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Sight and Sound, December 2001

Babes in Babylon
'Mulholland Dr.' may be David Lynch's audacious salvage job on a TV pilot, but
the result is a triumph says Graham Fuller
Mulholland Dr. unwinds in a benighted LA dreamscape where
two girl detectives fall into lipstick-lesbian embraces, a Mafia
power play is sublimated in a menacing Pinteresque discussion of
an espresso's drinkability, smug studio types commingle with
doo-wop-singing starlets, Sunset Boulevard riff-raff and the
ghosts of Hollywood past, and shattered identities are mosaicked
back together in an oneiromantic fable about Hollywood's
conspiracy-riddled dream factory.

On its release in America in October, David Lynch's film, which is

as perversely sadomasochistic as Josef von Sternberg's Dietrich
farragos and as lushly surreal as Raul Rufz's early work, lured
critics into oxymorons. The Village Voice's J. Hoberman described
it as "thrilling and ludicrous", the New York Times' Stephen
Holden dubbed it "the grandest and silliest cinematic carnival to
come along in some time." And as if inspired by the moral reactionaries who savaged Michael Powell's
masterpiece Peeping Tom, the New York Observer's Rex Reed unintentionally vindicated Lynch' s film
with the sheer uncomprehending viciousness of his attack.

But Mulholland Dr., in which nothing is as it seems, is something of an oxymoron itself. Never
intended as a movie, it became one when Lynch pulled it from the wreckage of an open-ended television
series he had planned to make for ABC (the sponsors of Twin Peaks) in 1999. It consists of most of the
$7 million pilot for the show, which had been rejected by the network as too slow, weird and offensive,
and approximately 45 minutes of new material financed by Studio Canal Plus, which reportedly doubled
the original budget. Lynch has admitted that even after the French company's intervention he didn't
know how to reconfigure the narrative, which peters out on an optimistic note in the pilot after the
female sleuths have discovered a woman's decomposing corpse, but that the ideas eventually came to
him in the space of half an hour (presumably over several cups of java). The resulting movie may be the
most audacious salvage job in recent Hollywood history...

Given its unpromising beginnings, this lethally perfumed neo-noir may be even more remarkable as a
successful marriage of form and subject. That is, if one is prepared to see it as a cinematic equivalent of
pathetic fallacy, which, even as it recasts its amnesiac love object as a femme fatale who sexually taunts
the woman she has discarded, takes on the aura of a siren song luring the viewer into a magnificent
deception. Although Lynch comes across in interviews as the least manipulative of showmen, he has a
marked predilection for demonic conundrums - think of Bill Pullman's sax player Fred phoning home in
Lost Highway (1996) and getting Robert Blake's gnomic Mephistopheles on the line, even though he is
standing in front of him - that cannot be solved, or squared away with such forays into folksy
pastoralism as The Straight Story (1999).

Alternately blithe and threatening,

Mulholland Dr. is one schizoid fantasy.
After a stylised opening credits sequence
that depicts a partially silhouetted jitterbug

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contest and a bleached-out shot of the

smiling girl who wins it with her proud
parents, we see and hear a woman
murmuring in her sleep hidden under pink
and green bedclothes - and we need only
recall the unconscious plunge into the
severed ear of Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle
MacLachlan) in Blue Velvet (1986) to
recognise this brief scene as a portal to a
dream. What this as yet unknown dreamer
dreams is a tale of a sheeny brunette
escaping her nocturnal murder when a car
full of joy-riding kids smashes into the
sleek limo her would-be killers have driven
up on to Mulholland Drive, the iconic
hilltop artery that snakes west from
Cahuenga above the bejewelled black
velvet necropolis of Los Angeles. She
dreams, too, of two slate-eyed cops, the
kind that always harass Philip Marlowe,
investigating the crash site, of the
concussed brunette taking refuge in an
apartment on Havenhurst, and of a
bug-eyed Hollywood insider telling a
colleague about the dream he's had of a
terrifying man lurking behind the coffee
shop on Sunset where they're having
breakfast; they actually head out back to
confront the monstrous vagrant. The scene
is crucial because in the anxiety dream
we're witnessing it signifies the release of
the dreamer's id.

We don't know it yet, but the next scene introduces her alter ego - a naive, relentlessly cheerful blonde
called Betty Elms, the jitterbug champ, who has flown into LAX from the Ontario city of Deep River
(also the name of Dorothy Vallens' apartment block in Blue Velvet). She disembarks from her plane in
the company of a friendly elderly couple who tell her to be careful as she sets out to become a movie
actress, but cackle malevolently through discoloured teeth when she leaves them. Arriving her absentee
aunt's flat, Betty finds the brunette there. She has lost her memory but takes the name Rita from a Gilda
poster; her amnesiacal solipsism may convey Rita Hayworth, but with her crimson lips and black
cocktail dress she evokes the Gardner of The Killers.

Betty persuades Rita to find out who she really is, and they coyly embark on their adventure like a cross
between Rivette's Celine and Julie and a pair of Nancy Drews. (Nancy is the ever polite teen supersleuth
who began her fictional career in 1930; coincidentally, perhaps, she is from a place called River Heights
and favours blue, the occult colour in Lynch' s palette from Blue Velvet on.) Their trail leads them to the
corpse of a woman called Diane Selway, after which they make rapturous love and Betty twice tells
Rita, at the peak of her ecstasy, that she is in love with her. Significantly, as will be revealed, Rita does
not reciprocate.

There then follows what could well be a dream within the dream as Betty and Rita repair in the early
hours to a dank nightclub called Silencio where the revels are overseen by a barking aural prestidigitator.
Here Rebekah Del Rio's rendition in Spanish of Roy Orbison's 'Crying' reduces the new lovers to tears,
as the fetish-stroking version of 'Blue Velvet' sung by Dorothy (Isabella Rossellini) did Frank Booth
(Dennis Hopper). This post-coital flight into Swinburnian lachrimosity and Magritteian surrealism has

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an erotic morbidity that only an appreciator of the limits of decadence such as Lynch could pull off,
though it might be argued that the sequence is no closer to most people's experiences of dreams than
those Salvador Dali designed for Hitchcock's Spellbound.

It does, however, offer a jarring comment

on the betrayal that can take place when
cinematic illusionism - in this case,
sound-picture synchronisation - is exposed
as a trick. When Del Rio swoons
unconscious to the floor, her theatrical
croon continues unchecked, and Betty -
perhaps because this act of violence
threatens her romantic epiphany and her
ability.to suspend disbelief - is deeply
disturbed. Lynch had originally intended to
use 'Crying' in Blue Velvet, but opted
instead for Orbison's 'ln Dreams'. Dean
Stockwell's Ben lipsynchs the song with the
same baroque affectedness demonstrated by
Del Rio, but he too is cut short when Frank rips the cassette of the song from the tape recorder. On both
occasions Lynch is breaking through the dream fabric of the film, reminding us of the fragility of
cinema's hallucinatory power.

These stabs of consciousness also puncture the dream-protected sleep of the dreamers. In Blue Velvet
Jeffrey, bruised and bloody after his beating by Frank, wakes up on a vacant lot, though he still has
another dream to get through. Back in the apartment in Mulholland Dr., Betty disappears and Rita opens
a small blue box - one of several Pandora's boxes in the film that literalise its Chinese-box structure -
and we tumble Alice-like (or like Jeffrey) into Diane's living hell as an unwashed, bitter prostitute and
drug addict. Diane is in love with a self- satisfied star called Camilla Rhodes and has been having sex
with her in her dingy flat. But she learns at a party to which Camilla has invited her that Camilla is not
only to be married to the arrogant director Adam (Justin Theroux) of the 50s doo-wop movie they're
both acting in but appears to be having a fling with another blonde on the side. Camilla's flagrantly
voluptuous kisses with both the director and the blonde hit the paranoid Diane like Oedipal hammer
blows and prompt her to arrange Camilla's murder.

That Rita and Camilla are both played by Laura Elena Harring and Betty and Diane by Naomi Watts is
the audience's key to understanding that the film has jack-knifed from Diane's wishful dream of herself
as a confident, happening starlet with a passive lover she can control to an ugly reality in which neither
Betty nor Rita exists. This disarming scenario also weaves in Adam's perilous provocation of a couple
of Mob lieutenants, who insist that he hire a talentless moll, prompting him to take his golf club to their
limo. In his Mulholland Drive home he then finds his wife in bed with the pool-boy, takes a beating
from him, and flees to a seedy hotel./P>

Mulholland Dr. is the Lynch film most rooted in a specific

milieu, deploying a Chandlerian use of LA's iconic topography
and its potential for terrifying rendezvous in the dark. When
Adam is summoned to a corral at the end of Beechwood
Canyon, his night drive there is reminiscent of Marlowe's
drive to Purissinia Canyon off the Pacific Coast Highway in
FareweIl, My Lovely. Under a Lynchian sputtering light bulb,
an unsmiling, homily-drawling Poverty Row cowboy
suggests, in a scene as chilling as it is absurd, that the hotshot
director should overcome his artistic reservations and hire the
moll.

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"If you do good, you will see me once. if you do bad, you will
see me twice," he warns, and Adam takes the hint, deciding to hire the moll even as Betty turns up on
the set in the company of a casting agent. Their eyes meet across the crowded studio floor - either a
falling-in-love moment the film does not pursue but the planned series might have done, or a hint that
Adam, again in the series, might have further endangered his life by casting Betty anyway, despite her
running Cinderella-like from the set to meet up with Rita on the afternoon they discover the body. This
twist in Diane's dream thus carries Betty from what would have been her Hollywood breakthrough to a
confrontation with her dead self.

The cowboy is a more specific presence than Robert Blake's pointy-eared bogeyman in Lost Highway.
He is one of several breathing waxworks of old industry folk, whose role it is to twist the knife in
Betty/Diane for having had the temerity to come to Hollywood in the first place. The others include
Coco Lenoix, the elegant dowager (Hollywood legend Ann Miller) who welcomes Betty to her aunt's
apartment only to scold Diane repeatedly at the engagement party where it transpires she is Adam's
mother; Louise Bonner, the mad, leonine old movie actress turned seer who casts an imperious eye on
Betty when told by Coco she is an actress; and the cadaverous, blue-rinsed phantom lady who presides
over the Silencio club and is the movie's eerie figurehead. The cowboy turns out to be Diane's pimp, his
words "Get up, pretty girl!" interrupting her long sleep. Then there are ghosts in Diane's life who
predate her Hollywood demise - the old couple Betty met on the plane are presumably Diane's parents,
who return as tiny hobgoblins at the end of the film to drive her over the edge,

Adding to this notion of Hollywood as the locus of moral squalor is the

suspicion that Diane's story borrows from the tragedy of the actress Marie
Prevost, just as Lost Highway loosely inscribed the 1947 murder and mutilation
of Elizabeth Short, 'the Black Dahlia', in the butchering of Renee Madison.
From Toronto, like Diane, Prevost was a Mack Sennett Bathing Beauty who
became a star in Lubitsch comedies in the mid 20s. She made a successful
transition to sound, but went on a crash diet when she put on weight, and
eventually died of malnutrition. In his conflicting account in Hollywood
Babylon, Kenneth Anger reported that Prevost drank herself to death because
she failed in talkies. "Marie dragged on until 1937 when her half-eaten corpse
was discovered in her seedy apartment on Cahuenga Boulevard," he sneered.
"Her dachshund had survived by making mincemeat of his mistress." The
accompanying photograph is startlingly similar to the images of the putrefying
Diane in Mulholland Dr., Lynch's fascination with decay, of course, going back
to Eraserhead (1976).

Whatever noisome Tinseltown lore Lynch drew on as he cross-fertilised film noir and 509 pop flicks
into Mulholland Dr.'s ambient postmodem Hollywood gothic, everything in the movie is subservient to
its structure, specifically its spectacular dive into apparent illogic - not quite what script gurus have in
mind when they speak of stories taking a hairpin bend as they enter their third acts. Actually, this kind
of structural about-face isn't new for Lynch, who abandoned the first half of Twin Peaks: Fire Walk
with Me involving FBI man Chester Desmond to tell the story of Laura Palmer's orgiastic disintegration
before dissolving the entire edifice in arch surrealism of the 'Red Room' scenes. Nor is it illogic that
characterises Mulholland Dr., but dream logic, which permits a stream of non sequiturs and cul de sacs,
though many of the characters glimpsed once in the film are 'explained' through their presence in the
party sequence, in which Diane describes how she came to Hollywood in the first place. Mulholland
Dr. not only echoes the bifurcated Twin Peaks. Fire Walk With Me, but its particular dream logic also
echoes Lost Highway's in the way it shows a dream miscarrying from wish-fulfilment to anxiety to
wakefulness.

In Lost Highway impotent Fred (Pullman) is imprisoned for killing his wife Renee (Patricia Arquette)
whom he believed had cuckolded him. In his cell he metamorphoses into the virile mechanic Pete
Dayton (Balthazar Getty) who embarks on an affair with a gangster's moll and porn actress called Alice
(also played by Arquette). In other words, Fred dreams of being the top dog in an Oedipal triangle

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involving a sexually idealised Renee. But this wish-fulfilment dream spins into an emasculation fantasy
when Alice's ferocious lover Mr Eddy (Robert Loggia) pursues him, and Alice informs Pete, "You will
never have me", whereupon Pete turns back into Fred, who, waking up in the desert, remains
psychically if not literally in prison.

Diane's reverie similarly curdles. In the wish-fulfilment part of her dream she sees herself as a winning
amalgam of Doris Day and Grace Kelly who, on arrival in Hollywood, meets the brunette of her dreams
(so to speak) and proves she is a brilliant, seductive actress in her first audition. Anxiety takes over
when she runs out of the film studio, and her sense of selfhood begins to crack when Betty and Rita
stumble on the body.

Though Lynch denies any interest in psychoanalytic theory, Mulholland Dr., especially in its
reconstituted form, offers a field day for amateur analysts in the audience. Whatever he originally
intended as the 'conscious' action of the television series, the first two-thirds of the movie - up to where
the body is found (and where the pilot more or less ended) - now comprise the dream elements that are
'analysed' by the action of the grim third act that culminates in Diane's suicide. Where Lynch makes most
effective use of dreaming in Mulholland Dr. is in exploiting, consciously or not, its capacity for
overdetermination and the notion that a dreamer is all the characters in his or her dream. Nothing here is
as overdetermined or as downright kinky, though, as the scene in Blue Velvet when Frank, his mouth
smeared with Dorothy's lipstick (or, if you like, his mother's menstrual blood), kisses Jeffrey and leaves
him similarly anointed.

Rueful Diane's limo ride up Mulholland to the engagement party exactly replicates her dream of the as
yet unnamed Rita being driven to her (botched) murder as Angelo Badalamenti's synth score infuses the
scene with ominousness. When Adam finds himself cuckolded, he dispassionately pours pink paint into
his wife's jewellery box. His acting out on his sexual jealousy in the very house where Diane's
humiliation takes place symbolises her desire both to violate and to possess Camilla, Adam's wife-to-be
- pink is the colour with which Betty is most identified, through her clothing, lipstick and nail polish,
and the Freudian symbolism of soiling a woman's jewel box is all too obvious.

And there is more. The vapid moll who wins the lead role in Adam's film in Diane's dream, and whose
headshot names her as 'Camilla Rhodes', turns out to be the 'real' Camilla's other girlfriend - her role as a
sexual rival to Diane is sublimated in the dream to that of a professional rival to Betty. Meanwhile a
beautiful blonde waitress in the coffee shop is called Diane and a junkie hooker hanging out with the
lowlife whom Diane will hire to kill Camilla is such a dead ringer for Betty that you have to look twice
to make sure it's not Naomi Watts.

More pregnant in meaning, however, is Rita's hacking off her locks and donning a platinum-blonde wig
that makes her look like a brassier version of Betty, shortly after which they make love. Talk about
over-determination: the revelatory moment suggests that, as well as being a fully paid-up member of the
Oedipus complex, Diane is pathologically narcissistic. The scene ushers Mulholland Dr. into the
company of Hitchcock's Vertigo, Bergman's Persona and Bunuel's That Obscure Object of Desire.
Twinning, of course, has been a consistent theme in Lynch's later work, as witness the 'good' and 'evil'
Dale Coopers in Twin Peaks and the two Arquette characters in Lost Highway. In 1992 David Lynch
met Dennis Potter, and there was subsequent talk of Lynch directing Potter's adaptation of D.M.
Thomas' novel The White Hotel. Lynch and Potter would have made uneasy bedfellows, though there
are several points of comparison between their works, including the interest in using lipsynched songs
to convey emotions mere naturalism cannot adequately express. Then there is their dubious fascination
with sexy amnesiac women who inspire homicidal thoughts (also shared by Martin Amis, whose novel
Other People works as a sequel to his later London Fields). The best analogue to Mulholland Dr., in
fact, is Potter's ill-fated Blackepes, with its twinning of the jaded blonde ex-model and the 'fictional
passive brunette - herself an amnesiac by the story's end - whom she bequeaths to her novelist uncle.
Potter's writing frequently dealt with characters who fail (Cream in My Coffee) or succeed (The Singing
Detective) in gathering up the shards of what he called their "sovereign" selves. This is especially
instructive when contemplating a drama of deconstruction like Mulholland Dr. with its lost angel Diane,

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whose sovereignty has been fractured long before we enter her dream.

'Mulholland Dr.' opens on 4 January

Copyright 2001 British Film Institute

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