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.

 

Blue Velvet (1986)

I’ve heard people rave about David Lynch’s body of work before and I knew his films were something I needed to experience. Blue Velvet was my first taste of Lynch and I was in no way prepared for the weirdness that was to follow.

The DVD case champions the film as “David Lynch’s Erotic Masterpiece” so I went in expecting something vastly different than what the film actually was. To me, there seemed to be two different worlds occurring in the film, one being the sugar coated glamour of 1950s small town America and the other being a world of darkness, crime, and sexual perversion.

I’ve read around a little bit and Roger Ebert’s opinion of Blue Velvet criticizes the film for not letting the sexual portion of the storyline unfold. Blue Velvet keeps going back to the kitschy, small town America storyline and the dark world of sexual perversion never really develops past the initial fake rape scene in Dorothy’s apartment. It seemed to me that David Lynch was trying to flesh out two vastly different ideas in this film and the result left me a bit uncomfortable.

 

Color

Moving past that though, I would like to bring up one aspect of the film which really stood out to me and that was Lynch’s use of color. The over-saturated picket fences and perfectly manicured lawns that we are introduced to as the film opens has an interesting, Tim Burton-like effect for me. The overly colorful suburbs read as something being just a little off, as if the town is trying so hard to be something that it is not; the result is an eerie quality which the film quickly develops as Jeffrey finds the severed ear and the mystery plot picks up.

Saturated picket fences

I found myself looking out for the color blue from the very start of the film given the name of the film. I found it interesting that the first time the color blue really shows up in the film is when Jeffrey sneaks into Dorothy’s apartment and the walls in the hallway are dark blue, giving the hallway a cold, eerie feeling. Then Jeffrey walks inside her apartment, only to be greeted by warm red tones all over the walls and furniture.

Shade of red

From that point on, I started to notice a juxtaposition of blue and red tones associated with Isabella Rossellini’s character throughout the film. The juxtaposition is seen, quite literally, on her face in most of the film as she sports that horrific blue eye shadow with the vibrant red lipstick.

 

Every good make-up artist knows you either do bold lips or bold eyes, never both…

Sound

David Lynch was recommended to me as someone to look out for in terms of film sound and I was not disappointed. One aspect of the sound design that stood out to me was Lynch’s (and the sound designer, Alan Splet’s) use of horror sound throughout the film. One such moment occurs when the camera cuts to a close up of a street sign (Lincoln Street) and there is a corresponding screeching sound typical of horror movies. Juxtaposed against the sounds of small town suburbia, these horror sounds stand out and provide two vastly different sonic universes, just as there are two different types of stories occurring.

The sound design continues to implement juxtaposition and contradiction through is use of anempathetic music. As some of you might remember from my lecture on film sound, anempathetic music does not participate in the action or emotion onscreen; the music expresses indifference to what is going on and this apathy further accentuates the emotion onscreen. David Lynch takes full advantage of this effect. One example is in the scene where Frank pulls Jeffrey out of the car on the side of the road and beats him senseless while the cheery song “Candy Colored Clown” blares from the car stereo. The absurd collision of the upbeat song with the violent action accentuates the brutality in an almost comical way. There are also homoerotic undertones in Frank’s treatment of Jeffrey here and the anempathetic music serves to highlight those undertones and give the violence a perversely sexual feeling that harkens back to the violent rape scene earlier.

One last point I will make about sound pertains to the party scene at the whorehouse. Music begins as Ben begins to sing Roy Orbison’s “In Dreams” into a lightbulb that he uses as a microphone. His voice is beautiful and although you might momentarily question if he’s really singing, you don’t fully realize that he’s lip synching until Frank begins to sing along and breaks the spell of Ben’s performance, exposing the artificiality of it all. By doing this, Lynch is playing with out conception of what is real and what is staged by first fooling us and then revealing the trick. I find this particularly interesting and it is something that I will discuss further in my response to Mulholland Drive where Lynch plays again with ‘authentic’ versus pre-recorded sound.