mulholland dr. (2001)
Mulholland Dr. sees a turning point, not only Lynch at his creative peak, and the primary expression of his narrative inventions, but also a time when the television and cinematic form began blurring into one. Here, Lynch sees a turning point toward an era of the simultaneous embrace and abandonment of humanity in a world of false deceptions and mutually agreed-upon synthetics masquerading as reality. The cathartic Club Silencio sequence bringing a reckoning of the subconscious and the conscious, the subconscious experiencing false stimuli it can neither understand nor verify, being driven to an outpouring of emotion over smoke and mirrors. There is no band and yet we hear it, there is no Betty and Rita and yet we feel them. It's about the loss of identity in all forms, including losing our identification and reliance on the plot and becoming instead attached to objects, actors, places and tones as the way of following Lynch’s symbolist journey. As our lead performer wakes up, the identities of everyone shift around her and the meaning of objects change as well, just as in a relationship breaking up, things which were once significant vanish. What is a romance but a mutual pact to ignore the realism we know and plunge together headfirst into a fantasy? We know it could and likely will end one day, yet it’s a fantasy we hope our shared belief will make real. For Betty the identity she had was based on the future success she imagined and so, when it doesn’t come to be, she’s lost who she was. Rita, through trauma, now no longer has an identity of any kind. What Lynch activates here is archetypal, it's primal, it's the personification of the blank slate ego-loss speaking directly to the persona of hope and optimism. Betty as identification with the future rather than the present, and Rita as a characterization that is without a past or a future, cross-cut with Adam Kesher, the director, experiencing his own ego-erasure due to his financial life and career being deleted at the same time his marriage ends. Only by connecting with the past (and the power structure) via the cowboy can he reconnect to the life he's lost. The Id speaks directly to the newly blank ego "don't you want to know who you are?". Like stepping into life alone again when our relationship to another had become our entire personality. Lynch keeps the dialogue so scant that the short lines pronounce like slogans, echoing in the viewer's mind like enunciations from the subconscious rather than consciously spoken conversation.
When the object of dreams and desires can’t be ours, or the imagined future persona can't be actualized, the result is a different kind of ego death, a loss of the self. Objects and mementos (a coffee cup, an ash tray) which once held meaning lose their significance entirely. People we could once trust, so close to us they became an extension of our sense of self, become sinister outsiders, joining again with the ranks of “everybody else” and not to be trusted. We opened the door to a vulnerable place and now they’re leaving. In parallel, as the ascendant artist enjoys the favor of all those around them, and the descendant career artist enjoys the betrayals and chuckling from the same crowd who once came to kiss their ring. Lynch was experiencing his own version of this at the time and his brutal honesty here with himself and with us plays at the deepest levels of our psychological hopes and fears, every element of the film can be read as a litmus test for the viewer's own psychology, it can be read as genuine or sinister, as hopeful and beautiful or as terrifying and predatory. Even the upbeat pop songs of ‘16 Reasons’ and ‘Every Little Star’ take on a threatening presence as we glimpse the machinations behind the pretty faces. Yet, for Betty, this moment represents the most hopeful apex of her failed career, the moment she felt like she had the whole world in front of her. Why, that director even looked so longingly in your direction, surely he wished you could be his leading lady, but his hand was forced by powers beyond his control, plus you had to keep an obligation to a new friend. Lynch presents moments of traumatic impressions that can’t be shaken, the viewer is jolted near the beginning with a jump scare preceded by a POV of a camera rounding a corner, as we look for the man behind Winkie’s, “the one who’s doing it”. The camera movement recurs time and time again, and time and again our muscles tense, waiting for the impact that never comes, there’s only one such startling moment in the film, yet that’s all it takes to keep us in suspense each time the situation is recreated. For Betty also, the wide-eyed innocence gives way as soon as we’ve seen her audition performance, we glimpse a dimension of self that she conceals. This isn’t the character we thought we knew, who is she really? The mature performance coming from the naive girl who immediately recedes back into her child-like persona. Did the gaze from Adam excite or intimidate? Is that why she fled? Betty, as virginal hope for the future made flesh, only masks the appetites that linger just below the surface, and the blank slate amnesia of Rita provides the only desirable sexual gratification. When Rita, as Camilla, finally reconnects with the self she’s lost, becoming a full personality again, the sexual relationship is lost. In the film’s many visual references to Hitchcock’s Vertigo, this element mirrors Scotty and Madeline. The world becomes Betty’s fulfillment from her newfound love for Rita to her acceptance as an actress, yet within Club Silencio, set to the false performance of Rebekah Del Rio, we find the center point that we were drifting toward all along. As we’re shown over and over, this is all artifice, there is no band, there is no Betty, there is only an actress, this is only a recording.
As the world dissolves away around them, Rita and Betty are moved to tears, only composing themselves when the illusion of the performance is broken. Somehow the deception bursts the immersion, as we wonder if the recording of the voice or the woman who performed it were what we were reacting to, and both seem to lose their power as the union is broken, the illusion is destroyed. As Diane awakes, it all comes crashing down, the illusion of Rita becomes Camilla, in the same way Betty’s performative naiveté masks the ego’s duplicity underneath, so too is she unable to cope with watching the persona of Rita restore from amnesiac to self-aware, with full awareness comes the possibility of deceptive behavior. The ability to perform, to act as something other than their true motives and intentions, is what transforms the characters here into threatening entities, the dream place begins to melt and disfigure. The pitying eyes of Coco now recast as Adam’s mother, the two Camillas of both stories sharing a kiss where the lipstick is transferred, the world cutting deeper and deeper into Diane’s psyche, eventually becomes too much to carry. Past the naive exterior, past the jaded and scorned failed Hollywood actress, the core of Diane’s persona finally collapses. As the same smiling faces, whose belief in our potential motivated us not long ago, become a terrifying reminder of the life that will never be, the life that could have been. What once gave us hope and belief in the future, what fueled us, slowly transforms into the weight we can’t bear, the eyes we can’t escape, our own eyes looking back at us from the past. Our dreams, and the ones who made us feel they were real, can so quickly transform into the specters around the corner, the “one who’s doing it”. When we lose ourselves, the nightmares rush in.
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