Mulholland Drive (2001)

After seeing Blue Velvet, I wanted to venture deeper into the dark corners of David Lynch’s body of work and so I watched Mulholland Drive. It straight up blew my mind. I just sat there laughing after the film ended because my favorite types of films are ones like Mulholland Drive which hold up a middle finger to convention and do whatever the hell they want. I’m sure Lynch pissed people off by giving people absolutely zero closure or cohesion with this film but I absolutely love films that aren’t afraid to make people mad and play with our expectations.

Hollywood as Factory of Illusion

Mulholland Drive is really interesting to me when examining it as a critique of Hollywood and the filmmaking industry. Mulholland Drive presents Hollywood as a colorful, beautiful place from the outside but this idealized image quickly gives way to a corrupt system which devours the weak and strips those involved in the system of their morality and ethical responsibility. Although the first portion of the film is arguably the construction of Diane’s unconscious, even this idealized depiction of Hollywood is glaringly flawed and corrupt. The politics of the system are apparent as Adam, the director, is stripped of his artistic integrity. He barely has any control over his own film and is subjected to the whims of others in power, like the mysterious film executive Mr. Roque and the peculiar cowboy character. Even in the first half (or ‘dream’ sequence), the films produced in Hollywood are the victims of a flawed system, which is driven more by the shallow desire for money and seemingly arbitrary hierarchies of power than by the desire to create a product that is artistically meaningful.

Through characters like Diane/Betty and even through Camilla, Hollywood demonstrates its ability to perpetuate delusions and suggests the potentially destructive effect that cinema can have on all involved. In the latter portion of the film, the impact of the corrupt system of Hollywood is felt even more forcefully as it destroys nearly all that it touches. Diane is a failure of the system; her attempts at making it big have proved futile and, though she has maintained some of her humanity, she is ultimately destroyed by her encounter with Hollywood.

Camilla, on the other hand, could be deemed as a Hollywood success; she is a young, beautiful, and famous starlet who seemingly has it all. However, she is morally corrupt, emotionally manipulating those around her for her own personal gain, all while having no qualms about who she is hurting. She is a Hollywood success, yes, but she is stripped of her humanity, robbed of her morality and ethical responsibility by a system, which makes her as much of a victim as Diane.

Mulholland Drive: A Freudian Dream

            The depiction of dreams in cinema is something that has always fascinated me. Dreams are something that we all experience on the regular but rendering them on film and preserving that dream-like feeling is difficult to do and I think Mulholland Drive does it. Mulholland Drive gives you that dream-like feeling where absurd, non-sensical things are constantly occurring but for some reason, they feel completely logical.

Freudian and the double: fragmented identities

Mulholland Drive presents itself like a Freudian dream in which symbolic images are pervasive throughout the film but these images don’t mean what they appear to on the surface—and sometimes they don’t mean anything at all. The film does not highlight what elements carry meaning and which do not. The lack of narrative structure makes you think about all the elements and decide which carry meaning; this puts us through a process much like how we interpret our own realities. Our senses are constantly bombarded and we have to decide where to place our attention and what carries meaning and sometime we might miss important things because there is simply just too much to take in.

 Cinema’s Ability to Mimic Our Mental Processes

Mulholland Drive seems to operate on some system of internal logic which is not based on narrative linearity. The narrative approximates how our mind works and how we perceive things. The film jumps between different time periods and spaces for no reason, disregarding linear temporality or cause and effect. As I mentioned earlier, it also bombards us with sensations whose meanings remain hidden or are only revealed to us much later. I believe the film’s presentation, which is so based on our mental processes and how we come to understand things in life, is a large part of why the film is so adept at depicting a dream-like situation that feels so authentically real.

Furthermore, just as is in life, the film does not give us all the answers at the end. It doesn’t even really give us all the questions. It shows us one thing, which we think we understand, and then it shows us something completely different that makes us recontextualize and reinterpret what we watched earlier. The moment we think we understand what something means, Mulholland Drive flips it on its head and completely unhinges what we thought we knew. The film makes us constantly renegotiate our understanding of the film and alter what we think, mimicking our processes of understanding our own realities.

Authentic vs. Constructed

Mulholland Drive excited me for many, many reasons but the point at which I was the most enthralled was during the scene at the nightclub called Silencio. It is a bizarre sequence but the ideas behind the performance at Silencio carry some very intriguing questions.The scene begins with a strange man on stage speaking ominously, telling the audience that “Everything is pre-recorded”. Then we see a trumpet player on-stage playing an intricate piece of music that appears to be a live performance until his fingers stop and the music plays on, revealing that it is merely a pre-recorded song being played.

There is no band. It’s all recorded.

A second performance repeats the trick. A beautiful woman comes on stage and sings a heartbreaking, tear-jerking ballad in Spanish, only to fall down ‘dead’ on the ground while the music continues, revealing that she was lip-synching the entire time. Moments like these elicit a sense of indignation in the spectator, making us constantly question the authenticity of what we are experiencing. It is unsettling to feel like you’ve been tricked and this scene makes you feel as if you’ve been manipulated because you believed something was real and authentic only to realize you’ve naively been led to assert truthfulness to something that is ultimately fake.

It’s funny that this scene elicits such an uncomfortable feeling because what this scene is playing with is essentially the very basis of what we experience when we watch sound films. Most of what we hear in a film is post-synch sound but for some reason, we’re okay with that. It’s easier to pretend that the sound we hear is actually occurring in the moment onscreen, emanating from the actor or actress pictured, than to accept that what we are hearing is a farce, a reconstruction of something that happened in the past.

In Michel Chion’s Audio-Vision, he makes the argument that the prevalence of cinema is so influencing how we experience sound, that it is conditioning us to perceive recorded sound as more realistic that the sounds we hear in our own reality. We perceive the overexaggerated, stereotypical sound of a punch in a movie fight as more realistic than the sound a punch actually makes in real life. Taking into consideration films like Mulholland Drive, which seeks to acknowledge its ability to manipulate the spectator rather than conceal it, it is easy to see how cinematic convention has conditioned us to be easy prey—conditioned us to be duped, unable to identify when we are being lied to and fed something that is inauthentic.

All of this ultimately begs questions that are hard to ask and even harder to answer. If cinema has made us so easy to fool into believing that something inauthentic is truthful, how is it affecting our ability to identify artifice in our own realities? And furthermore, is cinema’s illusion of reality conditioning us to experience cinematic ‘reality’ as more authentic than our own realities? What happens when what we see onscreen feels more real than our own lives? I’m not sure if I want to know the answer to that.