Mulholland Drive, Part 2: a Phenomenological View

Phe· nom· e· nol· o· gy [fi–nom–uh–nol–uh–jee]
– noun
1. the way in which one perceives and interprets events and one’s relationship to them in contrast both to one’s objective responses to stimuli and to any inferred unconsciousmotivation for one’s behaviour.
2. in psychology, phenomenology is used to refer to subjective experiences or their study.
eg. “from a phenomenological perspective, I didn’t feel that way…”

That David Lynch sometimes prefers to direct his actors in metaphors is remarkably appropriate; it would take one to describe my feelings about Mulholland Drive. I am not brave enough to attempt any lengthy in depth analysis of his film, least of all his unfathomably enigmatic third act, but in some way I understand everything that I need to about it. I am comfortable in the absence of a definitive meaning of the film, knowing that Lynch himself would cite the feeling that it gives me as proof enough of its influence.

Mulholland Drive has always seemed to me profound, not in terms of artistic statement or aesthetic beauty, but something more; something that I would find it extremely difficult to articulate. I have long since stopped trying, knowing that I would never be able to craft an accurate description of how the film makes me feel. Simplistically, Lynch’s cinema, and in particular Mulholland Drive, has the power to provoke from me a huge range of emotional responses. I find the film at parts extremely unsettling; a number of scenes frighten me more than any horror film has managed to. The man who lives behind Twinkies and the hallucinatory nightmarish ending have both at some point proved too scary for me to watch and I am not exactly sure why. It seems obvious to me that Lynch isn’t trying to scare me, and perhaps knowing this scares me even more. At the same time I find the film achingly beautiful. The establishing arial shots of Los Angeles seem to belong in a blockbuster, so detached are they from the visual style of the rest of the film. Yet they are timeless, flawlessly photographed and therefore return to me as an element of the film that I love.

Many of the emotions that I experience when I watch the film are provoked by both the music and the sound design of the film. The ‘Club Silencio’ scene, one which is heavily reliant on the relationship between the visual and aural components of cinema, is one that I am particularly intrigued by. A personal response to this scene is that Lynch is toying with his viewers, not in a manipulative way, but rather by adopting the theme that all is not what it seems as a microcosm for the film as a whole. In any case, the scene is a spectacle. Peter Deming’s floating, disembodied camera announces the arrival of a shift in tone; we are not aware of what is going to happen, but we know that it is something significant, something meaningful.

Angelo Badalmenti’s score is another aspect of the film that I consider hugely important in my response to it. Music in film is important, but so often it is not given the chance to have a significant influence on the film and an impact on its audience. Badalamenti worked closely with Lynch, often writing music based on Lynch’s attempts to verbalise a mood or feeling. The result is a score that is every bit as responsible for the film’s tone as Lynch’s direction, the cast’s performances and Deming’s cinematography. Using a subtle blend of synth and strings, Badalamenti enhances the power of the image, often giving it a new dynamic in the process.

My emotional involvement with this film peaks at the same point every time I devote 2 hours and 20 minutes of my life to it. The following sequence, which is represented in Lynch’s mind by the image of a glowing red lamp according to his chapter prompts on the special edition DVD, occurs well after we learn that all is not what it seems; during and after the ‘Club Silencio’ scene. By this point in the film my reoccurring thoughts and theories have been put to bed, in their place lies a sense of relief as I realise that my curiosity and intrigue has survived another viewing. Long may it do so. The day that I watch the film and realise that I am no longer affected by it in the same way will be the day that it loses its power over me.

The transcription that follows is of my favourite scene of the film.

A phone rings. The camera pans down past a lit red lamp, cutting to a wider angle to reveal Diane walking into the room as her answering machine message picks up the call. “Hello, it’s me… leave a message” – the lack of a given name underpinning the ambiguity of character. The caller’s tinny voice through the speaker is not quite as unrecognisable as her character has become, nevertheless we intuit her identity. The conversation that ensues, one sided and wracked with condescension, reveals the setting of the next scene as the camera slowly closes in on Diane’s face. 6980 Mulholland Drive. The synthesised score creeps in as Diane’s despondent expression, framed against a wall absent of discernable colour, fades from the screen.

A shot of Mulholland Drive’s street sign, identical to the one that introduces the film, hangs dreamily at the top of the frame. It wades through soft focus and the glare of oncoming headlights as the camera passes below. A black limousine, the same which ushers Rita to her misfortune almost two hours before, winds its way through the Hollywood hills before drawing to a stop. Betty, who occupies the rear passenger seat in place of Rita, ominously utters the words “we don’t stop here…” whilst the eerily hypnotic score works with our expectations to contrive a sense of threat.

“A surprise” remarks the driver, who does little to allay Diane’s concern. The car door opens and Camilla, appropriately silhouetted, descends the forested incline by the side of the road and approaches the car. “A shortcut” she explains, leading Diane out of the car and back into the undergrowth with a soft word or two. Angelo Badalamenti’s orchestral score swells as the pair move on; no other arrangement could better accompany the couple’s ascent, its beauty making their destination irrelevant. The camera tracks their movement, switching perspective from higher to lower ground. We cut to a shot of their clasped hands from which the camera pans upwards to linger on Diane’s spellbound smile.

Lights ahead of the couple signal their arrival; the alluring musical motif dies away to be replaced by the intentionally inappropriate sound of diegetic jazz, revealing their location as utterly unworthy of its poetic foreword. The shift in tone is almost heartbreaking, inspiring in the audience a profound sense of disappointment which remains evident for the coming scenes. The introduction of Adam Kesher, the director with whom Camilla is having an affair, marginalises Diane, who is forced to watch as she toasts “to love” with her new lover. After an agonising exchange with Kesher’s mother which serves to devalue Diane’s position in the group even further, they make way for the house – tellingly, Camilla and Kesher lead whilst Diane follows behind them.

Over dinner, Diane is revealed as the outsider that the disdain of her hosts suggests she is. As she begins a clumsy anecdote, Lynch allows only an indecipherable blur to set the scene before snapping his camera into focus. Kesher’s mother feigns interest whilst clawing at a bowl of nuts, Kesher himself speaks Spanish with Camilla and an out of shot other; Diane clearly doesn’t understand. After dinner, as Kesher and Camilla announce their engagement, the scene descends into parody. The previous restraint shown in light of Diane’s presence has vanished; a sequence of shot reverse shots reveals both the new couple’s sickening, almost insincere joy and Diane’s agony at the news.

From this point onwards is where some claim to be able to make sense of the film. Diane, unable to cope with the loss of her love, hires a thug to kill Camilla. Then, tortured by her decision to do so she kills herself in a scene so unnerving that my best efforts to describe it would prove thankless.

After that... silencio.

Although out of context and therefore presumably lacking much of the emotional substance that I have tried to convey, the scene can be viewed here.

Mulholland Drive, Part 1: The Cinema of Abstractions

"The neat thing about film is that it can tell a little bit of a certain side of that thing that words couldn’t tell. But it won’t tell the whole story, because there are so many clues and feelings in the world that it makes a mystery and a mystery means there’s a puzzle to be solved. Once you start thinking like that you’re hooked on finding a meaning, and there are so many avenues in life where we’re given little indications that the mystery can be solved. We get little proofs - not the big proof – but little proofs that keep us going.”

– David Lynch

Taken from the reissued edition of Chris Rodley’s Lynch on Lynch, which was in 2005 expanded to include a chapter on the director’s then latest film, the above words are typically Lynchian in that they say so much whilst saying so little. Rodley’s book, despite Lynch’s well documented assertion that his films should do the talking, is far from the ‘book of riddles’ that it could have turned out to be. Despite clearly shying away from the more probing questions about his work (Rodley briefly recalls a telephone conversation with Lynch in which the director jokes about having had to check into a rape-crisis centre after their last interview session), Lynch’s answers are often insightful, always interesting and surprisingly candid. However, it is the subject of his 2001 film Mulholland Drive that he is most protective of; if it hasn’t been made clear already, Lynch unreservedly refuses to discuss any ‘meaning’ or ‘reason’ pertaining to his most enigmatic film.

Lynch seems to understand and embrace the subjective nature of the cinematic medium more than any other director working in or around Hollywood today. His films seek to foreground the power of the moving image and elevate it above and beyond conventional narrative patterns rather than present a harmonious package of narrative, theme and visual style as the mainstream Hollywood cinema demands. The critical response to Lynch’s specific style of filmmaking has typically made discussions of ‘dream logic’ its focus; the idea that any perceived reality in a David Lynch film may not be a reality at all. This theory, although itself being far from reductive, is predominantly grounded in the analysis of narrative form in Lynch’s films and often leads to the task of attempting to work out how his films make ‘sense’ by piecing together their fractioned narratives. This process, given precedent as it is over other possible avenues of criticism, frequently stifles the exploration of other areas of the directors work, of which there are many.

Another concerning aspect of the ‘dream logic’ theory is the connotation that there is a logic to be found irrespective of whether it makes sense. This is particularly pertinent when considering Mulholland Drive, with which the theory is often strongly linked. Mulholland Drive, despite its frequent reference to dreaming (the ‘Winkies’ sequence and the Cowboy’s ultimate line, “Hey pretty girl, time to wake up” amongst numerous other examples) is perhaps Lynch’s least logical film, if such a generalisation can be made. Whilst the term ‘dream logic’ is often intended to imply an absence of reason rather than an explanatory process through which cohesion can be gained, it is still primarily concerned with the notion of logic itself. Rather than the process of exploring how the seemingly arbitrary events might fit together, the focus shifts to an exploration of why they do not. Put simply, with the introduction of ‘dream logic’, everything can be explained away. My overriding concern is that ‘dream logic’ seems to act as more of an excuse than a theory. For those who watch films and demand a high level of cohesion, ‘dream logic’ is the perfect tool; it allows them the satisfaction of being able to say ‘it’s okay that this doesn’t make sense to me, because it’s all a dream and dreams don’t make sense either’.

It is testament to Lynch’s subjective cinema that an article of Mulholland Drive is rarely without the inclusion of the writer’s own interpretation of the events that take place in the film. My experience of reading these interpretations has resulted in what I believe to be the dominant reading of the film; that the final act is a reality in which the preceding events are dreamt up by the character of Diane Selwyn. That there is a dominant reading of this film alone is a fact that I choose to view with scepticism, such a thing renders much of the film’s subjectivity obsolete. Some interpretations convey a level of confidence in their own accuracy that I find implausible. These interpretations often only deal with the film’s primary narrative strand; the dynamic between Betty / Diane and Rita / Camilla, ignoring the labyrinthine sub-plots that accompany it. Other interpretations are exhaustive in their submission of theories and ideas, attempting to leave no stone unturned in a bid to elucidate the hidden meaning of the film; a meaning which I simply do not believe to be there.

The subjective nature of the film aside, Mulholland Drive is labyrinthine in its construction of sub-plots and what can best be described as ‘pockets’ of narrative. It is clear that the film doesn’t subscribe to the rigid, purposeful structuring of Hollywood mainstream narrative and due to this it is impossible for the film to be truly understood by the same rules. The film is comprised of seemingly arbitrary events that are linked through the films final third which is itself as detached from the first two acts as these events are from each other. Because Mulholland Drive is not a mainstream film that utilises mainstream narrative techniques and conventions it is pointless to attempt to contrive meanings that satisfy mainstream ideals. The film must be approached without the burden of reason in order to be truly appreciated.

Mulholland Drive is, in some respects, a cinematic dichotomy. Perhaps the overriding theme of the film is concerned with Hollywood itself; Betty travels to Hollywood from Canada in order to pursue her dream of being an actress, numerous scenes deal with studio politics and film production, especially the process of casting and the influence of Hollywood can be felt throughout the film. A number of scenes pay what could even be considered homage to the tradition of Hollywood cinema; Joe Messing’s hit man scene draws on the gangster and thriller genres, as does the opening limousine scene. Adam Kesher’s ‘pool guy’ scene evokes the family drama with comedic overtones whilst the casting call scene for The Sylvia North Story and the ‘club silencio’ scene share obvious comparisons with the musical. Most noticeably, Diane and Rita’s amnesia inspired attempt to find Rita’s true identity is the kind of narrative that could have been lifted straight from a golden age film noir. Even the mysterious ‘Cowboy’ can be seen as a nod to the Western, albeit at a push. These scenes do have self contained narratives that if viewed in isolation would appear to be lifted from a mainstream Hollywood film. However, it is their relationship to each other and some of the more obscure elements of the film that render Mulholland Drive so stark in comparison with the Hollywood tradition that the film takes as it’s theme. It could be argued that Lynch is making a statement about Hollywood itself by polarising his film with mainstream conventions whilst taking the context of these very conventions as his theme. This argument is strengthened by Lynch’s follow-up film Inland Empire, which too deals with the Hollywood film industry in typical evasive fashion.

It is possible then to establish meaning in Mulholland Drive without reason. Narrative and theme go hand in hand in the context of mainstream cinema, but with Lynch theme is foregrounded whilst narrative is undoubtedly less important. The theme of Hollywood gives the film a context, a tone and a style which is nothing if not consistent throughout the entirety of the film from the blurry-lensed 50’s jitterbug contest opening to the enigmatic and haunting finale. The lack of narrative cohesion allows Lynch to explore his theme in freeform rather than being bound by convention. Essentially, Mulholland Drive is constructed from a collection of abstractions that are brought together as a whole by a theme and cemented by Peter Deming’s floating cinematography and Angelo Badalamenti’s lush combination of synth and strings; despite its face-value impenetrability, the film is remarkably well rounded.

Films as emotionally overwhelming as Mulholland Drive often seem shallower with further acquaintance.

– Kim Newman (from Sight & Sound)

An interesting if slightly self-assured article about about Mulholland Drive entitled Babes in Babylon, written by Graham Fuller was published in Sight & Sound in December 2001 and can be found here.