 |
|
|
|
|
By John Demetry
So often in Lynch's career, he sees himself through a male voyeur protagonist. The statement from Blue Velvet, "I don't know if you're a detective or a pervert," defines all of his dopplegangers. It also defines the conundrum critics and audiences usually fail to juggle in dealing with Lynch's work. With Mulholland Drive, hip-o-critics drop the ball by praising the distance between Lynch and his new protagonist, a young woman who aspires to stardom in Hollywood and finds herself a detective in love with a mystery woman. They luxuriate in the perversity of voyeurism (what critics mean when they tell audiences to just "enjoy the ride"), while avoiding Lynch's search for meaning.
Cinematographer Peter Deming flattens space in Mulholland Drive, while shimmering outlines cause details to pop out of the screen. 2-D iconography - $100 bills, the Hollywood sign, overhead shots of skyscrapers, street signs, a Gilda movie poster, and a fake studio backdrop - establish the mechanisms constructing pop consciousness. The glowing close-ups, particularly of the female leads Naomi Watts and Laura Elena Harring, pause thought like the Vermeer portrait in Lynch's roving frame. His tableaus - Club Silencio, a movie set, or a conspiratorial series of phone calls - have the clarity and context of a surrealist Edward Hopper. In one scene, Lynch achieves a dreamy soft focus through the mundane filter of a screen door. Lynch piques and prods the commodified pop consciousness. Ultimately, he liberates that pop consciousness through an emotionally exhaustive narrative structure. The first 90 minutes of the film, mostly made up of material from a rejected ABC pilot for a new series, appear to be an epic-sized nightmare analysis of Hollywood's - and America's - hidden power structures. That's the conspiracy backdrop to the investigation of Watts' Betty into the identity of Harring's amnesiac Rita. The last hour crosses identities as Watts becomes Diane (who was earlier seen dead in her apartment as evidence of the danger that threatens Rita) and Harring becomes Camilla (the actress previously forced upon the director of a Hollywood film for which Betty had an opportunity to audition). The movie now focuses on the interior conflict between fantasy and anxiety played out in the mind of Diane, humiliated when Camilla dumps her for the big-time director. It reveals the Betty-Rita mystery and romance as a projection of Diane's pop delusions. Diane masturbates herself raw, her p.o.v. blurred and deafened. Lynch moves behind the scenes of the film noir tropes that informed his Blue Velvet, Wild At Heart, Twin Peaks, and Lost Highway. He details the ideology that creates it: the random logic of hetero male violence, greed, and power. Through Diane, Lynch's radical pop humanism realizes how the wish-fulfilling placation of Hollywood genre spreads even to the dreams of a lesbian woman. (Rita gets her name from a poster for the gay-coded noir classic Gilda, starring Rita Hayworth.) When Diane communicates her guilt and hurt in a shared stare with a gay man at a diner, Lynch uncovers the Queer sensibility that results from social constructions. This moment of gaydar resonates back to the beginning of the film. The same gay man in the same diner recounts a nightmare in which, "behind this place," he saw "the one who's doing this." He sees a homeless man with a deformed face. It's the fear of what one may become or is already - a casualty to a corrupt popular culture. The insane, nightmare violence encroaching on Betty and Rita's lives in the first part is Diane's own, but so is the love - as faces, images, and situations ricochet through both narrative strands. Hollywood's ideologically loaded narratives rupture through the individual consciousness of the spectator. Lynch locates that imaginative space as the site of a modern spiritual crisis, consigning Diane to - and warning the audience of - a film-loop purgatory of (self-)discovery and (self-)destruction.
The audience of Mulholland Drive may quake during the sequence's climax. Rebekah Del Rio lip-synchs a Spanish-language a cappella version of Roy Orbison's "Crying". Lynch matches the glittered teardrop painted under Del Rio's eye with the tears of Betty and Rita in the audience. Through the revelation that it is the awareness of the falseness of pop that makes it so powerful, Lynch gets at new truths. He honors the pop audience with the art that ABC and Hollywood would deprive. Lynch reverses the usual process of identification in Hollywood's reflection of heterosexual hegemony, defined in the sequence on the set of a movie featuring a 1950s racial utopia centered on a white female pop singer. The director of this movie-within-a-movie might be modeled after accusations of Lynch's smugness. Lynch dispels such misconceptions. The gambit of expressing his and the audience's anxieties through the tragic fantasy life of a lesbian character is matched by Naomi Watts' daring performance. Lynch allows Watts to re-imagine her character from the inside out. Watts finds wide-eyed Betty in weary Diane. Through Watts, Lynch finds Diane in himself and creates a world and work of art out of that empathy. After Mulholland Drive, movies can never be the same. |
Laura Harring and Naomi Watts star in David Lynch's Mullholand Drive 
Director David Lynch 
© 1997-2002 BEI