Mulholland Dr.

It took me a long time to get into David Lynch. For years, I simply couldn't see what the big deal was about him. His stories frequently spiraled into incoherence; even their strongest points ultimately felt like pieces in a disconnected whole.

It wasn't until I saw Mulholland Dr. that I finally understood the way to approach a Lynch film. While there's a narrative, it's not the point of the whole thing; the point is to immerse yourself in the experience, to give yourself over to something completely subjective - not real, not fiction, but some dream-like (or, as is the case often with Lynch, nightmare-like) state where reality is subjective and given to shifts that can happen at any moment. Lynch works in moods; there's a constant, pervasive sense of dread throughout his work that some exists even when it shouldn't, just as it does in a dream. Lynch can make the surreal horrifying, and the real comedic, all with the right look, the perfect pause, the appropriate music in the background.

Rewatching Mulholland Dr. last night - which, for my money, is Lynch's finest work, and an absolute cinematic masterpiece - was a reminder of how potent the effect can be when Lynch is firing on all cylinders. For perhaps the first time in his career, Lynch has made something that's truly understandable and dissectable - at least, as much as anything the man makes can ever be. And while the results are endlessly fascinating to explore, the end effect is a draining one, as Lynch puts the audience through a nightmarish experience.

Ultimately, discussing Mulholland Dr. is difficult to do without destroying the experience. The movie is essentially two very different stories, one that takes up the majority of the running time, and a short second story that takes up about the last 20-30 minutes of the film. The first concerns a woman who is in a car accident on Mulholland Drive; while she is the only survivor, she is left without any idea of who she is or what happened to her. She finds her way to the apartment of Betty, a star-eyed newcomer to Hollywood with hopes of making it big, and the two attempt to unravel the woman's story, all while weaving in and out of a story full of shadowy figures, ominous developments, dangerous hitman, mullet-clad pool men, and a very strange cowboy.

All of this is completely compelling as it develops. There are scenes here that are uniquely disturbing in that way only a dream can be. You'll attempt to explain it later, and be unable to convey exactly what was so terrifying about a meeting with a cowboy at a corral, or a man in a wheelchair behind a glass wall. And yet you can't deny the impact of it all.

Still, this first story is good, but not great. It's compelling, and interesting, but ultimately unwieldy, and if it were all that Mulholland Dr. had to offer, it would be a good film, but not the masterpiece that it is. Luckily, Lynch has something unexpected up his sleeve, all in the form of a blue box that opens and takes us into a far different second tale.

This second tale is a far clearer and more literal one, and it's one that completely recontextualizes everything we've seen so far. Few twists, in fact, as completely change the meaning of everything we've seen, forcing us to look at what's happened in a whole new light, not just from a plot perspective, but also from a character one as well.

[Spoilers follow.]

There are those who become frustrated or roll their eyes at Mulholland Dr. and complain that the "it's all a dream" ending a cliched one, but they're overlooking the brilliant way Lynch's dream becomes a window into Diane's deranged and guilt-ridden mind. Look, for instance, at Diane's portrayal of herself in her dream: a "wide-eyed innocent," I wrote earlier, but also a remarkably talented one. People are drawn to her kindness and love her deeply, most importantly the damaged and lonely Rita. In fact, in the dream world, Betty would be a phenomenal actress, one who anyone would want to work with - but dark forces are aligning against her.

Compare this with Diane, a failed actress relegated to supporting roles. Far from an innocent, Diane's bitterness and anger over being ignored by Camilla (the "real" Rita) leads her to hire someone to kill her. Her self-hatred and guilt lead her into a horrible spiral. No one loves her; in fact, her presence is barely tolerated by those around her. Realizing all of this, her dream version of herself becomes more understandable. Even apparently strange film choices become more clear in retrospect. On a first viewing, the film seems oddly anachronistic, with its pie-in-the-sky characters who refrain from swearing and act as though they stepped out of a 1950s sitcom. But realizing that this is Diane's dream, we see through this - it's Diane's correction of the world, the world the way it should be, but far from the world it is.

All of this is fairly obvious. But look even at the supporting characters. The male director who has stolen Camilla's heart in Diane's dream becomes infatuated with "Betty," just like everyone else - it would be her who is desired, not Camilla. The dangerous hitman she hires to kill Camilla becomes an incompetent fool, nudging us toward Diane's secret wish that he could never have succeeded in the task she now hates herself for assigning him. The diner in which she plans the murder becomes a home for "pure evil", with a dark presence there - herself.

Complaining that the "dream" reveal negates much of Mulholland Dr. is to miss the point entirely. Rather, what it allows us to do is to see the movie for a fascinating character study, one in which the story is told through perhaps the most subjective eye possible, and every detail, revision, and change means something far more complex than we originally thought. Yes, Lynch uses our mind's tendency to latch onto random images to create his mythology, but even that rings true; far from making us believe the dream less, it allows us to see the "real" scenes all the more clearly through Diane's eyes. Much has been made, for example, of the cowboy passing through the party scene briefly and the obvious way he plays into the dream later. But realizing his dream-importance makes his appearance at the party all the more effective, and we find ourselves, like Diane, wondering at his strange appearance in this gathering, wondering what secrets he's hiding, feeling the paranoia start to creep in.

By the film's end, we realize that we have spent almost two and a half hours immersed in Diane's fractured, guilt-ridden psyche. We have found ourselves slipping in and out of dreams, never knowing what's real and what's not, and often being unable to tell the difference. And when Diane's parents come after her in that nightmarish, hellish attack as her mind fractures once and for all, it's all the more terrifying because Lynch has so carefully set us up. We are Diane by this point in the film, and we find ourselves in her own personal hell - and it's ours, too.

It's that ending that cements Mulholland Dr. as a masterpiece. It would have been easy to leave us in a dream state, or have Diane slip back into confusion, or even take a page out of Lost Highway's book, and end with even more ambiguity. Instead, Lynch follows the story to its logical end point. Mulholland Dr. is a movie entirely created within the mind of Diane; it can only end when Diane's mind does. And end it does, in a horrific nightmare that we by then understand all too well.