Why Mulholland Dr Sucks Balls

Nonlinear narrative style is nowhere more ambitious, nowhere more fragmented or assertive in the competitive filmography of David Lynch than in his baffling, frustrating, and plainly ludicrous postmodern opus, Mulholland Drive. Lynch’s ninth feature film is arguably most famous for defying comprehensive, critical narrative analysis. Published analytic reviews of the film tend to praise it; however, one common feature among this praise, perhaps the only consensus, is that ordinary sense simply cannot be made of Mulholland Drive. It is an unsolvable maze, comprised of a series of loose ends which never tie up no matter how many times the film is re-watched. Critical disregard of the nonsensical nature of Lynch’s work is most disappointing, irritating, and speaks loudly to the modern, vulgar pride of intellectuals.

If you want to feel like David Lynch is masturbating inside your brain, watch this movie.

It is the opinion of this blog post (and its author, obviously) that Mulholland Drive does not belong in the critically acclaimed light in which it currently resides; in fact, it belongs nowhere near it. The Matrix, a crucial postmodern film of actual intelligibility, currency, finesse, wild originality and intelligent applications of key postmodern concepts was released in 1999, the same year Lynch shot most of Mulholland Drive, and is superior to it in every conceivable regard, except perhaps for the number of nude female co-stars engaged in sexual congress, if such a thing may be regarded as a category.

In the same, wholly superior vein exists David Fincher’s Fight Club, a postmodern film (based on the Chuck Palahniuk novel of the same title) which calls attention to vapid, meaningless consumer society and the disenfranchisement of the individual and its inherent humanity and the resurgence of the id through a personality split at the expense of the conscious self. Fincher’s film employs non-linear narrative conventions but unlike Lynch’s film, Fight Club is intelligible, surprising, effective and highly entertaining.

Stripped of its undeserved accolades, Mulholland Drive is a failed television pilot (conceptually similar to Lynch’s Twin Peaks). Good directors integrate symbolism, dreams, and various meanings into coherent, narrative structures, exemplified by Fincher’s and the Wachowskis’ films respectively. Bad directors, as Lynch was in this case, do not. This blog post shall not entertain the notion that by not making sense, this film has somehow transcended or elevated itself above the standard mode of moviemaking and is praise-worthy simply for ignoring the rules. There are plenty of dreamlike, surreal films which make sense. Mulholland Drive is not one of them.

David Lynch originally conceived Mulholland Drive as a television show. Similarities to Lynch’s previous work Twin Peaks abound, from the close familiarity of the eerie electronic musical themes to Lynch’s characteristic use of femme fatale characters and women who are either in danger or who are, themselves, the danger. When pitching to ABC for a first season run, an executive recalled, “I remember the creepiness of this woman in this horrible, horrible crash, and David teasing us with the notion that people are chasing her. She’s not just ‘in’ trouble—she is trouble. Obviously, we asked, ‘What happens next?’ Lynch responded, ‘You have to buy the pitch for me to tell you’” (Woods, 206). Although the origin of Mulholland Drive as a television pilot may provide a reason for the film’s tangled, irregular plot, it offers no help to organize or explain the narrative mess on-screen.

David Lynch’s film Mulholland Drive without question departs from traditional Hollywood forms. However, the departure enacted is not liberating, but contrarily painfully frustrating. Lynch’s film is a collection of plot set-ups and mysteries never developed, which have no business clumping themselves together and declaring themselves a film. The film’s two halves, if they may so be named, constitute the difference between the portion of Mulholland Drive which is composed of the roughly ninety minute pilot David Lynch originally shot, and the portion which David Lynch, quite entrepreneurially, made up in order to re-package his product in postmodernist, feature film wrapping.

Mulholland Drive is recognizably television pilot matter; firstly, it is cheap, as evidenced through its ill-fitting, out-of-date costumes and awkward, out-of-date effects, inexpensive sets and general lack of concrete detail. Additionally, the film contains lists of unnamed, undeveloped, inarticulate and senseless-seeming characters and fragments (loose ends), which, when included in the first episode of a television series logically create anticipation, eagerness and suspense for the viewer and logically urge the viewer to continue watching to observe their development throughout the season. When devices meant for a television series are unnaturally compressed into a feature film, they will invariably fail their function; they will create suspense, anticipation and eagerness, which Lynch’s work accomplishes, but will lose the aha! moments of reward for finally recognizing their reason and will correspondingly nullify the payoff. When Mulholland Drive ends, so do hopes of deciphering any rewarding meaning from the experience, thus rendering the application of multiple initial mysteries valueless. This film is no great exploration into a new cinematic form, but is rather a collection of misapplied television formulas which the academic community is apparently too intellectual to grasp.

(Mulholland Drive loose ends include but are not limited to: Cowboy character, dirt monster, pandora’s box, Betty’s convulsions, death of Singer at Silencio, man in underground chamber, Italian financiers, phone line characters, original Camilla, change of characters into other characters, white-trash hitman asking presumed prostitute “Any new girls on the street? a brunette maybe, a little beat up?” obviously alluding to Rita (still Rita) but this goes nowhere, etc. The fact that Roger Ebert rated this film 4/4 makes me want to resurrect him just so that I can murder him for gross stupidity and injustice.)

 Interestingly, the pilot portion of Mulholland Drive ends roughly around 1:30.00. Lynch shot a ninety minute pilot, meaning the succeeding hour of the film is new content which Lynch shot in order manifest a film from his pilot’s humble origins. More interestingly, the content which makes up the second half contains the lion’s share of desperate-seeming filmic attempts to build the fanciful, irregular and nonsensical narrative conclusion which this post is keen to address. The second half of Lynch’s film is a combination of pornographic imagery meant to distract the viewer from the narrative mess the film becomes, an incredible, ludicrous multiple character reversal, and a hodgepodge of loose ends featured at the conclusion in a very sorry attempt to justify their presence in the first half. The narrative construction of Mulholland Drive only becomes laughable after the first ninety minutes, supporting the theory that Lynch simply added content illogically to a failed television pilot.

The introduction of an unexplained key found by Rita at minute 45 and an unexplained, literal pandora’s box abruptly, truly magically, shifts the cinematic narrative when the blue box is discovered in Betty’s purse within Club Silencio, which Betty and Rita visit after having sex. The sex scene does not enhance nor lend meaning to the narrative structure of the film in any regard but rather sensationalizes the spectacle of female nudity, as do the succeeding sex scenes and portions of nudity. Once home, Betty magically disappears and Rita fits the key inside the box and the film’s narrative is quite literally thrown up into the air and the falling pieces randomly rearranged by Lynch. The fantasy life of Betty is magically transferred onto Rita. Rita’s amnesia, that is her forgotten life, the film attempts to claim is equal to Betty’s fantasy and as Betty explores Rita’s amnesia and falls in love with her (as she has fallen in love with the idea of Hollywood stardom), she (and the audience) begins to realize that her fantasy life is, somehow, the real life of Rita, which her amnesia was disguising. This transformation of character is so abrupt, so realistically unexplainable and so dependent upon suspension of disbelief that it must be regarded as a fault in the film’s construction, not a hidden gem explainable only through its inherent inexplicability.

After the pandora’s box is opened, Betty magically transforms into Diane, the waitress from Winkies. Rita magically transforms into Camilla, who is shown earlier auditioning for the film within the film. Betty’s (Diane’s) landlord turns into the director’s mother, which is nonsensical, as she would have mentioned that she had a Hollywood director son to Betty as she knew Betty was looking for acting work. Also, Betty (Diane’s) aunt conveniently dies, which conveniently explains the money Betty (Diane) uses to order the assassination of Rita (Camilla), after Rita (Camilla) is proposed to by the director, who is still the director. Then, Rita (Camilla) intimately kisses… Camilla, who is also present, for no justifiable reason, as Rita (Camilla) had won the film role introduced earlier. The second half of Lynch’s film is pure narrative comedy, only were the critics to realize. Though, despite extreme narrative inconsistency, Mulholland Drive does offer something of a Hollywood commentary worth considering.

Where Mulholland Drive is successful is its critical depiction of the oftentimes harmful desire, or craving, for fame and success achieved through the powerful machinery of Hollywood. Tools which bred machines have made possible the interaction between millions of people separated by hundreds, thousands of miles. Hollywood is a vehicle through which massive interaction and recognition is facilitated. Therefore, it is logical that humans who greatly value interaction and recognition, which all humans, to varying extents instinctually do, seek it out from an industry which is built upon the very impulse.

The danger in seeking such recognition from the amoral industry of Hollywood is accurately portrayed through the character Betty (prior to magically transforming into Diane). Lynch’s film describes Hollywood’s menace, the specter of fame which so often disguises the reality of poverty, crime, and abuse which constitutes the lives of many unsuccessful dreamers, a rank which Betty (Diane), inexplicably, joins. Betty’s initial girlish innocence is effective in rendering her later magical character transformation more potent, more painful to observe.

When addressing Rita, who borrowed her name from a poster of Rita Hayworth, Betty explains, “Well I couldn’t afford a place like this in a million years. Unless of course I’m discovered, and become a movie star. Of course I’d rather be known as a great actress than a movie star, but, you know, sometimes people end up being both. So that is, I guess you could say, sort of why I came here…and now I’m in this dream place!” (min 26). Within this scene Betty announces her whimsical naivety though her dreams of stardom by failing to offer any evidence that she knows or is aware of the potential sacrifices, consequences and risks of pursuing stardom. It is the destruction of this exact type of innocence for which Hollywood is disparaged. Lynch’s work is an interesting portrayal of such a loss of innocence, and a fair warning to would-be starlets that there is indeed a cancerous underbelly to the glitz and glamor, a dark reverse to the shining marquis; the price of fame can be as harmful as its rewards are desirous.

Rita’s amnesia, however, is a poorly explained, incoherent mechanism which is appropriated by the film to illuminate Betty’s fantasy life and to separate it from her actual experience in Hollywood. Betty discovers Rita hiding in the apartment in which she was staying, and pledges to help her discover the source of her amnesia and her real identity, which the audience plausibly suspects is the central plot of the film. Though, once the pilot content runs out and Lynch begins filming and writing blindly to turn failed television content into a film, things head south. The audience is endlessly confused, the plot is endlessly confused, characters’ sexual orientation is continually reoriented, and no meaning can be derived of anything.

Furthermore, Betty’s convulsions within Club Silencio serve no purpose, other than perhaps to allude to the magical nature of the club, which, in the opinion of this very serious blog post, is narrative cheating. The inclusion of an unexplainable event which may be applied to explain other unexplainable events is not professional, Hollywood-grade work by a long shot. Additionally, an unnamed character at Winkies in the beginning of the film faints at the sight of an unexplained dirt-monster. Perhaps these characters are convulsing in response to the ridiculous narrative their work is intended to support…

The final word of the film, Silencio, is most likely a personal message, from Lynch, to viewers who were able cut through the nonsense, something like please do not speak of this film if you realize what I did. The final shots of Hollywood through the window edited against shots of Betty’s beaming face seems to be a message of Lynch’s as well, saying Hollywood is to blame for not picking up the pilot, and now this is what you get!

But when the noxiously convoluted, inarticulate nature of the postmodern condition is applied as the measuring stick, Lynch’s work truly measures up. The postmodern condition is perhaps the only intellectual avenue through which a disorganized film such as Lynch’s can find an audience willing to entertain and even praise it. However, this film aught not to call itself postmodernist, nor should postmodernists call this film a postmodern work. Both the postmodern theory and the postmodern thinker suffer immensely to include this film among its ranks. Only if critical postmodernism is the misapplication of devices can Mulholland Drive be considered an expression of critical postmodernism. This post does not entertain the notion that critical postmodernism is the misapplication of devices; therefore, Mulholland Drive is absolutely not a form of critical postmodernism in any stretch of the, granted, highly stretchable, term, but has merely cunningly masqueraded as such.

This film is nothing but masturbation.

Thank you.