David Lynch's MULHOLLAND DRIVE

Mulholland Drive. I’ve never been able to entirely comprehend this film, although it’s one of my favourite movies and I’ve watched it countless times. Its last spoken word—“Silencio” (Lynch, 2001)—uttered by a strange blue-haired female being, is somehow supposed to put a conclusion to the tragic mystery. What follows is my attempt to make sense of what is almost universally regarded as an enigmatic, inscrutable, and nebulous work of art.

First, before I plunge headfirst into the murky waters of attempting to understand the unfathomable, let me say that one of the elements of the movie that I like the most is the score by Angelo Badalamenti, especially the “Love Theme” which is in the key of A minor. Since I often appreciate music more than film, it means a lot to me that the score should be the film’s worthy equal. Yet without David Lynch’s obsessive-compulsive tendencies and creative genius there would be no story and plot. The film Mulholland Drive has all the elements of a groundbreaking metaphysical masterpiece, in addition to revealing the beauty of what some might perceive to be ugly or mundane. It is a drama that encompasses a variety of diverse genres and themes—tragedy, mystery, Hollywood, doomed love, surrealism, murder, the American Dream, etc. The film Mulholland Drive can be understood and perceived from several perspectives, some of which include the philosophical, the psychological, and the literary or dramatic.

The first scene of the movie appears to consist of random people dancing or jitterbugging to swing music, and rapidly alternating and swapping dance partners. This establishes one of the themes of the movie in relation to the fluidity (and illusion) of identity: In particular, names, as well as roles, are subject to transmutation. The film Mulholland Drive may teach that there exists a fundamental essence of human nature in the majority of people regardless of the form, expression, or identity (or lack thereof) this humanity may take. Nevertheless, the film doesn’t shy away from revealing and shedding light on the potential destructiveness and depersonalization of an “inhuman, dehumanized world”. (Nietzsche, 59). The world of Mulholland Drive may not be of our world, yet its characters are striving and struggling for meaning, purpose, friendship, love, intimacy, success, self-preservation, survival, and truth just as much as the inhabitants of our reality are. As a result of a car crash the female brunette character—who later on becomes and is revealed to be the inamorata of the blonde protagonist—consequently loses her memory and identity, and in desperation cries, “I don’t know who I am!” (Lynch, 2001). Who has never felt lost in the labyrinth of humanity’s relentless, ineluctable, and everlasting search for identity?

In a later pivotal scene of the movie, Betty (the protagonist) and Rita (which is the name the brunette has adopted in the first half of the movie) take a cab to what externally appears to be an abandoned and hidden place—“Club Silencio”. (Lynch, 2001). Upon arriving, the cinematography and camera action imbues the otherwise trashy grey urban megalopolitan downtown lot with a certain urgent and numinous surrealism, beauty even. Once the two female characters enter, the viewer must adjust to the dissonance or discrepancy of the exterior of the building in contrast to its high-class interior. Inside the theatre, there’s an eerie presentation, a man speaking in the role of a Magician, the sound of musical instruments, and all of this set against a backdrop of red curtains reminiscent of that of David Lynch’s TV series Twin Peaks. In the movie Mulholland Drive, the “Club Silencio” serves as a mystical center and doorway between worlds and parallel realities without actually providing direct bridges between said worlds. Rita is compelled to visit this location after repeating Spanish phrases like “Silencio” and “No hay banda” (Lynch, 2001) in her sleep, as if her subconscious, the collective unconscious, or someone’s sorcery or dark sinister influence is speaking through her. Prior to this, they had discovered a dead body, which unbeknownst to both of them, was the corpse of the Betty from a parallel reality in which she’s called Diane. I believe the two characters are searching for the truth, which they can never fully integrate into consciousness.

It’s also my opinion that one can correlate the scene involving the Magician with the concept of the eternal return. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche, Zarathustra’s animals say, “ ‘Everything goes, everything returns; the wheel of existence rolls for ever. Everything dies, everything blossoms anew; the year of existence runs on for ever.” (Nietzsche, 234). In Mulholland Drive the Magician says, “It’s all recorded. No hay banda! It is all . . . a tape.” (Lynch, 2001). As he motions with his hands you hear the sound of the trumpet, which someone had also pretended to play in order to emphasize that there is a recording yet no band or instruments actually playing. In conclusion he says, “It is . . . an illusion.” (Lynch, 2001). The idea that beneath our perception of reality lies a valley comprising of an infinite number of striations that symbolize parallel planes of existence or altered states of consciousness, as well as the universal patterns and repetitions that underlie existence, is neither new nor original. Nevertheless, its presentation in the film is. In Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s novel The Brothers Karamazov, The Devil suggests that “ . . . our present earth may have been repeated a billion times . . . and the same sequence may have been repeated endlessly . . .” (Dostoevsky, 733). The “tape recording” (Lynch, 2001) can seemingly go on forever; whereas the objects and people are ephemeral, transitory, and ever-changing, while subsisting on the same basic blueprint or formula. Like light refracted through a prism, our world in its multifarious divisions and oppositions derives from a single source. Nevertheless, much like the eternal “tape recording," there exists an objective timeless element—immune to subjective shifts in culture—which dictates what is salutary, salubrious, and healthful, what is not, and what can easily be both depending on the individuals’ natures and their underlying patterns.

In the second opening scene of the film, we observe a limousine driving through Mulholland Drive. In it we see the brunette, and when the limousine suddenly stops, she asks, “What are you doing? We don’t stop here.” (Lynch, 2001). We can assume that the brunette knows her identity in this incarnation, and just when one of the men in the front of the limousine is about to kill her, a speeding car full of wild screaming youths crashes into them. The brunette is the sole survivor, and descends the hill, without her memories, into the city which is to be greeted by Betty’s arrival as a friendly ingénue the following morning. This is Betty’s idealized world. Yet in the more dysphoric dystopian reality, the blonde protagonist Betty is called Diane, and is invited by the successful and callous Camilla, the brunette—with her memories and identity intact in this scenario—to her abode near Mulholland Drive. As the blonde protagonist in the form of Diane is being driven in the limousine, it also comes to a sudden stop, and she also asks, “What are you doing? We don’t stop here.” (Lynch, 2001). The following scene which is accompanied by beautiful music depicts Camilla taking Diane by the hand as they ascend the hill together. In Diane’s idealized rose-colored reality in which she is Betty, the amnesic Rita — who is actually Camilla in the more depressing loveless reality — suddenly recalls the name Diane Selwyn, whose decomposing corpse they discover in a townhouse. Yet they’re not aware of this. Betty doesn’t know that the dead Diane is herself from a convergent reality. And neither does Rita.

Near the end of the Club Silencio scene, we are confronted by a Spanish version of Roy Orbison’s song “Crying” which is being sung by a woman who ends up collapsing on stage as the recording continues. I don’t believe this scene alludes to lip-syncing as much as it alludes to the immortality of music which outlasts the fallen star. If anything, the vocalist, who is portrayed belting out the song with such virtuosity, bravado and emotion, seems to presage singers like Amy Winehouse in regards to appearance, talent, and tragic fate. The movie harks back to an era in American popular culture and music that Amy Winehouse idealized. As the song is playing under the guise of a brilliant performance, Betty and Rita are overcome by an (unconscious) feeling of loss and catharsis which translates into tears. Consciously, Betty and Rita may or may not have partial access to their original history, yet the fact that Diane Selwyn died seems to also have an effect on Betty, since she disappears once they return to the house with the blue box they discovered when they were at Club Silencio. This box contains the truth which comes at the price of lost love. The effect that Club Silencio and the song had on Betty and Rita was ineffable and could not be expressed into words, yet I feel that this excerpt from Thus Spoke Zarathustra can capture the true essence of this fleeting and evanescent anomaly:

. . . are words and music not rainbows and seeming bridges between things eternally separated?

‘Every soul is a world of its own; for every soul every other soul is an afterworld.

‘Appearance lies most beautifully among the most alike; for the smallest gap is the most difficult to bridge. (Nietzsche, 234).

What has always struck me about the movie is how prominently the yearnings, realizations, disappointments, and betrayals of romantic love figure in it. Yet who can find a form of romantic love that is healthy, vital, enduring, genuine, life-affirming, and frequently mirthful if one is insecure, insalubrious, deluded, or depressed? The characters of Mulholland Drive cannot find true lasting love because our world’s unpleasant truth is that romantic love can often be an illusion we cling to so we can escape the shadowy demons of our pasts. Who wants to explore the hidden motivations and depths of human destructiveness? Some of us who seek solace in romantic love or infatuation may often feel a sense of playing a programmed role of almost heroically epic proportions in the dazzling game and dance of life. We are validated in our stuntedness or mediocrity, and believe this to be the ultimate, ideal, and quite possibly only, way of life. We defeat ourselves by believing that we can’t find completion, happiness, freedom, self-discovery, emancipation, maturity, and independence without romantic and sexual love.

In the film Mulholland Drive, the destinies of these two women (Betty/Diane and Rita/Camilla) are inextricably linked and intertwined. I believe that this movie has elements of tragedy in spite of its characters being fragmented and not sharply delineated. In Aristotle’s Poetics he says that “ . . . you can’t have a tragedy without an action (praxis), but you can have it without [clearly defined] characters.” (Aristotle, 73). In the end of the movie, Diane shoots herself after she has hired a hit man to kill Camilla. The agonizing guilt and the irreversibility of the “action” takes such a toll on Diane’s psyche that she can’t live with herself and the consequences. What a terrible turn of events—one that is unfortunately all too common in our world, and often enacted by those who are more brutal and violent than Diane, yet not less broken. I of course understand the dashed hopes and painful loss of a sudden break-up, which occurred with my first relationship, yet revenge is never a solution, and can only make things worse. The more one seeks to make up for what one lacks through a romantic relationship, and the more one entertains overly-idealistic illusions regarding a romantic relationship, the more one is bound to be bitterly disappointed and emotionally wounded. By writing and directing Mulholland Drive as a post-modern 21st century tragedy, David Lynch was able to depict “destructive or painful acts” via the visual medium of film and aided by a “plot” he “put together” so “that even without seeing [anything] a person who hears the events unfolding trembles and feels pity at what is happening . . .” (Aristotle, 69, 99).

In our modern world we are often so overwhelmed by the apparent absurdity of existence and the countless tragedies and calamities that humankind encounters, that we are often unable to detect any deeper meaning or pattern in the madness. Mulholland Drive is one of those rare gems that seems to reflect our most personal, cherished, or guarded dreams, nightmares, and experiences back to us in an atmosphere of varicoloured city lights, dark quiet urban deprivation and desperation, Kafkaesque bureaucracy, surveillance, Hollywood opulence, and apoplectic paroxysms of the passions. One cannot completely deny the id or instincts, nor can one completely embrace or be consumed by them without incurring grave consequences. The film Mulholland Drive encapsulates the euphoric magic and fearsome ravenous anguish of the simultaneously young and ancient, ever-renewing and dissipating, chimeric opiate of the masses—romantic love. One cannot instantly put an end (either through love or anything else) to all the suffering, pain, and Sturm und Drang in the world. Yet one can take a step back every once in awhile in order to take the time to listen to one’s inner voice and relax. This attempt can often be very challenging in and of itself. Maybe we’re afraid of surrendering our sense of self to the unlimited flow of the universe and the unconscious. Perhaps emptiness and loss need not always be negatives. Because in the vast expanse of interstellar space one can hear a voice gently whispering, “Silencio.”

Works Cited

MULHOLLAND DR. Dir. David K. Lynch. Performers Cori Glazer, Laura E. Harring, Geno Silva, Naomi E. Watts. DVD. TVA International Distribution Inc., 2002.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book For Everyone and No One. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books Ltd, 1969. 59, 234.

Dostoevsky, Fyodor. The Brothers Karamazov. New York: Random House, Inc., 1996. 733.

Aristotle. Aristotle’s Poetics: Translated and with a Commentary by George Whalley. Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997. 69, 73, 99.