Metro Pulse/Movie Guru/Mullholland Drive

Movie Guru Rating:
Nirvana (5 out of 5)

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David Lynch's Mullholland Drive is perfect nonsense

by Jesse Fox Mayshark

To the side of this review, you will see that I have awarded Mullholland Drive five of our little gurus—"Nirvana," according to our ratings system.

This is the first time in my relatively short and scattershot career as a film critic that I've felt justified in going all the way to the top of the scale. And yet, as always, there are caveats and explanations needed. Because Mullholland Drive isn't so much a great movie as a collection of great ideas, some that connect with each other and some that don't. It's not even a movie at all in any conventional sense of the word. It started out as a pilot for an ABC TV series, got canned when network execs freaked out partway into production, and had an ending essentially tacked on by its mad-scientist director, David Lynch. If you see it in that context—as a new kind of art form, a teaser for something that doesn't actually exist—it makes its own kind of sense. It's two and a half hours long, and I didn't want it to end.

I've loved Lynch ever since I saw Blue Velvet while I was in high school. I had never seen, heard, or felt anything like that in a movie theater. I promptly went and rented all of his other films, from Eraserhead through Dune, and I've subsequently been bewitched, bothered and bewildered by his work: the Twin Peaks TV series and prequel film Fire Walk With Me, Wild at Heart, Lost Highway, his nod to Americana in the G-rated The Straight Story.

All of it has been laced with mind-altering, head-spinning moments of dread and discovery and cinematic wonder, but it has also been laden with the weight of both Lynch's redundant obsessions and his apparent effort to outdo himself as the freak-show king of Hollywood Babylon. And then there was his increasingly disturbing misogyny and weirdly regressive morality, which seemed to frame his films as parables of disgust and loathing for anything outside the myth of mainstream America (or, in The Straight Story, as an unapologetic celebration of that myth).

Well, the endlessly cross-referential Mullholland Drive has all of that, but it feels reconnected and revitalized. If you consider Lynch's career as a 24-year arc beginning with the release of Eraserhead (which is much, much more than the oddball cult film some people make it out to be), Mullholland Drive represents the third act. It brings together the cumulative knowledge of his work to date, all the fetishes and genre inversions and innovations in light and sound and storytelling—but it also feels like a maturing, a release. Where Lost Highway in particular was self-conscious and cold, Mullholland Drive is full of warmth and Lynch's own brand of soul. It's not kinder and gentler, exactly, but even the horrors here are deeper and more keenly felt than in anything since that stunning first episode of Twin Peaks.

There are horrors aplenty. Explaining what the movie is about is kind of beside the point, but I'll give it a try. It starts with a violent car accident (one of Lynch's many recurring motifs), which sends the sole survivor, a lovely and mysterious brunette (Laura Elena Harring) with a purse full of cash, staggering from the scene in a state of amnesia. She sneaks into an apartment, where she is discovered—naked and bruised, another recurring motif—by wide-eyed ingenue Betty (Naomi Watts, who delivers something like three stunning performances over the course of the film), who has just moved to L.A. to become an actress. The two become friends, bonding over the brunette's (she starts calling herself Rita, after seeing a poster for Rita Hayworth's film Gilda in Betty's bathroom) search for her identity.

Meanwhile, there are some men—mysterious and evidently powerful men, but also old and ugly, as powerful men in Lynch films tend to be—looking for Rita because...well, it's kind of hard to say. And there's a young film director who also ends up crosswise with these men, because they want him to cast a particular woman in his new film. And there's a guy who meets another guy in a diner to talk about a recurring nightmare he's had. And there's another guy who meets yet another guy in his office because he wants a certain "black book" from him. And then Betty goes to an acting audition. And then Betty and Rita discover a dead body. And then they have sex. And then they go to a theater in the middle of the night where a woman sings Roy Orbison songs in Spanish. Or does she? Or do they? And then things really turn strange.

The major theme here is the artificiality of appearances—and the reality of them too, how we create meaning from scratch, how all surfaces are somehow true. The film begins with one character assuming a name, and ends with a couple of Lynch's patented identity swaps. In between, there are marvelous moments that wrench open the moviemaking dream factory and show us exactly how fake everything is, even as Lynch dazzles us with his mastery of the medium. When Betty goes to her audition, she gives a gripping reading that pulls us in even though we've already watched her rehearse it. And the nightclub singer's rendition of "Crying" is so passionate that it reduces Betty and Rita to real tears, even though the singer's eyes stay resolutely dry (with a teardrop painted on her cheek to emphasize the fakery—which, it turns out, extends to the singing itself).

There are papers and dissertations and books to be written on David Lynch's films, and Mullholland Drive will figure prominently in them. Personally, I think he represents a reaction to the artistic, cultural and political rifts in the American psyche over the past 50 years, as filtered through mass media iconography. Sometimes he's trying to understand those rifts, sometimes he's poking fun at them (and it's easy to forget how funny he is—Mullholland Drive is full of hilarious deadpan humor), and sometimes he's just feeding back into them, creating distortion along the way. All of that makes him a "reactionary" artist in all senses of the word. If you ever wondered what the mind of a white Midwestern Republican male (an Eagle Scout, no less!) really looks like on the inside, here's your chance. It's just that most of them won't admit it (and they're likely to be more terrified than anyone by what Lynch lays bare).

Anyway, if you love movies, or if you're even just bored with seeing the same stuff happen every time someone writes a script, hires some actors, and turns on a camera, you owe it to yourself (and Lynch, who needs to pay his mortgage as much as any genius) to go see Mullholland Drive. It's a hell of a ride.