rawlinson
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348. Mulholland Drive
Director: David Lynch
2001
Film
Last Year's Position: 220
Let's start off by saying Mulholland Dr. is not as complicated as some will have you believe. The problem with playing too much on the narrative trickery is that it gives critics of the film ammunition to say that it's not that complicated. And it isn't. Let's look at the plot. The story is told in non-linear order. A dark-haired woman (Harring) is involved in a car accident following an attempt on her life on Mulholland Drive. In a state of shock, she loses her memory and stumbles into an apartment soon to be taken over by Betty (Naomi Watts), a naive girl just arrived in Hollywood with hopes of becoming a star. She adopts the name of Rita, taken from a poster for Gilda. Betty is surprisingly accommodating to this amnesiac stranger and together Rita and Betty try to discover Rita's true identity, falling in love with each other along the way. Another plot strand follows a Hollywood director, Adam (Justin Theroux). He's being pressured to cast an unknown actress, Camilla Rhodes in his new film. When he refuses he is threatened by producers, mobsters and he is even thrown out of his house (By Billy Ray Cyrus, no less) Meanwhile, in a diner called Winkies, a man describes a nightmare about a horrific, evil figure who lurks behind the diner. Rita remembers a name, Diane Selwyn, and they try to track her down. They discover a dead body in her apartment. They go to a theatre called Club Silencio to try and finally find the answers they need. After an emotional performance they arrive home and Rita opens a mysterious blue box, then things flip on us. Naomi Watts is now playing Diane, a failed and depressed actress in love with Camilla Rhodes (Now played by Harring) who humiliates and rejects her. In revenge, Diane pays a hitman to kill Camilla before committing suicide herself.
Now let's put it in linear order. A young actress, Diane wins a dance competition. She comes to Hollywood, dreaming of stardom, and finds herself used by Camilla, a beautiful actress. She is then dumped by her for a man and in revenge she hires a hitman to kill her. That night she has a dream. In her dream she is a naive young thing named Betty and she meets Camilla's double, a beautiful and friendly woman who's lost her memory in an accident. Betty gets to look after Camilla and she is dependent on her for once. For the first time, Betty has all the power in the relationship. But the real world intrudes on the dream The evil thing behind Winkies is symbolic of the fact that Winkies is the diner where the hit is ordered. The film director in the dream is pressured from all sides to hire Camilla Rhodes rather than Betty, explaining why Diane didn't get the film role. In her dream Diane is not a bitter stalker, she's a sweet young thing whose dream woman loves her in return and the only reason she doesn't get a dream job is mysterious forces that work in opposition against her. In the dream, Betty and Rita visit the eerie Club Silencio. In the Club the real world intrudes more than ever, we are shown that everything is artificial and that there is a deeper truth that needs to be seen. Diane wakes again and sees a sign from the hitman that the murder has happened. In despair over her actions and of the direction of her life, Diane breaks down and is driven to suicide.
Far too much is made of the change between identities, Lynch has been accused of deliberately obscuring a simple plot line, of pretentiousness and of pretty much everything else you can imagine. What those criticisms ignore is that Lynch is presenting us with a film about the nature of dreams. From the beginning of his career Lynch appears to have viewed cinema as representing a dream state, and he's not far wrong. Cinema presents us with dreams and with nightmares. We are sold an illusion presented as reality and we have to believe in that illusion for any film to work. We know that cinema's very nature plays on duality and presenting an alternative representation of an object or a person, we are manipulated by the directors and writers, the dream-makers, and Lynch seems fascinated by that.
It's telling that Mulholland Dr is a story of Hollywood. Hollywood is sold as the dream capital of cinema, people go there to become stars but more of them end up with their dreams crushed than those who become stars. Hollywood tears apart dreams, just like it does to Diane. It's notable that the characters have doubles, representing both the way actors portray characters and the way we often see people in dreams. Identity is often fluid in Lynch's films, they often make me think of a dream where a person is present and you know they're supposed to be a specific person but they look completely different. The creation of another identity is also a trait of Hollywood and the way actors portray characters. Even Rita herself is a Hollywood creation, she lifts her identity straight from a picture of Rita Hayworth in a classic film. This sense of duality is vital, Watts is both helpful and happy and a sick stalker, Harring is helpless and loving and also heartless and destructive, nobody is what they first seem because we're not at first aware of the true story, we only see the illusion.
Lynch is basically just giving us an exploration of the dangers of love, of the difference between our dream and waking states and a negative portrayal of L.A. as the city of manufactured dreams that only just manage to hide the darkest nightmares. So at heart this is basically a simple morality tale, so why does Lynch present it in a non-linear fashion? Because it's one way of evoking a dream state, that place where identity, place and events are all in constant motion. So if this is just a simple tale told in a confusing manner, doesn't that mean it shouldn't hold up to repeat viewings? Of course not. That would only be true if the heart of the film was based in the narrative twists, it isn't. The heart of the film is in the relationships and in the way we care for the dream Betty and pity the real Diane. It's a film with excellent direction, a superb screenplay and some masterful performances, including a career best Naomi Watts and all of those things ensure that Mulholland Dr. is a film that's destined to withstand repeat viewings and become regarded as one of Hollywood's finest examinations of its own nature.
< Message edited by rawlinson -- 13/11/2012 1:00:09 PM >
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