John Cope wrote:The more recent films (Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive) are refinements of a sort on this technique, but I find them more problematic. They both seem to want to establish a jejune psychological reading as a foundational entry point (Fred's psychic fugue state and Diane's personality driven dream logic) and then Lynch expects us to recognize these readings as inadequate and transcend them through that recognition. But what Lynch is doing is radical enough to require a little hand holding along the way. These last two films can be understood well enough within the boundaries of those initial readings and do not demand to be taken further. In fact, they seem to resist it, in a way. Let's not forget how much of a breakthrough it was considered to unravel the dream in Mulholland Drive. It certainly is not adequate to fully appreciate or understand that picture but as with our modern empirically driven "culture" it is hard to convince people of how valuable transcending pat and reductive interpretations is when the method of understanding which is directly available seems so all inclusive and definitive (the fact that it is all inclusive and definitive should be the tip off that it is driven by desires for mastery and comprehensible grand narrative). Anyway, only now are some people doing the hard work of taking Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive into new territories. These new interpretations are visionary and rich with possibility.
Great, great post! I don't have too much to add to your totally dead-on reading of FWWM, but I would like to go (slightly) OT to discuss your points about later Lynch a little further. I have only seen
Lost Highway once so far, and as I'm sure we all understand here, that's hardly enough to get anywhere close to its myriad mysteries -- that film is still very much a puzzle to me, one I can't wait to delve further into with more viewings. But
Mulholland Drive is possibly one of my most-watched films of all time. It was my first encounter with Lynch, and my initial viewing of it left me in such a state that when I went outside immediately afterwards, the whole bright, sunny summer world seemed literally
unreal and bizarre -- it was as if I'd become so acclimatized to Lynch's strange world that my own suddenly seemed weird.
Obviously, I've watched the film many times since then, and I'm not sure your characterization of it is quite accurate. Yes, there is certainly a kind of psychological dimension to it, and the dream interpretation, while not very easy to unravel without multiple very thorough viewings, is satisfying as a simple explanation for a lot of what is going on onscreen. But I think the real key to
Mulholland Drive is in its very insidiousness -- the dream interpretation is, initially, incredibly satisfying once one has stumbled across it or "figured it out", satisfying on the level of guessing the murderer in a murder mystery except that this revelation comes only after the film is over. But without going into deeper levels of the film, this interpretation doesn't even explain everything on the surface level. The sheer complexity of the dream, its quasi-independent characters like the director, who seems to have his own separate narrative
within the dream, the enigmatic, somewhat frightening mob-type characters lurking around its edges; these things defy simple explanation and twist away from an all-inclusive encapsulation. There's simply too much going on within the lengthy "dream" part of the narrative that can't be put down easily to any psychological motivations in the mind of Betty/Diane. In any case, even more obvious than the dream explanation in the first place are the multiple allusions to Hollywood and film culture: the
Vertigo/
Persona references, the acting auditions, the "silencio" nightclub with its dissection of film soundtrack norms and the artifice of film. I think these are just as integral to the movie as the psychoanalytical components, and add to its complexity.
Basically, what I'm saying is that
Mulholland Drive (and probably
Lost Highway as well) is every bit as complex, powerful, and amenable to rich interpretations as his earlier work. I'd even venture to say that
Mulholland Drive is possibly his densest work, so stuffed with layers to be unpacked and unravelled that the process can perhaps never be completed. It will always be a temptation with films like this to settle upon one explanation, but I don't think that's a reflection on the film so much as it is on the audiences' willingness to confront difficult works of art in general. Let's not kid ourselves, much of the appreciation of
Twin Peaks was at a fairly surface level -- how many viewers took Lynch's soap opera satire with a straight face? A large number of them, I'd wager. That's no reflection on TP, certainly.
Also, as an alternative to the ubiquitous "dream" theory, I find it just as compelling to think of the two uneven halves of
Mulholland Drive as representing a split, not so much between dream and reality as between
film and reality. The first half of the movie runs through a number of generic conventions and tropes: the idealistic-girl-making-it-in-the-world, the Hitchcockian mystery, the hard-boiled detective, the Tarantino-esque bumbling hitman, the cowboy picture, the erotic thriller... And finally the "silencio" sequence, probably one of my favorite scenes in film ever, lays it all bare, reveals for the audience -- both the audience watching the film, and the audience in the club within the film -- the ways in which film mimics and fakes reality, the separation between soundtrack and events, the artificiality of the whole setup. "No hay banda" indeed. And then the enigmatic transfer through the blue box into a dingy apartment where all Hollywood artifice and glamour has been stripped away, and a largely makeup-less Naomi Watts expresses the kinds of very raw, unfiltered emotions that have never had much place in Tinseltown.
Now I'm not sure if that particular explanation has been posited before (I suspect it has), but I'm just trying to point out that
Mulholland Drive is potentially much richer than the reductionist psychoanalytic explanation you refer to above. I think despite some possible pat answers to the many questions this film raises, it's real intent and effect is much deeper, more subliminal and ambiguous.
