Mulholland Drive: A Lynchian Ode to The City of Dreams review

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Mulholland Drive is a great and influential piece of cinema. It proves that even Hollywood can sometimes produce films at par with those by Michael Haneke, or the darker works of Luis Buñuel, writes Aniruddha Basu.

Lets face it. Nobody really understands David Lynch. And trying to figure out Mulholland Drive is about as easy as putting together a jigsaw puzzle with some crucial pieces missing. When this film was released in 2001, Hollywood had not seen anything quite like it before, except Lynch’s own Lost Highway and Twin Peaks.

And like those, Drive too is structured as a mystery. But this time Lynch is more concerned with a variety of other elements like the trappings of celebrity, alienation, unrequited love, and insanity.

Naomi Watts portrays Betty, a perky young woman who comes to Los Angeles to become an actress. She meets a woman who calls herself Rita and who has lost her memory following a car accident. The two quickly become friends and Betty resolves to solve the mystery behind Rita’s identity. But what starts off as a good natured Nancy Drew like mystery becomes far more disturbing as the nature of reality itself begins to unravel around Betty. Friendship turns into forbidden love and then jealousy. The emotions are played out in a surreal nightclub named “Silencio”. A woman sings a hypnotic lullaby, but a voice warns them “ no hay banda‘¦it is all a recording”. It is not real. What follows may be a flashback and/or self realization on Betty’s part . But more on that later.

Supporting this storyline are a number of other subplots. A cocky director refuses to do a film when his producers force him to cast a different leading lady. He is however “convinced” later on by a sinister cowboy to play along: a clumsy gangster messes up a murder assignment in a series of comic incidents; a don sits in the middle of a large room, giving orders and dispatches his men to find a “missing girl” (Rita?). A cheerful old couple that Betty meets come back later in the film as monsters out of your worst nightmare.

And in a terrifying sequence, a man realizes that the nightmarish face he saw in his dreams does in fact exist.

Meanwhile Betty and Rita leave the nightclub and discover a blue box, which may contain the answers to the secrets of Mulholland Drive. The box is opened, but then viewers are presented with an alternate (or is it actual?) reality. Betty is not a smart, sexy young starlet. She is now somehow less attractive, her beauty marred by dark circles and lines of worry. We discover that Betty and Rita were not just friends, they were lovers. After Rita leaves her for the director, Betty decides to take revenge by employing the gangster (who in this scene does not seem to be clumsy at all).

Is the first three-fourths then Betty’s dream of how things should have been? And the final segment the tragic reality? It seems to be. Betty would then imagine the gangster as clumsy so that he would fail in his mission. The “cowboy” is revealed to be just an extra on the sets dressed as a cowboy. The old couple are a figment of Betty’s overheated conscience that prompts her to end her own life. The recurring words “it is all a recording” is Betty’s interpretation that what has happened so far was not real. But now the dream is broken.

That is just one interpretation. But Mulholland Drive is not about plot. It follows the pattern of a dream, where the entire event is clear only to the one experiencing it. We viewers sit outside, viewing the dream as well as how Betty’s fractured conscience tries-and fails-to deal with the reality of the events. The mystery was not about Rita. It was about Betty. She realizes the only way to end the dream was to take her own life. The “murder” at the center of the movie was Betty’s own.

This is a great and influential piece of cinema. It proves that even Hollywood can sometimes produce films at par with those by Michael Haneke, or the darker works of Luis Bunuel.

On a related note, when the equally surreal No Smoking was dished out by our very own Anurag Kahsyap, most of the major critics panned it (one even termed it as an “incoherent mess”). Undoubtedly the same critics hail Mullholland Drive as a masterpiece. But when Bollywood tries its hand at a similar genre, the work is dismissed as pretentious and arty. Discouraging, to say the least, especially when the public’s opinion on contemporary films is formed to a large extent by media reports.