MULHOLLAND DRIVE
RAW PLOT HAS, in recent years, become the mortal enemy of pop cinema. Like Japanese knotweed it coils under its foundations, growing uncontrolled and at a ferocious rate, choking off all life. Great fibrous clods of indigestible narrative have sunk the Pirates Of The Caribbean. Indiscriminate backstory and drive-by lore have fatally constipated Ridley Scott’s once narratively svelte Alien and left James Cameron’s formerly singleminded Terminator bewildered and terminally on the fritz.
It’s pleasingly ironic, then, that the era that birthed this tsunami of story gave us at its very beginning a film that can be taken as an enthusiastic jeremiad against the centrality of, or even need for, conventional, coherent, yarn-spinning. David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, his finest film and still, 17 years later, a contender for the greatest of the millennium so far, is superficially teeming with action. Femmes fatales rub up against inept hitmen. Corpses pile-up in darkened apartments and dingy office buildings. The Mob apply the screws to a harassed movie director. There’s a gumshoe cop and a whispering cowboy. Billy Ray Cyrus turns up.
And none of it matters a jot. Superficially it is a mystery, the kind of movie in which you can have any colour of herring as long as it’s red. Betty (a wondrous Naomi Watts), a fresh-faced ingenue and jitterbug ( just when is this set?) competition winner from the sticks, arrives in La La Land with hopes of stardom only to find a mysterious young woman already inhabiting her aunt’s apartment. A car crash has left ‘Rita’ (Laura Harring) with that most soapy of afflictions, amnesia, the only clues to her identity being a handbag stuffed with dollars and a mysterious blue key that looks like it came from outer space.
The pair begin to try to piece things together. But the rapidly snowballing plot machinations are like a deliberately inflicted overdose, designed to wrench us loose from the need to track characters, who seem to merge at one point anyhow, and assign motives, freeing us to fully inhabit Lynch’s world. Once you finally surrender — perhaps when the dwarfish mobster in a strange, soundproofed room begins issuing orders to a hood with an espresso fetish — Mulholland Drive (or Mulholland Dr., as the initial marketing materials would have us call it) reveals itself as a thrillingly strange fever dream, an abstract tone poem, and a heartfelt, horrified love letter to The Dream Factory.
Its own production history is appropriately nightmarish. Lynch had, by the late ’90s, established a fragile relationship with television. Though Twin Peaks had been a critical hit, his subsequent series, On The Air, had lasted a mere three episodes before network ABC brought down the axe. But by 1998 relations had improved enough for him to be given $7 million for a pilot for a new
series, with the rider that he shoot an ending, giving the studio beancounters the option of releasing the pilot as a feature in Europe and thus recouping some cash if what Lynch delivered failed to adequately delight.
“Basically they hated everything about it,” a despondent Lynch reported after he delivered the first cut. The subsequent tussle with ABC had him recutting the pilot, reluctantly hacking half an hour out. The changes failed to appease the studio, which shelved the project, with the vague threat that it might take it upon itself to broadcast this butchered cut as a standalone TV movie at some undisclosed future date. Lynch started to investigate the possibility of taking his name off the project, but then French studio Canal Plus bought the pilot and threw in an additional $2 million, giving him an extra nine days’ shooting time, to produce a fully fledged feature.
A double helix of dread and seduction coil their way through Mulholland Drive. It’s as alive to the sultry, seductive glamour of Rita Hayworth and Raymond Chandler as it is to the town’s rancid undertow, which hides in broad daylight, like a monster behind a diner dumpster. There’s an indefinable, irresistible magic to the Los Angeles Lynch conjures, one of tinkling fountains in bougainvillea-entwined apartment courtyards, and of the halogen grid of the city glimpsed from the hills through thin, enveloping smog. Peter Deming’s luminous cinematography paints the town in broad, blazing sunlight and then in shadow and rich, saturated colour (you have never seen a yellow cab so yellow) while Angelo Badalamenti’s score, alternating sunny pop with quietly sinister thrumming soundscapes, hints at barely submerged horrors.
It’s what keeps film lovers coming back to Mulholland Drive. It’s a film about the strange, narcotic allure not of stories or plots, but of cinema itself. What’s it about? Who knows. But who’s it about...? “And now here I am in this dream place...” is one of the first things that Betty, fresh off the plane, says. Switch that “I” with a “we”, and you have the nearest thing you’re going to get to Mulholland Drive’s enduring secret. As we sit in the darkened theatre, dreaming Lynch’s wonderful, terrible dream, it turns, at least in part, to be a movie about us.