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Mulholland Dr.
// Those who previously feared that Lynch's oeuvre had dwindled since Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me should rejoice, for Mulholland Dr. marks the surrealist filmmaker's return to greatness. No more moribund dalliances with heavy metal or tractors; Lynchian trademarks are back with a vengeance, fusing mystery, magic realism, dwarves (this time only the head is small on The Man From Another Place, who is now a Hollywood kingpin) with atypical weirdness, exploring a society swirling in its own darkness and secrets with an array of characters armed with darkly comic, oddball dialogue. Linear narrative is very much absent, replaced with an entirely confusing, twisting, turning Mobius strip variation of the non-linear model. Lynch orchestrates an utterly beautiful, dreamy vision of the undulating city of dreams itself, Hollywood, Los Angeles. Focusing on perky, idealistic Ontario jitterbug champion Betty Elms and her arrival into such a realm, Lynch crafts his daring execution at first as a mystery/romance similar to Hollywood and pulp fiction, albeit with two female leads. Naomi Watts is the revelation of the two, displaying an intrepid duality in her extraordinary, multi-layered performance; we fall in love with the radiant, sweet and talented Betty only to discover that she is not real, simply the dreamt ideal of depressed, tragic Hollywood casualty Diane Selwyn (the nightmarish reality) martyred example of unrequited love, the personification (i.e. the bum outside Winkie's) of guilt, regret and hopelessness. With glamorous, particularly crystalline visuals almost too perfect for Lynch's usual style, Mulholland Dr. often enters the realm of devastatingly raw, dark human recesses and a tapestry of unease and foreboding which unfolds into an unaccountable menace. Even the most portentous of scenes are disturbing, frequently and unbearably so in the last chapter of the film; alternatively, in the first chapters, it sometimes descends into bizarre farce and Nancy Drew mystique. Lynch's contradictions are evident, leaving the audience clamouring for answers they will never find; artistry and clues already plant the idea, but Lynch's genius is allowing the viewer to come to their own conclusion.
After all, at the crucial point where the plot seems poised on the brink of resolution, the film disappears into a black hole from which it reappears more contrary than ever. That this is, in fact, the twist that binds the threads together probably won't occur until long after the credits roll. But then, this isn't a film to be followed in the traditional sense; it's one to let wash over you, one to wallow in.
If you need to understand rather than feel, then you can call it comprehensible in some ways, its fractured, sensual lyricism explores a tragic love whereby identity, rivalry, power and jealousy foray into an everlasting, beautiful romance, with the formerly troublesome roles reversed and happiness envisioned as the closing image of Diane's fever dream (and the film itself). As with most of Lynch's films, it has many interpretations and allusions, but in a film half set in a woman's subconscious version of Hollywood and the stark, decaying reality, you can view it any way you want to and still be rewarded with new details each time, that to me is the definition of a masterpiece. Silencio.
