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 Mulholland, 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. I think that this criticism is not a great one — all of his movies do have a logic to them, however bizarre — but I also think that it’s particularly untrue of Mulholland Dr.

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 kind of fucked up 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 plot 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. obliquely 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.

3.

She and Her

In a recent re-watching of Ingrid Bergman’s Persona, I was struck by how much my experience belied its director’s reputation for (and my memory of Persona’s connection to) heavy, ponderous topics. In actuality, the movie is not only light, quick and various, but also extremely—and at times unexpectedly—subversive. Here (NSFW), for instance, is a particularly mischievous (and often-censored) still from the film’s famous prologue.

And here, in a much better example (also NSFW), is the famous “beach” monologue that Alma presents to Elisabet after they have settled into the administrator’s cottage:

In the same way that the opening scene of Hitchcock’s Psycho still contains the whiff of scandal, with its casual depiction of an afternoon rendezvous, Alma’s scene still shocks after fifty years, with its frank discussion of sex, abortion, and infidelity. In fact, such is its force that, as Ebert reports, moviegoers frequently misrecall the story that Alma recounts as an actual set of events depicted by the film.

As with both Vertigo and Mulholland Dr., the tone of Persona is haunting and possesses an ethereal, unreal quality. It is also evocatively shot, and full of memorable images:

The image of two women’s faces, one in profile, is a recurring visual motif in Persona, and it is one that Lynch borrows from directly:

As with Vertigo, there is, additionally, substantial narrative overlap between the two films, as Robert from The Film Experience notes astutely:

Both are about two women living together under unusual circumstances, one sick, the other a caregiver. In both cases, at least one of the women is an actress. Both films show a general degredation (sic) of these women’s relationships…Persona begins with actress Elizabeth Vogler (Liv Ullmann) experiencing a sudden fit of despair and going voluntarily mute. In the hospital, she’s paired with nurse Alma (Bibi Andersson) and the two are sent off to a seaside cottage where they develop an ambiguously intimate relationship… Eventually the film begins to flip on it’s head, revealing its own artificiality, and it becomes impossible to know who is who, and what role they’re playing. Mulholland Drive opens with aspiring actress Betty’s discovery of accident victim amnesiac Rita hiding out in her apartment. Soon, between line readings and Betty’s audtions, the two lady sleuths are investigating Rita’s life and identity and eventually becoming lovers (or have they always been?). Eventually the film begins to flip on it’s head, revealing it’s own artificiality, and it becomes impossible to know who is who, and what role they’re playing.

Add to this list another essential similarity at play: the arc of the characters of Alma and of Betty/Diane. Alma’s evolution is conventionally summarized as a slow merging with Elizabet’s personality, but I believe that what actually happens is much more subtle than this. A fuller description of her arc would emphasize radical and fundamental changes in her persona rather than simply find a slow consuming of her will by Elizabet’s. It is true that, early in the film, Alma suggests to the hospital administrator that Elizabet be paired with a more experienced nurse because she worries that she, Alma, will not have the mental fortitude to engage her willful patient. It is also true that such concern turns out to be prescient, since, as Robert notes, “the silent, passive judgement of Elizabeth begins to turn Alma into an aggressor.”

Like Mulholland Dr., and Vertigo both, Persona is the story of a betrayal, and an investigation into a power dynamic. Roughly midway through the film, Alma opens one of Elizabet’s letters without permission and discovers that her mute companion, with whom she has shared intimate personal detail, has secretly been judging her all along.

“My dear, I could live like this forever. Silent, living a secluded life, reducing my needs. Feeling my battered soul finally starting to smooth itself out. Alma takes care of me, spoils me in the most touching way. I believe that she likes it here and that she’s very fond of me, perhaps even in love in an unaware and enchanting way. In any case, it’s very interesting studying her. Sometimes she cries over past sins. An orgy with a strange boy and a subsequent abortion. She claims that her perceptions do not correspond with her actions.”

Elizabet’s letter, with its aristocratic, clinically condescending take on Alma’s desires, also exposes a class tension between the two women that had not yet emerged obviously into their interpersonal dynamic.

Ebert reads Alma’s subsequent, violent reaction to the betrayal as a straightforward professional failure:

In the sunny courtyard of the cottage, she picks up the pieces of a broken glass, and then deliberately leaves a shard where Elizabeth might walk. Elizabeth cuts her foot, but this is essentially a victory for the actress, who has forced the nurse to abandon the discipline of her profession and reveal weakness.

I’m not sure, however, that Elizabet’s ‘victory’ is so clear-cut. Yes, Alma’s fear is realized, and yes she does abandon her professional discipline by surrendering to a desire toward cruelty. But Elizabet also reveals weakness of her own in this moment, with an involuntary exclamation upon stepping on the broken glass, thereby breaking her own vow of silence — and thus her own code of discipline. In fact, watching the scene in its entirety, it is actually very difficult to reduce into simple terms who its “winner” and “loser” are:

This pattern recurs and deepens throughout the film: Alma, filled with anger, confronts Elizabet over the betrayal, demands that her patient speak, and even threatens to pour boiling water on her. Elizabet replies with her first words of the film, nearly an hour into its running time:

This scene doesn’t end with obvious winners or losers, either. Both Bibi Andersson and Liv Ullmann offer masterly, subtle performances throughout Persona, but this scene in particular is a deeply nuanced exploration of the two women’s relationship. Watch it again; look at their faces. Observe what their expressions communicate, and try to keep track of who is “winning” or “losing” at various moment in their fight—and at what cost.

Ebert notes that Bergman had once told him that “the human face is the great subject of the cinema. Everything is there.” If that sentiment is true for any film, it is inarguably true for this one.

The contours of the women’s power dynamic become more fluid over the course of the movie, as do their identities. It is not clear who is wounded most when Mr. Vogler mistakes Alma for his wife and begins, absurdly, to make love to her in front of Elizabet after coercing Alma to ‘admit’ that she is the mother of Elizabet’s child. And the closing interview between Alma and Elizabet, shot in full first with focus on Elizabet and then in full to observe Alma’s face as she issues her monologue, is a torrent of judgment and reaction.

Alma’s speech exposes personal horror in Elizabet’s life, which provides subtext for her earlier mockery of her less sophisticated caretaker, and seems to upend the earlier balance of power between the two women for good as Alma decisively rejects Elizabet (“No! I’m not like you!”). But then, the film presents a sudden image of the two women’s faces merged together:

Although it is a composite of two attractive faces, there is something deeply unsettling, even uncanny, about this image. This is particularly true for viewers of Persona who have spent an entire film in the company of the women whose faces compose it, and who also encounter this image greeted with horror movie strings. Ebert, again, notes that

Andersson told me she and Ullmann had no idea Bergman was going to do this, and when she first saw the film she found it disturbing and frightening.

Extending this, Wheeler Winston Dixon cites Bergman as recalling that, for

the famous split-face image in Persona, in which Nurse Alma’s face melts into Elisabet Vogler’s, both actresses, viewing the rushes, failed to recognize themselves in the artificially congruent image, concentrating instead on the image of the “other.”

We set the [projector] running, and Liv said: “Oh look, what a horrible picture of Bibi.” And Bibi said: “No, it’s not me, it’s you!” . . . Everyone has a better and worse side, and the picture is a combination of Bibi and Liv’s less attractive sides. At first they were so scared they didn’t even recognize their own faces.

As mentioned, Alma’s arc shares similarities with that of Betty / Diane in Mulholland Dr. Both blonde characters begin in optimistic roles, taking care of a detached, silent (or nearly silent) brunette women whose personality is also cypheric and distant. Each ‘caretaker’ in the pairing, however, has also changed irreversibly by the end of the film, and ends up cynical, accusatory, and consumed by her own failures. Those failures also, significantly, are connected to a failure of interpersonal connection between the ‘caretaker’ characters on the one hand, and the women that they are caring for on the other. Part of what makes the concluding act of Mulholland Dr. so powerful, for instance, is its exposures of the collapsing Diane-Camilla relationship, the dynamics that underpin this, and the shadows that this failure casts, both forward and backward:

Lloyd Michaels connects Alma’s arc to horror fiction, noting (in a summary also partly descriptive of Betty/Diane) that

Alma’s dedication to caring for others, her breakdown into madness and violence, and her attraction to mirrors may also conjure up the mythic figure of Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde.

As Michaels notes, other horror references undergird Alma’s transformation. “Unbearable pain, and nausea,” she declaims in the nightmarish dream sequence that nearly closes Persona, just before she draws her own blood with her fingernails and beats Elizabet for vampirically feeding on her.

An audience to Persona might conclude from this scene that it was, at last, watching the story of Alma’s personality gradually, but inexorably, being consumed by the silent, more dominant Elizabet (a transition that would be lightly echoed in the power dynamic that emerges to view in the final third of Mulholland Dr.). However, just as it is too simplistic to conclude decisively which of the two women emerges victoriously from their various confrontations, so too is it difficult to describe the progress of their relationship in terms that do not feel reductionist. It is probably most accurate to say that Persona is, in part, an extended investigation into the complex interweaving of several different kinds of identity.

Begman’s original title for Persona, “A Sonata for Two Women,” is reflective of this idea, and of fluid interplay between actresses, parts, and identity.

I believe that Steve Vineburg is close to the truth when he observes that

The mystery at the heart of Persona is the mystery of identity, articulated by Bergman and his two actresses chiefly in two ways. The first is this mirror exercise, in which we cannot say for sure which of the two women is the initiator and which is the responding mirror. The other is the metamorphosis, a process whereby an actor undergoes a dramatic mutation of some kind.

The motif of blended identities, to return to the earlier summary from The Film Experience, is one that recurs throughout Persona. Many images in the film, to include many of those included above, play on the fact that Bibi Andersson and Liv Ullmann physically resemble one another. As Michaels notes, one of the points of inspiration for the film was

a chance view of a photograph of Bibi Andersson and Liv Ullmann, who had recently become close friends; Bergman noticed the strong resemblance between the two actresses and began conceiving of a film starring them both, “a sonata for two instruments,” as he would later describe it.

The idea of blending the two women’s images and identities is one that the director returns to repeatedly.

Notions of identity and its boundaries also explicitly emerge from the text of the film.

In this context, it is worth returning to Alma’s ‘beach’ monologue:

Alma’s story is introduced (and, therefore, framed) by her recollection of youth as a lone girl among seven brothers, who always wanted a sister: a familial peer (or double) that shared her gender identity. It is into that context that the story of Katarina emerges, and this begins with an image of the two female neighbors sunbathing next to each other, naked.

(Well, nearly naked, anyway. The women are recollected as lying next to each other wearing nothing but straw hats. Those hats are a detail that Bergman returns to in another beach scene, later in Persona.)

The duo of Alma and Katarina are joined, in Alma’s memory, by another double, of opposite gender: two boys who appear near the two women on the beach and who stare at them before being initiated into erotic coupling by Katarina. Alma’s description of events here, with its focus on Katarina’s initiative and physicality and its flurry of pronouns and action between three, then four, participants, is also partly a story about identities blending. Blink, for instance, and you’ll miss the only time that either boy is named (‘Peter,’ who is the less ‘brave’ of the two interlopers). When, after Alma recalls her return home to Karl-Henrick, followed by their coupling and her subsequent abortion, she is moved to tears by her own guilt, but also utters a strange, revealing phrase about the entire experience:

Susan Sontag finds the notion of doubles and doubling to be essential to Persona and its conception of identity.

…The construction of Persona is best described in terms of the form: variations on a theme. The theme is that of doubling, and the variations are those that follow from its leading possibilities — duplication, inversion, reciprocal exchange, repetition.

This is the context in which she reads the “interview” scene near the end of the movie as well.

Perhaps the most striking episode, in which the formal and psychological resonances of the double theme are played out most starkly, is the monologue in which Alma describes Elizabeth’s relation to her son. This is repeated twice in its entirety, the first time showing Elizabeth’s face as she listens, the second time Alma’s face as she speaks. The sequence closes spectacularly, terrifyingly with the appearance of a double or composite face, half Elizabeth’s and half Alma’s.

This is certainly true for this scene specifically, though blurred identities, doppelgangers, and repetition — all encompassed in Sontag’s taxonomy — are also elements in Persona more generally.

Each of these three items are also touchstones of Mulholland Dr. (and of Vertigo as well: think of the repeated falls from heights, for instance, or the Madeline/Judy split, or other similar items). Most overtly, the plot of Lynch’s film circles explicitly around questions of identity: who is ‘Rita’ the amnesiac, and what is her story? This question (which motivates most of the first two-thirds of the film) is never resolved, but by the time that the movie has concluded, its entire notion of who is who has become unstable. In fact, Alma’s remark in Persona, about being ‘one and the same person at the very same time,’ is almost a statement of intent for the de-centered way in which identity is eventually represented in Mulholland Dr.

Two Camillas

Echoes and reflections are also deeply integrated into the fabric of the film as well. This idea of doubles, which also connects to the plot of Mulholland Dr., pops up in unexpected places.

Some doubles are textual. As Zina Giannopoulou observes, it is possible to find a surprising amount of subtext for the Betty/Diane-Rita/Camilla relationship in the content of the script that Betty reads for her audition, given its handling of overlapping ideas, such as murder, looming consequences, sexual passion, betrayal of trust, and hatreds both internally and externally fixated.

The relationship between two principal (and similar) female characters is, to some degree, the core of both films, and another point of similarity between Persona and Mulholland Dr. is the romantic/erotic tension that exists between each pairing in each film.

I probably risk some laughter by pointing out that your author is not much of an authority on the subject, and therefore endeavors to tread lightly here, but I did find Gwendolyn Audrey Foster’s essay on lesbian subtext in Bergman’s film to be both thoughtful and illustrative. Following another critic, Robin Wood, Foster highlights the importance of Bergman’s decision to have Elizabet fall mute during a production of Electra, for instance, given Freudian implications of that play. Citing Wood (whom she, admittedly, finds a bit overstated), she notes that it is possible to read Elizabet as having thus rejected the Freudian ‘symbolic order’ and to have retreated instead into a more liberated, ‘performative’ space with Alma, despite the eventual disintegration of their tumultuous relationship.

Astutely, Foster observes that male-female sex in Persona is unfailingly associated with pain, though it often contains a surreptitious, same-sex performative aspect as well; conversely, “homosexual sex is associated with fear of and fascination at the merging of identity” instead. Foster therefore finds the real erotic energy of the beach monologue to be between Katarina and Alma (and, telescoping outwards, between Alma and Elizabet, who is Alma’s audience). In this reading, the surreal sequence where Mr. Vogler appears suddenly and makes love to Alma might be notable not just because it is the only direct depiction of male-female sex in the film, but also because it both represents a literal transfer of identity, and also takes place in the presence of Elizabet (who is, bizarrely, the object of Vogler’s address).

Much of the reading above also describes Mulholland Dr., which also presents male-female relationships as sources of pain, exploitation, and humiliation (think of the performances that Diane encounters at Adam’s mansion at the end of the film, the different performance that Betty is encouraged to give during her audition, or the very different performance that Adam encounters at his own home earlier in the storyline). Conversely, the relationship that emerges over the course of the film between Diane and Rita is largely characterized by its tenderness and sincerity.

That all said, I would amend slightly the reading of the relationship between Elizabet and Alma above to note that it is also characterized by a deep, painful intensity. So it also goes in Mulholland Dr. Though the Betty-Rita relationship does not (and cannot) collapse in the way that the less explicitly sexual Elizabet-Alma relationship gradually does, the dissolving romance between Diane and Camilla presented at the end of the film is equally rocky. Significantly, Diane seems to accept, however reluctantly, the relationship between Adam and Camilla, but expresses wounded shock at the gratuitous same-sex kiss between Camilla and the unnamed blonde woman at Adam’s dinner party. Both at that party, and on Adam’s film set, Camilla seems to delight in forcing Diane to watch her kiss other people.

Although their contexts are very different, the dinner party and on-set scenes are similar to the scene with Mr. Vogler in Persona insofar as both contain performative acts. Alma wants the unattainable Elizabet to observe, and to be alienated by, her strange liaison with Mr. Vogler; Camilla seems instead to want to rub Diane’s face in the fact of her displacement.

There are enough nods to noirs and their conventions in Mulholland Dr. to fill a separate essay, but part of the film’s genius is to find seeds of the femme fatale archetype in Elizabet’s willfulness, allure, emotional remove, and cruelty towards the more naive Alma.

Elizabet finds a double analogue in Lynch’s film, in the characters of Camilla and Rita, and although Camilla’s passionate relationship with and subsequent betrayal of Diane is textbook noir, it is Laura Elena Harring’s other role that is more explicitly connected to genre conventions.

In Mulholland Dr., Rita discovers her name on a poster for Gilda, the titular character to which, played by Rita Hayworth, is among the most famous femme fatales in movie history, and features a marquee performance from an actress who was famous for playing the type. Rita’s amnesia and the film’s allusions to her shadowy, troubled past filled with danger are nods to the genre, but these also work to help subsume several of the questions about identity into the film’s plot. Like Betty, we also seek resolution on who Rita is, and what her backstory might be.

Persona, I think, is after something slightly different: it is interested in how identity relates to experiences of reality, particularly as these are mediated. As Egil Törnqvist observes, the interplay between objectivity and subjectivity is characteristic of many of Bergman’s films, and subjective experience is definitely a topic that Persona investigates in variant and in intriguing ways; its extended riffing on conceptions of identity can be seen as largely in the service of this notion.

Mulholland Dr. is also very interested in this idea as well, though in a slightly different fashion.

Another connection between the films discussed so far is a motif of drapery. As noted, Vertigo makes very prominent use of curtains in its evocative motel scene.

Curtains are, however, also a dominant motif in Persona as well.

Both are influences on Mulholland Dr., which also prominently features curtains in several scenes.

Mulholland Dr., however, is even more deeply connected to a fourth film, which includes a storyline that contains a particularly famous set of curtains. In fact, all of Lynch’s films may enjoy their deepest connection with this film, which is worth an extended comparison.

First, however, an interlude.

4.

Dreams, and Their Uses

“I like to dive into a dream world that I’ve made or discovered; a world I choose … [You can’t really get others to experience it, but] right there is the power of cinema.”

-David Lynch

One of the most common refrains about David Lynch is that his movies are unusually connected to worlds, and to peculiar mechanics, of dreams. Pauline Kael, in her 1986 review of Blue Velvet, nodded to this connection (as well as his sometimes 1950's aesthetic) when she called Lynch “a Frank Capra of dream logic,” and for good reason; in many of his films, states of dreaming and the experience of the film itself are very closely intertwined. When Lynch is not depicting the actual dreams of his characters, he is frequently presenting memorably dream-like images:

As Giannopoulou astutely notes, dreams and films make natural analogues:

The phenomenology of a film is similar to that of a dream: the spectator watches the film, just as the dreamer sees his or her dream…In addition, film spectator and dreamer inhabit a different space and time from the immaterial characters in the film and the dream, respectively…yet the film’s time, as well as the dream’s time, is largely indeterminate…the images on the screen, the darkness of the movie theater, the immobility of the spectator, simulate the atmosphere of a dream.

Lynch, however, seems to take this analogy much further than do most other filmmakers.

The famous scene in Blue Velvet where Dean Stockwell lip-syncs to Roy Orbison is a good, quick case in point.

This sequence is in part so striking because it feels like an event in a dream. One big reason for this is due to its staging. Much is made by critics of Lynch’s background as a painter, and given this scene’s use of lighting, color, depth of field, arrangement of figure, etc., it’s easy to see why.

But also note that the lyrics to the Roy Orbison song that forms this scene’s focus also take up dreaming directly as their subject. Consequently, the scene has an unusual feel: both surreal, like a dream, and also in possession of a kind of strange distance from the concept that it is commentating on — amplifying the effect.

The scene also does something else that is interesting: it calls attention to the break in Stockwell’s (mock) performance, prompted by the sudden anger of the character of Frank Booth, while diegetic music continues in the background.

To return to the David Foster Wallace essay on Lynch for a moment, Wallace draws an interesting contrast regarding the purposes of art vs. commercial film in order to situate Lynch’s work.

MOVIES ARE AN authoritarian medium. They vulnerabilize you and then dominate you. Part of the magic of going to a movie is surrendering to it, letting it dominate you. The sitting in the dark, the looking up, the tranced distance from the screen, the being able to see the people on the screen without being seen by the people on the screen, the people on the screen being so much bigger than you: prettier than you, more compelling than you, etc. Film’s overwhelming power isn't news. But different kinds of movies use this power in different ways. Art film is essentially teleological; it tries in various ways to “wake the audience up” or render us more “conscious.” (This kind of agenda can easily degenerate into pretentiousness and self-righteousness and condescending horsetwaddle, but the agenda itself is large-hearted and fine.) Commercial film doesn’t seem like it cares much about the audience’s instruction or enlightenment. Commercial film’s goal is to “entertain,” which usually means enabling various fantasies that allow the moviegoer to pretend he’s somebody else and that life is somehow bigger and more coherent and more compelling and attractive and in general just way more entertaining than a moviegoer’s life really is. You could say that a commercial movie doesn’t try to wake people up but rather to make their sleep so comfortable and their dreams so pleasant that they will fork over money to experience it-the fantasy-for-money transaction is a commercial movie’s basic point. An art film’s point is usually more intellectual or aesthetic, and you usually have to do some interpretative work to get it, so that when you pay to see an art film you’re actually paying to work (whereas the only work you have to do w/r/t most commercial film is whatever work you did to afford the price of the ticket).

“Waking people up” is a particularly interesting idea here in the context of the art/commercial dichotomy presented. The concept of forcing an audience to confront the fact of its own participation in spectacle is one that is often attributed to the German playwright Bertolt Brecht, who somewhat famously advanced the notion of a “distancing effect” in his theatre.

Let me apologize: pulling a vaunted name like Brecht’s into this essay feels a bit silly, and threatens to derail me into a rote conversation about Serious Dramatic Ideas in the 20th Century, when, really, I'm just as eager as you are to get back to dreams and to David Lynch. I do have to hoist a bit of machinery here, though, so bear with me. There will be surnames.

The essential concept at play with Brecht is both interesting and simple: that the sudden imposition of self-awareness on an audience — of forcing it to realize the fact that it is watching events on stage or screen — can be used to powerful effect. And although (some might argue) there are also some interesting historical precedents for the idea of jolting an audience out of its complacent status as mere observers, Brecht is a good place to start a brief discussion.

This is exactly where Todd McGowan’s excellent book, The Impossible David Lynch, begins. McGowen underlines Brecht’s deliberate intent to break identification between audience and character, so that the audience is not immersed in any fictional illusion. He quotes Brecht as noting that his intent is not to appeal to emotion, since “the essential part of the epic theater is perhaps that it appeals less to the feelings than the spectator’s reason.” Brecht thus rejects the idea of fiction as escapism; he wants those who attend his plays to bear a kind of witness to actual claims about the real world, and particularly to specific political and sociological claims.

A 1974 staging of “Mother Courage” Note the deliberate exposure of the theater’s rigging that is incorporated into the performance.

In transferring these ideas from the theater to cinema (a fairly widespread effort among many directors in the 1960s), McGowen cites a few theorists, all of whom argue for the careful collapse of the “imaginary proximity” that cinema seems to offer to its audience. In particular, Constance Penley argues not just for the depiction of radical images and events on film, but also for inclusion of commentary on the act of filmmaking as the only way to break the imaginary ‘fascination’ (as McGowen puts it) that film promises to an audience. All of this aligns nicely with Wallace’s summary above of ‘art film’ as being essentially characterized as trying to ‘wake’ an audience up, into a state of awareness about what it is watching.

As McGowan notes, “the most prominent filmmaker who embodies this theoretical aspiration is undoubtedly Jean-Luc Godard.” Godard, in this telling, has intended to erode the “fascinating” power of cinema over its audience by deploying constant reminders that what it is watching is only a movie. Here is a particularly clever example, from Pierre le Fou:

In most movies, the sort of thing that Anna Karina’s character, Marianne, expresses a desire for in this scene and the desires of the audience more generally are one and the same: fun, excitement, sexuality, adventure—all of the “entertaining” elements of film that Wallace refers to. Godard explicitly intercepts this desire, however, by having Fernand not only dismiss Marianne, but also turn to include the audience while he does so. This is a sly move, because it undercuts the movie’s fiction exactly at a high point of “fascination;” here, then, Godard doesn’t just deflate the wants of Marianne, but also those in the theater that is watching her (which have been built up by her declaration), all in one stroke. The key subtext is that there is also more that cinema should aspire to than just offering up a good time.

Another example, among many, that McGowen advances is the opening shot of Le Mépris (Contempt), which presents a long tracking shot of a long tracking shot while film credits are read aloud. His reading is that this setup, characteristically for Godard, “confronts the spectator with visual evidence that breaks down any illusion of proximity to the events that will follow.” The conclusion of Le Mépris also returns to this same idea of deliberately exposing the filmmaking process — it concludes by showing Godard himself on the set of a film, ordering quiet. Before the film cuts to noiseless black, Godard utters a single command to his cast and crew (echoed in Italian by an interpreter) that is particularly germane to discussions of Mulholland Dr.

Over time, what once was daring has gradually become stylized reference. For instance, this scene from Pulp Fiction is self-referential, but is wryly so, intended to evoke knowing nods from students of An Actor Prepares rather than serve as a bold and deliberately Godardian break:

McGowen finds eventual, unavoidable failure in Godard’s project. The way that he puts it, the program of defusing a viewer’s interest in what happens on screen has inevitable limitations:

The problem with the attempt to create a spectator whom the cinema does not seduce is its tacit assumption: it imagines that the spectator can attain a pure viewing position. The Brechtian aesthetic forgets about the desire of the spectator and fails to see how desire necessarily implicates the spectator in what occurs on the screen. Even though distance is inherent in the cinematic viewing situation itself, no spectator can remain completely distanced, even from a Godard film. Some element of fascination remains at work and continues to involve the spectator in the images on the screen — or else the spectator would simply walk out of the film. In other words, a film’s alienation-effect has to fail to some extent in order for the film to retain the desire of its spectators. The successfully distanced spectator ceases to be a spectator at all. [emphasis his]

He even makes the case that the Brechtian project fundamentally misunderstands human psychology. “The deeper problem with the opposition to cinematic fascination,” he continues,

lies in its conception of what motivates political activity and change. This position contends that knowledge itself — seeing how things really are, how the production process really works, etc. — has a radicalizing effect on spectators and subjects in general. According to this view, subjects accept their subjection to an oppressive social order only because they fail to recognize than an element of fascination has duped them into this acceptance. Thus, the thinking goes, if we remove the fascination and expose the relations of production as they actually are, we will produce radical subjects. But knowledge without desire does not inherently create political subjects.

Brecht and Godard, as political radicals, obviously had particular, subversive intent behind their whole program of ‘waking an audience up’ to reality. But as McGowen notes, merely pointing out to an audience that it is watching a movie while it is in the act, or otherwise exposing the machinery of moviemaking in order to highlight political subtext, doesn’t necessarily mean that the audience in question will emerge from the process any more politically engaged.

This is partly because any narrative trope, no matter how clever and daring, is bound to become familiar over time.

And, as McGowen goes on to point out, Godard’s view has at least one major structural problem: it gives very short shrift to the deeper, multi-layered possibilities of cinematic fantasia.

McGowen himself is pretty big on Lacan (admittedly, more than I am), and he is particularly enamored of the Lacanian concept of the ‘real.’ This idea is an intriguing one, and, like Brecht and Godard, worth an entire set of separate essays. One of its key implications, however, is the idea that fantasy must be relied upon to step in where ‘ideology’ (in the Marxist sense, i.e. political and social ideology) alone cannot reason. Consequently — and, apologies for short shrift here, because this is an absurdly heavy idea— all fantasy must therefore contain access to, or reflections of, deeper, more fundamental and immediate truths than can be expressed in language.

It is worth revisiting Persona in this context. There is, in fact, a Brechtian reading of Bergman advanced by Christopher Orr, who sees the film as participating in a general critique of class and gender norms. In his view, Persona is a “subversive melodrama” that explores the disorder that results from a social collision between an upper-class “star” actress and a lower-class nurse.

In the Brechtian tradition, Persona also contains exposures of the filmmaking process. Take, for instance, its initial few moments. As Orr, notes,

the film’s precredit sequence begins with shots of arc lamps, film leader, and a projector, followed by a rapid series of disjointed images, some of which allude to earlier Bergman films. [The next sequence, where a young boy touches a screen featuring the film’s actors’ faces] obviously calls attention to the motion picture apparatus while moving spectators to decipher the director’s cryptic meaning.

Additionally, the depiction of the film projector’s breakdown in the film’s middle section, just after Alma places the glass on the walkway and causes Elizabet injury, also recalls images from the film’s prologue, and exposes Persona itself as inherently constructed:

The scene that Orr is most interested in, however, is the ‘repeated’ scene where Alma accuses Elizabet. As Orr notes,

Alma’s twice-told monologue on Elizabet’s motherhood is perhaps Persona’s best example of an avant-garde device that can be read in terms of both authorial expressivity and Brechtian distanciation. Hearing the nurse’s monologue for the second time, we experience a genuine Brechtian moment, the full awareness of the text as constructed object.

To this list, one could also add the final scene of the film, which exposes Bergman himself, as well as his cinematographer, Sven Nykvist:

Orr reads each of these moments in the film as prompting work from the audience, which he believes is invited to reflect upon the implications of the ongoing class conflict between Elizabet and Alma.

He allows, however, that “the distinction between the avant-garde devices in Persona and Pierre le Fou is that Bergman’s self-reflexivity is open to both political and expressive readings.” In fact, there is a great deal of ambiguity around the Brechtian/Godardian breaks that Bergman employs: are these meant to promote distance and reflection upon the action just observed, or are they meant to serve a different purpose altogether?

Orr is partly responding to Sontag in his essay, and his note about the ambiguity of Bergman’s intent is a nod to her reading of the film, which downplays plot-based interpretations and instead focuses on the idea that Persona is, as discussed, a ‘variation on a theme,’ of doubling. She views Bergman’s use of Brechtian gesture as

the most explicit statement of a motif of aesthetic self-reflexiveness that runs through the entire film. This element of self-reflexiveness in the construction of Persona is anything but an arbitrary concern, one superadded to the ‘dramatic’ action. For one thing, it states on the formal level the theme of doubling or duplication-that is present on a psychological level in the transactions between Alma and Elizabeth. The formal ‘doublings’ are the largest extension of the theme which furnishes the material of the film.

Sontag goes on to suggest that Bergman’s use of avant-garde device is intended also to be commentary on the medium itself, and that it has an effect on an audience that is removed from, for instance, Godard’s intent. Whereas Godard uses Brechtian technique to attempt to “wake up” his audience to political realities, Bergman uses it to expand his art into other layers of meaning.

Bergman is playing with the paradoxical nature of film — namely, that it always gives us the illusion of having a voyeuristic access to an untempered reality, a neutral view of things as they are… [he is] inserting into the viewer’s consciousness the felt presence of the film as an object. He does this not only at the beginning and end but in the middle of Persona, when the image — it is a shot of Alma’s horrified face — cracks like a mirror, then burns. When the next scene up immediately begins (again, as if nothing had happened) the a viewer has not only an almost indelible after-image of Alma’s anguish but an added sense of shock, a formal-magical apprehension of the film — as if it had collapsed under the weight of registering such drastic suffering and then had been, as it were, magically reconstituted.

Bergman’s procedure, with the beginning and end of Persona and with this terrifying caesura in the middle, is more complex than the Brechtian strategy of alienating the audience by supplying continual reminders that what they are watching is theatre (i.e., artifice rather than reality). Rather, it is a statement about the complexity of what can be seen and the way in which, in the end, the deep, unflinching knowledge of anything is destructive. To know (perceive) something intensely is eventually to consume what is known, to use it up, to be forced to move on to other things.

This principle of intensity lies at the heart of Bergman’s sensibility, and determines the specific ways in which he uses the new narrative forms. [emphasis mine]

I personally love Sontag’s reading — “this principle of intensity” — and I believe her assertion that Bergman’s use of Godardian technique is, I think, closer to the mark. Though his films do contain characters that recoil from images of the Vietnam War or the Holocaust, Bergman generally appears to be less interested in engaging these topics in a specifically political context than he is in posing larger questions. As might befit the director of The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries, his focus is on such heady topics as life, death, human relationships — even the nature of reality — as well as the additional question of whether cinema is capable of forming sufficient response to questions asked.

There is a reading, for instance, of Persona that sees Elizabet’s silence as, in part, a conscious reaction to televised images of a Vietnamese Buddhist monk self-immolating in protest over the war. Bergman, however, uses this imagery not to make any direct political statement about the war, but to raise deeper questions about how it is or is not possible for human beings to respond to “the violence of the spirit,” as Sontag puts it. Just as Elizabet abandons language due to the horror that she witnesses, neither, he seems to say, can Bergman respond adequately to the reality that he observes with the illusions of film.

This is the view of Lloyd Michaels, who observes an evolution in Bergman’s thinking about his own craft:

From the perceptive but still sanguine view of the intrinsically deceptive nature of his craft, [Bergman] had described an introduction to the first anthology of his screenplays:

Even today I remind myself childish excitement that I'm really a conjuror, since cinematography is based on deception of the human eye. I worked it out that if I see a film which has a running time of one hour, I sit through 27 minutes of complete darkness — the blankness between frames. When I show a film I am guilty of deceit. I use an apparatus which is constructed to take advantage of certain human weakness, an apparatus with which I can swing my audience in a highly emotional manner. … Thus I am either an imposter, or, when the audience is willing to be taken in, a conjurer. I perform conjuring tricks with an apparatus so expensive and so wonderful that any entertainer in history would have given anything to have it.

Burton had developed a much more critical understanding in his notebook during the making of Persona:

I am unable to grasp large catastrophes. They leave my heart untouched. At most I can read about such atrocities with a kind of greed — a pornography of horror. But I shall never rid myself of those images. Images that turn my art into a bag of tricks, into something indifferent, meaningless.

This is Elsabet Vogler’s dilemma, as well as Bergman’s. Her silence becomes her protest.

Whereof one cannot speak, as the idiom goes, thereof one must be silent.

Persona, however, isn’t just about limitations of what is possible to say, but also of what is possible to perceive, and to be. As previously mentioned, moviegoers have tended misrecall Alma’s monologue for an actual event in Persona; this is only too appropriate given that a permeable barrier between reality and fantasy, and of objectivity and subjectivity, is key terrain for the film.

Elizabet’s silence, which we are told is a form of willful protest, is in part a rejection of the notion of playing a subjective role. Significantly, she falls mute during a stage production of Electra, and although her part in the play is never revealed to the audience, her rejection of playing a part in the play can be understood as a broader rejection of adopting a role more generally, of trying to escape a subjective persona. But by the end of the film, even adopting silence has turned out to be a role of sorts.

Elizabet’s problem, of distinguishing reality from fantasy, and objectivity from subjectivity, is also Bergman’s. As David Cook’s History of Narrative Film aptly summarizes:

Framed by sequences that seemingly depict the projection and photographing of the film itself, Persona collapses virtually every narrative convention of the cinema to suggest the illusory character of both the medium and the human personalities it seems so realistically to incarnate. The film is … about the different levels on which film, or media in general, can be said to represent the real. But its narrative style is so elliptical, disjointed, and self-reflexive that Persona ultimately suggests that the cinema is no more illusory than the reality that it pretends to record.

Michaels extends this idea beautifully.

Perhaps the best procedure for considering the construction of meaning in Persona is to begin with the most widely held view of its content: whatever else it may be about, the film is concerned with its own status as a work of art and, as a consequence, the problematic relation between the artist in the audience. To underscore the integrity of his medium and the self-reflexive aspect of his themes, Bergman lobbied for the title Cinematography before finally relenting to [Svensk Filmindustri]’s demand for a more appealing name, and he insisted that the sprocket holes at the edge of the frame be retained in the early publicity stills for Persona…

The hopeless dream of being, Persona implies, is the shared condition of both life and film art. In its aspiration to escape subjectivity, the cinema inevitably falls back on special effects (its expensive and wonderful apparatus) and the audience’s willingness “to be taken in”; from our own desire to live in truth, we invariably resort to another kind of performance that experience will, in time, unmask. But to go beyond romantic conceptions of the artist as redeeming visionary for exemplary sufferer, as Elizabet apparently has, or to renounce a conventional life of service, as Alma seemingly does, need not necessitate dismissing the efficacy of either works of arts or good deeds. To the tyranny of lies, Bergman responds with the necessity of illusions.

“I understand, all right. The hopeless dream of being — not seeming, but being… But reality is diabolical. Your hiding place isn’t watertight. Life trickles in from the outside, and you’re forced to react. No one asks if it is true or false, if you’re genuine or just a sham. Such things matter only in the theatre, and hardly there either. I understand why you don’t speak, why you don’t move, why you’ve created a part for yourself out of apathy. I understand. I admire. You should go on with this part until it is played out, until it loses interest for you.”

Distinction between what is real and what is not also emerges as a relevant question for an audience experiencing Persona. Although the dreams of Professor Isak Borg in Wild Strawberries — another Bergman film that makes use of a doubled identity for Bibi Andersson — do possess a surreal quality, these are generally presented as discrete episodes, i.e. as dreams within the fictional world that Borg occupies. In contrast, it is not always clear what in fact is just a dream in Persona, subjectively experienced by its characters, or what is part of the film’s reality. Sontag, again, at some length:

Take, for instance, the scene which starts with the abrupt presence of a middle-aged man wearing dark glasses (Gunner Björnstrand) near the beach cottage. All we see is that he approaches Alma, addressing her and continuing to call her, despite her protests, by the name of Elizabeth, that he tries to embrace her; that throughout this scene Elizabeth’s impassive face is never more than a few inches away; that Alma suddenly yields to his embraces, saying “Yes, I am Elizabeth” (Elizabeth is still watching intently), and goes to bed with him amid a torrent of endearments. Then we see the two women together (shortly after?); they are alone, behaving as if nothing has happened…Still, nothing we see justifies describing this scene as most critics have done as a ‘real’ event — something that happens in the course of the plot on the same level as the initial removal of the two women to the cottage. But neither can we be absolutely sure that this, or something like it, isn’t taking place. After all, we do see it happening. (And it’s in the nature of cinema to confer on all events, without indications to the contrary, an equivalent degree of reality: everything shown on the screen is ‘there’, present.)

The difficulty is that Bergman withholds the kind of clear signals for sorting out what’s fantasy from what is ‘real’ offered, for example, by Buñuel in Belle de Jour. Buñuel has put the clues there, he wants the viewer to be able to decipher his film. The insufficiency of the clues Bergman has planted must be taken to indicate that he intends the film to remain partly encoded. The viewer can only move towards, but never achieve, certainty about the action. However, so far as the distinction between fantasy and reality has any use in understanding Persona, I should argue that much more than critics have allowed of what happens in and around the beach cottage is most plausibly understood as Alma’s fantasy. One prime piece of evidence is a sequence occurring soon after the two women arrive at the seaside. It’s the sequence in which, after we have seen (i.e., the camera has shown) Elizabeth enter Alma’s room and stand beside her and stroke her hair, we see Alma, pale, troubled, asking Elizabeth the next morning “Did you come to my room last night?” And Elizabeth, slightly quizzical, anxious, shaking her head No.

Some critics also find similar ambiguities at work in Vertigo. For instance, Charles Barr makes a case for the Biercean possibility that Scotty never makes it off of the ledge that he is left hanging from at the end of the film’s opening scene:

Perhaps the ultimate key to Vertigo’s fascination is the consummate way in which, from the start, it fuses two modes of narrative, which can loosely be called objective and subjective. We can glance back here to that other story that begins with a fall and a miraculous-seeming survival, A Matter of Life and Death. A written title introduces it as, explicitly, a story of two worlds, one ‘real’ and the other ‘in the mind of’ the faller, the David Niven character. Despite this, and despite the visual markers of differnce between the worlds, publicity was still able to play on the film’s uncanny dimension with the line ‘Was it a Dream or Did it Really Happen?’ The same question is pertinent to Vertigo, in which there is no division between worlds, but rather a hesitation. On the one hand, it is a carefully crafted ‘yarn’, the story of the character, Scottie, of what happens to him, and of how he responds, located in a detailed and recognisable California environment. On the other, it is famously dreamlike both in its texture and in the way it introduces story and protagonist. Echoing Robin Wood, James Maxfield argues that ‘everything after the opening sequence is … dream or fantasy’, and both of them on this basis develop comprehensive accounts of Scotty's psychological journey.

…

The French film-maker Chris Marker, one of the most acute of the commentators on Vertigo, has drawn attention to its artful pattern of ellipses: between Scotty's first sight of Madeline and his trailing of her, eliding the decision; between his rescue of her from the bay and her waking his bed, eliding his undressing of her; between their embrace in the hotel room and their preparation for dinner, eliding the love scene. To these one can add the obvious one at the start, the ellipses between Scotty hanging from the gutter and the first scene with Midge, and also a final one. What happens after the shot of Scottie looking down from the tower, as the nun rings the bell?

The essay by Chris Marker that Barr references (which is brimming with general insight, charm, and wit), advances a similar, possible reading of the second half of Vertigo: as the product of Scottie’s dreaming mind.

There are many arguments in favour of a dream reading of the second part of Vertigo. The disappearance of Barbara Bel Geddes (Midge, his friend and confidante, secretly in love with him) is one of them. I know very well that she married a rich Texan oilman in the meantime, and is preparing a dreadful reappearance as a widow in the Ewing clan; but still, her disappearance from Vertigo is probably unparalleled in the serial economy of Hollywood scripts. A character important for half the film disappears without trace — there isn’t even an allusion to her in the subsequent dialogue — until the end of the second part. In the dream reading of the film, this absence would only be explained by her last line to Scottie in the hospital: ‘You don’t even know I’m here …’

In this case, the entire second part would be nothing but a fantasy, revealing at last the double of the double. We were tricked into believing that the first part was the truth, then told it was a lie born of a perverse mind, that the sec­ond part contained the truth. But what if the first part really were the truth and the second the product of a sick mind? In that case, what one may find overcharged and outrageously expressionistic in the nightmare images preced­ing the hospital room would be nothing but a trick, yet another red herring, camouflaging the fantasy that will occupy us for another hour in order to lead us even further away from the appearance of realism. The only exception to this is the moment I’ve already mentioned, the change of set during the kiss. In this light, the scene acquires a new meaning: it’s a fleeting confession, a reveal­ing detail, the blink of a madman’s eyelids as his eyes glaze over, the kind of gaze which sometimes gives a madman away.

At long last, I can get back to David Lynch. An uneasy dividing line between what is real and what is not is clearly pertinent to a reading of Mulholland Dr., where much of the first two-thirds of the movie appears to be a fantasy that emerges out of the ‘reality’ of the film’s final portion. As in both of the above examples from Persona and from Vertigo, there is ambiguity surrounding the question of which events in Lynch’s film exist within a dream or otherwise altered state, and which during waking hours. And, like both films, Lynch finally intends for his narrative to be at least partially “encoded” in the way that Sontag describes. It is possible, then, to read the film as, at least in part, an expressive retelling of the subjective experience of its protagonist.

There are Godard-like elements of Mulholland Dr. as well. As with Le Mépris, it is a movie in part about moviemaking; just as Godard’s film follows a neurotic young film writer and knowingly details the industry-forced compromises that he suffers through, so too is Lynch’s film in part about the challenges and indignities of working under the Hollywood system. From Adam’s surreal boardroom encounter towards the beginning of the film to Diane’s acerbic recollections of her time trying to make it as an actress towards its end, Mulholland Dr. is, as discussed, partly a warts-and-all exposure of the process by which films are made in the grand tradition of films like Sunset Blvd. or Robert Altman’s The Player (a personal favorite).

Lynch isn’t just interested in filmmaking as a topic, however — he’s also interested, at times, in exposing the machinery of filmmaking itself. Whatever additional subtexts are at play in the respective scenes where, late in the film, Adam kisses (brunette) Camilla on-set while giving direction to another actor, or where Betty auditions, these also serve as demonstrations of processes that are integral to moviemaking. The scene on set after Betty’s audition where (blonde) ‘Camilla Rhodes’ conducts a screen test for a part in “The Sylvia North Story” participates in the same pattern:

“Rollback and sound!” “Playback, and action.”

Note also here how this scene calls attention to Melissa George’s lip-synching of the (well-chosen!) Linda Scott cover — and does so in a way that, in form, if not tone, recalls the scene from Blue Velvet referenced above.

McGowen’s take on Lynch is that he works as a kind of ‘anti-Godard.’ Whereas Godard, in this view, attempts to present alternatives to bourgeois cinema and bourgeois life, McGowen situates Lynch as a director of extreme “normalcy” (think of those white picket fences in Blue Velvet). And whereas Godard is a director of intentional distance, he continues, Lynch is a director of uncomfortable proximity.

I agree with about half of this. I do think that Lynch is up to something much different than, say, the Coen Brothers, whose films frequently ‘comment’ ironically or knowingly on their material (often to delightfully subversive effect).

In contrast, I do like McGowen’s idea that Lynch is less about maintaining a similar, straightforward kind of ironic distance from his material, though I think that it is perhaps more accurate to say that his films are frequently perched between irony and sincerity, or closeness and distance, in ways that don’t make it immediately obvious which side of the ledger they are on:

This perch, I submit, is a very large component of the eponymous adjective that is frequently applied to his (and other’s) work: this balancing act is partly what is meant when we call something “Lynchian.”

I was surprised to discover that Wallace (who locates the crux of “Lynchian” cinema someplace related, but other), had a somewhat similar take on this proximity/distance question, which he also relates the question to elements of perversity in Lynch’s work:

Lynch’s movies tend to be both extremely personal and extremely remote. The absence of linearity and narrative logic, the heavy multivalence of the symbolism, the glazed opacity of the characters’ faces, the weird, ponderous quality of the dialogue, the regular deployment of grotesques as figurants, the precise, painterly way the scenes are staged and lit, and the overlush, possibly voyeuristic way that violence, deviance, and general hideousness are depicted-these all give Lynch’s movies a cool, detached quality, one that some cineasts view as more like cold and clinical.

Here’s something that’s unsettling but true: Lynch’s best movies are also the ones that strike people as his sickest. I think this is because his best movies, however surreal, tend to be anchored by well-developed main characters-Blue Velvet’s Jeffrey Beaumont, Fire Walk With Me’s Laura, The Elephant Man’s Merrick and Treves. When characters are sufficiently developed and human to evoke our empathy, it tends to break down the carapace of distance and detachment in Lynch, and at the same time it makes the movies creepier-we’re way more easily disturbed when a disturbing movie has characters in whom we can see parts of ourselves. For example, there’s way more general ickiness in Wild at Heart than there is in Blue Velvet, and yet Blue Velvet is a far creepier/sicker film, simply because Jeffrey Beaumont is a sufficiently 3-D character for us to feet about/for/with. Since the really disturbing stuff in Blue Velvet isn’t about Frank Booth or anything Jeffrey discovers about Lumberton, but about the fact that a part of Jeffrey gets off on voyeurism and primal violence and degeneracy, and since Lynch carefully sets up his film both so that we feet a/f/w Jeffrey and so that we find some parts of the sadism and degeneracy he witnesses compelling and somehow erotic, it’s little wonder that we (I?) find Blue Velvet “sick”-nothing sickens me like seeing onscreen some of the very parts of myself I’ve gone to the good old movies to try to forget about.

Earlier, I noted that Wallace had also offered a dichotomy between commercial film, which, he argues, intends primarily to extend a viewer’s fantasies, vs. arthouse film, which is didactic and aims to provoke reflection on the act of observation.

He does this in order to place Lynch into a third category entirely, one that I think is very related to the question of proximity. I believe that he is right to do so, and that his rationale is an interesting one:

David Lynch’s movies are often described as occupying a kind of middle ground between art film and commercial film. But what they really occupy is a whole third kind of territory. Most of Lynch’s best films don’t really have much of a point, and in lots of ways they seem to resist the film-interpretative process by which movies’ (certainly avant-garde movies’) central points are understood. This is something the British critic Paul Taylor seems to get at when he says that Lynch’s movies are “to be experienced rather than explained.” Lynch’s movies are indeed susceptible to a variety of sophisticated interpretations, but it would be a serious mistake to conclude from this that his movies point at the too-facile summation that “film interpretation is necessarily multivalent” or something — they’re just not that kind of movie. Nor are they seductive, though, at least in the commercial sense of being comfortable or linear or High Concept or “feel-good.” You almost never from a Lynch movie get the sense that the point is to “entertain” you, and never that the point is to get you to fork over money to see it. This is one of the unsettling things about a Lynch movie: You don’t feel like you’re entering into any of the standard unspoken and/or unconscious contracts you normally enter into with other kinds of movies. This is unsettling because in the absence of such an unconscious contract we lose some of the psychic protections we normally (and necessarily) bring to bear on a medium as powerful as film. That is, if we know on some level what a movie wants from us, we can erect certain internal defenses that let us choose how much of ourselves we give away to it. The absence of point or recognizable agenda in Lynch’s films, though, strips these subliminal defenses and lets Lynch get inside your head in a way movies normally don’t. This is why his best films’ effects are often so emotional and nightmarish. (We’re defenseless in our dreams too.)

This may in fact be Lynch’s true and only agenda — just to get inside your head. He seems to care more about penetrating your head than about what he does once he’s in there.

To a large degree, I think that this is true. When I think of Lynch’s most immediately nightmarish moments, they do tend to be designed to be too close for comfort:

Trigger warning: BOB

This scene is not a particularly easy one to watch, and I confess that I don’t feel the need to revisit it very often.

But it is also a powerful illustration of “proximity,” and it uses a few devilish tricks to get under your skin: amplified sound design, disorienting fades while BOB crawls unyieldingly towards an immobile POV, juxtaposition between the highly symmetrical normalcy of the sun-lit Palmer household and the demonic character invading it, and so forth.

Note also, however, the directness of this scene’s awareness and involvement of its audience. And that, for a setup that (therefore) has a tinge of the high-conceptual or artsy to it, boy howdy does this sequence also connect viscerally.

If nothing else, it certainly succeeds at getting inside your head.

I think that I now have all of the balls in the air that I need in order to talk about my favorite scene in Mulholland Dr., the scene where Betty and Rita attend the disorienting and disarming performance at Club Silencio.

(If possible, let me recommend that you take the time to watch this next excerpt all the way through in HD inside of a different, maximized browser window.)

There is a lot to say about this scene.

One of the first things to notice is that the Club Silencio sequence is deliberately set apart from the rest of the movie in several ways. Not only do Betty and Rita travel a great distance under the conspicuously hazy and artificial light of post-nightfall Los Angeles in order to get to the club, but it is also not clear why they are attending in the first place. Until this scene, the main plots of the movie have circled around Betty’s Hollywood ambitions and the mystery of Rita’s identity. The two women’s journey, though prompted vaguely by Rita’s strange, eyes-wide-open dreaming, does not, however, follow directly from either plotline; it is an event external to the film’s narrative. An inescapable sense that the club is a foreign place, one out of time, and outside of the geography of the rest of the film, is further extended by several elements in this scene, including the lengthy, Vertigo-like dolly zoom that marks the two women’s entrance.

The women are still finding their seats in the club when its bizarre show begins. No hay banda, says the show’s devilish ringleader. There is no band. And yet, the club is slowly filled with music. A brief series of instruments are mentioned, then heard, one by one, above the din of a sultry jazz saxophone: first a clarinet, then a trombone, then a muted trombone. A man walks out playing a muted trumpet, only to reveal that he is not actually playing it at all, merely miming, while a solo reminiscent of the Love Theme from Chinatown plays on in the background. It is all a recording, repeats the ringleader several times. It is an illusion.

He conjures loud and bright — but counterfeit — storm and stress before vanishing with a mischievous grin into a plume of blue smoke. His effect on Betty, however is immediate, and authentic.

After he disappears, the club is suffused with strange blue light. This fades, and a man (Adam’s landlord?) walks out to introduce Rebekah Del Rio.

There are a few moments in cinema, at least for me, that are quite as powerful as the three or so minutes between the time that Del Rio begins her woozy, ghoulish walk towards the microphone and the moment that she is carried off from the stage.

There are about a million things going on in this scene, and no matter how many times I watch it through, or how thoroughly I know what is going to happen, it just destroys me, every time.

One of the reasons that the scene is so powerful is the reaction that it provokes from Rita and from Betty. Their crying (itself a frequent motif in Lynch) is incredibly affecting, at least for me, and calls to mind Ebert’s description of cinema as “a machine that generates empathy” (a description that, by the way, may have some neuroscientific basis). It is very hard to watch this scene and not to be moved by it.

Part of that, perhaps, may be due to the gentle overlap between the women’s action and the subject matter of the song that Rio performs. In the case of “Llorando,” the lyrics of the song enjoy a very pertinent subtext given the last third of Mulholland Dr. This subtext is softened and de-foregrounded by the fact that the song is not performed in English, though its melody is obviously recognizable in an instant as Roy Orbison’s “Crying.” The song, (which Bob Dylan praised in the highest available terms by saying that Orbison sang it like a ‘professional criminal’), would be a great choice for a climactic scene in Mulholland Dr. based on the power of its operatic coda alone. But every word of the song is also directly pertinent to the Camilla-Diane relationship in the same way that Betty’s audition script is:

“I was alright…for awhile/
I could smile for awhile/
But I saw you last night/
You held my hand so tight/
As you stopped to say,/ ‘Hello’”

Like the excerpt from Blue Velvet above, the Club Silencio scene also achieves a strange kind of distancing effect from the way that lyrics to a song that is present in the scene describe the act that is represented in the film itself. Just as “In Dreams” (another Roy Orbison song) performs a bit of meta-conversation upon the dream-like scene that it inhabits, so too is the sequence with Rebekah Del Rio also the representation of people crying… to a song about crying. What is remarkable, however, is how deftly this conceit is handled, given that it could very, very easily — but miraculously does not — overwhelm the emotional impact of the scene. In fact, I would argue that this “meta” element actually contributes (gently, invisibly) to the scene. This fusion is a particularly well-executed high-wire act on Lynch’s part.

The moment where Del Rio passes out on stage, revealing her entire performance (like Dean Stockwell’s, and like Melissa George’s) to be a lip-synced illusion, is also, similarly, a small miracle. It represents a seminal moment in the film’s plot: “Betty’s” key moment of recognition that leads to her to to begin to “wake up” from the dream world that surrounds her.

“Hey, pretty girl, time to wake up.”

This moment also takes place, however, in a context where the women, like the greater audience to Mulholland Dr., have just spent several minutes being explicitly and repeatedly told that what they are watching is all just an illusion, music without instrumentation.

What is remarkable, and crucial, is that this doesn’t matter. The performance of “Llorando” is deeply moving to all parties observing it anyway.

Having spent a great deal of time talking about filmic narrative breaks in this section, you have likely sensed that I have been paving ground to talk about how this scene is Brechtian and/or Godardian, given its explicit reveals of narrative illusion. It is certainly that. However, its purpose, at least as I read it, is not to de-fascinate its audience in the way that the fourth-wall break in Pierre le Fou does. It is, rather, to affirm the power of the illusory nature of cinema. As this blog on critical theory at Vanderbilt puts it, noting that many “signs” in the Club Silencio sequence are designed to resist reading:

The entire film is based around this idea that it is not the solving of the signs and narrative clues that make a film powerful, but the emotional connection between the work and the viewer that can exist even without complete comprehension of the narrative or thematic meaning within a text.

This, I think, is right on the money. The thunder and lightning that appear in the club may be artificial or irrational, but Betty’s reaction to them is entirely genuine.

Earlier, when I argued that Lynch’s film reflects a sincere respect for a certain kind of ideal, this is precisely what I was talking about: the power of cinema to forge deep, emotional connections to its audience, and to anticipate and to draw out that audience’s desires. Part of what occurs at the moment of Betty’s recognition here is that all of the previous plot strands that Mulholland Dr. had been establishing until then have essentially melted away. What matters most in that moment is not these narrative concerns, but, instead, what the audience is made to feel directly.

To return briefly to surnames, I enjoy McGowen’s use of “normalcy” as an axis to situate Lynch’s work. However, where he argues straightforwardly that Lynch is generally about collapsing proximity between film and audience in a way opposite to Godard’s strategy, I might suggest an alternate view. Godard, it might be argued, intends to present his films in a sort of self-deconstructing way, so as to deliberately expose and to isolate those ideological elements lurking beneath. He wants to shock his audience into recognition and rejection of filmic fantasy, and of any underlying assumptions about “normalcy” that come along with these. His plan therefore involves, in variant ways, suffusing filmic worlds with rationality.

Lynch is, I think, following Bergman in taking a different (though not wholly opposing) tack. The “silencio” of the eponymous club in Mulholland Dr. (and of the film’s last words) may be a near-quotation of Godard (and therefore lightly share its “meta” quality of referring to directorial calls for silence on a film set), but it is perhaps better-related to the actual silence that Elisabet enacts in Persona: as a form of rejection of the symbolic world around her. Whereas Godard uses Brechtian technique to attempt to “wake up” his audience to political realities, in other words, Bergman uses it in another way: to expand his art into other layers of meaning and understanding. This is perhaps why Brechtian techniques don’t escape from the narrative in Bergman, but rather, are integrated back into it as a matter of course.

But if Bergman, as Sontag argues, synthesizes elements of traditional and avant garde film alike in order to draw out and explore deeper modes of existence or meaning, Lynch performs the same synthesis with a slightly different aim. It’s true that, as Wallace suggests, he wants to “get inside your head.” But I think that he has other, deeper purposes as well. What he wants to do even more than burrow into your mind, I submit, is both to affirm and to critique the power of filmic illusion, as Bergman does, but also to take the notion of fantasy itself to absolute limits. He doesn’t reject fantasy, like Godard, but rather provides excess of it, to the point that what once had seemed conventional grows to become strange or grotesque. Lynch’s films, it seems to me, are frequently about drawing a single line from the mundane to the ultraperverse, oftentimes within a single context.

This is, I think, why Lynch is so interested in the intersection of dreaming and film. Giannopoulou’s taxonomy is correct in that there are many structural similarities between the two. But there is a deeper, more fundamental similarity between them as well. Both are also realms for the exploration of fantasy.

Lynch:

I want a dream when I go to a film. I see ‘8 1/2’ and it makes me dream for a month afterward; or ‘Sunset Boulevard’ or ‘Lolita.’ There’s an abstract thing in there that just thrills my soul. Something in between the lines that film can do in a language of its own — a language that says things that can’t be put into words.”

The key influence on Lynch for this last impetus arrives from an incredibly unlikely, but deeply fascinating source: a film that has come, with some justification, to become nearly synonymous with movies themselves.

5.

No Place Like Home

But maybe there’s something about “The Wizard of Oz” that’s in every film — it’s that kind of a story.

-David Lynch

Victor Fleming’s The Wizard of Oz is one of the most deeply formative filmic influence on David Lynch; elements of it pervade every film that he has worked on.

To the degree that it exists, any unintitiveness in the previous sentence arrives mostly from what might be called differences in tone. Oz is one of the most wholesome films ever put to celluloid. David Lynch, in contrast, has gifted such memorable phrases to popular consciousness as “you’ve got me hotter than Georgia asphalt” and “he put his disease inside of me.”

But pieces of Oz do appear throughout Lynch’s work, in unexpected places.

They surface most overtly in Wild at Heart, where direct references abound:

Credit: Judith from Spain, Beaufort Place Tumblr, http://beaufortplace.tumblr.com/

Ebert notes that The Wizard of Oz is a film that looms disproportionately large in the popular consciousness, and offers three possible reasons why this might be the case:

“The Wizard of Oz” fills such a large space in our imagination. It somehow seems real and important in a way most movies don’t. Is that because we see it first when we’re young? Or simply because it is a wonderful movie? Or because it sounds some buried universal note, some archetype or deeply felt myth?

He lights on the the third possibility as being the most probable:

For kids of a certain age, home is everything, the center of the world. But over the rainbow, dimly guessed at, is the wide earth, fascinating and terrifying. There is a deep fundamental fear that events might conspire to transport the child from the safety of home and strand him far away in a strange land. And what would he hope to find there? Why, new friends, to advise and protect him. And Toto, of course, because children have such a strong symbiotic relationship with their pets that they assume they would get lost together.

I mostly agree with this, but it’s a bit rosy. There are other elements of the film that appeal to universal emotions as well, particularly among children.

Like Wild at Heart (and The Straight Story), The Wizard of Oz is also a ‘road movie’ of sorts, one that follows the adventures of Dorothy as she travels down the yellow brick road to the fantastic land of Oz.

But, like many other road movies (particularly since the 1960s), it’s worth noting that Dorothy is also an outsider from society; her travels are an escape from authority as much as they are an adventure. When her “symbiotic” companion, Toto, is sentenced to be euthanized, largely due to the malice and indifference of its adult world, Dorothy finds herself so unable to cope with Kansas life that she runs away from home.

You could argue that the DNA for films like Easy Rider, Cool Hand Luke, or Five Easy Pieces is already right there, in that premise.

Hostility from the adult world and the subsequent desire to escape into alternative universes is also a mainstay of literature for children or young adults. Think of Where the Wild Things Are, Charlotte’s Web, the works of Roald Dahl, much of J.D. Salinger’s fiction, the Narnia books, Disney’s Frozen, Peter Pan, and so on.

That The Wizard of Oz exerts a subtle but inescapable influence on Mulholland Dr. is already a topic of some discussion. But what I think is less-discussed is just how deeply this connection runs.

The Wizard of Oz was, famously, one of the first movies to use Technicolor, and its daring color palette is a big part of its impact. Color is not just an element of the film’s design. Because it is the primary device that distinguishes the drab adult world of Kansas from the fantastic world of Oz, its use can be said to rise to the level of theme.

The dominant colors of Oz are unmistakable: ruby red, emerald green, the pink of the Good Witch Glenda’s costume, the blue of Dorothy’s dress, the gold of the yellow brick road, the silver of the tin man, wicked witch’s black.

As noted the above link, there are visual similarities between the two films. Less observed is the fact that the exact same colors used in Oz also provide the dominant scheme for Mulholland Dr.:

Note the sequins.

Note the stars on Betty’s dress.

A witch.

Another (with green eyes).

A munchkin, and a power behind the curtain.

Note the lamp.

All gold everything.

Seriously, everything in this house is gold-colored.

Note the flooring.

Mulholland Dr. has some exceptionally subtle callbacks to Oz as well:

As has also been observed, the two films share a number of narrative devices. Both films make use of the notion that their internal stories are just a dream; Persona and Vertigo, as discussed, allow for the possibility that portions of their plotlines are dreams, or otherwise altered states, but The Wizard of Oz is the film that is most associated with this trope — perhaps in all of cinema — and also among the most direct in its use.

Mulholland Dr. and Oz also treat the relationship between dreaming and waking life in similar fashion: in both films, characters from a drab and unhappy ‘reality’ are repopulated into the main character’s fantasy in order to recontextualize them in suggestive ways.

This pattern also escapes from the level of story in Lynch’s film, since, as this essay has explored, he also recontextualizes other films into Mulholland Dr. in exactly the same way that the acting population of Kansas reappears in different forms over the rainbow.

Raising this last idea puts me on some dangerous footing for a number of reasons.

One, it may suggest that I am on my way towards a reading that Mulholland Dr. is in some way a complete and literal retelling of Oz rather than a work that borrows liberally and imaginatively from it. I’m not, and I don’t believe that, for instance, Louise Bonner (or any of the other characters dressed in black) is actually supposed to be thought of as a secret witch, so much as a character that can lean gently on that reference as suits Lynch’s needs.

Second, the idea that Lynch is unique in placing allusions to other films in his own would obviously be an absurd one. Most films, including The Wizard of Oz, contain references to other films, and Oz itself may be one of the most-referenced films in all of cinematic history.

What I would argue, instead, is that the way in which The Wizard of Oz is referenced by Lynch is, in fact, both unique and essential to his method of filmmaking.

One of the things that The Wizard of Oz is most famous for is its juxtaposition of drab Kansas “reality” with a world of pure fantasy, as represented by the land of Oz. Its basic narrative, as discussed, involves Dorothy’s discontent with the former, leading her to seek out the latter.

The crux of this yearning provides the primary lyrical thrust for the movie’s most famous musical number:

“Somewhere over the rainbow, way up high/
There’s a land that I heard of once in a lullaby/
Somewhere over the rainbow skies are blue/
And the dreams that you dare to dream really do come true.”

The division between fantasy and reality is subsequently represented cleanly and straightforwardly in the film. As McGowen (who identifies Oz as the core model for many of Lynch’s films) observes, Dorothy’s experience in Oz satisfies all of the needs that are unfulfilled in her Kansas life: over the rainbow, she enjoys agency, the love of others, a sense of heroism, and attention.

The idea of fulfilling desires is also something that occurs in miniature within this fantasy. Just as Dorothy’s various wants are fulfilled by her larger dream of Oz, so too are her companions’ more concrete needs (for courage, for brains, for heart) sated by their visit to the Wizard within that dream.

The Wizard of Oz ends with Dorothy and her friends receiving gifts from the Wizard, before she taps her heels together and departs for the comforts of home. She wakes up to discover that all that she had experienced was only a dream.

As discussed, the relationship between “normalcy” and “fantasy,” or between desire and (attempted) fulfillment, are key elements of Lynch’s films as well. McGowen identifies these as core poles that anchor each of his films, and his book is largely a reading of each of Lynch’s works in these terms.

One way to illustrate this point is to imagine a Lynchian take on the plot to The Wizard of Oz (stay with me here).

For starters, he probably wouldn’t present the worlds of Kansas and Oz as neatly and distinctly as does Fleming’s film; he would complicate matters by presenting each of these domains as different parts of the same world. And he might complicate Dorothy’s desire for escape both by making her wants less obvious and less sympathetic than previously presented, and by making the world of her fantasy offer up a less straightforwardly sunny resolution. He may also play with other elements of the film, for instance by reversing the gender of its protagonist.

That is, in broad stroke, more or less what he achieves in Blue Velvet.

One way to read Velvet, if you’ll pardon the formulation, is as something like “the Hardy Boys and the case of the psychosexual fugue.” In the film, Kansas is the sleepy town of Lumberton. Oz, however, is not a separate entity, but is the hidden, grotesque underbelly of the same locale.

And while the anxiety that informs The Wizard of Oz is largely about Dorothy’s distance from the adult world, the anxiety that motivates Blue Velvet is largely about Jeffrey’s sudden integration into it after the hospitalization of his father compels him to assume patriarchal responsibilities. This second kind of anxiety is a powerful narrative engine, and the coming-of-age genre that it animates has been a mainstay of world literatures since there has been a literature at all.

What Lynch accomplishes in Blue Velvet, however, is to take the want for integration into adult life, and, as previously discussed, to stretch this desire out until it becomes horrific. He does this in a brilliant way: by exposing dark, Freudian subtexts beneath gilded Lumberton norms.

What is amazing, though, is that this is already largely achieved by the film’s two-minute mark.

Note this scene’s famously color-saturated vision of middle-American normalcy, with cherry-red firetrucks, white picket fences, and prototypical familial constellation featuring dad out front doing yard work while mom sits indoors watching television. But the scene is so in-your-face about its off-kilter rendering of this normal slice of Americana that to observe dark psychological subtext in the image that Mrs. Beaumont sees on screen, for instance, or in the buildup of water tension that finally explodes out of the decidedly phallic garden hose that Tom Beaumont is unable to control after his stroke, is to state what is already made extremely obvious by the film. Blue Velvet doesn’t just invite a Freudian reading, it all but expects its audience to bring Freud readers along with them to the theater.

One of the many innovative things that Lynch accomplishes in Blue Velvet is to turn the Oz/Kansas split inside out. As Bill Wyman observes in an essay on Blue Velvet that has many great insights, it is the world of Lumberton by daytime that most possesses an unreal, ultra-cheesy quality to it, while the nightmare world of Frank Booth and his gang is made to feel “more real than normal life.” All of Blue Velvet feels like a bad dream (in the best possible way), but it is also not a film where it is easy to tell whether Kansas or Oz is its main reality.

The word “uncanny” gets thrown around a lot to describe Lynch, although I think that what is generally meant by the term in the context of his films is close to Wallace’s definition of “Lynchian”: worlds of fantasy or nightmare, and their containment within “normal” life. Jeffrey’s journey into the world of the Deep River Apartments, despite the film’s emphases on his frequent entrances and exits, isn’t so much about literal travel to a distant location as much as it is a plunge into the depths of his own psyche.

The violent exchange between Dorothy Vallens and Frank Booth is oftentimes read in these terms, as a variation of the primal scene (since Jeffrey is observing their encounter from the closet) and also as a commentary on voyeurism (since Jeffrey is observing their encounter from the closet, and since the audience to the film is also observing him). This last point, by the by, is one of many similarities between Blue Velvet and Hitchcock’s Rear Window.

As a brief aside, I can’t be alone in thinking that Dorothy’s apartment is incredibly womb-like.

Such a setting might provide additional undertones for the already flagrantly Freudian encounter between Dorothy and Frank, i.e. with Frank commanding that “baby wants to fuck,” and so on.

The key to understanding Blue Velvet, I submit, is to recognize that the episodes at the Deep River apartments, however bizarre, aren’t intended to be understood as external to Lumberton, or as perversions of its wholesome character. Rather, they are part of its essential fabric.

To revive a previous quote from Wallace:

the really disturbing stuff in Blue Velvet isn’t about Frank Booth or anything Jeffrey discovers about Lumberton, but about the fact that a part of Jeffrey gets off on voyeurism and primal violence and degeneracy, and since Lynch carefully sets up his film both so that we feel a/f/w Jeffrey and so that we find some parts of the sadism and degeneracy he witnesses compelling and somehow erotic, it’s little wonder that we (I?) find Blue Velvet “sick”-nothing sickens me like seeing onscreen some of the very parts of myself I’ve gone to the good old movies to try to forget about.

To extend this point, the most genuinely disturbing thing in Blue Velvet isn’t any of the gonzo or outré things that happen on the gang’s joyride. It’s when Frank, during that same sequence, excitedly tells Jeffrey that he (Jeffrey) is like him (Frank). And what is maximally disturbing is the degree to which this statement is clearly true. Jeffrey is not overtly psychopathic in the way that Frank is. But part of Jeffrey’s journey has been to discover how much instinct he and Frank share. That is where his journey into his own psychology has delivered him.

What Frank’s line also does, in its moment, is to collapse any pretense of dissimilarity between the two worlds of the film. To become an adult in the world of Blue Velvet is to enter into the world of Lumberton’s social norms — and to become closer to Frank Booth and his demonic version of paternal authority than one might otherwise be comfortable with. In this context, the answer to Jeffrey’s naive question about why there are people like Frank in the world is a deeply unsettling one.

When the camera begins its zoom into the underbelly of the Beaumont’s front lawn in the film’s opening scene, it is not changing contexts. It is extending them. The nightmare occurring deep within the grassy lawn is also present just beneath the glossy veneer of small town life depicted by the film. Oz, in Blue Velvet, is a permanent nightmare of primal desire that lurks just beyond a starched, conservative Kansas surface.

Along similar lines, the most genuinely disturbing moment in Fire Walk With Me isn’t any of the scenes depicting murder or overt sexual debauchery or surreal world-shifting.

It is the domestic exchange at the dinner table where Leland Palmer insists that his daughter needs to wash her hands.

Note how much Pinteresque menace Lynch wrings out of otherwise anodyne father-daughter topics of discussion such as Laura’s friends, school, how hungry she is for dinner, and so on. In context, Leland’s conventional insistence that Laura clean up before sitting down (which, uncomfortably, he has also just commanded her to do) has an unbelievably disturbing subtext that quickly crowds out the family’s remaining pretense to normal dinnertime conversation. As in Blue Velvet, worlds of darkness and perversity are evergreen in Twin Peaks just beneath the accustomed social order, and familial authority is also depicted as having more in common with Frank Booth than with Ward Cleaver.

Later films by Lynch have different approaches to Oz, though all wear its influence. Lost Highway, which works as a kind of fraternal twin to Mulholland Dr. in several ways, is a film that makes use of a more distinct division between worlds of reality and fantasy than in Blue Velvet. Correspondingly, the scenes that follow Fred Madison through the moment of his prison transformation are (not black-and-white, but) intentionally desaturated to reflect the listlessness of his marriage to Renée.

After Fred’s improbable transformation into Pete Dayton, Lost Highway switches focus to young Pete’s encounters with gangsters and pornographers as well as his affair with mob moll Alice Wakefield. In this section, the film gains vivid color:

As Zizek puts it, the film presents

the opposition of two horrors: the phantasmatic horror of the nightmarish noir universe of perverse sex, betrayal, and murder, and the (perhaps much more unsettling) despair of our drab, alienated daily life of impotence and distrust.

Following The Wizard of Oz, which presents cleaner dividing lines between Dorothy’s alienated, impotent Kansas life and the fantastic world over the rainbow, Lost Highway is split between two worlds as well. One possible reading of the film is that, if not exactly part of a dream, all of the Pete Dayton events nonetheless take place in Fred Madison’s unstable mind (as in Persona and Vertigo, such instability is never made clear by the film). If that is the case, it is possible to read Lost Highway’s focus on pornography and violence as forms of psychogenic reaction born from Fred’s sexual anxiety. Just as Dorothy’s dreams in Kansas are of agency and of relevance, Fred might dream (or hallucinate) instead of forms of masculine power.

Lynch is deeply interested in the fantasies and fears of his characters, even if these are oftentimes presented, and investigated, in ways that evade easy understanding. Much of Eraserhead is open to interpretation, although it is no big stretch to find anxieties about marital relations and fatherhood informing Henry’s story. As noted, Blue Velvet takes a decidedly (extreme) Freudian approach to the coming-of-age story, but it does so partly in the service of exploring Jeffrey’s strange predilections and fixations. Both John Merrick and Frederic Treeves in The Elephant Man want nothing more than the warm recognition of the upper echelons of Victorian society, and Sailor and Lula in Wild at Heart both want to keep desire itself alive all the way to the end of their yellow brick road in California.

One of the things that Lynch understands better than most filmmakers is that it is not just the case that movies are like dreams; it is also the case that dreams are like movies. Towards this end, he appropriates a wide variety of genres to construct the fantasies of his characters. Think here of the ways that Fred Madison’s “psychogenic fugue” borrows heavily from film noir and video-grade porn, or that Sailor’s vision at the end of Wild at Heart presents Glinda the Good Witch by way of Elvis films (“E,” in the film’s parlance). And there are a wide variety of filmic references that populate Diane’s fever dream in Mulholland Dr., as I hope this essay has demonstrated.

Lynch doesn’t just investigate the fantasies of his characters, however — oftentimes he will tie these back to the implicit desires of his audience. This, I think, is why detectives and voyeurs show up so often in his fictions. Like Jeffrey and Sandy, we also want to know what is going on in the Deep River apartments, and we also observe the action there from a distance, with a mixture of dread and prurient interest. And, like Treeves, we too are caught between our empathy for Merrick and our own unavoidable participation in the exploitative spectacle that he represents.

It is certainly much more gentle than many of the examples raised thus far, but there is also a lightly metatheatrical element to The Wizard of Oz as well. What Dorothy and company discover at the end of their journey, in fact, isn’t so different from what Betty and Rita discover at Club Silencio. The great and powerful Oz, as it turns out, may put on an impressive show, but in the end he is not all that great, or powerful, and all of his effects are merely illusions (telegraphed by the smaller-scale chicanery of Professor Marvel, also played by Frank Morgan, in the film’s Kansas portion).

So it goes with the movies: we are taken in by special effects, by the deceptions of characterization, spectacle, and continuity that film provides. In the end, though, all of the elements of film are fictions, however convincingly they might insist upon their own authority.

Vertigo, Persona, The Wizard of Oz, and Mulholland Dr. are all, in their ways, stories about disillusionment, of characters coming to terms with deceits or dashed promises.

But, as previously noted, all are also partly about the power of illusion.

This is precisely the terrain that the closing moments of Oz explore.

In Jesse Kalin’s discussion of another Bergman film, Fanny and Alexander, he calls attention to several bits of improbability, most notably the opening sequence where Isak Jacobi kidnaps the Ekdahl children from the home of the authoritarian bishop, Edvard Vergérus. Kalin notes that large parts of this sequence are flatly illogical and in obvious contradiction with the “basic realism” that is otherwise suggested by the film. What he concludes, however, is that the film’s daring breach of the illusion of realism works for the film. “What matters for the story,” he suggests, “is not how [the children are rescued], but that it is done.”

I think that this dovetails nicely with the Club Silencio scene: despite the fact that we know an illusion to be broken, it succeeds anyway. What matters most in film may not be strict logical accuracy, but its ability to work directly, emotionally upon its audience.

In this context, it can be easy to overlook the fact that the ending to The Wizard of Oz is deeply improbable: the sentimental idea that there is “no place like home” is in pretty serious conflict with the opening portion of the film, where that place has been depicted as being so unpleasant and unforgiving that Dorothy was compelled to run away from it.

But what matters in the final moments of the film isn’t any of this — it is the inarguable emotional truth of Dorothy’s statement.

As noted before, another thing that all four movies have in common is the motif of drapery.

Of course, the idea of curtains working as an intermediary between two worlds, reality and fantasy, is also of particular significance to filmgoers.

Every film is a small miracle, but I submit that Mulholland Dr. is a greater miracle than most. Given its troubled production history, it is startling that the finished product stands up at all, let alone as one of the best films that Lynch has produced. It’s also just plain eerie that some events in the film, which are partly about a distressed film director trying to rescue a collapsing film production, map so well to actual events in real life (which, you get the sense, were not entirely intentional). Part of Lynch’s genius, however, may have been that he was able to turn his troubles into something approaching a statement of purpose.

Again, the film shouldn’t work at all, given not just its history, but all of the heavy lifting that it sets out to accomplish — it should creak and break under the weight of its references and its ideas. But these are integrated so elegantly and seamlessly that, ultimately, although Mulholland Dr. works on an unusually wide number of levels, it can ultimately best be said to be “about” its own experience. It is an unusually deep and intelligent film, and though Lynch shamanistic and aloof public persona suggests otherwise, it should be taken as evidence that he is among the first rank of directors working today.

Mulholland Dr. does just about everything that I might ask a film to do. One thing that this essay hasn’t really had time to talk about are the more subjective elements, for instance its tone. It is extremely hard, I think, for a movie to be either suspenseful or funny throughout its running time: suspense often breaks, and comedy is notoriously hard to sustain. Lynch’s film achieves both tones, frequently simultaneously, all the way through.

And, god, the acting in this movie. But that’s a topic for another day.

Mulholland Dr. is one of the the best, most powerful dreams that it is possible to experience in the theater, an anti-Hollywood love letter to the movies that works both an expose of the dark side of the dream, and also as a testimonial to the emotional power of film’s illusions. It is also the kind of fantasy, both dream and nightmare, that I find myself not wanting to wake up from. To paraphrase Dorothy Gale, some of it isn’t very nice.

But much of it is beautiful.

The rest, as they say, is silence.