The Lynch Meditations 22: Mulholland Dr. (2001)

"You ever done this before?"

"I don't know."

We see swing dancers overlapping each other against a purple background.
A blonde beauty queen gets a crown.
Flashing lights.
Remember those corny swing-dancing GAP ads?
I'm thinking about 'em, now, for some reason.

Then we're in a first person camera POV,
diving into a pillow.
Is all that transpires after this but a dream?

Now we're following a limo through the curves of Mulholland Dr. a famous road associated with Los Angeles, with Hollywood, with the movies. It was the setting for a hilarious road rage episode in Lost Highway. Deepest night, and a beautiful raven-haired woman is riding in the limo, apparently against her will, as one of the goons in front points a silenced handgun at her. The woman is rescued when drunken teen joyriders collide with the limo, killing the goons, and tossing the woman clear, albeit with a serious head injury. She staggers off into the night.

The woman with the head injury eventually lays down to rest . . . are we entering a dream within a dream? Or is it all just one big dream? Who is dreaming who into existence?

Because the blonde beauty queen arrives in Los Angeles as an aspiring actress from Ontario. And soon enough she and the beautiful raven-haired woman meet, and the whole scenario feels like . . . a film scenario. Happenstance. A woman in trouble. A plucky young civilian investigator. The Canadian beauty queen makes like a wannabee Nancy Drew and offers to assist the amnesiac limo lady with her dilemma.

Oh, yeah: and there's a hitman who just barely manages to shoot his way out of a hairy situation, piling up two too many corpses. Three, if you count that poor damn vacuum cleaner.

Meanwhile, a filthy homeless man-who may be the secret evil god of this reality-hangs out behind a diner's dumpster, scaring to death anyone who looks directly upon his face.  Also: a sinister cowboy seems to dictate the fate of a young filmmaker. And then there's Mr. Rocque, the studio head who seems to want to exercise total control over the young filmmaker's dream project just because he can. Why have power if you cannot inflict it upon people, right?

Lotta sinister secret masters in this world-do I need to include the creepy-as-fuck elderly couple?
The mobster who is very particular about his espresso?
And Dan Hedaya-that guy always seems to have the weight of the world on his shoulders. Just like a secret master would . . . shit, he might even be playing the same character he played in Clueless. One moment he's fretting about his teenage daughter's provocative fashion sense, the next he has to go give the business to some upstart young director punk. When it rains.

Has anyone ever written fanfic about the Mulholland Dr./Clueless Extended Universe? Somebody oughtta get on that shit.

Initially, we are presented with idealistic, youthful people trying to make it in Hollywood: an aspiring actress/civilian detective and filmmaker making his first big studio film. The Canadian actress wants to become a star AND solve the mystery of her new friend's amnesia while sinister forces swirl all around her. The filmmaker is trying to resist the oppressive hand of the studio while also dealing with his unfaithful wife and worsening financial situation.

But then the narrative shifts: and an idealistic actress/detective becomes a vengeful jilted lover and the rebel filmmaker is revealed to be a self-serving cog in the studio machine; and the beautiful amnesiac woman is revealed to know exactly who she is and what she wants out of life no matter who gets hurt along the way. The idealistic protagonists struggling against fate are all unmasked as opportunists trying to hustle and con their way through life just like every other person in Los Angeles.

A weird nightclub host tells us, "IT IS ALL RECORDED," and, "IT'S ALL ON TAPE," and a song goes on even after a singer collapses . . .

A blue key opens a void that displaces one reality with another . . .

A woman sees a corpse that turns out to be her own-but only after a shift in space/time . . .

Are we seeing the fantasy Hollywood unmasked as a nightmare of free will cancelled by sinister Lovecraftian deities lurking in deepest mindshadows?

Or is it more of a loop or maybe a simultaneity?

When I first saw this movie, I perceived it as a slow revelation, an unmasking of a horrid reality, but, after absorbing Inland Empire and the third season of Twin Peaks, I can't help but see it not so much as a fantasy followed by the revelation of the dark reality powering it but more of an evocation of the instability of reality itself-of identtiy-of dream-of nightmare.

It's a whole lotta weird shit.

I have no explanations, no solutions, but I'm reminded of something the science fiction writer Samuel R. Delany said about how a writer should not attempt to employ popular tricks and commercial writing techniques to improve their fiction, but rather should be aware of the opposed tensions within the text. The writer can only control those tensions and how they are deployed. Everything else is out of the writer's control. I'm not sure I completely understand what Delany was getting at-he also brought up Wittgenstein, I think-but it resonates in my mind with what Lynch is doing in Mulholland Dr.: opposed visions of reality, of characters presented within the same film. What does this bizarre set of oppositions do to us, as filmgoers?

It confuses the shit out of us, but that confusion goads us to think about what we've seen, heard, felt, thought, experienced. We are no longer being passively entertained. We are engaged.

Or maybe we're yelling at the screen in frustration.

Maybe we're desperately wondering what the fuck is going on, what did I just watch?!

Maybe we're all just a dream in the mind of Alicia Silverstone's character in Clueless.

"As if."

"Silencio." 

The Lynch Meditations -22

Mulholland Dr. is the first David Lynch movie I saw in a theater and on a big screen.
After years of watching Blue Velvet on shitty pan-and-scan VHS,
I could see a Lynch film exactly the way it was intended. It did not disappoint.

Mulholland Dr. was that rare movie that ended up being everything I could’ve hoped for and then some.
Initially, I was concerned that it might be a bit of an overheated mess, like Lost Highway,
which was the most recent Lynch film I had seen at the time.
(I’m not sure I even knew about The Straight Story back then.)
But Mulholland Dr. delivered a nightmarish and hilarious mystery rooted in character and atmosphere
and driven by clever dialogue suffused throughout with a sense of the cruel and the absurd.

Some movies, when I’ve watched them, have confused the shit out of me.

I am full of questions and perplexities and conundrums.

I am left profoundly unsettled, uncertain of the ground upon which I stand.

I no longer know who I am, or I’m not as certain about myself as I was before.

What does this mean?

Why is all this weird shit happening?

Who is that guy? Where did this gal come from?

Why are the dead rising from the grave?

Who actually thinks nuclear war is a good idea?

What the fuck is going on?

Why was Kane so hung up on that snowsled?

Did the monolith make the primates smarter?

Why does the primate ancestor throw the bone up into the air?
Did the bone become an orbital missile platform just like that?

How did that happen?

Is the magic in the choice of edit?

Is the magic of the edit the power to fuck with space and time and space/time?

Why is there a giant fetus-in-a-bubble in orbit around the Earth?

Why did the astronaut-man get old and die?

Was the elderly astronaut-man reborn as the giant space fetus?

Why did the smart computer being murder the one astronaut?

What was HAL-9000’s major malfunction?

Did Tetsuo evolve into a universe at the end?

Why did the kid go and do that?

Where did he get all that extra mass?

Why do Kanaeda and Tetsuo shout each other’s names over and over?

Where does Optimus Prime’s trailer go when he transforms?

Why do all the crew members of Space Battleship Yamato have arrows on their uniforms
pointing down towards their crotches?

Is Space Battleship Yamato the one true Love Boat?

Did Batman actually die in a nuclear fucking explosion?

Did Alfred actually see Bruce and Selina at that cafe, or was that just his fantasy?

Did The Dark Knight Rises rip off Gundam 8th MS Team’s indecisive double ending?

Why would they do that?

Is it so hard to say goodbye to Shiro and Aina or the Batman?
Or to let a powerful ending work-just leave it the hell alone, people!
Sometimes it’s okay for your protagonist to die.

Especially if it counts for something big, y’know?

Why does Hollywood spend millions of dollars to make a new Halloween movie,
when they could spend a fraction of that cost just to re-release the original John Carpenter film?
That’s the one to see.
None of the sequels or remakes have lived up to the original.
Not even close.

If Hollywood is going to do exploitative remakes, they should try something kind of arty.
Like a remake of a respectable arthouse picture as done by YouTubers.
Think about it: if the Angry Video Game Nerd, the Nostalgia Critic, and Red Letter Media
spent the same amount of time trying to make actual movies that they’ve spent mocking pop culture,
they would be among the most prolific filmmakers in the business.

I want to see a remake of Blue is the Warmest Color
directed by Mike Stoklasa
and starring Jay Bauman and Rich Evans
in the roles originally played by Adele Exarchopoulos and Lea Seydoux, respectively.
Why can’t Hollywood do something like that?
What’s the holdup?
Mysteries . . .
Will I be forgiven for wishing they would've made the Mulholland Dr. tv series?

Was it Killer Bob or Leland Palmer who ended those young women’s lives?
Did Killer Bob take over all the spiritual command and control functions,
or did Leland let Killer Bob in?

Was it collaboration?
Or total takeover?
Or did collaboration lead to total takeover?

Why did Agent Cooper get fragmented into so many different Coops?
Is the Black Lodge a factory for cranking out doppelgangers or tulpas or whatever you want to call them?

I watch,

and I think,

and I always ask,

“Is this a metaphor or is it just a motherfucker?”

Mulholland Dr., when I first saw it, struck me as a surrealistic mystery which must be definitively solved.
Over the years,
I’ve come to think of it as an experience of unstable identities,
shifting realities,
very much like Lost Highway,
but with more relatable characters, and something closer to a coherent narrative
despite the all-encompassing Lynchian weirdness.

I feel as though I’ve come to understand Mulholland Dr.
in a way that I cannot grasp Lost Highway or Inland Empire-
two of Lynch’s more forbidding cinematic works.

And yet, one mystery still abides regarding Mulholland Dr.:

How in hell did Justin Theroux get top billing over Naomi Watts?

Must have a killer agent.

What will I think now?

Diving in . . .

The Lynch Meditations 21: Eraserhead Stories (2001)

Here be some yarns, all right.

The one that is most obvious to talk about is how Lynch got hold of a dead cat, and all the stuff he did to the feline corpse . . . was this deceased animal used to make the monster baby whatsit? Lynch doesn’t say that, exactly, but he says some other things about it. Yeah . . .

This is an entertaining watch, but it is also the “official story,” produced by and centered upon David Lynch, so keep that in mind while watching. I found it generally convincing, but it is on-brand with Lynch’s policy of not explaining the why of things, what the movie means, things of that nature. There is a lot of how here, though, and that’s as it should be. There’s quite a remarkable story behind Eraserhead, one of absolute devotion to the pursuit of an uncompromised artistic vision despite every kind of hardship. Lynch and his collaborators lived and breathed this movie for about six years or so. Kind of unbelievable. But it’s all true.

And, yes, this does seem to be the start of a kind of brand identity for Lynch as an independent filmmaker, which he would carry on with Inland Empire a few years later. Eraserhead Stories seems to be the start of Lynch taking a hand in how he is documented as an artist at work, and more of his process as a filmmaker would be documented as it happened in behind the scenes special features for Inland Empire and Twin Peaks Season 3. Lynch seems to have an interest in controlling how he is perceived as an artist, which is interesting considering how cagey he can be in interviews. I get the impression that he wants to shift the emphasis solidly from why questions to how questions in this regard.

Lynch speaks into a microphone. There are curtains in the background. It’s in black and white. Great stories. Goes deeper than the usual behind-the-scenes puff pieces. You get an actual sense of what went into the making of Eraserhead.

Not much more to say about it on my end. Watch it after you’ve watched Eraserhead, is the only thing I can think to tell you.

Onwards . . .

The Lynch Meditations -21

David Lynch produced a documentary about the years he spent in the 1970s making Eraserhead back in 2001. I’ve never seen it, ‘til now. My understanding is that it is sort of the precursor to the special features on the Inland Empire DVD, but who knows?

Going in . . .