poster_mulhollanddriveLately I’ve been making my way through The Great Movies reviewed on Roger Ebert’s website. Sometimes I’ll watch and then read his review, but I prefer to read his review and then watch to see whether I agree with his assessments. So far I’ve watched (or re-watched) the first five on the list (which were really the last five he wrote before he passed away). Like most film lovers of my generation, I admired Roger Ebert, and this exercise in viewing side-by-side with his critique has been rewarding and enjoyable. On Monday, I watched David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, which is one of the films on the list I was looking forward to reassessing. I saw it back in the early aughts when it came out on DVD, and I’ll admit what should be no surprise: the film baffled me. I wondered, would it still? Now that I have over a decade more of life experience, of books read and movies watched. Could I make head or tail of it this time around?

From Ebert’s review of Mulholland Drive, it obviously resisted interpretation for him as well. He likens the film to a dream and investigates the ways in which Lynch uses dream logic to hypnotize and enrapture us. He thinks the film a surrealistic experience that isn’t designed to make sense. But I think this assessment does the film an injustice, dream logic would imply no greater meaning or purpose. Viewing it now, a decade and a half after it was released (and reading no commentary other than Ebert’s), it strikes me that Mulholland Drive is a love letter to noir, an investigation into the magic and deceptions of Hollywood, and the ways that magic and deception toys with our emotions. This revelation, however, didn’t occur to me until I reached the scene where the film lost me the first time around. “Silencio!” Rita whispers in her sleep. She wakes and opens a magic blue box and the two main characters enter a theater and watch a performance where the trumpeter isn’t actually playing the trumpet, and a singer belting out a tearful gorgeous version of Roy Orbison’s “Crying” in Spanish collapses only to reveal that she hasn’t been singing.

Up until then, the film makes a kind of sense. It begins with a car crash on Mulholland Drive. The woman who later names herself Rita is forced from a limo at gunpoint, as two drag racing cars speed along heading directly for them. In Ebert’s review he mentions that the cars are from the 1950s, but he must have been writing from memory, since they’re both going too fast to get the make and model, and when the one crashes into a limo, it looks more like a 1980s Ford Taurus to me. But I might be wrong. In any case, Rita drags herself from the wreckage and falls asleep in the bushes outside Betty’s aunt’s apartment complex near Sunset Boulevard. Of course, as the camera lovingly pans across the street sign, we get our first clue that Lynch intends this as something of an homage. Rita sees that Betty’s aunt is leaving (looks like a longer vacation based on the luggage) and sneaks in to shower, rest, and figure out who she is. This is when Betty arrives to stay, full of dreams of becoming an actress. In this sense, she’s a type straight out of old Hollywood movies, the starry-eyed ingénue from the mid-west who has come to be in movies, but ends up disillusioned, and Naomi Watts is enchanting. The narrative then detours to a boardroom meeting between a director, producers, and two “serious” gentlemen who are probably mafia. They insist the director, Adam, (a young Justin Theroux) cast Camilla Rhodes as the lead in his upcoming film. When he resists he’s told he’s off the picture, and a string of strange events unfolds resulting in his being intimidated into casting Rhodes and returning to work.

By this point, it takes some work on the viewer’s part to figure out what’s going on, but this is because Lynch, as he’s often done in his career, defies storytelling expectations. He doesn’t ground us with background, but throws us disparate threads of a story that’s already going on and allows us to weave them together ourselves. There are, of course, surreal dreamlike elements: the man at the diner whose nightmare about this same spot comes true when he’s frightened into a heart attack by the homeless woman out by the dumpster. I’m still not sure how this fits in. But I’m okay with this, since I believe the film is designed to resist easy interpretation. Lynch allows us to arrive at our own conclusions, or at least, ask our own questions. Is the reason Adam needs to recast his film Rita’s disappearance? Was the original hit put out on her by these Mafioso in order to plug Camilla Rhodes into that role? We’re not given answers to this, but it’s one possible link. And how does the dead woman in a bungalow (also played by Naomi Watts, also another noir trapping Lynch plays with), who Rita and Betty discover after a diner waitress’s name-tag reminds Rita of the name Diane Selwyn, play into this?

When the film shifts after the “Silencio” scene at the club, Betty becomes Diane Selwyn and Rita becomes Camilla Rhodes. Does Lynch mean this as a metafictive commentary to remind us we’re watching a movie? That the roles are interchangeable? That the actresses acting out these parts can switch back and forth between them? He provides us with one possible interpretation to how Selwyn ended up on that bed in the bungalow. But is it the true one? Is there any truth at all when movies are involved? Or do they simply dazzle? Is it all smoke and mirrors? And what does it say about our reality that film can move us so deeply when it’s all deception? I’ve seen articles or clips titled Mulholland Drive Explained. But I don’t believe there’s just one explanation to what’s going on in this film. David Lynch strikes me as a bit too crafty for that. At the same time, if this were all just a dream, none of what happens would matter. But I believe Lynch is asking us to question these things. And he’s having a whole lot of fun entertaining us while doing that.