Mulholland Drive (2001)

Mulholland Drive is a confusing mess of a film--but is often brilliant. That it was complete entertainment for one evening, even though I had seen it before and previously disliked it, surprised me. As I see it now, over twenty years later, it strikes me as an unsettling work of art, one that is perhaps incomplete (Lynch's "body without a head"), with several parallel plots and a myriad of vignettes suggesting so much.

We all have fantasies, and Betty Elms (Naomi Watts) is going to make her dreams come true by moving to live with her wealthy Aunt Ruth in Los Angeles (escorted there by her parents? Aunt and Uncle? We are never quite certain). While at Aunt Ruth's, she encounters the raven-haired mysterious Rita (Laura Harring) who is living there unbeknownst to Aunt Ruth or her domestic help (Ann Miller). Rita is an amnesiac (she claimed the name from a poster of Gilda starring Rita Hayworth) but is carrying a purse with a lot of money inside. Meanwhile, director Adam Kesher (Justin Theroux) has his movie, The Sylvia North Story, recast for him by gangsters played by Angelo Badalamenti and Dan Hedaya, and Michael Anderson, the "Man from Another Place" dancing midget of "Twin Peaks" fame, appears to be behind all of THAT and appears dressed in a huge "normal body suit" to boot. Confused? It gets worse.

Kesher is instructed by the gangsters to cast a girl named Camilla in his film, to which he rebels. Previously we've seen a tragi-comic scene of a hitman who manages to inadvertently kill three people trying to kill one, to get a book of secret phone numbers. Kesher departs, busting the windows of the gangsters' car, and goes home to find his wife sleeping with Billy Ray Cyrus, the "Pool Man." He uses thick pink paint to destroy her jewelry but finds that his "line of credit" has mysteriously been cut off while staying in a cheap downtown Hollywood hotel. He agrees to meet the mysterious and unlikable character calling himself "the Cowboy." The Cowboy tells him to cast Camilla, even specifying that he's to say, when he sees her audition, "This is the girl," and that Kesher will see him "one more time if you do good. Two more times if you do bad." He then disappears into the darkness.

We have previously seen two men at a diner called Winkie's discuss one of the men's dreams about a grotesque homeless character living behind the diner. They go out of the diner and find the homeless man (who seems covered in filth from head to toe) back there, and the fear of it causes the dreamer to collapse. There seem to be a number of these supernatural characters intersecting. What are we to make of this?

Later, after making love, and changing hair (Rita dons a blonde wig--these characters seem to be alternating, shifting versions of their "selves" at times), they enter the "Club Silencio," a theater that opens at two in the morning wherein the Emcee, in various languages, pronounces that "everything is an illusion." A woman singer sings Roy Orbison's song "Crying" in Spanish, while Betty and Rita look on. (Or is it Diane and Camilla, as will later be revealed? Who knows?) It is a uniquely powerful image of the singer's Felliniesque face and mournful mien, and is the best thing, in THIS author's opinion, in the entire film.

The name "Diane" on a waitress's nametag triggers Rita's memories of Diane Selwyn. Her apartment is soon discovered; it's a seedy little place. Here, they discover a dead body. This plot point may be out of order with the others I've described. But, in the context of this film, it scarcely matters.

But Betty, it turns out, is not all sunshine and light and a drive to success--she's also DIANE, who lives in a seedy apartment, wants to hire a hitman to kill her lover Camilla (same bungling hitman from the earlier scene), and goes to a party (the dream shifts, as every dream does at some point, to a mansion with Adam Kesher, Rita/Camilla, the Cowboy, and the Other Camilla, who kisses Rita/Camilla while Betty (or Diane) explains she came from Ontario to L.A. to be a big star. Alright.

The thing ends in hallucinations that are absurd and frightening. Or perhaps they are dreams. And clouds of smoke, blowing in slow motion, an indelible Lynchian image.

The film is little intersecting circles of parallel worlds, little alternate selves interweaving and crossing over, or it is a dream of one woman, or it implies...nothing. Either way, like a puzzle you can never quite solve, it will attempt to resolve itself, like the best of all cinematic enigmas, in your subconscious mind, even hours after you've seen it.

The little black cube, of course, is a nod to Kubrick, 2001. Also, a mystic cube is a symbol important in several magical traditions. The homeless man at the back of Winkie's almost looks like a fantasy character, as covered in filth or burnt flesh or whatever, he seems almost troll-like; magic characters such as the Cowboy are hiding at the edges of these intersecting rings of life. Are they the puppet masters, or simply more pawns in a game they do not understand themselves?

The cube is a black doorway--the camera proceeds inward, into the darkness, much as it did through the mouth of the worm on the planet's surface in Eraserhead, or the severed ear of Dorothy's husband in Blue Velvet. Lynch's films are replete with such doorways, hidden subconscious cues to the viewer that he has descended to another bardo, another state in the dreaming world, into the mouth of a virtual, hallucinatory death.

And then, silencio.