REVIEW
Mulholland Drive
Writer/Director: David Lynch
Dark City
New Lynchian Noir
By Laura Thompson
 In Mulholland Drive, David Lynch employs his (un)usual surreal, indulgent style to critique the very business in which he has been most successful - mainstream Hollywood filmmaking. Written and directed by Lynch, the film interweaves various plots of deception, corruption, and love against a mysterious, neo-noir Hollywood.
The film is lush, sexy, entertaining and, of course, baffling. Indeed, despite its trademark Lynchian elements of confusion and randomness which, in his previous films, have turned many viewers off, Mulholland Drive has amassed the best reviews for Lynch since Blue Velvet (1986).
The beginning of Mulholland Drive centers around two loosely related plots. One follows a woman who is stricken with amnesia after a car accident as she attempts to recover her identity, with the help of a curious aspiring actress who has just moved to L.A. The other plot involves the takeover of a young director's film by a threatening, enigmatic "film mob" of sorts. Then, more than halfway through the film, this all changes - some characters switch names and roles, while others have completely new identities. The amnesia victim becomes a successful and seductive movie star. The talented would-be actress becomes a hardened, jealous extra. The corruption of the movie industry that, for the most part, is only implied and remains mysterious in the first half of the film is made explicit in the second. Here, the money, power, and surface of Hollywood become all-consuming.
It is common for Lynch's films to reveal what seems to be normal as actually strange or corrupt, an idea fittingly summed up by that infamous Twin Peaks line, "Things are not what they seem." Mulholland illustrates that Lynch is still preoccupied with the notion that what lies beneath the surface of a thing is often not what you might expect - evidenced by his choice to explore and purge a business that is inextricably tied to surface and myth-making.
The Hollywood within Mulholland has an attractive, flawless surface (revealed, for example, in its actresses' ever-faultless make-up and a sophisticated stage set for a 1940s-era film), but it possesses a scandalous, ugly underside where the magnetism of money and fame prevail. In one instance, for example, the "film mob" pre-determines the casting of a coveted female part, threatening the director with financial ruin if he protests. Lynch's delving into the deception of appearances reminds us of the constructed nature of Hollywood cinema as a whole - replete with gleaming smiles, narrowly avoided disasters, and clichéd endings. Mulholland emphasizes that the very business whose job it is to create such fictions is as equally mythified as the products they make.
The seamless construction of the Hollywood film is underscored particularly well by one scene in Mulholland's first half in which the two women seek information about the protagonist's past at a small, late-night, low-budget theater called Silencio. Here, the show's host reveals that the performers will be lip-synching or otherwise performing to an audio tape. Later, when a performer "sings" a Spanish rendition of Roy Orbison's "Crying," the two women are moved to tears as their emotions outweigh the fact that she is not actually singing. When the singer suddenly falls to the floor but the song continues, they are shocked out of their sentimentality. The low-budget, live theater production stands in marked contrast with slick, detached Hollywood films in which, for one, there are no such mistakes because everything can be re-shot and seamlessly assembled. Like the "Crying" audio tape, movies can be honed to evoke a certain reaction.
Of course, as a Hollywood film itself, Mulholland is also guilty of this type of manipulation. Sometimes it seems like Lynch goes out of his way to bewilder and frustrate viewers. You may have to suspend any instincts to attempt to make sense of some of the film's content - like one scene depicting a giggling inch-tall elderly couple running out of a paper bag. (!) And in fact this can be a very pleasurable experience - to just sit back and see what will happen next. Further, on a more serious level, the film illustrates the notion that experience cannot be portrayed as cohesive, linear narrative, and shows that there can be pleasure in confusion.
 There are countless tangles in Mulholland Drive and it would probably spoil the film to distill even half of them here. In the end, the film may remain ambiguous, but it is certainly interesting to scrutinize and appealing to watch. And perhaps you'll leave the theater feeling equal parts relief and jealousy that your life is not nearly as mysterious and shady as that of the characters in Mulholland Drive.
Photographs by Melissa Moseley courtesy of Universal Studios
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