David Lynch Week: Mulholland Drive (2001)

2 years ago

David Lynch Week: Mulholland Drive (2001)

IT’LL BE JUST LIKE IN THE MOVIES.

by Letitia Trent

David Lynch is interested in women. No, I take that back. David Lynch is interested in ideas about women. Like the innocent blond in ankle socks and the seductress, dark-haired and red-lipped. And I, too, am interested in ideas about women. I like tarot cards, not to tell the future, which doesn’t exist to tell, but because they show archetypes and images created from the various class, religious, and gendered distinctions of Western culture. In the Tarot deck, the idea of woman is pulled into two parts: The High Priestess, who represents the hidden, intuitive, and frightening things men have imagined about women (women, after all, bleed for days without dying), and the Empress, the loving, nurturing, harmless, motherly part of who women are, also as interpreted by men.

If we were talking about almost any other male director, my response to an interest in archetypes and—let’s face it— stereotypes about women would be a resounding ick. Lynch, though, doesn’t reinforce or argue for the truthfulness of these various limiting poles. He works to twist, combine, confuse, and generally fuck up these fixtures of our dreams, nightmares, and most embarrassingly, our desires.

In Mulholland Drive, Naomi Watts is Betty, The Empress, all nurturing and innocence, our blonde full of sweetness and naive belief that she is going to become a famous actress if she works hard and learns her lines. She comes to Hollywood and stays in the furnished apartment of her actress Aunt. Betty is from Canada. She has won the Deep River Jitterbug contest. When she arrives in Hollywood, she nods and smiles and declares it a dream. She’s both substanceless and passionate.

Laura Harring is the other woman, the High Priestess, the mystery. She has black hair and permanent red lips. She stumbles from a crashed car, blood on her temple, and wanders down an embankment into the lights of Los Angeles. She falls asleep in Betty’s hedges and sneaks in unseen as Betty’s aunt leaves the apartment. She can’t remember her name so she calls herself Rita after Rita Hayworth in a Gilda poster on the wall. In the poster, Hayworth is about to peel off one long glove - it’s the beginning of a striptease, and Lynch is beginning his striptease, too. Only he isn’t unpeeling clothes; he’s unpeeling characters.

Lynch understands that our current versions of the Virgin and the Vixen come from cinema. Marilyn Monroe is the dumb slut, so sexy she doesn’t know it, all softness and hair. Debbie Reynolds is the good girl in an updo as stiff as her girdle. Every generation has them, the women who mean sex and the women who are beautiful in a remote, brainy way or who are too sweet and bubbly to be associated with sex. The women who are mothers and the women who get tattoos. But of course, people are confusing beyond clear categorization. Couldn’t Monroe be an innocent, unable to hold her body inside her clothes?

Betty wears pink, button-down sweaters. Her blonde hair is short and bouncy and hopeful. When she finds Rita naked in her shower, Betty befriends her, though Rita doesn’t know who she is, where she is, where she’s come from, and why she had thousands of dollars in her purse. They go off together like Nancy Drew and Bess - if Bess wore red lipstick - to figure out exactly who Rita really is.

Harring stumbles through the first half of the movie without memories, or a past, or any idea of where she’s going; a starlet stepped down from a movie screen into a world she cannot understand. She remains a cipher throughout the film, an embodied collection of desires and jealousies. When asked a question, she pauses for longer than necessary, as though words take longer to sift through her head than they do ours. Is she even a person? Is she alive? Or is she just a fantasy of Betty’s, her idea of a woman-in-a-movie come to life?

Betty, though, contains multitudes. When she goes on her first big audition for a dreadful, corny soap opera, she makes a scene of uninspired writing into something so intense, so uncomfortable, that it’s hard to watch. In that scene, Betty becomes somebody different, and the reality (as it were) of Lynch’s vision slips. Who is Betty? Is she real, or is she our idea of an innocent?

As in many of Lynch’s movies, there seems to be some third element at play, a force behind events that both the viewers and the characters cannot fully see or understand. Actresses are hired or fired based on hidden, conspiratorial criteria. In Mulholland Drive, there are forces beyond logic arranging our world, making us who we are, putting us in places that limit or propel us.

In Twin Peaks and Blue Velvet, the worlds were small towns, places where everybody knows everybody and who you are has been fixed since high school, when you were a freak or jock, cheerleader or slut. Mulholland Drive gives a bigger, yet equally limited scope: the world of movies. Lynch has always made movies that move by the logic of dreams, and Hollywood is Dreamland. When Rita and Betty’s identities (as uncertain and shifting as they were to begin with) start to meld and switch, Lynch turns what we thought we understood about Betty and Rita, and the idea of identity at all, into something completely confused and beautiful.

I remember the first time I saw the scene right after Betty and Rita, with matching blonde hair, visit Silencio’s, a nightclub they believe holds the key to Rita’s identity. When they return home and the movie changes completely (I can’t give it away), I had to pause the film. I had to stop and think. Had I missed something? Where was I? But the disconnect was pleasant, a jolt of real pain or pleasure in a dream or a suddenly bitter taste at the bottom of a glass of wine.

I found an entire website devoted to untangling the various curious threads of Mulholland Drive: the homeless man behind Winky’s, the elderly couple that accompany Betty from the airport, and the names Betty and Rita. The website treats Mulholland Drive as though it’s just a beautiful puzzle. But aren’t puzzles boring? Remember those weekends assembling puzzles with your parents, all the silence and boredom? And then, when the puzzle was finished, what did you have? A fixed, finished picture with the seams showing. There wasn’t much to do but glue it together or take it apart again, but who wants to put together a puzzle they’ve already solved once?

I’d rather not put Mulholland Drive together. Like most dreams, the meaning is in the detail: The rhinestones on Betty’s sweater or the pearl earring Rita leaves in the car after she has stumbled away. The impression it leaves is what matters: cinema both exalts and flattens its images, makes them bigger than life and thinner than paper. Lynch uses these conflicting effects to confound and shock us into seeing the strangeness of films and identity.