David Lynch has made something of a comeback with Mulholland Drive, after a couple of misfires and one movie (The Straight Story) that was so low-key it barely registered on the radars of the moviegoing world. Mulholland Drive returns him to the territory he mined so successfully in Twin Peaks — it was, indeed, originally a pilot for a television series that failed to fly. Unfortunately, Mulholland Drive doesn’t take us beyond the Twin Peaks formula, and bears the traces of its televisual origins.
And now: how to sum up the story? Basically, a woman is involved in a car accident, and loses her memory. Another woman, a would-be movie star, arrives in Los Angeles to stay in her aunt’s flat, and the two women hook up and go searching for the truth of what happened to the first one. That’s the broadest, simplest possible outline. Into it, Lynch packs a host of subplots, or plots, which may or may not connect to the main plot. He also manages to tell the story in a way that keeps us constantly guessing as to what is going on, and therein lies his great talent. The whole of Twin Peaks, for all its great length, was a masterpiece of suspended closure. Not knowing what it all meant was part of the fun, and thus the resolution, if you can call it that, when it finally came, seemed somehow rather insignificant. It was the ramifying strands of mystery that appealed.
Indeed, it is as though Lynch has taken a leaf very determinedly from François Truffaut, who insisted that his movies always had a beginning, a middle and an end — just not necessarily in that order. Lynch is very good at scrambling his storyline in an intriguing way, though it must be said that it isn’t really terribly hard to make sense of it in the end.
It doesn’t even need the mumbojumbo aspects Lynch throws in to make some transitions and pull things together. We don’t need a mysterious blue box or a horrible-looking tramp figure to resolve anything. In fact, the parts that Lynch tries in some way to resolve don’t really need resolution, while other loose ends that would have been useful to fill things in are left hanging. Deep mystery or a lack of suitable footage? And it seems a bit of a cop-out, in fact, to find ourselves once again in front of a red curtain (what does that mean to Lynch?) with some odd figure making opaque pronouncements. It’s as though all that stuff is simply there to emphasise the fact that this movie is truly, deeply mysterious. In case we’d missed it.
There are nice things in the movie, including a great audition sequence, and a masturbation scene that (for about 30 seconds) is truly moving. Certainly it’s more moving than anything else in any Lynch-scripted movie. And Lynch plays very effectively with the contrast between the torpid glamour of raven-haired Rita (Laura Harring), the amnesiac, and the innocence of perky blonde Betty (Naomi Watts). They are like two opposing sides of a particular part of the American movie mystique, the clash of the sultry Forties and the squeaky-clean Fifties. (Ann Miller, who made some 20 movies in the Forties, and several in the Fifties, has a small allusive role.) It’s as though Rita Hayworth and Doris Day had been thrown together into one complicated tale, though in the end the Doris Day figure is there to be undercut, in the way Lynch undercut the suburban bliss of Kyle McLachlan’s life in Blue Velvet. He’s got to subvert, hasn’t he? It’s like he’s still sticking his tongue out at Middle America.
In any case, Betsy, the Doris Day figure, soon changes into something else: a very modern lesbian. And that’s another thing Lynch makes his audience wait for — the much-vaunted lesbian love scene. I wouldn’t be surprised if the straight male audience (for these are distinctly lipsticked lesbians) who found themselves strung out by the suspense of the mystery plot were not, in fact, strung out by having to wait so long for the sex scene.
Make no mistake — I like a convoluted storyline. I liked Bound, and LA Confidential, for instance, and I loved Memento (though it should have been called Aide Memoire). But I also like tightness; that is to say, a film that doesn’t ramble on or is too loosely plotted. For a movie that gestures towards film noir, Mulholland Drive would have been infinitely better had it been a tense thriller of an hour and a half, instead of two and a half hours that amble by at the pace of a bad art movie. And it lacks rhythm as much as it lacks pace; it has something haphazard and half-formed about it.
Also, it looks unbelievably boring. For an arch-stylist like Lynch, it must have been a deliberate decision to shoot Mulholland Drive in as flat and banal a way as possible. But it’s a bad decision. Moreover, the acting is often as bland as the visuals. It reminds one of Kubrick movies in which the actors have had to do so many takes that all life is blanched from their faces and words. Perhaps that’s the intention, in that Mulholland Drive is, in a way, as much of a dream movie as Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, but add that to the dull visuals and you end up with something that doesn’t exactly compel the viewer to keep watching. If the Coen brothers’ much-praised minimalist take on film noir, The Man Who Wasn’t There, could be described as noir blanc, then I think the best term for Mulholland Drive would be noir blank.