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MULHOLLAND DRIVE
CINEMA INTERRUPTUS by Roger Ebert |
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"A Love Story In
The City Of Dreams..." |
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Directed by David Lynch
- Written by David Lynch
Score Composed by Angelo
Badalamenti
Starring Naomi Watts,
Laura Elena Harring,
Justin Theroux, Monty
Montgomery
Distributed by Universal
Focus -
2001 - 147m - Rated R
Click Here to Go Back to
the Original Review |
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Cinema Interruptus - Mulholland Drive... |
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BOULDER, Colo.--We
have finally met defeat. A film has resisted our efforts to pound it
into submission. Every year I join some 1,000 students and townspeople
here at the University of Colorado on a five-day, 12-hour,
shot-by-shot trek through a film. Using the freeze-frame and
slow-motion features of a DVD, we track down symbols, expose hidden
messages, analyze visual strategies, expose special effects, and in
general, satisfy ourselves that we have extracted every fugitive scrap
of meaning from the movie under discussion.
This year the target was David Lynch's "Mulholland Drive." It is a
film I greatly admire, and indeed it was on my Top 10 list for 2001. I
still admire it, perhaps more than before. But I also find it more of
a mystery. Here at the Conference on World Affairs, we gathered in
Macky Auditorium every afternoon to look at the film together. We were
sitting in the dark, so the voices were anonymous. Anyone in the hall
could shout out "stop!," and we would freeze-frame the film and
discuss what the shouter found intriguing. (This process was named
"Cinema Interruptus" by the late Professor Howard Higman, founder of
the conference.)
Because I've been doing this at Boulder for 30 years, the audience
includes seasoned veterans. Not much eludes our collective mind and
eye. We've looked at classics like "Citizen Kane," "Vertigo" and "The
Third Man," modern masterpieces like "Raging Bull," "The Silence of
the Lambs" and "Pulp Fiction," foreign landmarks like "La Dolce Vita"
and "Persona," and contentious films like "Fight Club"--last year's
selection, a film I remained convinced, at the end of the week,
consisted of two brilliant acts and a broken ending.
This year I chose "Mulholland Drive" (which was released last week on
DVD and video) because I wanted to get to the bottom of its dream
images and shifting realities. "The characters fracture and recombine
like flesh caught in a kaleidoscope," I wrote in my original review. "
'Mulholland Drive' isn't like 'Memento,' where if you watch it closely
enough, you can hope to explain the mystery."
Analysis of the film ranges all the way from "it's all a dream" to a
6,000-word dissection on Salon.com that attempts to account for every
scene (although even Salon, confronted with the movie's mysterious
little blue box, admitted, "We don't know about the box").
In my review, I wrote, "'Mulholland Drive' is all dream. There is
nothing that is intended to be a waking moment. Like real dreams, it
does not explain, does not complete its sequences, lingers over what
it finds fascinating, dismisses unpromising plot lines. If you want an
explanation for the last half hour of the film, think of it as the
dreamer rising slowly to consciousness, as threads from the dream
fight for space with recent memories from real life, and with
fragments of other dreams--old ones and those still in development."
Did I still believe this at the end of the week? Yes, and definitely
no. The last half hour of the film does suggest a level of reality,
although I still believe that real life and fragments of dream are
interconnected. The more times you watch the film, the more the buried
structure reveals itself. At the most basic level, I believe
"Mulholland Drive" involves a failed blond actress named Diane Selwyn,
disappointed in love by a brunet woman, who hires a hit man to kill
her. Neither Diane nor her lover looks the same at the reality level
as at the dream level, although the blond actress is played all the
way through by Naomi Watts.
Most of the movie involves Selwyn's dreams or nightmares, in which she
appears as a chirpy young actress named Betty. Her brunet love in the
dreams is a slinky '40s-style sexpot named Rita (played by Laura Elena
Harring). In the dreams, Betty and "Rita" (a name taken by the
amnesiac sexpot from a Rita Hayworth movie poster) investigate Rita's
missing identity, Nancy Drew-style, and become involved, at various
levels of reality, with the casting and production of a movie. There
is also material about gangsters who are dictating a casting choice to
the film's director (Justin Theroux). There are scenes at which
neither "Betty" nor "Rita" is present; there is a haunting performance
in a nightclub; there is a monstrous homeless man (played by a woman)
behind a diner where several crucial conversations take place; musical
numbers are performed; a decomposing corpse makes an appearance; a man
in a wheelchair wields great power; a cheery elderly couple turn up
later, reduced to cockroach-size, and there are two lesbian scenes of
unusual frankness for today's Hollywood--perhaps because one is Diane
Selwyn's erotic dream, and the other her masturbatory fantasy.
Well, yes, you're thinking, I've seen the movie, so tell me something
new. But that, you see, is precisely what I was unable to do by the
end of the week. Having trekked through "Mulholland Drive" in great
detail, I confess myself still outside looking in. I speak for many of
my fellow Interrupti, whose interpretations ranged from "her life is
flashing before her eyes at the moment of death" to "it's a version of
the Odyssey, with every character corresponding to a character in
Greek mythology."
In short: "Mulholland Drive" resists, defies and finally defeats
logical explanation. It is impossible to produce a consistent précis
of the film that accounts for everything. And there is an admirable
reason for this: Like a dream, it does not have to make sense.
And yet the movie still plays like a movie. Every individual sequence
is satisfactory and effective in and of itself. It's just that they
resist efforts to make them neatly add up. Often we seem to watch
fragments of other movies, or threads of this one never completed. An
early conversation between two detectives, for example, hits the
familiar rhythm of a police procedural, but then the cops never turn
up again. The first lesbian scene is moody and erotic (and contains
the movie's best laugh), but later we suspect that both of the women
in the scene may in fact be the same woman--that Betty is Diane's
dream-self, and Rita is a Betty-fantasy replacing Diane's real-life
partner, who is not as attractive.
In our shot-by-shot progress, we found many details I had not seen
before. Consider the mysterious man in the wheelchair. He is played by
Michael J. Anderson, who is 43 inches tall. But is the man in the
wheelchair a dwarf? Or is the body in the wheelchair a fake, with
Anderson standing behind it, his face positioned atop the dummy's
shirt collar? That's what someone suggested. We looked at it several
times. Looks like it could be possible.
Something else we spotted: In a closing scene, as Diane reaches into a
bureau drawer to take out a gun, there is a split-second glimpse
of--the mysterious blue box. Earlier in the film, this box is
introduced with a triangular blue key. In one of the "real" scenes, a
hit man tells Diane that when she finds a blue key (not the same one),
she will know the hit has taken place. Perhaps the blue box represents
no secrets, but is simply a possession which Diane's dream combines
with a blue key to symbolize the death she has paid for. And the
monster behind the diner, who has the blue box in its paper bag, may
be a displaced form of the decomposing corpse that Betty and Rita find
in the dream, and that Diane imagines is the result of the hit?
(Unless, of course, that is Diane's corpse.)
And so on. One clue to the movie may be the confusing number of blond
actresses. Naomi Watts plays Betty and Diane, who look so different
(Salon.com notes) that Watts deserves praise for creating such
different appearances. Then there is a waitress in the diner, named
Diane Selwyn, who is not played by Watts (although the dreamer may
have transferred her own name to the waitresses' name tag). And a
singer in an audition scene who looks confusingly like Betty, but
isn't.
I mention all these blonds not to explain them, but to remind us of a
1977 Luis Bunuel film named "That Obscure Object of Desire," in which
two different actresses interchangeably played the heroine, with no
explanation, and without any of the other characters noticing. Bunuel
was a surrealist, and Lynch's work has always suggested that he
treasures him. Perhaps "Mulholland Drive" can be seen as the first
surrealist film of the 21st century.
I suspect the best way to appreciate "Mulholland Drive" is simply to
experience it as a series of scenes, each one with a power and
consistency of its own, that do not "add up" to a logical plot
summary, or cannot be reduced to an explanation--although various
patterns and narratives form out of the mist and then evaporate. As we
all staggered out at the end of our Boulder odyssey, that seemed to be
the consensus--although I am still getting e-mails from people who
have suddenly figured it all out.
To read Roger Ebert's original
Four Star review of "Mulholland Drive," go to
www.rogerebert.com
Copyright © Chicago Sun-Times Inc. |
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© Posted by TC Candler -
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