Review of Mulholland Drive

by Roger Baldwin

Mulholland Drive is an eerie, poignant journey into pulp fiction territory that trades in identity displacement, shattered expectations which transform a virginal naïf into a scarred soul and the intolerable, raw wounds of unrequited love. The reviews I've read focus on the movie's form—its Lynchean oddities, dream logic and deliberate ambiguity—but those people misread it who call it incoherent and they neglect its emotional thrust, which is the film's distinction. David Lynch is quite famously a sensuous, moody visual stylist, even when he confuses and seems to be cinematically speaking in tongues his frames frequently fascinate, his images both amuse and haunt. But his style also shapes his content, as in Twin Peaks the camera and soundtrack may linger on banal objects long enough to conjure up an unidentifiable sense of imminent dread. Lynch weaves textures of feeling before he explains them, we respond viscerally before knowing why. The San Francisco Chronicle critic labeled the movie impenetrable, which it isn't, it unfolds. Its motif is grounded in 1940s film noir revisited and 1950s Technicolor—in its jitterbug and doo-wop sequences, in its pipe dream of imagined innocence. More than those movies immediate, unsettling emotions inhabit its core. It is a deeply melancholy and extraordinarily affecting piece of work, although we don't perceive that until toward its end. As with other recent films such as The Sixth Sense and The Others, events happen which cause us to rethink earlier scenes as puzzle pieces lock meaningfully into place. It's like an intriguing, rambling dissertation in which the thesis statement appears in the final chapter. Much of the first 40 minutes seem aggravatingly random at first and somewhat bloated, a gifted director wallowing in precocious self-indulgence, strange for strangeness' sake, as was the case in Lost Highway, a film whose inscrutable method swallowed up its message. Mulholland addresses the same theme of fugitive identities narrated through a distorted ether of solipsistic fantasy. But this film is a stunning achievement, focused in its way and up close and personal, part of its potency is a function of its skewed chronology and REM-state/wake-state oscillations.

Mulholland begins with a car crash and a mystery. There is one most-handsome survivor and we wonder, who is this name-challenged voluptuary and why does someone want her dead? The same type of question mark drew audiences into conventional noir, which often began with an unexplained murder and then proceeded to descend into forbidding nether-regions as the hard-boiled detective worked the case. This story line travels familiar terrain and recalls numerous movies, as well as some of Lynch's own favorite recurring themes, but ultimately it resonates with a chilling intimacy. Here we have Betty, a small-town girl of pristine, whole-milk beauty who arrives in L.A. with Hollywood signs beaming in both wide blue eyes. She hooks up with Rita, the car-wreck amnesiac she finds naked in her shower and who resembles an iconic forties bomb-shell femme fatale. Like Kyle Machlachan and Laura Dern in Blue Velvet, they seem like a congenial enough pair, innocently investigating a secret that twists into blind alleys of spiritual and physical rot. But Lynch's vision is darker here, the moral corruption (in this case a take-no-prisoners Hollywood sharkfest) corrupts absolutely and brooks no redemption, not for the protagonists with whom we come to identify and whom we covet.

Two-thirds of the movie is an elaborate dream sequence, a deception we realize only in the final third. Betty in real life is Diane Selwyn, Rita is Camilla Rhodes. Diane loves Camilla with an open-sore obsession (as Jimmy Stewart did Kim Novak in Vertigo, a film Lynch generously uses), and the Australian actress Naomi Watts conveys Diane's passion with a vulnerable, bitter intensity, her transformation is quietly unforgettable, she lingers in our sympathies. Particularly because through most of the movie Diane is Betty, perky, self-assured, all-American can-do and we are shocked suddenly to find her in the role of defeated cuckold, her perfect teeth discolored, her bloom withered before it was granted the opportunity to flower. Diane cannot bear to see the woman she helplessly adores marry a hot-shot director. The successful star she worships and whose career places her own meager accomplishments in fallow eclipse is leaving her behind. She uses money left her by a dead aunt to have Camilla killed. Driven to psychotic despair by her act of spontaneous retribution, and having to live without the woman whose absence leaves her dangling in an endless midnight of tormented yearning, Diane in short fashion shoots herself. These belated revelations are ghosts that abruptly haunt our two prior hours of wondering what the movie was about. Its closure is richly fulfilling, painful and tragic.

This boulevard-of-broken-dreams story line has appeared in one form or another since forever, had we been privy to it from the beginning, Mulholland Drive might have been just another potboiler, though quirky, surreal and memorably shot. Its emotional power lies in part in the order in which we are parceled out information. Initially, we enter Betty's dreamscape as her companion, we experience with her the future Diane envisions, to the audience as to her it is real and it is modeled most overtly on The Wizard of Oz, a movie Lynch reworked in a more ham-boned fashion in Wild At Heart. We later see in two brief scenes—Camilla's wedding proposal and Diane's ordering Camilla's hit in a two-bit diner—the faces, names and scattered lines of dialogue ("I got the pool and she got the pool man," says the director) which she will assimilate into her fantasy. Like Dorothy in Kansas, as in many of our dreams, Diane collects recent sense-impressions and channels them into an escapist sanctuary of projection and wish-fulfillment. Betty is the aggressive one, she initiates Rita's finding her true self. Rita is dependent and needy, Betty has generous open arms. Betty wows a casting team with her talented bad-girl audition, her career is off to the promising start she no doubt laid awake dreaming of in Deep River, Ontario. Yet she doesn't sacrifice her identity, her virtue or her roots to obtain success, she remains pure. In Betty's role-reversal universe, Rita becomes like her, summed up in a Vertigo-influenced hairdo change. We watch the director who steals Diane's woman, rather than Diane herself, being humiliated and dumped. For close to two hours we are swept up in her idealized delusion and then it is summarily dismembered. We are left to absorb the remains of her day and it cuts to the bone. Diane addresses her guilt and loss in the first scene in Winkie's Diner where a man she had seen there says he had two dreams, the same dream twice (two alternate possibilities), which scared the hell out of him and he wants to rid himself of "this god-awful feeling." When, at the beginning of the film, he confronts the beast behind his terror he dies, as does Diane at its end.

We're given coy clues, when Betty arrives at her aunt's house she announces that she's "in this dream place." After the diner scene in which Rita says she might be Diane Selwyn, the two women locate Diane's number in a phone directory, Betty punches it in and observes, "it's pretty strange to be calling yourself," which she was. I thought the movie shifted from Alice-in-Wonderland curious to breathlessly intense as Betty and Rita—following their first evening of hot lesbian love, erotic and tender (where we are given the first suggestion that Betty is not the alpha-female of the two when she whispers to Rita twice that she is in love with her, to no response)—entered the nightclub Silencio and L.A. singer Rebeka del Rio covered in Spanish Roy Orbison's "Crying" as they trembled and silently wept. Lynch has used torch songs before to embody moods, Orbison's "In Dreams" and "Blue Velvet" in Blue Velvet, but never has his selection so effectively satisfied his thematic ends. The music here was achingly beautiful, heartbreaking and frightening, although at the time we don't know why. We don't understand that Diane is beginning to emerge from her self-protective bubble and awake to the horror of her act and the disappointment of her life. (Soon after the two first meet, Rita—who is also Diane's confused dream self step-by-step completing the grim odyssey toward her genuine identity—has just awoken from her post-crash, post-shower slumber and tells Betty she thought that if only she slept for awhile everything would turn out all right, then adds through tears that she was dead wrong.) This marks Betty's transition, the final scene before she disappears and The Cowboy tells the mysterious body on the bed, "Hey pretty girl, it's time to wake up." And then Diane does. The cabaret connection was unclear when I watched it, yet I wanted to get rid of this god-awful feeling. From there on Lynch seemed to be exploring something significant, as it turns out a knotted thicket of bottomless desire, desperate insecurity and unforgiving remorse. I was impressed by how delicately he mapped out the emotional interiors of the two women's relationship. Lynch has often shown great affection for his female characters, especially the abused or doomed. Here his camera stalks them with a voyeur's relish, this is a film of extreme close-ups, but the intent is to banish the emotional distance between us and them, to achieve a more complete identification, to make us love them, before we and they are betrayed.

Mulholland Drive isn't a perfect movie, there is Lynchean opaqueness, diversions and some pointless humor (why the extended scene of the hit man botching his first kill unless Diane wanted to believe he was too incompetent to murder Camilla after she hired him?). The weirdness doesn't always work, a few bits seem overdrawn or incompletely connected (this began as an ABC television project, Lynch probably condensed themes that would have developed over a season—like the wheelchair-bound figure who speaks two words and appears long enough only to bewilder)—and we puzzle over frayed narrative threads for so long it's difficult finally to piece some of them together. I wondered why he chose to dress his symbolic monster in a comically-cheesy, Target Halloween costume. His depiction of innocence can be so 50s television cartoonish that we are inclined to recoil from or mock it, rather than find common cause. Although in this movie, Betty's pleasantly-armored virginity and 30s movie-heroine stilted speech contrast strikingly with the later scenes and their post-60s deliberately underwritten dialogue, nihilism and Diane's washed-ashore pathos. Here the hyperbolic naiveté serves a purpose, the two traditions of movie-making mingle and combust. Lynch has matured enormously in sculpting personal relationships. Compare Mulholland with the romances in Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks and Wild At Heart, all of which come across like a sheltered pubescent's uncomplicated version of true love. He first mined a realistic vein of human emotion in The Straight Story, thanks in part to a stripped-down plot and economy of script. Here he fuses his existential fetish for obscuring and overlapping layers of reality and his gift for distilling emotional states into filmed objects with accessible empathy and profound sorrow for his characters. Though the emotional connection pivots primarily on Ms. Watts' miraculous, bipolar performance. Laura Harring as Rita and Camilla remains largely a woman of laconic mystery, but ingratiatingly so, she is undefined enough that we can project onto her, our best wishes, our hope that she might share her phone number. In any case, the sum total is knee-buckling, Mulholland and Roy Orbison have shadowed me for days.

Read about Mullholland Drive in the Internet Movie Database

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