And then, somewhere in the middle of it all, after intimidating cowboys, mafia bosses with celestial standards for espresso, cheating Hollywood wives, a stunning first audition in front of movies heavyweights and so much more, there is a point of scission during which Betty and Rita suffer a traumatising vision of reality after which everything is reversed. We have been watching Diane dreaming of being instantly successful Betty and Adam, the hotshot director who rejected her for Rita (who is really Camilla), is humiliated by mobsters into casting one of their girlfriends. The relationship between Betty and Rita outside of the dream is a complex emotional torture instead of the burning love story it came to be.
This film began as a ninety minute pilot for a TV series that was canned before it aired. David Lynch hawked it to those nice hommes at Studio Canal who'd been so helpful with the dark and nasty sequel to Twin Peaks and the coldly alienating Lost Highway. They ponied up for the conversion to a feature with a further hour of story and an even more involved plot than the body hopping Lost Highway. It paid off. Mulholland Dr. brought Lynch back from arthouse penury and, however briefly, back to the attention of the mainstream. Not even the mostly sweet (with some smuggled darkness) Straight Story which he made for Disney did the business like this complicated but strong tragedy.
The TV pilot origins show through with a choir stall of characters who only appear in the first phase like the detectives or the guys at Winkies. But then Lynch was able to incorporate into the dream logic what he couldn't expand into the rest of the film. The guy at Winkies tells his friend of a nightmare he had that involved the setting they are both in. He's here to dispel the dread of the dream but it comes true (in a jump scare for the ages) and he collapses as the audio blurs and blends into the deep drone on the track. It's like a capsule of Diane's life in Hollywood. The hitman stumbling through a black comedy of errors in the beginning re-emerges in the second phase as a much more sinister figure. We don't need to see the mafiosi after the "production meeting" scene again as they have done their job in the story (though we do get a few more glimpses at the coffee-obsessed brother, played by composer and long-time Lynch collaborator Angelo Badalamenti). The little man in the secluded room seems to be controlling even the gangsters with the phrase "the girl is still missing" taking on the meaning that she has not yet been cast in the film. The nice old couple who travelled with Betty soon after head somewhere in a limo, laughing evilly. They turn up at the end as miniature sprites in Diane's ridicule. Even the frightening bum from behind Winkies reappears in yet another controlling role. Successive viewings allow these features clarity which the first one offers as bewildering.
If those demonstrate how well a film maker can save an incomplete narrative by transporting it into fulfilled tragedy with more material (and this is a triumph of that) Lynch's tropes and tricks are thrown at the screen and speakers without pause. Art Deco interiors that feel unsettling or Googie architecture diners that host Nancy Drew mystery solving as well as hit contract meetings. Images of L.A. as a smouldering urban jungle. Bizarre characters like the cowboy who seems to carry his own remote electricity and is effortlessly intimidating. The whacked out cabaret show where nothing is what it seems and an impassioned Spanish version of Crying sends Betty into uncontrollable tears before revealing that it, too, is only appearance. Diane's suicide leaves her corpse enveloped by a cloud of reversing gunsmoke. Audio details of scenes are given an exaggerated volume. The moment of scission when Betty and Rita are confronted with Diane's decomposing corpse on the bed where the camera speed is distorted along with the audio taking on a delirious quality. Lynch is using everything he knows about his medium either in the conventional story of the first phase and the unconventional motion of the second. Of all his back catalogue, this was his most disciplined feature film since Eraserhead.
I'll trot out my favourite observation about Lynch here, that his films are not heavily intellectual but emotionally deep. Here he is depicting the capital of the American film industry as a character with aerial city scapes that shimmer with heat by day or glow softly through black nights. And he is showing us what he and anyone who has worked in Hollywood long enough knows, that most bright young Bettys are rendered into crushed and broken Dianes. The casting of Naomi Watts in this role proved perfect. Her performance stretches from a kind of antiseptic Debbie Reynolds as Betty to her broken alter ego Diane who rages or restrains herself in the face of a great, dark pain. It is impossible not to emote with her and every viewing past the first gives even her early naïve Betty scenes a tint of the tragedy to come as we know we are only seeing her self ideal. Mulholland Dr. awarded Watts with stardom and she has been a go to name for range but particularly the fearless intensity she brings here.
After this, Lynch moved on to one final (to date) feature that involved psychogenic fugue, completing a trilogy of them from Lost Highway, Mulholland Dr. and then Inland Empire. While the latter has lost more fans of the director than it garnered, it remains a committed work of surgical character examination. Several steps down from the 35 mm sumptuousness of Mulholland Dr. (it is shot on consumer grade digital video from the mid-2000s) it nevertheless presents a genuine vision. More recently Lynch returned to Twin Peaks with what he regarded as an 18 hour film which rather than an easy route of fan service disappointed everyone who was hankering for the old show's quirky locals and dark supernature. For any who made it through it delivered a reward with a tragic revelation and a horrifying coda.
Because of this kind of commitment, Mulholland Dr. feels as fresh today as it did when it hit Australian cinemas in 2002. The central tale of defeated dreams is as old as time but set in the forbidding beauty that Lynch commands for the best of his work it was rendered bold and of its own kind. Does it give viewers who attempt to answer all its mysteries headaches? Maybe, but all good fiction should to some extent guard its own shadows. What comes across in Mulholland Dr. is the conviction by Lynch that he is telling his story the best way he knows. That that way should involve individualistic cinema that speaks through its idiosyncrasies to our nervous systems only serves to give it longevity. If I have been successful in giving you a reason to revisit it, enjoy, and be assured that the final word by the bizarre bue-beehived character is no more cryptic than the last line of Hamlet. Relax, forget trying to explain it all, concentrate on your emotional response and it will all make sense. Promise.
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