Mullholland Drive raises numerous problems for narrative theory – is it a case of an unmarked dream sequence? Is it unreliable narration (as Laass explores)? Is it parametric cinema, art cinema, or Hollywood cinema? How do the extratextual markers of Lynch and the failed ABC pilot shape our comprehension? Or are we even supposed to try to comprehend the film? In short, what’s up with this film? (And anyone who wants to investigate the film’s meanings & backgrounds, the Wikipedia page is excellent, as is this interpretation on Salon and this vast fansite.)
6 thoughts on “Responses for 11/11”
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I think Mullholland drive is suggestive of a coherent narrative, but it is fundamentally incoherent. And i don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. By hinting at connections, hinting at consistencies, Lynch entices us to connect the dots, invites us to construct a coherent fabula, but any given viewer will come to his or her own conclusion about what happened in the film. Lynch invites multiple interpretations.
After all, this was meant to be a pilot. Pilots are supposed to be open ended, they are supposed to arouse intrigue.
The other thing i know about Lynch, after getting bogged down in the later stages of Twin Peaks, is that if the logical end to a story has been reached, Lynch will turn to the spiritual or metaphysical. In the case of Twin Peaks the show was basically predicated on finding the killer of laura palmer. Early in the second season they find that the killer was actually Leland, laura’s father. But they still have a whole season to fill so they say, Oh wait, no, it wasn’t laura’s father, it was really the responsibility of some kind of spirit that was possessing laura’s father against his will. That’s where i lost interest. Anyway the point is i don’t think there is necessarily a logical explanation to this narrative (even though it cues us to think there is), but there may be a spiritual or figurative one.
i personally came out of it thinking more or less along the lines of the ‘dream’ interpretation mentioned on the wiki page…
After watching the film and reading the Salon article, I can kind of make sense of this movie. However, while I’m actually watching David Lynch I like to simply prepare for confusion and take what comes with humor. Even if I don’t know what’s going on, I can still enjoy the idea of watching a spectacular fantasy. Though I’m hesitant to qualify Lynch, I think Lynch is an example of parametric narration. It’s difficult to categorize because it simultaneously possesses qualities of art cinema and Hollywood cinema. Lynch’s great skill is to fit so many clashing elements into one movie. Sometimes it was a cheesy horror movie and other times it was unsettlingly familiar. Its commentary on Hollywood as well as references to Hollywood greats also makes it both somewhat political and historical. Although there is no explicit narration, I think the film’s dreamlike qualities immediately establish it as unreliable. If it were a reliable narration, I think it would be much more boring.
Being my second viewing of the film, I think that Mullholland Drive actually does have a coherent plot. The confusion stems from the actual plot only being about 15 minutes of the two and a half hour movie.
As I see it, the plot of the film is Diane (naomi watts) comes to Hollywood, falls in love (or at least lust) with Camilla (laura harding) who soon after wants to break off the relationship to be with the director, throwing it in Diane’s face at parties. This causes Diane to hire a hit-man to kill Camilla, a deed that is completed as seen by the blue key. Diane goes to bed, but is woken up by her neighbor looking for her dishes, who tells her two detectives are looking for her. This causes a panic attack, which leads to an attack of her conscious for he deed, which leads to her suicide, the finale of the film.
However, while sleeping before her neighbor wakes her up, Diane has the dream where she is Betty and Camilla is Rita, the bulk of the film. The movie is made confusing by a seemingly complete disregard for the order in which the story is told and the fact that Diane dreams like a real person dreams, not like a “movie person” dreams. In movies, dreams almost always point to something in the plot, or at least something about the character that the audience should know. However, I believe Lynch has Diane dream as a real person would dream. Betty is the ideal person she wants to be, with Rita being in love with her and depending on her. But, other things, like the Spanish theater at 2 in the morning and “The Cowboy” are inconsequential, only there because Diane dreamed them and nothing more.
In this way, I think Lynch has taken very typical Hollywood Cinema, with a love affair, scandal and the resulting consequences and transformed it into art cinema by having most of the film be a dream where motives become inconsequential and various imagery and characters can be interpreted differently by every person who sees the film.
I still have absolutely no idea what’s going on with the monster behind the diner who holds the blue box.
This is my third viewing of this film and I have to say that it still intrigues me to the core, I love it! I really need to see more of David Lynch’s work. Anyone with any familiarity with Lynch’s filmmaking style will definitely identify his postmodernist approach: the offbeat tone, the bizarre acting style of some of the performances, the mysterious and confusing plot; they are all Lynch’s trademarks. I actually think the first part of the movie (before we enter the blue box) tells a coherent narrative working in a more or less conventional Hollywood style, albeit with some art cinema elements like and ambiguous or unclear fabula. We go back and forth between the A plot (Betty and Rita’s situation) and a B subplot (Adam, the Hollywood director). I think, as we go through it, we are led to believe that these two threads are connected somehow, but I don’t think we’re given many clues with respect to this. Lynch intentionally plays with the idea that the narrative presents all the important details and information of the fabula story world; in other words, if we see it happen on screen, then it’s relevant. This assumption is undermined as we see many mundane activities given much attention (a man spits out his espresso) and we are introduced to characters who seem to have little or no impact to the overarching story (if there is one). I actually think this is where a lot of confusion springs from; these events invite interpretation, at least one of a coherent kind. Also, some have proposed the explanation of one part of the film being an imagined dream of the other. I disagree with this only on the grounds that we are not really given explicit signs that such is the case. If there is a flashback or a dream sequence, we are not cued, at least not in the traditional or conventional Hollywood style.
This was the first time I’ve seen Mullholland Drive The Wikipedia page was very helpful, I wasn’t at all sure what to do with the movie. Knowing that the “normal” or “less confusing” part of the movie was made for television makes it easier to separate the two stories in my mind: Story 1–Betty and Rita; Story 2–Diane and Camilla. I like to think that they are sort of alternate realities. The Hit man messes up Camilla’s murder and she stumbles into Betty’s life, but Diane’s story line happens simultaneously. How else do you get a scene where a very alive Betty discovers a very dead Diane and both characters are played by the same actress? Or maybe the harry man with the blue box is some sort of ‘dream keeper’ and the man in the diner is afraid of what will happen? I could go on forever.
As for what kind of film this is, I think this is the most compelling argument for Ndalianis’s Neo-Baroque I’ve seen. In her article, she says that the 5th prototype has “no single, stable, linear framework [that] dominates.” Mullholland Drive is certainly open ended. There are multiple narratives that cross each other. One can easily see how Lynch saw this as an open-ended TV series. In class, Ndalianis explained how Neo-Baroque was not mutually exclusive from Hollywood. At certain points, one style will grow to include the other. Mullholland Drive has elements of Hollywood Cinema, and the non-classical aspects of the film work to help it avoid closure.
I do see Mulholland Drive still falling under the category of Hollywood narrative, but the issue that makes the film confusing for me would be its attempt to convey philosophical meaning through visual monikers, as well as its inextricable relationship to its paratext. Before one can delve into what formal characteristics create a confusing fabula it must be said that author intention and presence is clearly at play in this film. David Lynch is notoriously known for his narrative divergence in order to relay meaning through patterned, stylistic techniques. For example, acclaimed film, Blue Velvet (1986), begins within a familiar world recognizable to audiences as suburban America, which looks rather dreamlike in presentation, but still very believable. At the same time, the syuzhet feels to be sacrificed in Lynch’s display of exaggerated performance and visual presentation. To illustrate, the beginning of the film vividly launches audiences into an underground world of crime and mystery when the main character, Jeffery Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan), discovers a missing ear in a field. Film theorists, including, David Foster Wallace, believes David Lynch’s post-modernist approach to the making of Blue Velvet pays homage to Lynch’s auteur ethos of tying in “inter-textuality,” “the blurring of high and low cultural boundaries,” and the “ambiguous and uncertain nature of living.”
http://www.britishfilm.org.uk/lynch/blue_velvet.html
David Lynch’s personification of the presence of an underground world doesn’t start with the discovery of the ear, but rather with the death of the old man in the beginning, which initiates the sequence of the extreme close-up of the beetles writhing in the soil. In Mulholland Drive, audiences are launched into one specific plotline, which then later presents another one that is left in arms due to its random, dream-like conclusion. Audiences leave the film feeling very confused and incomplete. Though many can return to the film with a critical eye the initial meaning to audiences is unclear, where the film can easily be dismissed as art cinema. However, as stated earlier, the extra-textual context is highly subverted, where the film was actually designed to be a television series. For me, this explained why I felt the film was incomplete in absolving the plot with a resolution. I feel the film would have to approach nearly three hours or combine the paralleled stories in order to follow the conventional Hollywood style of filmmaking. I may be wrong about this hypothesis, but having a “to be continued” explanation certainly gives theorists—as well as myself—a better ground to analyzing this film. I’m just too stumped to think of anything else.