In Dreams

David Lynch and the art of the fantastic

1.

Disclaimers

“This film, perhaps, is like Zen; the moment you explain it, you betray it.”

-Michelangelo Antonioni

Some time ago, several friends and I got together to watch Mulholland Dr., a movie that I love, at the beautiful Castro Theater in San Francisco. When we reassembled after the lights came up, I found myself possessed uncontrollably by the sort of urge that is usually associated with sophomores in college. Proudly, knowingly, eagerly, I rushed to catch the uninitiated among our group up on what was “really going on” in the film, and to advance my own version of its story.

In thinking it over since then, I have come to the embarrassing conclusion that this was, in fact, a terrible urge to have in the proximity of others who have only just experienced this film. In fact, it is probably not a great urge to have in any case, for any film, but it was an especially bad instinct to follow in the context.

Insofar as it is possible to experience spoilers for a movie after watching it, I now believe that you should probably be quarantined from interpretations of Mulholland Dr. for about a week or two after you have first seen it — and that you should generally be hidden away from people trying to explain the movie to you, however well-intentioned they might be.

In that spirit, let me encourage you to stop reading right now if you haven’t seen the film, or have seen it for the first time only recently (I should also extend this disclaimer to several other Lynch movies and to a few other titles that will appear before you in boldface with plenty of time to avert your eyes).

To explain why will require some discussion.

One of the common criticisms of David Lynch is that his movies don’t make any sense. This is understandable, since his films tend towards the bizarre, what with their seemingly arbitrary use of backmasked dwarves, men advancing menacingly with video cameras, people of both genders smearing lipstick all over themselves, and, well, the entire plot to Dune. However, his movies do also almost always (excepting Dune) have a surprisingly solid internal logic to them, however off-kilter it may be.

I think that this is particularly true of Mulholland Dr., a movie that is actually much more comprehensible and deep than it first appears to be.

To put some cards on the table, I do believe that there is a reasonably coherent narrative tucked away in the film, and that this is basically it. Obviously the movie does not provide easy, intuitive access to this logic, but it is there all the same.

But.

Although there are ways to examine this story as a story, there are dangers in an overly rationalized interpretation, in confusing an untangling of plot, or even a plot and its attendant symbols, for a full understanding of what is “really going on.” I mean this both generally and specifically: part of the reason that my eagerness to catch my friends up on the purpose of the movie was foolish is because it took the form of explaining plot. Mulholland Dr. is, in fact, a particularly bad movie to attempt to reduce to its storyline.

This is in part because plot in Mulholland Dr. is almost entirely misdirection. Ultimately, the searching of the film’s purported protagonists, Betty and Rita, (which takes concrete form in the form of the blue key and box) is revealed to be a MacGuffin of sorts, and all suggestions that might start to unspool the mysteries of the movie’s story ends up being at least partially deceptive. Mulholland Dr. does play with its audience’s anticipations in this regard by (much as in Blue Velvet, or in Twin Peaks) making our search for narrative resolution analogous to Betty and Rita’s detective work.

Despite the mysteries at the center of the film, I do not believe that Mulholland Dr. requires, or even really benefits much from, what could be called a ‘decoder ring’ approach. “What’s it open?” Diane asks the hitman after he has presented to her a blue key (inquiring here on behalf of the film’s audience as well). His response is to laugh at her.

Instead, the film takes up a set of what Lynch might call ‘ideas’ that are obliquely (but essentially) connected to the story that it tells. I’m generally distrustful of Peter-and-the-Wolf-style interpretations of art that attempt to map elements of a story too closely to other concepts (“Now the duck is walking”).

What I hope to demonstrate, by contrast, is that Mulholland Dr. raises a series of Lynchian ‘ideas’ without forcing any of these entirely to resolution.

In nearly all cases, this strategy is to the movie’s benefit, and permits Lynch additional modes of expression or exploration that might otherwise be unavailable given too direct an approach. In some cases, those ideas that the movie is trying to motion towards, if not express directly, are extremely close to those actual experiences that arise for an audience while watching the film itself.

Like most jokes, or magic tricks, over-explication runs the risk of ruining effect, so in that spirit, consider the present text an attempt not to reduce the movie to any specific reading, but rather to elucidate and to explore various elements within it.

Mulholland Dr. is a movie that is, more than most, “about” its own strange fixations, its interactions with themes, moods, tones, and ideas. In this and several other regards, as is sometimes noted, it shares lineage with (and borrows liberally from) several perfect, or near-perfect, films that are similarly animated. All three have, in varying ways, key ideas that motivate them deeply, darkly, obsessively — and these conceits have, in turn, influenced aspects of Lynch’s film.

In one case, a central focus is actually the notion of obsession itself.

2.

Girls on Film

I saw Vertigo for the first time when I was much younger, but didn’t really connect with it. The plot was too shaggy, the pacing too languid. I distinctly remember thinking that it was kind of boring.

I think that some of my initial reaction might have arisen from the fact that Vertigo, particularly in comparison to other Hitchcock, is intentionally slow. Much like Lynch, Hitchcock is ultimately less interested in traversing narrative than he is in painstakingly exploring peculiar fixations. As a result, Vertigo is not an instantly gratifying movie, and at times it is a deliberately unpleasant one. This is particularly the case in its second half, when the film is busily exploring the horrifying psychoses of its protagonist, Scotty, and their effect on the unfortunate women around him.

Vertigo is also, like the best Hitchcock, a deep, bizarre, utterly engaging experience. I’m uncertain whether its 1996 restoration preceded my first viewing, but the set design is not something that I remember paying much attention to. In fact, the film’s look is phenomenal—particularly its haunting uses of color, and of light. It’s hard to imagine that this usage wasn’t a particularly strong influence on Lynch (a noted Hitchcock fan), and on Mulholland Dr.’s aesthetic in particular

As it happens, Lynch references Vertigo elsewhere besides Mulholland Dr. He does this most overtly in Twin Peaks, where the name of (blonde) Laura Palmer’s (brunette) cousin, Maddy, is a sort of multi-word portmanteau of “Scotty Ferguson” and “Madeline Elster;” Maddy and Laura are also doubles in the same way that Madeline and Judy are in Hitchcock.

And, in Lost Highway, the brunette Renee Madison is “transformed” into a different blonde woman, Alice Wakefield, and then (possibly?) back again, much like characters in Vertigo:

Lynch quotes visually from Vertigo elsewhere as well. For instance, the otherworldly curtains in Vertigo’s evocative hotel scene may be one possible origin of a frequent motif in Lynch’s other works:

Much of Vertigo’s visual grammar is also specifically re-contextualized in Mulholland Dr. For instance, Betty’s suiting as she heads to her audition recalls Kim Novak’s costuming as “Madeline,” just as the architecture of the Sierra Bonita apartments echoes that of Mission San Juan Bautista:

And there are other quotations as well:

And so on.

There are also deeper, structural similarities between the two films. Vertigo unfolds into two parts, each of which corresponds to one half of Kim Novak’s doubled character. At first, Scottie pursues “Madeline” (in all senses of that word), whose identity is a fictive, idealized construct; he spends the last third of the film coercing Judy, a “real,” but less glamorous, girl from Kansas to adopt his idealization.

Similarly, the naive, talented, and cheering “Betty,” who we also encounter for the first three-quarters of Mulholland Dr., is revealed (possibly) to be Diane’s idealized self-construction, though Lynch complicates the analogy by having the cypher-like Rita complete the sort of physical transformation that Judy undergoes in Vertigo instead, by donning a blonde wig.

But there are deeper connections. The interplay between idealization and coercion, for instance, is the subject of Roger Ebert’s review of Vertigo, a subtext that I undoubtedly missed on my first viewing. Despite a recent, enthusiastic pair of exchanges, wherein two separate friends of mine insisted that this reading gave Hitchcock too much credit, I like Ebert’s take. His case is that the movie is not only a portrait of one man’s psychoses, but also that bullying Scotty stands in for bullying Alfred Hitchcock, who was notoriously controlling of his female actors. In that context, much of Scotty’s dialogue, particularly in the film’s final scene, can be understood to contain another level of meaning entirely:

“Did he train you? Did he rehearse you? Did he tell you what to do and what to say?”

You can go a bit crazy with this sort of thing, and can read Vertigo as a perverse love-letter of sorts from Hitchcock to Grace Kelly, a prior star in several of his films. She was also a leading blonde, and (in a Hitchcock-like third-act twist) abandoned acting entirely in 1956 to become Princess of Monaco. The fact that Novak had previously worked as a stand-in for Kelly further encourages a reading of Vertigo as the meta-story of a movie director attempting to mold an actress into a lost idealization, which, as Ebert notes, would make the Proustian reference in “Madeline” a somewhat pathological one. Novak’s later recollection that part of her performance explicitly involved reaction against Hitchcock is poignant in that context:

“I know that Hitchcock gave me a lot of freedom in creating the character, but he was very exact in telling me exactly what to do. How to move, where to stand. I think you can see a little of me resisting that in some of the shots, kind of insisting on my own identity.”

Whether or not Vertigo contains explicitly autobiographical elements for Hitchcock—a point deserving of some skepticism—Novak’s “insistence” here on her “own identity” reveals a final, exceptionally powerful way to read the film, intended or not. It can also be considered to be an exploration of the abusive, mechanical way in which the Hollywood system molded its female actors (i.e. Judy) into idealized stars (i.e. “Madeline”), while also “making their lives miserable, ” as Richard Brody puts it. Novak, again:

[The film] was the opportunity to express what was going on between me and Hollywood…what was going on in ‘Vertigo’ was very much what I was going through in my life at the time…Scottie vs. Madeleine/Judy, like Hollywood vs. Kim Novak.

Susan White in an extremely insightful essay on Hitchcock, provides additional context and color:

Kim Novak was a top box office star when Harry Cohn loaned her out to Hitchcock to make Vertigo. She was already ill at ease in her sex kitten roles, and this malaise was a part of the star image she projected, exemplified by her role in Joshua Logan’s Picnic (1956), where her character suffers under the lecherous scrutiny of the townspeople. Virginia Wright Wexman has described in penetrating detail the machinations of the studio system in the creation of Novak as star, with its obvious parallels to her role as Judy, a young woman “transformed into a celestial beauty by a controlling man.” Though Cohn “arranged to have her constantly watched, forced her to live in her studio dressing room and eat only food prepared by the chef, and called her ‘the fat Polack,’” Novak did assert a modicum of independence by such gestures as “keep[ing] her surname despite its ethnic overtones” (80).

If, as Ebert argues, Vertigo is the portrait of a woman in “unbearable pain,” Novak reminds us that this portrait was not limited to the world of the film.

Despite a generation of change between the two films, the mistreatment of women in Hollywood remains a lamentably current topic, and can also be said to be a reality that Mulholland Dr. is very alert to as it follows the career of Betty / Diane. Lynch being Lynch, this topic is coded and obliquely rendered, but it is also an undeniable element of his film that recurs in surprising ways.

One entrance into it is through a closer examination of one of Mulholland Dr.’s most powerful and remarked-upon scenes.

Consider what actually happens during Betty’s audition. The scene is characterized first by the producer, Wally’s, easy condescension toward her, and then by the casual predation of her disconcertingly orange partner, “Woody,” who repeatedly demonstrates the sort of sensitivity that one might expect from an especially low-grade porn star. Woody is, in fact, a great stand-in for a type of loutish attitude explored by the film more generally: he makes special effort to discount the work of those women that have previously auditioned with him (“They all say it the same way!”), and when he does refer to a specific auditionee, she is “what’s-her-name,” who is notable only because their interaction “felt kind of good.” His mistreatment of Betty proceeds along similar lines.

Part of the later power of this scene clearly derives from its contrast with the expectation that Mulholland Dr. sets for it in this moment, and earlier: when Betty and Rita practice line-reading in anticipation of Betty’s audition, they ridicule the script’s campy dialogue (“Such a lame scene!”). We are primed to expect that this scene will be awkward at best. What we actually do observe in this scene as it evolves, however, is not what we are prepared for at all: it has real heat, and includes a tour-de-force performance from the hitherto asexual Betty that stuns all in attendance (including Woody):

It is undeniably so. However, it is more than this as well, and it is worth bearing in mind here all of the various criteria by which Betty’s performance is evaluated, both by the small audience assembled in the room in which she auditions, and also by its equivalent watching Mulholland Dr.:

Despite the fact that it is never explicitly discussed, one of the major motives of Lynch’s film is that of men leveraging their status in Hollywood over women, particularly in support of their own gratification. This motif is best exemplified by the audition scene, but it is further extended by Adam Kesher’s kiss of Camilla at the end of the movie, directed by him on-set.

(As an aside, his kiss further stands in for Adam’s larger intrusion into Camilla’s same-sex relationship with Diane. A similar triangle in Vertigo, albeit one with a much different focus, is created by “Madeline”, Scotty, and the perpetually-disappointed, yet always-loyal, always-hoping Midge. Despite the differences between both scenarios, in both cases, our sympathies are largely with the excluded, powerless women.)

In Mulholland Dr., this larger theme of abuses by male Hollywood powers that be is extended in more oblique ways as well: a central conceit is the presentation of a horrific relationship between shadowy, sinister, star-making forces and those victims that these forces operate upon and exploit. It wouldn’t be a David Lynch film if this relationship was presented straightforwardly, but the Hollywood machine that he depicts is not only populated by literal grotesques, but is also presented as aggressively, predatorily engaged in the promotion of young female ingenues.

The relationship drawn by the film between the men of the Hollywood machine and their starlets is similar to the one drawn by Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights, which finds in the pornography and prostitution industries clear analogues for the broader world of moviemaking. Lynch finds, in my opinion, more nuanced ways to approach the same comparison:

(To say nothing of the many red lampshades that one can observe throughout the movie...)

If a larger notion around mistreatment of women is implicit in / implied by Vertigo, which does consider the special misery inflicted upon its female characters by its hero, Scotty, it is more present in Mulholland Dr., which connects that same misery to exploitative behaviors by men in the film industry. As has been remarked by several reviewers, the idea of holding a mirror, however distorted, to the underbelly of Hollywood is essential to the film. This has earned it comparisons to Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard, another Hollywood-located noir (similarly named for an iconic street, which runs parallel to the real Mulholland Dr.) that also reflects what Martha Nochimson evocatively refers to as its culture of “human putrefaction.” What I believe is sometimes overlooked in discussions of Mulholland Dr. is that this culture and its process are depicted as being heavily gendered, even if this connection never emerges explicitly within the film. Small wonder, then, what Betty and Diane discover in Apartment 17—and in what room.

There is at least one way, however, in which Lynch’s approach to this subject does give pause. In an insightful feature on Lynch written on set during the filming of Lost Highway, David Foster Wallace noted the following about the uncomfortable, coldly fitting use of Richard Pryor in that film:

The most controversial bit of casting in Lost Highway, though, is going to be Richard Pryor as Balthazar Getty’s boss at the auto shop. Meaning the Richard Pryor who’s got muscular dystrophy that’s stripped him of what must be 75 pounds and affects his speech and causes his eyes to bulge and makes him seem like a cruel child’s parody of somebody with neurological dysfunction. In Lost Highway, Richard Pryor’s infirmity is meant to be grotesque and to jar against all our old memories of the “real” Pryor. Pryor’s scenes are the parts of Lost Highway where I like David Lynch least: Pryor’s painful to watch, and not painful in a good way or a way that has anything to do with the business of the movie, and I can’t help thinking that Lynch is exploiting Pryor the same way John Waters exploits Patricia Hearst, i.e., letting an actor think he’s been hired to act when he’s really been hired to be a spectacle, an arch joke for the audience to congratulate themselves on getting. And yet at the same time Pryor’s symbolically perfect in this movie, in a way: The dissonance between the palsied husk onscreen and the vibrant man in our memories means that what we see in Lost Highway both is and is not the “real” Richard Pryor. His casting is thematically intriguing, then, but coldly, meanly so. (emphasis mine)

I believe that Lynch performs a similar maneuver in Mulholland Dr. by selecting Ann Miller for the part of Coco. Just as Pryor’s performance is meant simultaneously to recall and to contrast with recollection of his earlier persona, so too is the memory of Miller, whose image once “reflected a studio-era ideal of glamor,” meant to contrast with how she appears in the film. For this reason, I believe, Lynch lingers unflatteringly, even exploitatively, on elements of her personal appearance (Mulholland Dr. was her last film):

The same is also true of the casting of Lee Grant as Louise Bonner:

If the casting of Pryor has a cold appropriateness to it, so too do Miller and Grants’s: they both are and are not the figures of memory, and thus are literal, living embodiments of those themes previously discussed. All castings share a similar element of ‘spectacle’ to them, to quote Wallace, and as such are among my least favorite elements of Mulholland Dr. I do believe that there are additional, less unpleasant reasons for some of the focus on both women, but the “arch joke” component is also unavoidably present, alienating, and unfortunate.

My focus on this last point may imply that I am arguing that Lynch’s take is a cynical one. Despite his obvious willingness to render unpleasantries and the pessimistic arc of his narrative, I don’t believe that this is the case.

Both Vertigo and Mulholland Dr. ultimately do share a similar stratagem, pressing their audiences to consider the cost of an ideal’s pursuit; the tragedy of the Judy/“Madeline” dynamic can stand in for the treatment of aspiring female actors in a way that the Diane/Betty dichotomy further exemplifies. Betty and “Madeline” are both idealized fictions, and the more prosaic Diane and Judy suffer, and are punished, in different (and similar) ways for the existence of those idealizations, and the obsessions that they inspire. This is unfortunately not a new story in Hollywood by any means.

Yet, despite their shared focus on this point, both films also, in equally different ways and in very different contexts, demonstrate an unusual respect for the power, and importance, of certain ideas as well. In that, both share DNA with another film that explores the distance between what is idealized and what is “real,” perhaps more intensely than does any other.

[Part 3]