ‘ironically’ harking back to those forties movies that so clumsily
embraced then-fashionable ideas of psychology and psychiatry. But this
view of Lynch as ‘ideas man’ runs directly counter to the gee-whiz persona
Lynch has always affected in interviews, the legendary ‘Jimmy Stewart’
like character seemingly so at odds with this weird and wonderful filmography.
But is this an ‘affected’ persona at all? Could this ‘image’ be
what David Lynch is really like? Could it be that, instead of being some
inscrutable cinematic genius, Lynch is, in fact, just a little bit thick,
relatively speaking?
This
wouldn’t make him any less of a genius, of course – genius has little
to do with cleverness, rather describing someone who does things that
nobody else has even thought of doing: a quantum leap beyond. Mulholland
Dr shared the director’s prize at Cannes with The
Man Who Wasn’t There, and while the Coen brothers are very,
very clever, they’ll never be as interesting in their use of celluloid
as a relatively ‘dim’ artist like Lynch. Cinema happens to be the
medium in which this trained painter operates: he’ll try anything, he’s
open to all kinds of influences and possibilities, he often repeats himself,
his sense of humour is often very basic and juvenile. If it pops into
his mind, soon after it’ll pop up on screen, as onto a canvas, miraculously
unmediated by conventional ideas of ‘intelligence.’ It’s what makes him
a great director, and even though Mulholland Dr is far from a new
avenue for him to explore, it confirms – three decades after he started
Eraserhead - that his talent is of the truly freakish kind, impervious
to the vicious onslaughts of Time and Hollywood.
25th November,
2001
by Neil
Young
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