David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (2001) has usually been celebrated for its weirdly oneiric narrative hijinks and its unsettling doublings of character. In 2012, the critic Miriam Bale identified the film as a key entry in a subgenre she coined the “persona swap” film, in which the personalities of two female characters become blended or swapped within a non-realist text – for Bale, Jacques Rivette’s Celine and Julie Go Boating (1974) represents the ur-text of this tradition. Jonathan Rosenbaum’s Chicago Reader capsule from the time of the film’s initial release calls it “a 146-minute piece of hocus pocus.” Clearly, many critics have been attracted to the radical openness of the film’s construction, its dual capacity to invite interpretation and to frustrate those very attempts at reading. The emphasis that’s been placed on the film’s “dream logic,” though, has sometimes obfuscated what is, for me, a key aspect of the film’s greatness: the deeply harrowing and depressive emotional texture running beneath the film’s ineffably cool, mysterious surface, or as Robin Wood might have called it, its “skull beneath the skin.”
Mulholland Drive is, in my view, one of the greatest of all films about living in solitude, about loneliness and unrequited love. The film’s disturbing and implicitly told story, about a character who longs to emotionally possess and control another, has more affinities with Hitchcock’s Vertigo than it does with Rivette’s joyous and comic feminist extravaganza. The “persona swap” at the heart of the film functions as more than a surrealist provocation; it inaugurates a shift in the power dynamic between its characters. The more literary and realist first part of the film, in which aspiring actress Betty (Naomi Watts, in a truly great performance) helps a lost soul with amnesia (Laura Elena Harring) try to recover her identity, depicts a friendship between women forming within the darkness of voluptuous mystery.
But as this relationship moves beyond friendship, the personalities of these characters become more fluid and intermingled – so the film grounds its reversal of identity in this vision of feminine carnality and homoeroticism. The devastating second part of the film shows Watts’s character isolated and sexually obsessed with Harring’s character, who has recoiled into a more remote and unknowable version of herself. Yet if these two women are in fact supposed to be regarded as two versions of the same character, then the film may also be read as a story about a person who loses touch with a part of themselves, or who loses any respect for their own emotional reality. The film may be offering up a shattered reflection, but the shards that we’re permitted to see look quite ugly and despairing indeed.
Mulholland Drive also possesses a gestural and behavioral richness which surpasses that of other Lynch films. It remains a great film about the human face: the shots of Betty and Rita seated in the backseat of a car, their faces intermittently illuminated by the streetlights of Sunset Boulevard, seem to mysteriously evoke the feeling of two people staring into a void or an abyss, in a way that always reminds me of Fellini’s La Dolce Vita (1960) and its corrosive excavation of bourgeois emptiness. The film uses the face of Ann Miller, one of the “past and dear funny faces” of Old Hollywood (who some viewers might remember from Stanley Donen’s 1949 musical On the Town), to conjure a self-consciously mythic and spectral atmosphere of Los Angeles’s own past.
The film also locates its poetry in isolated objects, absurdist details such as an oddly privileged close-up of a bowl of walnuts, which serve to distance the spectator from the more harrowing emotions of the story in a kind of Brechtian way. The more narratively consequential item of a Pandora’s Box, which Betty opens near the end of the film, recalls the apocalyptic conception of LA found in Robert Aldrich’s scorching noir Kiss Me Deadly (1955). All of these details place the mysterious story of Mulholland Drive in a very particular universe; it’s not exactly a completely abstract fantasy world, nor is it meant to be taken as the same world that we as viewers occupy. Rather, it’s something in between: a collectively remembered cinematic landscape, a shadow-world that occasionally resembles the one we’ve seen before on the silver screen. But this story will unfold in the dark corners and liminal spaces of this romantic world, in its abandoned apartments, and behind the dumpsters of its diners.
Lynch’s other creations, like Twin Peaks and Blue Velvet, have often placed a horrific or violent act at the heart of their stories. But I keep returning to the softer and equally broken world of Mulholland Drive, perhaps because at its core, the film remains a kind of romance, albeit a deeply tragic one. The film invites the viewer to understand a relationship that occurred between two people, or two versions of a person, through large swathes of mood and emotion, rather than in commonly agreed-upon narratological terms. The film’s melancholic romanticism rests upon a skeletal emotional structure which lives beneath the puzzling incidents that comprise its fiction. In this sense, it may be Lynch’s most ambitious and satisfying creation.
Mulholland Drive screens in 35mm at IU Cinema on February 14 at 7 pm.
Other Lynch films that have screened at the Cinema include Eraserhead in 2020, Blue Velvet in 2016, and Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me in 2013.
Jack Miller enjoys the films of Howard Hawks, Jacques Tourneur and John Ford. He graduated from Indiana University with a BA in English, and currently resides in Chicago. He also enjoys listening to country and disco music.