Dreams don’t make for compelling narratives. It’s not only that they refuse to follow normal storytelling logic. It’s also that they exist in a time and place that’s one, even twice, removed from reality, far away from the here and now. When it’s all said and done, dreams don’t matter.
When it comes to dream movies, then, it takes a different mind-set to appreciate why they might matter. Patience, for one thing, as well as the willingness to watch a movie not for a payoff (catch the bad guys, win the girl), but simply for the immediate experience of watching it. Like our wildest dreams, dream movies don’t have to make sense to fascinate us the morning after.
Writer-director David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive has been praised as a dream of a dream movie, and, by the end, it’s certainly more satisfying than most movies. Whether or not anyone outside Lynch’s loyal following (he’s best known for oddities such as Blue Velvet and television’s Twin Peaks) will appreciate his latest blurred vision depends on their ability to find satisfaction in apparent senselessness.
Learning that Mulholland Drive got its start as a proposed television series for ABC (when it was rejected, Lynch shot more scenes to complete it as a feature film) might at first seem to explain the movie’s scattered nature. But scattered is Lynch’s style. The slight narrative framework on which the movie is built concerns Betty, a perky and naive aspiring actress played by Naomi Watts. Fresh off the plane in Los Angeles, Betty moves into her aunt’s vacant apartment and finds a stranger, played by Laura Elena Harring, in the shower. The woman’s name is either Rita or Diane, but she — and we — never really know. Suffering from a sudden case of amnesia, all she can remember is surviving a car accident on Mulholland Drive and managing to stumble to Betty’s aunt’s empty home.
As the women begin a search for Rita’s real identity, Lynch ventures off into endless asides involving a beleagured movie director, a clumsy hit man, and some sort of mob boss who sits in a wooden wheelchair and issues ambiguous commands through a speakerphone that’s suspended in midair. You rarely know what these characters are up to and — true to form for Lynch — you may never find out.
Is all of this a puzzle or a lark? Are these clues or whims? These should be burning questions, but too often here they’re hardly even smoldering ones. At 146 minutes, Mulholland Drive is bizarre but occasionally boring. Without a dominant narrative strand, each individual scene carries a greater weight to be something of its own, outside of the rest of the film. Some of these succeed — that hit man performs a bungled murder in a farcical scene that could have come straight out of a silent comedy — but too often the movie’s would-be set pieces ramble even within themselves. By the time Betty and Rita take in an extended music solo at a mysterious after-hours theater (it occurs just about the same time most movies are delivering their payoffs), the patience of even Lynch’s most loyal fans may be wearing thin.
Then things get even stranger. After Betty and Rita return home from the performance, the movie folds in on itself; identities are swapped, locations are rearranged, the theater floor nearly shifts beneath your feet. All of this is jarring until you accept that everything that came before was a dream. (I won’t say whose.) Then many of the seemingly random details — that hit man’s mission, the director’s plight, even the budding romance that develops between Betty and Rita — begin to make a strange sort of sense. Before you know it, a respectable story even emerges: that of a young woman’s tragic fall at the hands of the Hollywood machine.
If the film’s final act provides it with closure of sorts, is it also a cop-out? After all, there’s no easier form of dramatic resolution than to wink and whisper, “It was all just a dream.” True Lynch fans may find the ending pat, but it’s also what makes the movie accessible to a wider audience. At once confounding and clever, Mulholland Drive lets us have our dream and understand it too.
