Night – Hollywood Hills. A hit job is bungled by a car crash. Our would-be victim (Laura Harring) climbs from the wreckage and stumbles, all legs like a new-born calf, into the dazzling lights of the city. The impact of the crash has robbed her of her memory.
Later that day, stepping into the sunlight and out of LAX, Betty Elms’ (Naomi Watts) takes in the scene and utters her first line. ‘Oh, I can’t believe it!’ Her mouth is practically agape and, if her face didn’t already express small-town naiveté, the friends she’s made on the flight over from Deep River, Ontario – a sweet elderly couple – would tell you that she’s new in town. She’s here to make her name in Hollywood, to become a movie star, or preferably a great actress – ‘sometimes people end up being both,’ she muses later.
Separating the two introductions is the first of several seemingly unrelated vignettes. It climaxes – naturally – with a man frozen in terror by a supernatural tramp lurking behind a coffee place. Using some narrative logic, Lynch lets the women’s paths cross. The crash victim shelters at Betty’s still-empty apartment, plucks the name ‘Rita’ from a film poster and gathers what recollections she has to share – memories of the crash, a purse full of money. Betty is sympathetic – perhaps seeing a kindred spirit as ready for re-invention as she is – and, eager to take up the role of amateur sleuth that Hollywood’s dumped on her lap, promises to help her new friend recover her identity.
To say more would spoil the appeal of the film. Mulholland Drive is something that you have to immerse yourself in, perhaps drown in, for the first half-dozen viewings. And while it feels familiar – the tale of the wide-eyed, virginal ingénue crushed by Hollywood is as old as the suicide of Peg Entwistle, and the success of The Artist shows Hollywood’s interest in itself is alive and well – Lynch’s ode to the town defies comparison. Billy Wilder’s similarly noirish Sunset Boulevard is as close as you get, but the films are as different as the roads. Sunset Boulevard runs straight through the heart of Hollywood, while Mulholland Drive snakes through the Santa Monica Mountains – a lonely atmospheric road that cuts back on itself to navigate rocky outcrops and sheer drops, where the spectre of every lonely suicide and overdose lingers in the darkness beyond car headlights.
It’s a limited analogy as roads generally lead somewhere or end up where they started. Mulholland Drive knots around itself and sits outside of historic time – apparently contemporary, there’s still jitterbug contests, Roy Orbison, joyriding teens. Comic farces rub up against decomposing corpses. Characters and identities double. Cameras pan out to reveal once sincere action taking place on a film set. It’s wonderful, mesmerising stuff, but the artifice that the film pokes fun at is bigger than just fiction. There’s a central scene that alludes at some kind of truth or demystification, but to call anything before it a dream and anything after ‘real’ seems to miss the point entirely. Interpretations are as provisional as the personalities the film shows.
In Twin Peaks supernatural elements offered clues that correlated to the material world. The power of the unconscious is a theme that Lynch, a devotee of transcendental meditation, has used for decades, but in this ‘dream place’ there’s no solid ground. Everything is bewildering, merely representational. What would be teenage solipsism in the hands of a lesser director becomes a contemporary classic made for an age where the artifice perfected in Hollywood is a part of the everyday.
The movies didn’t ‘get small’ as Norma Desmond boasts in Sunset Boulevard. They stayed big and got bigger. It was the people who shrunk.
