Note: On Mulholland Drive
Visual poetry from David Lynch
Ember is in Berlin to play at Soweiso tonight. Perhaps it’s the travel or the time of year, but I woke up thinking of the ending to David Lynch’s Mullholland Drive (2001).
Mulholland Drive begins with a dream— Lynch shows us a pillow right after the dance contest.
That dream is the story of Betty (Naomi Watts) and Rita (Laura Harring). There are dead ends, unfinished stories, and contradictory evidence, but the story can be seen as a riff on movie acting and filmmaking, of the perils and promise of sharing a dream with a huge, abstract public, of what happens when you invite the public to dream with you.
When Betty and Rita return from Club Silencio, the dream ends. Betty, our dreamer, wakes up and is actually Diane Selwynn, unhappy, evidently unemployed; later we realize she was pursuing an acting career. In a sustained bout of rage and jealousy, she hires a professional to kill the newly-ascendent actress Camila Rhodes, her ex-lover, previously Rita from her dream.
When Dianne is told that Camila is dead, she is enveloped in memories, consumed by guilt. Finally tortured by (what I’ve always seen as) the memory of the goodness inside her, she kills herself, and the story concludes.
The coda to Mullholland Drive— the tableau of smiling, golden Betty and Rita, intercut with the menacing figure from behind Winkie’s as Badalamenti’s score swells— is a peak of concise expression, a poetic combination of images whose implications will haunt me forever.
With just two images, Lynch suggests how our dreams and our natures are twinned to darkness, but that our darkness does not render us meaningless: our darkness does not negate our beauty, especially the beauty of our dreams. It’s up to us to decide between the two realities.
Mullholland Drive is the truth.
This is crisp, focused writing with genuine verve and a natural voice… Nice piece!
Been a while since I re-watched and I forgot how astonishingly powerful this ending is!
What's so amazing to me is that whether or not you untangle or comprehend all the details of the the dream/reality/timeline, symbols like the box/key, tiny people, the creepy guy, the shining blonde, the coffee cup, work through some deeper level to bring up all these deep meanings you describe. It's kind of a first-order challenge to figure out what actually happens in the film and what it means, but I think the real challenge is, as you say, feeling propelled back into reality with a sense of new choices and new possibilities.