And, indeed, I will ask on my own account here, an idle question: which is better—cheap happiness or exalted sufferings? Well, which is better?---Fyodor Dostoevsky ---Notes from Underground Fyodor Dostoevsky ---Notes from Underground Even now, so many years later, all this is somehow a very evil memory. I have many evil memories now, but ... hadn’t I better end my “Notes” here? I believe I made a mistake in beginning to write them, anyway I have felt ashamed all the time I’ve been writing this story; so it’s hardly literature so much as a corrective punishment. Why, to tell long stories, showing how I have spoiled my life through morally rotting in my corner, through lack of fitting environment, through divorce from real life, and rankling spite in my underground world, would certainly not be interesting; a novel needs a hero, and all the traits for an anti-hero are expressly gathered together here, and what matters most, it all produces an unpleasant impression, for we are...
Hope
To be human is to be a miracle of evolution conscious of its own miraculousness — a consciousness beautiful and bittersweet, for we have paid for it with a parallel awareness not only of our fundamental improbability but of our staggering fragility, of how physiologically precarious our survival is and how psychologically vulnerable our sanity. To make that awareness bearable, we have evolved a singular faculty that might just be the crowning miracle of our consciousness: hope.--
Erich Fromm
Mulholland Drive at 20: David Lynch’s audacious puzzle remains a mistery
The greatest films are often the ones that we don’t completely know, that tease the mind with question marks and ambiguities, and leave you circling back to scenes or moments that linger vividly in the mind, often triggering an emotional response that can’t be immediately identified. There’s a reason why Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, which opened to a mixed reception in 1958, spent the last 50 years inching up Sight & Sound’s greatest-of-all-time poll before finally upending the mighty Citizen Kane in 2012. The film’s dreamlike story of romantic obsession and psychological violence, radiant in color and intensity, first seemed like a curiosity before it was understood as a work of art.
David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, now 20 years old, is on the same journey, one of only two 21st-century movies to place on the most recent Sight & Sound Top 100. (At No 28. It’s surely no coincidence that Vertigo, along with Sunset Boulevard, is the film Lynch most directly references as the identities of two very different women merge and then fracture into so many pieces that it takes multiple viewings just to start putting them back together. Lynch’s affection for classic Hollywood has been apparent since his 1986 film Blue Velvet turned noir on its head, but his own career on its fringes informs Mulholland Drive just as strongly. He’s seduced by the Hollywood dream factory, but knows how ugly it looks on the inside.
Case in point: Mulholland Drive itself, which began as a rejected 90-minute pilot for ABC, the network that once turned Lynch’s Twin Peaks into a sensation, but refused to roll the dice a second time. Though Lynch himself admitted to feeling unhappy about the cut, his extraordinary reclamation project seems informed by the common disappointment of not making it in Hollywood – whether through accidents of luck or timing, lack of better connections, or the unaccountable forces behind the scenes. “This is the girl!” they might say. And it won’t matter if the girl is more talented or not. There can be only one.
It isn’t that difficult to figure out where the pilot ends and where Lynch’s new material starts – some scenes could air on network TV, others absolutely could not – and there’s a startling, almost calamitous quality to the way he deconstructs his own movie, making every single part of the first two-thirds or so up for renegotiation. But the soul of Mulholland Drive is still the same: it’s about a sunny, optimistic dreamer from Deep River, Ontario, who lands in Hollywood hoping to make a career, but gets waylaid by circumstances beyond her control, losing her innocence – and a great deal more – in the process. She deserves better than the town gives her.
The irresistible hook of the pilot, and the finished film is the mystery surrounding a glamorous brunette (Laura Elena Harring) who gets in a car accident in the Hollywood Hills and stumbles away with a purse filled with cash and a blue key, but no idea who she is. The woman, who calls herself Rita, after a poster of Rita Hayworth in Gilda, takes refuge in a spacious apartment that Betty (Naomi Watts), an aspiring blond actor from Canada, is occupying while her aunt is out of town. Betty knows nothing about Rita or the danger she might be in, but she agrees to help the stranger find her identity. The two are a study in contrasts, but they connect nonetheless.
From there, Lynch uses an entire different set of characters to stage an ingenious piece of misdirection. As Betty prepares for her first big audition, the leading role opens up on a studio picture with a hotshot young director, Adam (Justin Theroux), and a shady group of backers who inform him that he must accept a specific woman who is up for the part. After initially balking at the request, a late-night corral meeting with a man called The Cowboy persuades him otherwise, but the role won’t be played by Betty. She totally nails a different audition, for a part in a film that will never get made. That’s Hollywood.
Lynch’s enigmatic puzzle wouldn’t be worth solving if the individual pieces didn’t beckon you to return to it. Mulholland Drive has some of the best scenes of his career: That first scene at Winkie’s, which turns into every bit the heart-stopping shocker that the man describes; Betty’s audition, which reveals a side to her (and to Naomi Watts) that’s as startling to us as it is to the odd has-beens who have assembled to witness it; Adam’s half-scary/half-comical meeting with The Cowboy; and the middle-of-the-night trip to Club Silencio, where music plays without a band and a dark magic seems to take permanent hold. And take your pick of the funny, eccentric Lynchian bits in between, like the brouhaha over an espresso that a grim-faced Italian producer (played by composer Angelo Badalamenti) winds up dribbling contemptuously into a cloth napkin.
Directed by David Lynch, Mulholland Drive is widely regarded as one of the greatest films of the 21st century. Originally intended as a television pilot, it was transformed into a feature film that functions as a surrealist "neo-noir" puzzle.
The Two Halves: Dream vs. Reality
The most widely accepted interpretation of the film is that it is split into two distinct parts: a Dream/Fantasy (the first 2 hours) and Reality (the final 30-40 minutes).
The Turning Point: Club Silencio
The transition occurs when Betty and Rita visit Club Silencio. The performer collapses while the singing continues, revealing that "it is all a tape." This shatters the illusion of the dream. When Betty opens the Blue Box with the Blue Key, the fantasy collapses, and we wake up to find Diane Selwyn.
Key Symbols
The Blue Box: Represents the "truth" or the "vault" of Diane’s subconscious where she has locked away the reality of the murder.
The Cowboy: A metaphysical figure who acts as a messenger of reality, telling the Dream-Director what to do and eventually telling Diane, "Time to wake up."
Silencio: The final word of the film. It represents the silence of death and the end of the "performance" that was Diane’s life/dream.
David Lynch’s 10 Clues
To help viewers "unlock" the film, David Lynch included 10 clues in the original DVD release.
Pay particular attention in the beginning: The jitterbug contest and the POV shot of a head hitting a pillow signify the start of the dream.
Notice appearances of the red lampshade: It connects the dream world (where a phone rings next to it) to Diane’s real apartment.
The title of the film Adam is auditioning for: It is The Sylvia North Story. In reality, Diane lost the lead role in this film to Camilla.
The location of the accident: The crash happens on Mulholland Drive, preventing "Rita" (Camilla) from reaching her destination—symbolizing Diane’s wish that the murder never happened.
Who gives a key, and why? The hitman gives Diane a blue key to signal that Camilla is dead. In the dream, it is a mysterious artifact.
Notice the robe, the ashtray, the coffee cup: These items appear in both halves, anchoring the dream to the objects surrounding Diane’s bed in reality.
What is felt, realized, and gathered at Club Silencio? The realization that everything is an illusion ("No hay banda").
Did talent alone help Camilla? Suggests that Camilla used her sexuality and industry connections (and Diane’s help) to succeed.
The man behind Winkies: He represents the "raw horror" of reality that Diane is trying to hide from.
Where is Aunt Ruth? She is dead. Her appearance in the dream is a fantasy of support Diane no longer has.
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