Joel Robertson

The government can’t always-” Michael looked down at the phone lines. Two, three, and four were blinking. His eyes lit up. “I hate to cut you off, but I have some more guests on the line.”

“Hm, I suppose I was wrong then. Well, remember what I said. I’d bet my life on the assassination being an inside job.”

“I will.” He hung up the line and pumped his fists into the air. He’d hit gold. He answered line two with greedy fingers.

A woman immediately started yapping. “Now I don’t know what that man was on about, but I know for sure who killed JFK.” Michael smiled. He was going places for sure.

The Dangerous Necessity of Belief: Cinematic Language in Mulholland Drive

Critical Essay

It is hard to imagine someone walking out of David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive feeling confident they understood exactly what happened. At first, you think it is the story of Betty, a rising actress in Hollywood, but the last half of the movie is not about Betty at all. It is about a woman named Diane, a failed actress who ends up killing herself. Both Betty and Diane are played by the same actress, Naomi Watts. Other characters undergo a similar name swap at the halfway mark. This dual narrative, sprinkled with out of place surreal sequences, seems to defy interpretation. However, you also cannot walk away thinking it was nonsense. Every scene exudes purpose. The simplest and most coherent way to understand Mulholland Drive is that the film is split into two distinct yet interlocked sections: Diane’s dream and Diane’s reality, but this interpretation limits the movie’s thematic depth. It locks the movie’s symbols into singular, literal meanings since any abstraction in Diane’s dream directly represents one thing in her reality. The problem with this interpretation is not that it is incorrect; it is incomplete because it puts its primary focus on the wrong dichotomy. The most holistic reading of Mulholland Drive focuses primarily on cinematic language over the film’s content. This reading reveals that the dichotomy between dream and reality is less important than the dichotomy the cinematic language creates between the audience and the film itself. Two brief scenes lay the foundation for the entire dream-reality interpretation. The first of these is a first person shot at the start of the film that pans over velvet sheets only to finally zoom into a pillow. This scene frames the entire dream sequence of the narrative. The other scene takes place immediately before the reality sequence. The Cowboy walks into Diane’s apartment and tells her it’s time to wake up, signifying that the dream is over. However, as previously established, this interpretation seems to limit the film on a thematic level. Everything seems to have a literal answer. In reality, Diane is constantly scorned by director Adam Kesher, so in her dream, she ruins his entire life. Similarly, Diane’s apartment is small and dingy while Betty’s apartment in her dream borders on bougie. The dream sequence (the longer and seemingly more important

sequence of the two) becomes entirely secondary to the reality sequence. The film as a whole seems to only be saying that believing in dreams is dangerous. Diane bet her entire life on the dream that she could become a Hollywood actress, a mistake which ended in suicide. If we take this interpretation to its logical end, Lynch seems to be suggesting that dreams are only lies and realities can only be truths. The dichotomy of dream and reality becomes more complex when we consider how each sequence is filmed. The dream is filmed to feel like reality. With few exceptions, the editing is extremely standard. Time linearly marches forward. Dialogue is shown to us using shot-reverse-shots. The cinematography is gorgeous but almost never abstract. The color palette is bright and cheery with lots of light yellows, emphasizing the wonder Betty feels, but otherwise, everything is extremely naturalistic. Reality, on the other hand, is filmed like a nightmare. The editing is extremely non-linear, often seamlessly transitioning across time and space without the addition of any b-roll to ground the viewer. Sometimes, Lynch even switches scenes mid-conversation giving the viewer absolutely no buffer between scenes. The jitterbug scene at the start of the movie (the only reality scene not in this sequence) feels anything but literal. Dancers and silhouettes are superimposed over one another as they fade in and out across a flat purple background. The cinematography during the reality sequence loses the bright yellows for grimy browns and often leans into the abstract. During Diane’s suicide at the end of the movie, two small, old people, seemingly filmed in timelapse then superimposed on the scene, crawl out from underneath Diane’s door and begin laughing at her. The pitch of the laugh is increased and is the loudest part of the mix. In doing all this, Lynch has shattered the line between dream and reality. Although the content of the movie tells us one part is fake and the other is not, the audience is not able to differentiate between the two on a first viewing. In fact, Lynch does not want us to. He is not concerned with explaining the events of his story. The literal is not the most important part of Mulholland Drive. The film’s language sets up the dichotomy Lynch is really focusing on: audience and film. The pillow scene at the beginning of the film implicates the audience in the act of dreaming. Literally, this scene tells us that Diane is asleep, but the audience has not met Diane yet. Lynch provides no contextual framework for this scene. Because of this, the scene takes on a less literal meaning. It is not just Diane that is falling asleep; the audience is too. By making this shot first person, Lynch implicates the audience in Di-

ane’s dream. Notably, Diane waking up is not in first person. The audience clearly sees her sleeping body on the bed as the Cowboy is speaking to her. Diane may have woken up, but the audience has not. Here, Lynch is identifying cinema itself as a type of dream. This idea is enforced further by Lynch’s visual homages to Ingmar Bergman’s Persona, a film that famously broke the fourth wall by showing Ingmar Bergman and a cameraperson filming one of the scenes near the end of the story. Lynch’s subtle fourth wall break goes further than cinematic lineage. Twice, Lynch plays with the film’s audio track. During Betty’s first scene in the dream sequence, Lynch chooses to run the dialogue track out of sync with the actors’ mouths, a subtle way of telling the audience that they are watching a movie, not reality. This intentionally breaks the cinematic language of the rest of this portion of the film. By reminding us that none of this is really happening at the start of the dream, Lynch ties together the concepts of film and dreaming. He does this even more explicitly during the scene in Club Silencio. The scene functions under a similar logic, but this time Lynch tells the audience what he is doing. A man comes out onto the club’s stage and tells us that everything we are hearing is a tape recording. Then, another man comes out and begins to play a muted trumpet. He removes the mouthpiece from his lips, but the soft whine continues. Lynch does not only reference this to inform the audience about the logic of the scene, it is a larger comment on film itself. Film is just audio and video dancing together in synchronization. The audio track can play without the video and vice versa. Together, they make the audience believe in the illusion of film. Apart, all belief in the illusion crumbles. It is not a coincidence that this final reminder that we are taking part in a dream happens right before we transition into the reality sequence of the film. In terms of content, the dichotomy of the movie may be between dream and reality, but in terms of form, it is between dream and nightmare. This second, implicit dichotomy is the one the audience experiences. The Club Silencio scene is more than a simple reminder that the entire film is a dream. It is the film’s pivotal moment. Here, Lynch drops all plot to show us, purely through cinematic language, how to read the film. After the rules of the club are explained by the man and the trumpeter, a woman comes out and begins to sing a Spanish cover of Ray Orbison’s “Crying.” The camera holds on a tight close up of her face, brimming with hope yet tinged with sadness. Most of the audience does not know what she is literally singing since it is in a foreign language, but they are taken purely

by this feeling of decaying hope and the musical talent on display. It is a shock when she suddenly collapses, but the music still echoes through Club Silencio. The audience knew it from the start. It was all a recording. When this is applied to the rest of the film, Lynch’s vision become apparent. Mulholland Drive is not shy about reminding the audience that it is a narrative (i.e. a dream.), but it does not do this in a cold, ironic way. The film is a dream, yet we believe it anyway. Not only do we believe it, we believe every part of the film even though they are all in tension with each other. We believe that Betty has the potential to become a successful actress. We believe that Diane is in a hopeless situation with little way out. We believe Betty and Diane are the same person. We know all of this is contradictory, but we believe nonetheless. The audience’s dream ends as the credits roll, and we are asked what part we believe in more: the dream or the nightmare? Lynch is unconcerned with revealing which part is “real.” If he was, he would have directed the movie so that would be clear. Lynch is more concerned with what part of the movie the audience believes in. Since the dream sequence is longer and directed to feel more real, it seems like Lynch wants us to err on the side of dream. Yes, believing in dreams too much is dangerous. The film obviously knows this. However, we can’t simply stop believing in them. Diane’s dream was all that she had. When she stopped believing in it, she lost her reason to live. However, Lynch isn’t forcing you to believe this either. He is simply asking you to believe in something, anything, no matter how dangerous that might be.