New Velvet

David Lynch peaks again with Mulholland Drive

By Peter Keough

*** 1/2 Written and directed by David Lynch. With Naomi Watts, Laura Harring, Justin Theroux, Ann Miller, Dan Hedaya, and Robert Forster. A Universal Pictures release.

As the world sinks into its collective bad dream, how nice to have David Lynch’s personal nightmares as a distraction. Those who feared that Lynch might have submitted permanently to the better demons of his nature with the G-rated The Straight Story (though under the surface far from straight or G-rated) a couple years ago need fret no more. Based on the pilot for a Twin Peaks style TV series rejected by ABC in 1999, Mulholland Drive is right up the vintage Lynch alley, his most bizarre, hilarious, and tragic film since Blue Velvet.

Like his 1986 masterpiece, Drive starts with the corny and conventional and quickly demonstrates that so-called norms merely mask the most profound doubts, terrors, and perversities. It’s night, headlights illumine a street sign for Mulholland Drive, and a thug holds a gun on a beautiful woman (Laura Harring) in a limo. A car full of teenagers plows into them, and the woman, dazed and amnesiac, wanders down the cliffs to Hollywood below in a sequence that’s like a parody of a ’40s film noir. Gilda, say: a poster for the movie hangs in the room the woman finds herself in, and she takes her new first name from Rita Hayworth (who played the title character).

The woman she encounters in that room seems a relic from another film genre. Betty Elms (Naomi Watts) is fresh off the plane from Deep Water, Ontario, and aglow with her dream of stardom. Her aunt, an actress herself, has let her stay in her apartment, but before Betty can set off on her first audition, she’s confronted with the enigma of Rita’s past and identity, a mystery complicated by a bag full of money and an ornate blue key. With Rita being a fusion of the Kyle MacLachlan and Isabella Rossellini roles in Blue Velvet, Betty, like Laura Dern’s character in that film, sets off to solve a mystery that soon takes some Sapphic and solipsistic U-turns.

Betty’s not the only one who’s got her detective work cut out for her. Although not as bluntly cryptic as Lost Highway, Drive takes some jolting narrative bumps in the road. The two men at Winkies, for example, one of whom discusses a recurrent dream he’s been having that takes place at the very same Winkies and ends with a fatal revelation. Or the black-comic grotesquely botched mob hit and theft of a book that is “the history of the world in phone numbers.” Or the story of Adam Kersher (Justin Theroux), the hotshot Hollywood director whose latest film is being hijacked by mafiosos even as his wife takes a toss in the hay with the pool man.

A SAPPHIC TURN? Naomi Watts and Laura Harring ponder the enigmas of love and identity.

No doubt these are traces of plot lines and dead ends the television series might have explored, but even in this two-and-a-half-hour crystallization they coalesce into a dazzling whole. As with other current oneiric films — Memento, The Others, Richard Linklater’s upcoming Waking Life, — part of the suspense and mystery revolves around basic questions like “Who’s awake?”, or for that matter “Who’s alive?” It’s not so much a “Whodunit?” as a “Who’s dreaming it?”

You might say, who needs it? If nothing else, Mulholland Drive offers good clean fun for those who like to piece together a bracing hermeneutic puzzle. If there is a dreamer behind it all, of course it’s Lynch himself, and one criticism of Drive might be that it’s just the filmmaker up to his old tricks again, offering a happy hunting ground of endless speculation for his fans. But you could have a worse time than going through Lynch’s œuvre and, say, comparing Drive’s blue box to the severed ear in Blue Velvet, or the scene in which Betty “calls herself up” to the one in which Robert Blake invites Bill Pullman to do the same in Lost Highway. Probably the richest source of allusions is the much despised Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, which actually begins to make sense in retrospect (the “blue rose case” described in mime by “my mother’s sister’s girl” at that film’s beginning seems to offer significant clues).

Okay, so it’s not Citizen Kane. What saves Drive from being just a cinematic Rubik’s Cube, however, are the epiphanic moments of astonishing beauty and inexplicable emotion. Thank newcomer Naomi Watts for much of that. She takes her aw-shucks ingenue Betty into the stratosphere in an audition scene where she almost scorches the pants off Chad Everett. Later, her response to a chilling Spanish rendition of Roy Orbison’s “Crying” captures all the horror of immutable loss and eternal damnation, as does a scene of futile self-abuse. Mulholland Drive might be Lynchian mental masturbation, but it beats almost every other film now out there in its passion and vision.

DRIVE TIME: Justin Theroux was in Toronto when the terrorists struck. Lynch mob The people involved with Mulholland Drive must be getting a little paranoid. Back in 1999, just as David Lynch offered ABC the pilot for what he hoped would be a Twin Peakslike series, the Columbine High School killings horrified the country. ABC rejected the pilot. Lynch recon gured the series into a two-and-a-half-hour movie that received its North American premiere last month at the Toronto Film Festival. That was the week the terrorists took down the World Trade Center. “I guess it was kind of a bizarre circumstance,” says Justin Theroux, a member of the cast who was at the festival. “At that point I sort of turned off. I got out of there right away and drove back down to New York. A bunch of people ended up taking a bus, but Lynch ended up staying and flying because the bus was no-smoking. But I wanted to return to work, I wanted to do something else. I wanted to start thinking my life was normal again.” Work was promoting Mulholland Drive. It goes to show how abnormal things are when you immerse yourself in a David Lynch movie in order to return to normality. Does Theroux think audiences might feel the same way? “The one thing that these events have done is put everything into perspective. Part of my response is, I don’t really care. If it does terribly as a result, I don’t care. If it does great as a result, I don’t care. I feel a bizarre sense of guilt hoping it does well when this is what I was thinking before the events of September 11th. I do know that I’ve been watching a lot of movies after I turned off CNN finally, I did a self-imposed news blackout. I’ve been watching movies and enjoying them. I don’t know if this movie will provide that kind of relief.” What kind of movie is it? Not the kind that lends itself to brief description or uncomplicated responses. A beautiful amnesiac befriends a naive girl who’s trying to break into Hollywood; meanwhile a young auteur, played by Theroux, is pressured to recast his new movie by mobsters and a paraplegic dwarf. A man in a Winkies fast-food place thinks he might be dreaming everything, a torrid lesbian love affair may be imaginary, and a blue box and a nightclub called Silencio seem to hold the key to whatever is going on while old-time Hollywood hoofer Ann Miller points out a dog turd on the pavement. In short, it might be a movie whose own mystery and horror will help people forget the mystery and horror outside, or it might piss people off as tasteless and insensitive and perhaps even unpatriotic given the present circumstances. “I’m sort of pessimistic,” says Theroux. “It didn’t go on TV because I think the network didn’t know how to place it, and they hated it. I don’t think Columbine had anything to do with it. I think the stuff they put on the air that year was 10,000 times more sinister. Now they’re quick to talk about all these projects being shelved, the Schwarzenegger movie that wasn’t coming out and is it censorship or is it self-censorship, or is it important? “I could have done away with the Schwarzenegger movie prior to this happening. My suspicion is Hollywood will go about business as usual. It took only 24 hours for them to already be having theme songs and titles to broadcasts and calling it ‘America’s New War.’ There are many ways to have movies be successful right now. One is to provide escape, one is to provide introspection.” His track record and his upcoming projects place Theroux more on the introspection side. He will soon be working on a new Mary Harron lm, his third after I Shot Andy Warhol and American Psycho, neither of which has scored highly with the gatekeepers of political or moral correctness. He is also working on a screenplay for a Vietnam War comedy. “If we go to war, obviously we’re going to put it on hold,” he says of the latter. “It might be just the right movie to do, it might be just be the wrong movie to do, we just don’t know yet. I mean, there is something much more awful about boy bands singing at the Super Bowl, in my mind, than, say, American Psycho.” — PK