Mulholland Drive is a difficult film to write about. It is an electric flight from cinematic convention presented as a chilling murder mystery. It has all the appearances of taking you along with it, albeit in a slightly surreal arc, but then we reach the 'Club Silencio' and are told it is all an illusion. And for director David Lynch, this really does mean it is all an illusion. Notoriously, the film's second section unravels the structures of the first, presenting the audience with the same cast but different characters. Yet it is not just the names that have been switched. Whilst Los Angeles is presented as a sun-drenched, starry-eyed city of angels in the opening half; the second is darker, moodier and lacks the dreamy flow of its predecessor. I use the word 'dreamy' carefully, for this is very much a film about dreams and, in many ways, a film of dreams. For Lynch is fascinated by the power of fantasy and often it is fantasy that shapes his cinematic reality. When his apparently naive, optimistic female lead says chirpily, 'now I'm in this dream place,' we should take it as a warning. Beneath the luminous fabric of this Hollywood setting lurk some painful, unfulfilled desires.
The plot is initially constructed in a way that is not wholly unconventional: the mysterious victim of a car-accident (Laura Harring) staggers from a limo on Mulholland Drive, overlooking the glittering lights of L.A., down into the city searching for a haven. When she is found by Betty (Naomi Watts), a fresh-faced ingenue from Deep River, Ontario, we discover that she is suffering from amnesia and can recall nothing of her former identity. Taking the name Rita, after Rita Hayworth, she and Betty attempt to piece together the events leading up to her accident. This is a basic outline but it is far from comprehensive. The narrative is peppered with odd incidents: a chain of phone calls repeating the line 'the girl is missing' reach a dead end; a pallid young man tells a friend about his nightmare before confronting a hideous monster outside a Winkie's branch; and an arrogant young director (Justin Theroux) finds his film taken completely out of his hands by a pair of mafia-types who are very, very particular about their coffee.
Forgetting the plot non-sequiturs, this film is captivating as a result of the atmosphere Lynch builds. It is intensely unsettling. Temporal conventions are circumvented and events shaped in a kaleidoscope of uncertainties and anomalies. It is all held together in an astonishing performance by Naomi Watts, who showcases great range in her Jekyll and Hyde-style portrayal of Betty and Diane. In one memorably disturbing scene, her face morphes in a single moment from adoring and hopeful to depraved desperation. Her Academy Award must have got lost in the post.
People have a lot of different theories about what the second half really means. The most popular seems to be that it is a version of 'reality,' rendering all that precedes it a construction of Diane's dreaming subconscious. But I think what Lynch tries to represent in the later part of the film is more (or less) than reality. It is reality without the possibility of the dream; a hopeless, sad kind of longing. But it is none the less engrossing for all its elusiveness, and the final shot of the rising smoke should perhaps discourage too much narrative-based theorising: it is, after all, a film that thrills in smokescreens.
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