Film #145: Blue Velvet

This is a reprint of my first NYC-published review. It was first printed in a long-dead 1986 NYU film school magazine, right after I had seen Lynch's movie with a disbelieving audience partially comprised of unsuspecting 1986 film students. My fellow NYU film production cadets and I watched the film together at an East 28th street NYC theater upon its release (I, personally, had been looking forward to this event with great anticipation; I, in fact, FORCED all these people to come see this movie with me, as I was a longtime Eraserhead and Elephant Man fan; and thus my cohorts were scarred forever--none of them had any idea who David Lynch was at that time, and they all looked at me quite differently afterwards, I believe).

I am reprinting my review now in full, with many corrections; still, the original spirit, and structure, and most of the writing, is contained. The minor changes to my initial article have occurred after a recent big-screen revisiting of the film, with fellow 20-something viewers who'd never seen the movie (this made me feel really old; still, it made me feel great that these new 2011 viewers exited the showing just like my 1986 NYU buddies did). I've tried mightily to retain the essence of seeing Blue Velvet for the first time in this review; there're no mentions of Lynch's subsequent works here, though for a truly full post-1990 review, such mentions would be necessary. That said, I think Blue Velvet will always remain the quintessential David Lynch movie, even though I think he's made better films since (read: Mulholland Dr.). Anyway, here's my review, quite largely written in 1986 innocence, with only four subsequent David Lynch features to follow:

What, exactly, is a David Lynch film?

Well, maybe it would be simpler to ask what it is NOT first. It is, for instance, not a textbook for most of the carefully computed formulas of other Hollywood products. Yet it always condones and concludes with that most traditional of Hollywood devices: the happy ending (even though the delicate and syrupy denouements Lynch imposes on his films usually--and purposefully--go to show us how fatally stupid most happy endings are).

A David Lynch film, also, never belongs to either its actors or the crew that worked on it. These artists certainly help the pictures along their surreal tracks. But the end result belongs to Lynch and Lynch alone. Never one to be chintzy with his visuals, this 38-year-old's background as a painter is startlingly obvious when one examines the lush shades and tones contained in his two black-and-white masterpieces, Eraserhead and The Elephant Man--two films that are injected with more ocular vibrancy than most color efforts. Even Lynch's first color film (how many times, since the 1960s, has THIS phrase been written in film criticism?), the gigantically-scoped but still fatally hamstrung 1984 adaptation of Frank Herbert's classic sci-fi novel Dune was still an energetically-hued jolt to the senses.

Above all, though, a David Lynch movie is never, EVER easy to take. With their bitter compare-and-contrast ironies, their fetidly twisted yet tender characters and unshakable images of ugliness that accompanies them, a David Lynch production is certainly not for the squeamish, shallow, or hopelessly average.

With all of this in mind, then, Blue Velvet begs to be considered as the quintessential David Lynch movie. It is, at once, exhilarating and exhausting. When the final credits are being superimposed upon a dynamic curtain made of the title fabric, the viewer feels resolutely steamrollered. This is what it feels like to put yourself in the control of a filmmaker who delights in every aspect of moviemaking. All of art is about the battle of control: control of its technical aspects, while its key artist is out of control of the forces that binds him or her; and as for the audience, there is the relinquishment of all control. All of life is a similar tightrope walk; lose your balance and you are finished. Lynch seems to have beat the system. He walks the rope.

Some people cannot take what goes on in Blue Velvet. They are hooked by the film's ambling first 30 minutes, but when the change comes (and, boy, does it come), they cannot brave it. Inevitably, when Dennis Hopper's stunning Frank Booth enters the scene, there are walkouts. Some viewers--more specifically, ones not familiar with the director's past works--consider putting their eyes in the grips of a director of this ilk to be an act of madness. But David Lynch is such a magnificent director that the more thoughtful moviegoers would have to look hard to find true fault with what he gets on celluloid, no matter how dangerously unbalanced it may be.

On its surface, Blue Velvet appears to be the kinkiest movie mystery ever made--which, of course, it is. Beyond all that, though, it's about what goes on UNDERNEATH surface appearances; we learn this early on, when an average man falls victim to an threatening internal struggle while, outside, another struggle for survival takes place beneath his well-watered lawn. This man's grass might be keen on the surface, but there are gnawing black beetles chomping away at those roots.

Blue Velvet takes Shakespeare's timeworn moral "All that glisters is not gold" (from The Merchant of Venice) and twists it to improbable shapes. With this first scene, scored with Bobby Vinton's lilting 1963 version of Bernie Wayne and Lee Morris' 1950 standard, David Lynch plunges us into the seedy underbelly of an outwardly serene lumber town named, appropriately enough, Lumberton. And so, the writer/director contorts one of the Bard's favorite iambic lessons like it's never been contorted before. Absolutely nothing in Lumberton is as it seems: not the rosy, white-fenced gardens, nor the store-lined main streets serving as beards for bizarre crime rings, nor the model nuclear families bearing through tragedies of grotesque proportions, and neither the quaint little sharp-gabled homes that, with their obligatory skeletons, standing as monuments to the emaciated American Dream. Even here, in the most scrubbed and naive God-fearing communities, moral and sexual decay cannot be staved off (or can it?).

Jeffrey Beaumont (expertly underplayed by Kyle MacLachlan) has just come back from visiting his hospitalized, desperately enfeebled father (looking very much like Kenneth McMillan's horrible Baron Harkkonen from Dune, minus the pus-filled facial warts). On the way back home, Jeffrey returns to a field, throwing rocks at an old green bottle, when he discovers an ant-infested, messily hacked-off human ear. Searching for something to engage him in this quiet city, he nonchalantly retrieves the ear and plops it in a brown paper bag (I think his discovery of the ear visually matches his discovery of future vaginas). Jeffrey delivers the ear to his neighbor, Detective Williams (an unnerving George Dickerson), at his downtown office. "Yes, that's a human ear alright," he says, looking into the bag suspiciously. (There's a lot of smart-aleck dialogue in the first part of Blue Velvet; it's meant to put you in a place of upheaval later on.) After having his men search the field, Williams--sensing that Jeffery is a wannabe detective as he once was--insists that Jeffrey not get involved in the investigation. "Once the case is all sewn up, we'll call you in" Williams says, in the first of many of the script's hilarious word-plays.

What Williams has not counted on, however, is the involvement of his daughter, Sandy (a gorgeous Laura Dern). After Jeffrey's visit to the Williams household, Sandy emerges from the darkness, in her pink sweater and feathered blonde hair, asking "Are you the one that found the ear?" She protests throughout, but she's just as hungry as Jeffrey is for some excitement in Lumberton. Clearly in the throes of a crush, she approaches Jeffrey and tells him of the "bits and pieces" she's "heard" about "the ear." For example, a name she says keeps popping up in her father's conversations belongs to the Slow Club (is this a reference to how "slow" the film is in its first half-hour?). The main attraction there is a singer named Dorothy Valens (Isabella Rossellini), who's more popularly known as The Blue Lady. (I need to mention now the film's contributions by sound designer Alan Splet, cinematographer Frederick Elmes, production designer Patricia Norris, editor Duwayne Dunham, the sublime sound designer Alan Splet, and the fantastic score's composer Angelo Badalamenti, who collaborated with lyricist David Lynch on the film's one original song, "Mysteries of Love;" I have to also note the film's magnificent source music score that includes Ketty Lester's "Love Letters," William Doggett's "Honky Tonk (Part I)," and and most importantly, Roy Orbison's "In Dreams," lip-synched unforgettably in a powerful one-scene performance by a powder-puffed, mascarared Dean Stockwell).

Jeffrey goads Sandy--who has a football player boyfriend--into attending the Slow Club with him, after enticing her with the unknown quantities of this town-wide mystery. She sees the danger, but is excited by it. They have an uncomfortable conversation about the beers they order--Heineken (which is LATER answered by one of the most powerful brand-name retorts ever: "FUCK THAT SHIT. PABST BLUE RIBBON!"). And then Dorothy appears onstage. Backed with brightly blue and red lighting, she delivers the movie's signature tune, "Blue Velvet" in her own inimitable, slightly stiff way. Hearing her voice, Jeffery is immediately intrigued; aroused, even. The day after, he meets with Sandy and concocts a scheme to sneak into the singer's apartment in order to get more clues about this severed ear.

Naturally, this is either a grave mistake or a stroke of luck. From here on--and no more will be said about the plot of Blue Velvet--Jeffrey is subjected to the harsh discourtesy of Frank Booth (the incredible Dennis Hopper), who's a drug-crazed, foul-mouthed Freudian nightmare with a fetish for snooky nitrous oxide and (what else?) blue velvet. From this point on, Jeffrey and Snady are thrust into the black heart of everything that is evil--rape, kidnapping, assault, joyriding, drug addiction and, finally, murder.

With all the intricate plotting at the center of Blue Velvet, is it too innocent a notion to dismiss the contrast between Lumberton's sunny daytimes and sinister nights as just a more vivid way of reiterating Shakespeare's aforementioned maxim? Probably so. Blue Velvet is too vivacious a film to be limited to just that. Like each of David Lynch's movies, almost anything--depending on the personality of the viewer--can be read into the story. The movie could be seen as a criticism aimed at the clash between the passive, TV-blitzed 1950s America (notice, in the opening scene, Jeffrey's mother as she watches a spooky, gun-toting film noir movie on her television) and the liberated, degenerated, yet socially-aware USA of the 1960s and 70s.

Lynch's film could also be an examination of a people who have no conscious, but many unconscious, desires to examine their sexual undercurrents (this describes the straitlaced Jeffrey perfectly; he blanches at every mention of Sandy's sexual unavailability, but has the slightest resistance to Dorothy's learned perversions, even though his participation in them leads him to nightmares and devastating crying jags; likewise, Sandy has many detailed desires of her own). Blue Velvet is surely, in the end, a harsh indictment of every counterculture our society has had to house over our past century--yet its also a celebration of such outbursts; it's the perfect mirror of the seemingly, astoundingly square visage of David Lynch, a man who marks only cigarettes and coffee as his vices, yet who clearly purveys a potpourri of glazed insanity.

Taking into account his entirely mindblowing 1978 film Eraserhead, and his radically different (but still similar) 1980 bio-pic The Elephant Man, as well as his inevitably failed 1984 adaptation of Dune, we still have to count David Lynch as a card-carrying member of the modern rebellion. However, we cannot ignore the fact that, while audiences may laugh uncomfortably and disparagingly at the sweet, myopic one-sidedness of Sandy's devoted monologue about the hopeful robins and their simultaneous brightness of love (surely one of the more inspired scenes in Lynch's film, even if it's not visually glossy), we choke in pure, nervous terror at the more electric, presently-oriented scenes with the terrifying Frank Booth and his chosen victim, Dorothy Valens. At last, Lynch seems to be asking us: "Wouldn't we all rather be saddled with blinders, as the Williams and the Beaumont families are, than be caught up with the looser but ultimately more debilitating and depressing non-conformities that belong to Frank and Dorothy?" In other words, be thankful for what you have got, because the grass is NOT always greener. This is a dazzling thing to learn from any movie.

This final theory seems a bit more weighty when examining the casting choices Lynch made regarding his available roles in Blue Velvet. Kyle MacLachlan and Laura Dern, as notable screen newcomers, stand as personalities primed for corruption. Meanwhile, we have an ineffably superb Dennis Hopper--a villain if ever there was one--playing Frank Booth. Hopper has been a counterculture figure since the mid-1950s. He was one of the hoods pitted against James Dean in Nicholas Ray's 1954 film Rebel Without a Cause. He opposed his Texan father (Rock Hudson) by wanting to marry a Mexican woman in George Stevens' 1956 film Giant. He was the isolated, mermaid-loving hero in Curtis Harrington's 1961 indie film Night Tide. He was a vocal admirer of Paul Newman's defiant Cool Hand Luke, in Stuart Rosenberg's 1967 movie. And he was, we all know, the star, co-writer, and director of 1969's Easy Rider, a story about two outsiders trying to rediscover America. Hopper has been associated with EVERY discontented youth movement to see the ink of national headlines. Who in the world could be more suited to play one of the most extreme sensation-seekers ever to be committed to film? Meanwhile, Isabella Rossellini was the very human product of mother Ingrid Bergman's then-scandalous 1950s love affair with Italian film director Roberto Rossellini (an avowed agent of worldwide change himself). She plays Dorothy, yet another innocent person jammed in the middle of what is seen by outsiders as pure peccadillo. She's been labelled by her parents' "sin," even if its not of her own making. While this is so, she's resplendent in every shot, even when bruised and beaten. (Laura Dern's unrelenting mask of dejection, upon the apex of the worst date ever filmed, smacks up cinema's most horrible nude scene, and makes it sublimely memorable; who has a face like Laura Dern's?)

Regardless, with all of this evidence--and forgive me if I appear to be shooting down my own theory--there is a strong possibility that Lynch means to convey to his audience an embrace of solid happiness, even in the face of cultural criticism. There's a great significance in the presence of the joyous (perhaps TOO joyous) outcome for the Beaumont and Willams' families following their momentary trifling with the murderous Frank Booth. The film concludes with the most knowingly corny of happy endings--just as did Lynch's Eraserhead. The robins return--with the evil black beetles in their beak---while Jeffrey's father is cured, the weather is once again beautiful, and lunch is on the table. Sandy and her beau appear to be in a state of bliss. Who knows what's next?

Film #81: Mulholland Dr.

NOTE: This is an article primarily for those who’ve already seen this movie, so SPOILERS abound. Still, see the movie if you haven’t--it's a must-watch--and then read this.


Just recently, I perused an article on Daniel Johnson’s Film Babble Blog titled 7 Years Later, Does Mulholland Drive Make Any More Sense? In it, Johnson vividly recounts a recent experience of watching David Lynch’s 2001 film with a group that had largely never seen it before, many of whom, when the film was through, were just as befuddled as a lot of viewers have long been with it for seven years. I would say Johnson characterizes some members of the audience as being absolutely infuriated by Lynch’s work, because it’s a movie that refuses to explain itself (much like Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey—one of Lynch’s favorite films--did back in 1968, when a lot of people were similarly either fascinated or angered). Anyway, Johnson’s article has inspired me to finally put down into words an interpretation of this masterpiece—one that only peeked at my conscious initially.

Now, I’ve never read word one regarding an explanation of Mulholland Dr. (which is the REAL title of the film—the word “drive” is not supposed to be spelled out; I’ll quickly explain why later). I never wanted to, because I chose to just enjoy the film in all its beauteous mystery. However, upon the second or third viewing, the puzzle pieces clicked into place for me and I’m now satisfied that my interpretation is the “correct” one. Unfortunately, this might robs Lynch’s film of some of its chilling perplexity, but it also gives it more of a sense of tragedy and heart. I’m fine with the trade-off. Mulholland Dr. will remain circuitous enough for me, and will continue to contain a lot more clues to other interpretations that could be just as valid as my own. At any rate, it will always be interesting enough for many more viewings. This on top of the fact that it is unspeakably gorgeous to look at and listen to make it a top favorite of mine, and certainly one of Lynch’s greatest achievements as America's premier living moviemaker.

Before delving deeply into Mulholland Dr., the viewer has to recognize that Lynch has three major obsessions in his work: abstraction, eroticism and—most importantly--dreams. And they further have to realize that any filmmaker who’s interested in dreams is also very much interested in the machinations of film art itself. And I mean, beyond looking at film as a way to tell a story or make a buck. Lynch, I feel, like any great director--Coppola and Kubrick have said this is so--sees the very viewing of films as a replication of the dream state. Think about it: we’re in a darkened room; we’re perfectly still; we’re (ideally) quiet; and we’re raptly interpreting mere shadows on a wall. You gotta admit, that’s about as close to wakeful dreaming as you’re going to get. This is part of what bewitches us all about the EXPERIENCE of watching a movie—and by that, I mean going to a theater to watch a movie. Lynch will tell you that this is really the ideal way to experience a film. He doesn’t really condone the viewing of his movies anywhere but in a theater (he doesn’t even put chapter stops on most of his DVD releases), In a theater, you’re lulled into a dreamy fog by the very nature of projected film, because you have no other choice: you've given yourself over completely to it. So, rightly, Lynch uses this technology to lure the viewer into the abstracted worlds he creates.

So we know now that dreams and movies are two things that are important to this artist. That’s good, because remembering that is key to interpreting Mulholland Dr.

Now think back for me. In almost every movie that has ever been made, if the filmmaker is attempting to show a character we’re following as they experience a dream, they will first introduce the character and his/her however complicated situation, then show them going to sleep, or asleep in the bed or whatever, then they’ll show us the dream they’re experiencing in their head. Then they’ll show the character waking up from that dream, usually wide-eyed and sweaty. This is almost always the case, unless the filmmaker is trying to trick us into thinking something outlandish is happening in reality when BANG the dreamer awakens and we find it was only happening in their tired brains.

So we have here: real life, sleep/dream, awakening. The natural three act structure of a dream on film (or in reality).

Movies, too, have three acts: set-up, conflict, resolution. Just to remind you, this is very similar to the structure we all experience when we go to sleep. We set-up our bed, we go to sleep, and then have conflicts with the various thoughts rattling around in our heads, and then we wake up and resolve to make sense of it all (or to forget the whole thing) before we go on with our day.


What Lynch, I think, decided to do with Mulholland Dr(eam) is to mess with the natural order of each set of three acts. In his film, we get the dream/conflict (the second act) first, THEN we get the real life/setup (the first act), THEN we get the awakening/resolution. It’s really that simple.

I think it’s important to briefly remind the reader of what dreams are or could be. I say “could be” because no one really knows if they have any meaning or not. There's no provable answer. We could go all Freudian and say that everything in a dream is a symbol for something else. We could say that dreams are the brain relishing in its holder’s deepest fears and desires. Or we could just say that dreams are the random neural sweepings of an average day—that they are the mindjunk with which we no longer have any practical use. I think that dreams are all of these things, and more: they can be prophecy, craft, regret, horror, wackiness, want, jumpiness, memory, relaxation, inspiration, and escape, at once and all together. And Lynch's Mulholland Dr. reflects those attributes more accurately than any of his other dream-obsessed works.


That said, Mulholland Dr. begins with a dazzling, purple-hued swing dance number—set to the first bit of Angelo Badalamenti’s astonishing score--in which we see real couples athletically dancing behind a process shot of even more couples dancing. We don’t have any idea what this intro means, really, until—if we’re paying attention—later on in the film. It’s here that we see our first images of Betty, played with utmost brilliance by Naomi Watts. But we only see her here as a ghostly, smiling visage.


Then we see a camera drifting through an apartment, into a bedroom, and into a pillow on the bed. Easy enough. Someone’s going to sleep. But who? Maybe it’s us? Someone else? We don't know, so we have to continue on...

Now we cut to a limousine, at night, driving up Mulholland Drive, creeping through the darkened, mysterious road that Lynch himself says inspired the first spark of an idea for him. The credits begin to roll here. I say this because credits--despised by many--are the natural signifiers to the beginnings and ends of movie dreams. Credits sequences ease us into the phantasm of cinema, and end credits wake us up; this is why you see so many people get up out of their seats at the first sign of end credits: they're trying to get on with their day. At any rate, we watch this limo cruising behind the credits, and then the horrible thing that befalls it once they are over. And from here we're lead into a mystery involving a dark-haired woman (Laura Elena Harring) who wanders, dazed, away from this scene and ultimately into an abandoned Hollywood apartment.


It’s here that we see our first shining images of Betty, played with verve by Naomi Watts. I remember hearing great things about Watts’ performance way before the film was released (it had won the Best Director award at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival before it was unleashed on theaters the following fall). But her first line readings, to me, seemed stiff, unreal—as if she were acting a role, and acting it badly. Still, I stayed with her, because Betty here is total sunshine and sweetness, her pink sweater nearly busting its buttons with enthusiasm. I have to admit, I loved her right from the start: it's one of cinema's most notable breakthrough performances. Anyway, Betty is escorted out of the L.A. airport at which she’s just arrived by an elderly couple who wish her well in her Hollywood sojourn. In a bizarrely looped conversation (Lynch is far too advanced a sound master to have sonically crafted these scenes in any way but in the lame-brained fashion they're received), Betty and the seniors part ways, the elderly couple getting into a limo (we get a bizarre glimpse of them driving away that’s a little portent of things to come: remember these people...), while Betty climbs into a cab.


Now, I have to stop myself. It’s not my intention to write a shot-by-shot support of this interpretation of Mulholland Dr.--I wouldn’t wanna take the fun or the challenge of the movie away from anyone who hasn’t seen it. But let’s just say that the meeting of these two women--Watts and Harring--and the relationship that develops between them is very much the center of the movie. It’s a pairing, at this point, that’s largely controlled by Betty. The dark-haired woman, afflicted with amnesia from a head trauma, has to rush for a name once she awkwardly meets Betty (bare naked in a shower, her very image sliced into clumps by the shower glass). Frantic for an identity, she takes the name “Rita” from a glimpsed poster for another film about obsession Gilda, starring Rita Hayworth. (That, alone, could be the basis for a film theory thesis right there, and probably already has been.)


Rita, throughout this first part of the film, is at Betty’s mercy, like a lost pup taken in by a fizzy girl. Betty and Rita are two sides of one personality, each intermingling with each other (the film sometimes feels like Lynch’s take on Bergman’s Persona, mirroring some shots from that masterpiece). Rita even takes to covering up her long black hair under a wig that replicates Betty’s short blond ‘do. further driving home the confluence between these co-mingling identities. What follows is a mystery that often feels like the adaptation of a Nancy Drew book while simultaneously being a passionate love story between off-guard paramours, replete with cinema's sexiest love scenes.


There are a few more elements in this section of the movie. We get the introduction of two detective characters (Robert Forster and Brent Briscoe) who unfortunately promptly disappear (just like some characters do in dreams, don’t ya know). We have two Winkie’s diner patrons: one (Patrick Fischler) who recounts a terrifying vision to his friend, and then is doomed to relive it right there. And we get a grisly though humorous scene with a hit man (Mark Pellegrino) who messes up a job somethin’ awful. And then we get Justin Theroux as Adam Kesher, the bespectacled, put-upon director who’s being uber-pressured into casting a specific girl for a role in his shitty movie—to the point where, midfilm, he’s called to a secret conference at an abandoned ranch where he confers with a creepy calm cowboy (veteran Lynch producer Monty Montgomery, here billed as Lafayette Montgomery, who blesses us with one of most riveting one-scene performances ever in motion pictures). Let's remember that the cowboy is one of Hollywood's most iconic images. Let's also remember that we DO see this character TWO more times. And notice his scene ends with an image of the Hollywood sign: Mulholland Dr. is very much, also, about the conflicting images of Hollywood--as a dream maker and a Marilyn Monroe-killing dream breaker.

There are more characters: Betty’s chatty landlord (MGM veteran Ann Miller, in her final film role); a spooky, psychic next-door neighbor (Oscar-winner and one-time blacklistee Lee Grant); a band of terrifying film financiers (Dan Hedaya and composer Angelo Badalamenti); an unctuous film producer (James Karen--the cemetery-upending villain of Poltergeist) who auditions Betty with a scene from a gunky soap opera where she’s to play a love-clamp with a much older man (Chad Everett); a pool cleaner (Billy Ray Cyrus) who's caught messing around with Adam's wife; and an extra-weird overlord named Mr. Rogue (Michael J. Anderson) who seems to be quietly pulling the strings of the whole affair (is this a reference to Bela Legosi's character in Ed Wood's Glen or Glenda?).


By the time the mystery Betty and Rita are trying to solve takes us to the Club Silencio, this dream has definitely reached critical mass. In a scene that seems like an extended homage to past Lynch films (especially Blue Velvet), we sit enraptured along with these women as they witness a devastated singer (Rebekah Del Rio) as she performs a Spanish version of Roy Orbison’s “Crying.” (I wanna note here that, while I watched it in the theater, the sound of this woman’s performance was something I'd never experienced before; it slashed the air, crystal clear, reverbed and utterly unforgettable; even in the cheap cinema I was watching it in; it transfixed me, and I could absolutely feel the audience I was with in attendant rapture). It's the best scene in the movie, for sure. The following invaluable piece of memorabilia lets you know that David Lynch had a specific vision of how this film, and I bet particularly this scene, should be visually projected and sonically played:


After the performance at Club Silencio, during which Diane discovers the Blue Box in her bag, Diane and Rita rush home to open it. But before Rita can turn the box's key, she discovers that Diane has disappeared. The box opens, the darkness it contains engulfs the screen, and then also Rita disappears, with the box falling to the floor of Betty's aunt's apartment. It’s here that the dream ends…

…and now we’re in reality, where we see a wholly different Naomi Watts, now as a dour Diane Selwyn. But wait. Wasn’t Diane Selwyn the name of the dead woman whose murder Betty and Rita were investigating? Okay, maybe...anyway... Diane, unlike Betty, is completely disheveled—in fact, when I first saw the movie, it took me more than a minute to realize this was STILL Naomi Watts. Instead of being powdered and dynamic, like Betty, she’s now dark-eyed, sweaty, neurotic, unconfident, and completely depressed. She’s getting over a breakup with Camilla (Camilla Rhodes? The one in the coffee-vomiting scene, where the producers keep saying "This is the Girl?"). Camilla (who, in the photo in the aforementioned scene, is visually repped as the star of a scene Adam Kesher is shooting--"I've Told Every Little Star")--Camilla is a woman who looks exactly like Rita. But now Camilla/Rita is in control of affairs, now having given up on her love affair with Diane/Betty in favor of a new one with Adam, the director of the new movie she’s in.

Now, the supremely confident Camilla is calling the shots. She cruelly invites Diane to her film set, where she let’s her see her make-out session with Adam Kesher. And then she equally cruelly, and manipulatively, picks her up in a limousine (remember the limousine?) and takes her up Mulholland Dr. (where we see the same shots that began the film) to the director’s modern Eames-designed house, where she introduces her to Theroux’s demanding mother (Ann Miller again—what’s going on here??). And then she puts Diane through the supreme heartbreak: the announcement of her engagement to the slimy Adam.

It’s here that Diane is sent over the edge. She’s seen meeting at Winkie’s (remember Winkie’s?), where she sees the nametag of a waitress named Betty, with a hit man (the screw-up Mark Pellegrino again), to whom she gives a picture of Camilla/Rita (“This is the girl”) and pays him to kill her. He says he’ll leave her a blue key (which figures into the dream portion of the film) when the job is done.

When Diane discovers the blue key (that opens the mysterious blue box), after a fruitless try at masturbating while looking not at her beloved Camilla/Rita, but the lonely stuccoed ceiling of her apartment, she is overcome with remorse, guilt, anger, and suicidal thoughts.


This is where the dream makes a reappearance. The two miniature figures of the old people that first greeted Diane/Betty upon her arrival in this fantasy town of Hollywood, sneak under the door of her apartment and, emerging from the ground-level trash (that, frankly, looks like a vagina), they become as big as life. Diane screams horribly as they corner her into her bedroom, and in response, she reaches into her bedside table, pulls out a gun, and shoots herself in the head, becoming the corpse that she and Rita once discovered. Smoke fills the room as a veil to the palpable world.


I think this a fair description of Mulholland Dr. It’s not my style to go through the ins and outs of a movie; I get impatient and even angry with movie reviews that merely recount the plot of a film without telling us what, truly, makes it worth watching. But if Daniel Johnson felt an article with the title of 7 Years Later, Does Mulholland Drive Make Any More Sense? was worth writing, then there must be many people out there who are still confused by the meaning of this incredible movie. I only wanna help. At the very least, I want to make one excited about it.

I conclude by mentioning a few more details that make Mulholland Dr. absolutely necessary viewing, even for those who may be afraid of diving in. I’m in love with everything about this movie, but there are five aspects of it I must point out:

(1) The incredible audition scene with Betty and Woody Katz (Chad Everett). Before this try-out, we get Betty giving a sub-par reading of this potboiler's corny dialogue with Rita as her amateur acting partner. But when she’s under pressure, and in different and more important circumstances, Betty/Watts delivers a stunning performance as a woman threatened by her own passion and driven to kill if things don't turn out her way. I am floored by the incompetent Hollywood characters in this scene--an incredibly poor director, an actor who's used to a lot less than what he gets, the coterie of hangers-on unprepared for what they witness. When I watched this in the theater, I could feel the audience immediately being roped in by this stand-alone scene; it's here that I knew that Naomi Watts' breathy, erotic performance was one of the best I've ever witnessed, and her transformation immediately afterwards into other forms of Betty underline this. And Chad Everett, a former '70s TV star with a troubled career, has never been handed as juicy a big-screen moment like this. It's a tremendous wow.

(2) The fuzzy, alluring photography from Peter Deming, who blossoms extraordinarily under Lynch’s direction. With this and his work on Lynch’s amazing (and similar) Lost Highway, he is wholly transformed into an artist categorically separated from his workmanlike efforts on such films as My Cousin Vinny, House Party and Scream 2/3 (although his work on From Hell approaches his Lynchian imagery).

(3) The detail-oriented, creative casting by Johanna Ray. There are a great many characters in Mulholland Dr. and Ray seems to have found the perfect person for every teeny, tiny role. Look at Ray’s resume and you’ll see she’s responsible for the effectiveness behind many of our favorite films: Kill Bill, Inland Empire, From Dusk Til Dawn, Lost Highway, Showgirls, Starship Troopers, Lost Highway, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Blue Velvet, Map of the Human Heart and the U.S. version of Funny Games.

(4) The dynamic scene where the dream Camilla Rhodes (“This is the girl") auditions for Theroux’s film. Melissa George, in lush '50s-era costuming and makeup, lip-syncs to Linda Scott’s version of the Hammerstein/Kern song “I’ve Told Every Little Star” with bald-faced verve. I adore how Lynch fits a musical number into almost every film he’s made (there's also "16 Reasons Why I Love You" to enjoy here). Lynch fans will recall Dean Stockwell lip-syncing Roy Orbison’s “In Dreams” in Blue Velvet or Laurel Near’s version of Lynch’s song “In Heaven” (later covered by The Pixies) in Eraserhead, or the dance number to Little Eva’s “The Loco-Motion” in Inland Empire, or Julee Cruise’s burlesques in Twin Peaks. Lynch loves musicals—they’re steeped in the sort of surreality he adores.

(5) Oh, how I love the incredible early scene in Winkie’s Diner. Can you think of anything more terrifying? This is one of the film's few stand-alone scenes; these characters never make a reappearance in the dream, but then, don't we all have dreams peopled by strangers?

I love Mulholland Dr. I love its mystery, its craft, its passion. I love, love, love it. And you should, too--even if it confuses you. If it does, perhaps that's even better.