David Lynch is less a film director, in any conventional sense, than a new-age L. Frank Baum on methamphetamines. Baum first took us to Oz. Lynch keeps sending us to Oz, but his Oz is a film noir plague zone of murder and unusual sexual practices, where his Munchkins are armed hoodlums, his wizard wears a cowboy hat, and if you tap your heels together three times and say, "There's no place like home," you won't go anywhere because you are home, and it's weird.
From "Blue Velvet" to "Twin Peaks" to "Lost Highways," it's been a dizzying trip, fraught with delicious menace, oozing corruption, sleazy violence, profound sexuality and utter stunning beauty. Being the wizard of a scuz Oz may be his only trick, but it's a great trick, and that's why his new movie, "Mulholland Drive," is a trip and a half: It's like playing Twister and Scrabble simultaneously while high on LSD. Oh, and it's dark out.
Laura Harring stars in "Mulholland Drive."
(Universal Focus)
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In case you don't know it, Mulholland Drive is a posh ribbon of asphalt along the spine of the hills that separates the Valley from L.A. proper. Stars live along it, but so do tiny desert hill creatures, tumbleweeds, sagebrush and cactus. It's beautiful, twisting, hard to follow, dangerous and addictive. So is this movie.
Many theories will be advanced to unify its seemingly disparate incidents and I will eventually get around to my own. But whether you can concoct a theory or not, the movie, it must be said, has a hypnotic rhythm that could only be Lynch's, and it really draws you in.
Basically, it seems to follow some troubling events that occur after a tragic auto wreck on the road of the title. It appears that a fearful, beautiful woman is about to be executed in the back of a parked limousine when a jalopy full of drunken teenagers comes straight out of "Rebel Without a Cause" and slams into the vehicle. In the aftermath, the woman, now in a fog of amnesia, crawls from the wreckage and down the hill into old Hollywood. (I'm thinking: I hate amnesia movies!) There, seeking refuge, she hides in a plush apartment whose owner she's just spied leaving for a long trip.
But the apartment isn't empty. It's just about to be inhabited by the owner's niece, a perky Canadian actress named Betty Elms (Naomi Watts), who's in town for a big audition at Paramount. The two meet – in the shower, actually – and the amnesiac woman (Laura Harring) chooses the name Rita, from a Rita Hayworth poster for "Gilda" hanging in the bathroom. Betty, so decent, so pretty, so innocent, decides, darn it! she's got to help Rita find out who she is.
So rather like Nancy Drew and a Rita Hayworth zombie, these two set out to backtrack Rita's story and uncover her life; they also fall in love and have a steamy toss between the sheets. Meanwhile, odd things are happening. A film director Betty meets in an interview is muscled by mysterious Big Guys to hire a certain actress for a part; a hit man kills a man, and several witnesses, to get his hands on a Hollywood show biz phone book; a fellow is scared to death by a fuzzy-wuzzy who lives behind a diner on La Brea; and a guy in '40s cowboy gear issues strange directives. And perky blondes are multiplying all over the place.
Can this be straightened out? Well, one argument is why bother. There is no rational scheme behind it and to look for one is to court frustration. Rather, sit back and enjoy the weirdness, the buzzing industrial sounds running behind the dialogue and music, the odd banality of much of the conversation, and the appearance of Hollywood memory figments like Chad Everett, Robert Forster, Diane Baker and Lee Grant in odd, discordant scenes (Everett, by the way, as a sort of bargain-basement Clark Gable, is quite good). Or just enjoy Watts's stunning performance.
But my decoding takes me to the following: What we are seeing is a hysterical, booze- and drug-blasted fantasy-dream in the mind of a suicidal, down-at-the-heels lesbian named Diane (also played by Watts), who has been jilted by her lover, a more successful actress, who is in turn about to marry the director (Justin Theroux). So Dorothy has hired a killer to kill her ex, and the arrival of a blue key signifies that the job has been completed. Diane, in the wake of this stunning news, has been re-imagining the affair, but in her incoherent state, she idealizes her memories: She sees herself as perky and plucky and cute and she sees "Rita" as helpless and needful, and she sees the two of them on a yellow brick road to love and security.
Her dream is in fact Oz-like in that it uses the same mechanism Dorothy used in the 1939 movie: Events from her real life, thinly disguised, taken out of chronology and context, rearranged over an idealized psychic dreamscape, are projected in space and their reality is just as convincing – and possibly to Lynch just as real – as any MGM musical or Baum children's book. But his sensibility is far darker, and his yellow brick road leads straight to Hell.
MULHOLLAND DRIVE (R, 146 minutes) – contains sexual explicitness and violence. At the Cineplex Odeon Dupont Circle and the Cineplex Odeon Shirlington
