LYNCH LAW
by Mark Netter

David Lynch is, more clearly in Mulholland Drive than ever before, the bastard child of Luis Buñuel and Alfred Hitchcock. Like Buñuel, he is a card-carrying Surrealist, who ultimately has less interest in narrativity than with exploring unconscious desires, fears, dreams and fantasies with bizarre juxtapositions and "inappropriate" humor. Like Hitchcock, he gets the perfect mileage from every shot, camera move and cut. The friend I saw the movie with said Lynch has so perfected his use of the medium that he doesn't even need a story to carry you along. Mulholland Drive is often close to abstract, and in the end you may or may not feel a coherent story was told. Much has been written about its beginnings as a rejected television pilot, and some criticism holds the loose ends engendered by those origins as evidence that maybe Mulholland Drive is not movie enough to be called a masterpiece. But I would argue that Lynch, who comes from a painterly or sculptural tradition before a cinematic one, has actually created his greatest triumph, one of "assemblage," creating from disparate parts a unique and thrilling work of art. Mulholland Drive is, in both experiential and emotional senses, the lushest Hollywood movie of the year.

Right from the start, Lynch delivers his patented mood swings. An out-of-nowhere jitterbug number is immediately followed by the quiet tension of a beautiful woman at gunpoint in the backseat of a limo, intercut (faster than you can safely process) with wild teens drag-racing up both lanes of the road. The ensuing car crash is the primal event, and the story that follows, such as it is, centers on the relationship between a fresh-in-town aspiring actress named Betty (Naomi Watts) and the amnesiac survivor of the car wreck (Laura Elena Harring) who takes the name Rita from a classic movie poster. The story veers off into several subplots, the most prominent of which concerns a young, seemingly independent film director named Adam (Justin Theroux) who finds his film hijacked by gangsters and his wife by the pool man, all in one day. Minor but also entertaining subplots include a hitman having his own bad day, and what appears to be a therapist and a psychotic patient at a Denny's-like diner.

Having been left with a television pilot but no ensuing series with which to explore the opening threads, Lynch reportedly was at a loss as to how to complete the film. French financiers had bought the rights and were providing $7 million more to finish, but it took a dream to inspire the wrap up. Supposedly every scene shot for the pilot was used, but reordered and recut for different emphasis once Lynch knew the ending. It may not be clear at what exact moment the TV pilot footage ends and movie footage begins, but Lynch's fictonal world starts to spin wildly in new and ultimately horrifying directions.

Whereas Lynch's earlier work was certainly something to behold, whether the outright surrealism of 1978's black and white Eraserhead or the weird landmark Blue Velvet in 1986, it is only later that his work has gained "gravitas," the seriousness of strong art. I date it from the revelation of who actually killed Laura Palmer late in the Twin Peaks series run - for those who haven't seen it, I won't spoil the surprise, but it was a genuinely disturbing solution to the mystery. Lost Highway (1996) is considered by many to be his most opaque movie, with the main character abruptly shifting to a different actor in a different setting, but the best explanation for that seems to be that the most horrifying: murders lead to madness, and we can't completely understand the mind of a madman...can we?

At some point into Mulholland Drive, between the laughter and the suspense, I felt the gravitas kick in, and I think the movie works because, again, there is something genuine and human and completely icky at the end. Due to the intended episodic origins, more themes are explored or touched on in the movie than in most films, and due to the elliptical nature of the entire project any number of viewers may latch onto as many different themes as the "main" one. Without, hopefully, giving away too much, I'd like to name my two favorites.

The first is the Surrealist notion, per the original 1920s Parisian artistic movement, of l'amour fou, i.e. "mad love," with emphasis on the fou. But whereas Buñuel, in films like L'Age D'Or (1930), portrays the mad love of a couple as having the power to stop an orchestra from playing, Lynch suggests the madness could send any of us into an alternative reality, as convincing as any true reality might be.

My other favorite theme is directly grounded in the Los Angeles setting, making it an essentially Hollywood story. At this level Mulholland Drive is about the crushing power of failure which, as anyone who has lived there might agree, seems more punishing in Hollywood than anywhere else in the world. The stakes are so high - those who get to play are the winners, the losers don't even get to work - and this failure is inextricably linked to the most poisonous envy imaginable.

My movie-going companion also raved about Lynch's ever sharpened application of sarcasm. A somehow crucial cup of espresso led to uncontrolled spasms of laughter throughout the theater. I think sarcasm may be right, since the comedy is less of the cheery Twin Peaks coffee-and-pie type and more cutting, more inside. Of all his targets, Lynch reserves his greatest contempt for directors, whether mediocre never-has-beens or iconoclastic sell-outs. My favorite cameo character, The Cowboy, asks the director, Adam (and us, by shot implication), "to think. Really think." When the director cavalierly claims he has, The Cowboy replies, "No you haven't. You're too busy being a smart-aleck." Aren't we all. Conversely Lynch's greatest respect seems to be for actors, the ones who really commit, who take pretending to another realm. In what is clearly a career-making scene for Naomi Watts, Betty proves herself to be much more talented than we ever imagined, blowing away her first audition under less-than-desirable circumstances.

If you know about it, one cannot completely ignore the television pilot genesis. It is fascinating to speculate on how the series might have unfolded. By the same token it seems churlish to punish Mulholland Drive for this knowledge. Besides the high art tradition of creating something new and compelling from found or discarded materials, is this not what Hollywood does as regular practice? Has not the film industry since its inception scoured books, newspapers, theater, even television for subject matter, casting legitimate actors alongside less talented box office stars, and merchandising it all with increasing expediency?

The collision (like the car wreck that kicks things off) of these two traditions seems best represented by the casting of Ann Miller, a true survivor and relic of Old Hollywood (a song-and-dance dynamo whose heyday was the 1940s). It is impossible to tell if she is good or bad in her role - she is just welcome, a signpost of both a departed era and reminder of how the basic Hollywood process has never changed. (The key line in the film seems to be "This is the girl.") Towards the end, Lynch even gives a nod to her being on our side, closest to the audience's point-of-view.

Since the set-up of a television series requires more "content" than the usual two-hour movie, Mulholland Drive is bursting at the seams with ideas and influences. It references everything from Lynch's earlier work (the shots of a singer in a mysterious nightclub are the same as the chipmunk-cheeked chanteuse hidden in the radiator in Eraserhead), to Hitchcock's Vertigo (Kim Novak's gray suit, the switch from brunette to blond), to Nancy Drew mysteries, to 1950s "spicy lesbian" paperback novels whose pulpy covers are in recent vogue.

Like Buñuel and Hitchcock, Lynch plays fair with the construction of his fantastic moments without resorting to process shots or digital effects. In fact, he constantly points to artifice, with lip-synch games in an edge-of-world club; perfectly sutured shot-reverse-shots that upon second thought have only psychological, non-literal connection to each other; and shape-shifting actor moments. As the mysterious nightclub emcee intones, "There is no orchestra...yet we hear an orchestra." No matter how obviously he points to the artificial construction of the very movie we are watching, at almost no time are we less than engrossed. Lynch is the true inheritor of Hitchcock's celluloid ribbon of dreams style, the one that skips straight to the cerebral cortex, with that same level of moment-to-moment control.

Aside from the obvious shot mastery, more painterly than ever, and the signature sound design, much of which Lynch creates in his home studio, by now Lynch proves himself a masterful director of actors. Naomi Watts is clearly the stunner, making her bones in the post-pilot footage, but every performance feels just right. Laura Elena Harring may be a better actress than her obvious beauty and Miss U.S.A./daytime soap resumé might lead one to believe, and when she finally intones the words "Mulholland Drive," we start to tingle. Lynch even gets something special from Billy Ray Cyrus.

It feels rude as well to point to the flaws or moments that do not appeal to personal taste. I'm not sure I understand or take seriously the very last moment/shot of the movie. But in a piece of work so powerfully individualistic, coming out of an industry that so regularly rejects the personal (that indeed rejected Mulholland Drive) I am happy to accept these lapses, especially since so much pure pleasure is provided. From Naomi's high passion to Rita's scarlet lips, to the surrealist trip down the rabbit hole and through the looking glass that comprises last act, Mulholland Drive is as full a cinematic experience as any in a long while. Don't be surprised if it takes a few days to recover, or if the images and sounds recur in your mind like fabled acid flashbacks for some time to come.

©2001 Mark Netter
CineScene