Hey, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab.
I almost saw this film this morning. Or rather, I did see it. I just didn’t hear it. Waaaaaaaaaah. Fate hates me. Fate is trying to keep me from this film. There are not enough tears.
Leave it to The Second Darren to see the film before me. First he gets to snuggle with a hot witch, seamlessly filling in for the departed First Darren, and now he manages to get a glimpse at the new film by David Lynch. Lucky bastid...
I say M.D. at the Dallas screening too.
Have a little different take on it than Ghostboy.
It really blew me away.
Here's my review if you're interested.
A Hollywood Fever Dream with Damsels
How many times have you seen it? The camera pans across those enormous white letters on the hill. HOLLYWOOD. If only you had a nickel for every time….
Of course, if you had a nickel for every time the shot was more than just filler you’d be hurting. But it’s harmless; it only takes a second or two. Depending on the film, at some level of consciousness you conjure tanned faces, health food, money, Manson, ruby slippers. When you think about Hollywood, and more specifically a Hollywood movie, there are associations as vivid as any myth.
With Mulholland Drive, David Lynch has made the archetypical David Lynch film. Just about every scene evokes, subtly or not, an image or idea from his previous work. It’s all there: the mystery, the anachronisms, the explicit sex, the otherworldly figures, the obsession and violence, the perverse, destructive curiosity, all of it outlandish, weird, unsettling, and funny. There’s even a lip-synched Roy Orbison tune and—the definitive Lynch touch—a creepy, impossibly noisy light bulb.
Some might accuse Lynch of recycling his themes and images just to flesh out (no pun intended) a rejected TV pilot. And they might just be right. But to me, his earlier work now looks like a crude study in preparation for Mulholland Drive. He may well have stumbled onto his masterpiece.
It takes a little while before it becomes clear, but the central characters in the film are two women, each a brazen cliché of melodrama. “Rita” is a dark woman with a secret. She suffers amnesia in a car wreck and wanders dazed into an apartment where she meets Betty—blonde, blue-eyed, ludicrously adorable Betty—who has just arrived in the city of dreams. Betty has come from small-town Canada to be a movie star. Well, preferably a great actress, she assures, but sometimes you can be both. They set out to learn just who Rita (a name she takes from a movie poster) is and why she has stacks of hundred dollar bills stuffed in her purse. You couldn’t come up with a more cliché-riddled premise, but all (All!) is not as it seems.
On the surface, Lynch seems to be sketching caricatures of filmdom—both the players and the product—in his familiar absurdist tones. Some are funny, and others seem weird for weird’s sake, but it’s all nice and familiar, by Lynch standards anyway. But then comes a strangely arresting scene. We see Betty prepare for a rehearsal with Rita. When the actual rehearsal scene begins, we think we are in for a satiric riff, with a smarmy leading man and a robotic director. But something different begins to happen. The contrast between now and the way Betty performed the scene with Rita is striking. By the end, you begin vaguely doubting much that you’ve seen before. Boundaries seem to have been distorted in a way that is hard to articulate, and it is now that the film begins to turn.
For where it turns, get out your Rolodex of Lynchisms and start flipping: surreal, disturbing, exhilarating, phantasmal. Indeed, nothing is as it seemed, least of all Betty and Rita. Or maybe they have simply assumed new roles, arbitrarily, without telling us. Gee, maybe it’s all a dream! Never seen that one before! But no. Mulholland Drive is using clichés, you might even say flogging us with them, but it’s going somewhere completely different.
A man who has often been criticized for the brutality he heaps upon female characters, Lynch has, I think, tried to atone in a way. He seems to have created a sympathetic rebuke of the way female identity and sexuality have been portrayed on film. We have the dark lady with a dark secret, the innocent waif, bobbysoxers, a hooker, an eccentric spinster, and a gum-smacking waitress (or maybe I just think she was smacking…ahh Hollywood). There’s even a wife who goes to bed with the pool guy. All of these figures inhabit a familiar, albeit off-kilter, universe until we come to the inevitable climax: the love scene. But after that, things change. Some kind of corruption takes hold and distorts.
All of it suggests a deeper purpose. Lynch may be exploring how the ways in which film has portrayed women have damaged the popular imagination, and the consequences. In the long list of migrants from his other films, there’s one notable absence here: the über villain. Instead, the prime mover of Mulholland Drive—a black figure who lives behind a diner—could be from Jung, or a folk tale, or even the Greeks. It could be the manifestation of all our twisted, Hollywood-made fantasies. Or maybe a homeless guy wandered into a shot and Lynch thought it would be cool to use him somehow. Either way, in this world myth and mythmaker are one, and it’s dangerous.
Mullholland Drive is an absolutely engrossing film. It should re-establish
Lynch as the king of weird, and, alongside The Straight Story, it should
elevate him to something more: maybe to the most important American director
working today.
OH, GOD, WHY DON’T YOU OPEN THIS MOVIE TOMORROW?!?! PLEASE?!?
*breaks down sobbing*
"Moriarty" out.
