The second film director we meet in Mulholland Dr., Wayne Grace (who yes, also shared an X-Files with Michael J. Anderson) as Bob Brooker, instructs Betty Elms during an audition. Established as an industry joke on the downward slope of his career arc, Brooker’s prompting is vague and emphatic (and, reportedly, not unlike the direction David Lynch gives actors). Naomi Watts as Betty pulls an indescribable expression that indicates this is a comic beat about the inscrutable techniques of pretentious directors. But it is the secret that explains Mulholland Dr.:
“It’s not a contest. The two of them, with themselves. Don’t play it for real until it gets real.”
David Lynch produces at least one era-defining/defying/best film per decade, triumphs of personal vision made in the margins of the industry production machine, previously unclassified film creatures which appear as singular anomalies and proceed to disrupt the cinema ecosystem for years after. The pervasive legacy and influence begins with Eraserhead in the late ‘70s, continues through Blue Velvet in the ‘80s, Twin Peaks in the ‘90s (and, less adored but just as seminal, Wild at Heart... can one imagine Kalifornia, True Romance, Natural Born Killers without Wild at Heart?). The Designated Lynch Classic of the ‘00s is Mulholland Dr., the single goddamnedest thing ever to earn its filmmaker an Academy Award nomination for Best Director.
The many entranced by Mulholland Dr. found that the spell lasts long after the final reel. Indeed, the hypnotism virtually begins with Betty Elms’ arrival at LAX, as she steps out of the terminal and soaks up her first rays of Southern California’s peculiar, brilliant sunshine. David Lynch has related a telling anecdote of being a new resident of the city, similarly enthralled by the unreal clarity of Los Angeles’ white gold light, its blasting, color-enhancing quality a beautiful-eerie contrast to the choked grime of Philadelphia. No, with this film that introduces its lead with a burst of sun, stepping out of the theater into the light (sunlight, marquee glow or street lights) does not dissipate the mystery.
For lovers of mystery, the problem with detective fiction is that it does not love mysteries back. It seeks to obliterate mystery; its pleasures are in rendering secrets legible. The sad fact with mystery stories is that they end with no mystery left. Lynch has gradually developed solutions to this conundrum, stories that preserve the pleasures of mystery itself while retaining basic of the shape of rational detective fiction. The feat is greater than simply paying off whodunits without reducing a film to an equation or riddle. The situation is not unlike Lynch’s entire relationship with narrative cinema itself. Narrative trades in the articulated, while Lynch comes to film as an abstract expressionist, mistrustful of over-articulation.
Many admirers of Mulholland Dr. spent 2001 making notes and timelines, sorting clues and developing elaborate theories, seeking to sort the chronology, explain the symbols and solve the mysteries of the film. The quest that fuels its first two acts, as we follow Betty and her amnesiac houseguest Rita as they try to track Rita’s identity, is derailed when the women find a dead body, attend a show at Club Silencio and promptly disappear, leaving behind a mysterious blue box. The game becomes something else, the locating of connections between the story up to this point and the third act, where names, personalities, relationships and circumstances have scrambled. Prevalent theories, in descending order of popularity — sadly, not necessarily in increasing order of outlandishness — include explaining the split between the Betty and Rita Mystery Solvers! section and that in which the leads have transmuted into Diane and Camilla as dream, psychotic delusion, masturbatory fantasy, deathbed reverie, fugue state, repressed memory of sexual abuse or parallel dimensions.
The film encourages these approaches with one beckoning finger, and bats them back with a flyswatter with the other hand. Mulholland Dr. is a rich environment in which to play games, but single-minded clue-sorting theories are literalist and reductive. Too many readings seek to iron out the curves and illuminate the shadows of Mulholland Dr., but even a literalist approach requires the puzzle-solver to evaluate what the film is about, to read it on multiple levels. Conversely, to read the film is to begin positing a theory of its narrative.
Listening to someone else’s Mulholland Dr. theory is like hearing a recounting of their dreams. Fascinating to the dreamer, and no one else really needs to hear it but a therapist. It is also a non sequitur to say it is “wrong.” And though Betty and Diane’s stories call and echo to one another through the blue box (“one chants out between two worlds...”), and signs and signals both underlined and parenthetical fly through the frame, when Diane has her coffee refilled by a waitress whose nametag reads “Betty,” (and here is the secret that explains Mulholland Dr.), no one needs to grope in the dark for meaning and clarity. The sensation of spooky, electric frisson flows directly out of Betty’s nametag and into the theatre.
Like a birdwatcher’s diary, the Mulholland Dr. theorist’s list of clues spotted and jotted is just a record. Besides imposing data that is not there onto the lopsided halves of the narrative, these threads are not knitted up into a holistic view of the film. In a film very much about the dark dazzle of the film image, to say Betty’s story is Diane’s dream, full stop, quite misses that Diane’s reality is no realer than Betty’s or Henry Spencer’s, Norma Desmond’s or Cruella DeVille’s. They dream each other. If Special Agent Dale Cooper famously woke from a dream to declare “my dream is a code: crack the code, solve the crime,” he eventually learns that the dream was something far more. In forwards-backwards-simultaneous time, the wised-up Agent Jeffries would mutter in Fire Walk With Me: “We live inside a dream.” It’s not a contest. The two of them, with themselves.
Betty and Diane do not live in Twin Peaks, they live in Los Angeles. Most often understood as a fable of a would-be starlet’s Hollywood dreams shattered by grim reality, Mulholland Dr. is certainly a bitterly funny portrait of the film industry as Kafka nightmare-fable, but it is not so one-sided nor so acrimonious about the artform itself. At Club Silencio, the emcee tells the audience that though we hear a band, there is no band. Rebekah Del Rio performs a captivating rendition of a Roy Orbison number, and collapses midway as the singing continues, revealing: No hay banda. There is no band. Why should we be surprised or awed, when we have just been told, no hay banda? Why, when standard film production reality is that musical numbers are customarily lipsynched? Was it any less involving a performance? Coming shortly before the film’s splashiest narrative fracture, this is the secret that explains Mulholland Dr.
“Hollywood” is vernacular for the American entertainment industry, and talismanic shorthand for the dream of studio system era Movie Stardom, the whole of the art, business and legend in one monolithic word, as if Hollywood were a single organization, collective mind, and symbol at once. But Hollywood is really a place, and you can go there — live there, even— and discover how strange it is, how wrong it feels, to actually walk on Hollywood Blvd. A clogged-by-day, abandoned-by-night tourist attraction with no attractions, the street is composed of approximately 300 tattoo parlors, smoking paraphernalia shops and stores that sell platform shoes to sex industry workers. The majority of the real, literal, physical Hollywood is a collection of neighborhoods where people walk dogs and eat fish tacos and sit in traffic. That big white sign is a leftover advertisement for a housing development.
There are still post-production houses, DVD mastering companies and film equipment and prop rental houses in the neighborhood. The Paramount backlot is the only remaining major studio production facility in the area (unless, as district zoning would have it, one includes Universal City, which makes no sense). There are television soundstages and landmark movie theatres, none of which do or “mean” what they did when Hollywood was “Hollywood.” It is not accurate to say that Hollywood does not make movies, but neither is it proper to imply that it produces a majority of what we casually designate “Hollywood” product. “Hollywood” is not in Hollywood.
Mulholland Dr. is about both of those Hollywoods. One of those Hollywoods does not exist anywhere. That doesn’t make it less real.
Here is the secret that explains Mulholland Dr.: it is very much like the experience of driving Mulholland Drive at night. The meandering road looks a little wiggly but more-or-less straight on a map, and connects two stretches of US 101 (which, confusingly, shifts alignment and starts running east-west just to be contrary). Mulholland twists up through the Hollywood Hills and Santa Monica Mountains, providing a spectacular Olympian view of both L.A. proper and the Valley, the city glowing below like a gilded lava spill. The road runs along a precipitous drop, occasionally shielded by scrape-covered guardrails. It is so wracked with tight turns and blessed with so few streetlights that one can inch along for an hour and barely get anywhere. Meanwhile, traffic is thin, but residents familiar with the curves will rush by at terrorizing, reckless speed. By night, Mulholland Drive is dark, it is dangerous, and it is extremely pretty.