Essay: I Think About This Scene From 'Mulholland Drive' All The Time
R.I.P. David Lynch
There should be a 24/7, 1–800 number you can call with questions about the late David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, a movie I saw twenty-three years ago in the theater and have watched countless times since then. Ideally, after a few rings, a woman picks up and whispers “silencio” before gently hanging up.
There is no point in asking questions about Lynch’s masterpiece because there are no wrong answers. Not really. There’s a plot, but the plot is a road that winds up dark hills full of murder and hidden mansions. But a road is not a journey, and a plot is not a story.
Mulholland Drive is a mystery about lovers and dreamers and predators. Beautiful cannibals. It’s a Hollywood story, which is to say it’s a story about money and power and the terrible things people do for both. It’s a movie that is confusing and intoxicating, and yet if you watch and listen carefully, there is a message, and that message is: the old eat the young.
During its Golden Age, Tinseltown had many nicknames, including America’s Dream Factory, and Lynch’s bleak, clear-eyed vision of the entertainment industry is also a kind of factory where women go in one end and come out the other, broken. Some become stars, but most don’t. Who decides? Men.
But Mulholland Drive is also a head cold on a sunny day, a woozy hallucination. Have you ever woken up in a motel bed, sheets soaked and curtains closed, confused about where you are? Who you are? That’s where Lynch’s imagination lives, a mythic place where anguish has shape, fear licks its teeth, and love is a throat. Eyelids are silver screens.
His movies are fairy tales about good and evil that bubble up from the dark oceans of the subconscious—and Lynch desperately wants to believe the pure of heart can win, but he has doubts.
If you have a question about Mulholland Drive, ask it out loud—shout it if you want—the universe is listening, and whatever words pop into your head or feelings you have is the correct answer. Emotions, colors, shapes. Here's an answer: you are asleep right now. Another: yes, that's Billy Ray Cyrus. A third answer: everyone has a blue box. That's where we keep our pain.
What are your answers?
Ultimately, and this is another one of my answers, I believe David Lynch wants you to find yourself in his work. Far too many people think he’s pretentious or impenetrable, but he’s not. He’s a generous artist who finds delight in whatever you see in his moving pictures.
I haven’t stopped thinking about Mulholland Drive for years, and there’s one scene I always crave—every time. I wait for it. I see it coming, and I brace myself. It’s not even a scene, really. Just a moment. It's a simple edit—a sudden snap.
Mulholland Drive is made up of small moments, smirks and hats, and thousand-yard stares. Erotic scenes are inexplicably sad, and ordinary life is sensual. If you remember one or two of these split-seconds, that’s enough. You’ll think about it for years, even if you don’t remember it exactly.
This moment happens during the scene at the pool party full of beautiful people. Naomi Watts’ Diane is sitting at a table across from Lara Harring’s alluring Camilla and Justin Theroux’s Adam, a slick, up-and-coming director who is bold, and fierce — an iconoclast! — and who does what he’s told, and if he does what he’s told, he will get to eat who he wants. It’s a dreadful scene as the small-town girl is quietly mocked, her heart crushed; Watts’ face is slowly melting ice as Rita kisses another woman, Betty, who is everything Diane wants to be and as Adam and Rita start to laugh and canoodle—as Diane slowly implodes, betrayed—there’s a sudden crash. Diane turns her head, and there it is, this exquisite, subtle edit. A quick cut. A nick.
So Diane turns her head, and suddenly, it’s a different Diane at a diner, surprised by dishes crashing behind her. She has no makeup. She looks like she hasn’t slept. And she wants a hitman to murder a woman who looks like Rita. Her name is Camilla.
And that’s it—a turn of the head. I’m not a filmmaker, so there’s no reason I should know how Lynch and his longtime editor and former spouse, Mary Sweeney, made that edit. It’s perfect? Unsettling? One moment, you’re at a fancy nighttime dinner party, and a finger-snap later, slingshotted — transported — into a different reality, a dingier, angrier dimension, and it’s sunny; LA in the daylight is filthy and desperate.
From that moment on, Mulholland Drive has no brakes, which is why, no matter how many times I see it, I am wrecked at the end.
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I just rewatched Mulholland Drive last night(coincidentally). What an amazing confusing sexy scary monster of a great cinematic achievement. So many questions, but the pink paint was awesome. Okay what about Adam’s wife? No clue
I am that 1-800 number. You should call me.