In this week’s final Lynch/Love selection, Naomi Watts and Laura Elena Harring lose themselves in the riveting, rotten underbelly of Tinseltown
Two Cents is a Cinapse original column akin to a book club for films. The Cinapse team curates the series and contribute their “two cents” using a maximum of 200-400 words. Guest contributors and comments are encouraged, as are suggestions for future picks. Join us as we share our two cents on films we love, films we are curious about, and films we believe merit some discussion. Would you like to be a guest contributor or programmer for an upcoming Two Cents entry? Simply watch along with us and/or send your pitches or 200-400 word reviews to [email protected].
The Pick: Mulholland Dr.
Befitting the oneiric epic to come, David Lynch followed up Lost Highway with a crushed dream. Re-partnering with ABC in a much-feted return to the small screen, few knew what to expect of Lynch’s Mulholland Dr. as a TV pilot. ABC’s answer was outright rejection, and David Lynch’s latest was left to wither on the vine of the Hollywood development system. A windfall of French financing gave the director a new opportunity to definitively end his dreamlike experiment. In completion, Mulholland Dr.’s puzzling narrative tangents, haunting imagery, profound love for moviemaking, and hatred for the crippling system that makes such art possible became a resoundingly definitive encapsulation of all of David Lynch’s lifelong thematic obsessions.
Featured Guest
David Lynch’s 2001 film Mulholland Dr. feels like the mystery-drenched opacity of The Big Sleep and a Photoplay picture spread of Hollywood’s heyday. When it came out, it was mistaken by some as an oversexed trick of the male gaze as opposed to a Hollywoodland love story. The intimacy is potent between the two or rather four women, Betty and Diane, played by Naomi Watts, and Rita and Camilla, played by Laura Harring. It’s a romantic love story, but sometimes lesbian love in modern film is the only time we get to see the depth of sweetness between women. In part, because women have been placed at odds with each other by and on behalf of men—we have lost the mannerisms, nomenclature, and sacred intimacy that was once commonplace.
Lynch often uses a bluntly applied approach to archetypes and tropes. This bravado, edged with lacelike detailing, creates magic. He revels in the roles assigned and examines the heart behind them. The female characters he animates carry the legends of the women before and after them. It isn’t cliche, it is down-to-earth, midwestern in tenor, and quintessentially America in tone—with a hard-leaning Cowboy bent born of the director’s Montana roots.
These archetypes and muses are the stuff dreams are made of. People often describe Lynch’s imagery as “dream-like.” I don’t think that is a good enough description. There is a collective unconscious level to Lynch’s storytelling. It’s not simply dream-like—it’s made up of the primordial ooze of imagination. The original material. The mythological. The ineffable.
The idea that we are all iterations of the ghosts that came before us is flashed before our eyes early and often in this film. The grounding, in reality, is the unreal darkness of the twisted yet glamorous top-of-the-world road Mulholland Dr., which, much like Route 66, is the way west if your destination is the studio systems galaxy of stars. Love, like fame, does the rounds on repeat for all to witness the soaring heights and heart-wrenching lows. Like Diane with a gun in her mouth or Betty with a dream in her heart, we will all come back around to a different iteration of the same starry sky. Let’s hope it’s in Hollywood.
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Every time I come back to Mulholland Dr., there is some new texture or feeling waiting for me. When I first saw the film in a theater years ago, I was overwhelmed by the emotional force of Rebekah Del Rio’s Roy Orbison cover. As the blues of Club Silencio beamed out into the auditorium, and Del Rio’s voice filled the air, I found myself in the same position as the song: tears broke free and flowed down my cheeks. David Lynch’s unique gift for transmitting pure emotions, be it sadness, fear, or love, through his work is perhaps most potent here. During recent rewatches, what has stayed with me the most has been how our desires for what should have been coexist with the reality of our everyday lives. The duality of Betty and Diane’s lives in Los Angeles – the starry-eyed newcomer and the jaded, broken-down actor – feels like it can be two sides of the same coin. The bright, beautiful promise of a new start, a fresh career, a chance at really achieving one’s desires, balanced by the reality that not every venture we take is destined to go well. We can’t always get what we want, and sometimes we can’t even get what we need. It’s sobering, to say the least, but it feels honest, too.
We’ve all been Betty and Diane at some point, which makes their parallel stories so powerful. In Club Silencio, the artifice of the world, even the artifice of what we tell ourselves to get through the day, is laid bare. “No hay banda. There is no band. No hay orquesta,” says the MC. Yet, we hold onto every word Rebekah Del Rio sings, until we’re snapped back into reality when she collapses on stage. This duality is one of the many textures that make Mulholland Dr. a favorite Lynch film for me. There is an ocean of meaning to dive into in every rewatch: the dream logic of every other plot point that flies in the face of conventional storytelling and the master class of horror filmmaking in the Winkie’s sequence, to name a few. I am forever grateful that Lynch left us with films that could make us feel seen in the complicated shades of gray that make up the world. Mulholland Dr. is a puzzle box, a comfort object, an emotional experience that demands to be experienced as such.
Our Team
Julian Singleton
Mulholland Dr. was my first David Lynch film.
Like lots of other first-time viewers, I spent the first half wondering what the hell this was, and the second half about what it all meant. I was unbelievably terrified by the Winkie’s scene. But the scene that unlocked the film for me–and much of Lynch to come–was Betty’s audition.
After about an hour and change of bizarre heightened soap opera acting, Naomi Watts blindsided me with a go-for-broke, emotionally raw performance that stood completely at odds with the rest of the film. But that was the key–in Betty’s world, the real performance was the life off set; in turn, the offer to be someone else doubles as the opportunity to perform who you wanted to be.
Mulholland Dr. is a film about so many illusions–through film, a cultural one, and through Betty/Diane, a deeply rotten yet seductive personal one. On some level, we all hold a drive to make our lives seem more interesting and meaningful rather than face a glimpse of truth that they’re anything but.
Dreams are destined to be fulfilled, and only dark forces are responsible for when they’re not. Someone’s behind everything. Because they have to be.
The rift in the film’s final third systematically chips away at the Twin Peaks-ean fantasy we’ve grown irresistibly compelled by–but does so to reveal the achingly human tragedy that created such a need for escape in the first place. Through Lynch’s enigmatic yet visceral filmmaking and Naomi Watts’ riveting performance, Mulholland Dr. captures a bitter experiential gulf like never before: between what we feel, and what we experience, the lives we dream of and the ones we inevitably wake up to. You can’t blame Diane for wanting to be Betty. And many of us still believe we are her.
The lucid dream of Mulholland Dr. reaches its peak with the Club Silencio sequence, ranking among the most emotional scenes of Lynch’s career. Rebekah Del Rio’s translated rendition of Crying is jaw-dropping on its own even before Lynch’s cinematic rug pull. But what I’m always mesmerized by is how Betty and Rita react to her. It’s clear that Rita understands the music and lyrics; Betty’s searching gaze, as we later learn, hints how the exact meaning linguistically escapes her. Regardless, both women are equally moved by how the emotional core of the moment defies translation–and both equally fall under Del Rio’s spell. Whether it’s comprehendible or real, there’s no denying its deeper emotional power.
No hay Banda. No hay Orquesta. It’s all an illusion. It’s all a tape. But every single emotion this cracked dream evokes is so damn visceral and real.
And we’ll likely never get as deep a dreamer as David Lynch again.
Jon Partridge
Mulholland Dr. captivated upon release in 2001 and has only grown in esteem since. Time allowing for a greater appreciation for the depth and sheer artistry on display. Mulholland Dr. is a film that stays true to the soul, and cryptic nature of David Lynch. A beguiling mystery that isn’t exactly focused on answers. A neo-noir mystery, unfolding as a young woman looks for her break as an actress in LA and gradually sinks into a haunting fever dream.
The film has one foot in classic Hollywood, the other firmly planted Lynch’s surreal subconscious. A reverence for film, but also an expose of the cost of dealing with Hollywood, and the toll it takes on a psyche. It’s in this fracturing that Mulholland Dr. secures its legacy, by blurring the lines between two realities. One propelled by the hope of Betty (a radiant and mesmerizing turn from Naomi Watts), and her burgeoning relationship with Rita (Laura Harring, oozing glamor and mystique), which weaves in more nightmarish elements. The parts combine to craft an evocative psychological thriller. A lurid and enigmatic affair that is undeniably Lynchian in construct and its themes around identity and obsession. A score from longtime Lynch collaborator Angelo Badalamenti only enhances the brooding allure. Evocative fare that demands multiple viewings to start to piece things together and grasp the achievement.
Ed Travis
I have been fully Lynch-pilled.
Over the years I had seen several of Lynch’s works, but I wouldn’t have said he particularly spoke directly to me as a filmmaker outside of Elephant Man. But upon his passing, I knew it was the right thing for the Cinapse team to spend the month highlighting his work, and I knew I had an opportunity to dive in deeper with him. It’s been pretty glorious. I even spent decades thinking I had seen Mulholland Dr. and hated it. Memory is a hell of a thing, though. As I watched it, I felt quite certain I’d never seen it before. I think what I saw and hated all those years back was Mulholland Falls?!
At any rate, it seems like Twin Peaks (I’m watching The Return for the first time as we’ve been writing up some of his other work and I’m in awe of it) is like Lynch’s Dark Tower in the sense that all his other work could in some way be a part of that Lynch-iverse. Mulholland Dr. apparently was exactly that at one point, a kind of L.A.-set spin off of Twin Peaks. I loved this Lynchian take down of the dream of Hollywood, both pure and wholesome, and rotten to the core. Mulholland seems to be intentionally doing something special with the medium of cinema as it repeatedly shows you something more than once, different riffs and versions of scenes and stories that play wildly differently when context is shifted just a little. Somehow Lynch was simply a master at dancing between heart and hurt, purity and putrescence. I laughed, I wondered, I was horrified.
David Lynch can reach through the screen and cause me to feel all of these things, and I thank him for that.
For March, Cinapse takes on an action-packed lineup of Swashbuckling Cinema:
