Lynchaton III, Part II: Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive
So.
(This might get more spoiler-y than usual, or at the least, it's going to unfold the commonly understood explanation of "just what the fuck was going on" in Mulholland Drive, which I guess is like a spoiler for watching the film two or three times.)
(Also: I entirely refer to characters in Lost Highway by actor because I don't remember the character names, and because the notable thing in that film is that two actors play what ends up being, sort of, in some ways, the same character. I refer to the characters in Mulholland by character name because I recall them without having to refer to a castlist, and because the notable thing in that film is that Naomi Watts plays what appear to be, in some ways, two different characters.)
I was right to pull The Straight Story out of order because Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive really do share commonalities of style, theme, and structure, and really they stand together, and stand apart from the rest of Lynch's filmography.
Actually, let's break this down real fast: Lynch has made three films that were either written by other people or written by Lynch yet significantly "controlled" in script style by source material - The Elephant Man, Dune, and The Straight Story. The remainder of his work was either completely produced by Lynch or the result of a collaboration (Twin Peaks) or adaptation (Wild at Heart) that Lynch's personality dominated throughout the creative process. And in that group that I consider more or less Lynch's product from genesis to final cut, there are three subgroups: three works made consecutively that have relatively linear and comprehensible plots (Blue Velvet, Wild at Heart, and Twin Peaks), two works that at first seem to have linear and comprehensible plots but ultimately subvert that expectation (the two films under discussion here), and two films that are overtly dreamlike and most aggressively "Lynchian" from the get go (Eraserhead and Inland Empire).
Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive not only share a vague similarity in the structural confusion of their scripts, they have in common a theme that seems to animate that structural confusion: sexual jealousy. The details of how each film perverts your understanding of the narrative structure differ, but what really ties them together is that in a very real way it seems that the distorted structure is a result of sexual jealousy (and other stuff, but it's the emotion in common between the main characters). The emotional force of Bill Pullman and Naomi Watts contorts the fabric of reality. Now, in Mulholland Drive it seems clear that most of this stuff happens inside Naomi Watts' head, whereas in Lost Highway it all seems more or less real.
The blemish on the filmstock here is that Mulholland Drive was initially intended to be an ongoing TV show, and the majority of what's onscreen in the film was actually the pilot. When the project wasn't picked up, Lynch reshot some scenes and wrote a bunch of new ones to turn the whole thing into a movie. Now, all along, I've somewhat intentionally underread Lynch interviews and Lynch scholarship, so it's possible that I could have gathered a great deal more information about what was in the pilot and what was new for the film, and how much the overall conception changed from one project to the next. I kind of wanted to just see the films and experience them on their own, and suppress my natural urge to overread on a subject of new interest. I have a suspicion that the real structure of Mulholland Drive was conceived after the pilot was rejected, and that Lynch more or less intentionally drew inspiration from what he'd done in Lost Highway, though the execution is quite different. There's nothing wrong with this, of course, especially since Lost Highway is in my opinion quite the inferior film.
I mean, it's not bad or anything, but in comparison to Mulholland, which I think is a masterpiece, Lost Highway suffers. It's also the more difficult film to understand, as the final line of the film (which turns out to be the same of the first) upends what was already an overtly surreal film world. It sends you back looking for the hitch in time where the film kinked around on itself (or, you know, it would've done that if I'd enjoyed it enough to watch it immediately again, which I didn't). Lost Highway differs from Mulholland also in that it takes place in a world not only Lynchian but supernatural; things happen that cannot be explained away by the shifting narrative, whereas ultimately Mulholland can be easily understood in a realistic context - which should not take away from its magic. I'm not really sure what to say about Lost Highway other than rehashing its story, which isn't really interesting to me and not really why I bother to ramble on in these posts. But to return to what I wrote above, Mulholland Drive is a film where the force of a character's emotions (including sexual jealousy) drive her to murder (via hitman), then suicide, and in her last moments (falling, gasping into the pillow in the film's first moments) she dreams or desperately imagines everything that follows. The characters of Diane Selwyn's real life are reconfigured into an emotionally satisfying fantasy - not precisely wish fulfillment, but the self-satisfied fantasy of someone certain she's been wronged. The fantasy cannot hold, though, and grows progressively darker until "Betty" - Diane's alter ego in the fantasy - finds the dead body of a woman named Diane Selwyn, and not long thereafter the mysterious cowboy tells Betty it's time to wake up, and she does, and we see what led up to those final breaths into the pillow, as the real Diane fell apart.
But Lost Highway is more structurally daring, less easily explained, more sterotypically Lynchian. Bill Pullman's character appears to possibly murder his wife, and might have done so out of what seems like suspicions of infidelity, and then once sentenced to death row transforms himself into another man, played by Balthazar Getty, with a complete life of his own (but an incomplete memory). I'm honestly not sure whether Getty's character is meant to be diegetically real, and an actual transmigration of some sort took place, or if he's meant to be a fully realized fantasy brought on by extreme emotional duress, like the Diane/Betty dyad. I'm not really sure it matters, either, because I can't see how either possibility could make the film's pieces hook up as neatly as Mulholland's do. Balthazar Getty meets Bill Pullman's dead wife, but she's not her, she's her sister, (except there is no sister), and she turns out be everything Bill Pullman was afraid she was. Patricia Arquette ... doesn't quite make this all work. She's attractive enough to believe that men are going to be as drawn to her on first sight as they are, but not a good enough actress - in this role, at least, which let's be honest isn't what I'd call a rich or rewarding one - to sell the seduction necessary for us to believe they'd stick around and do what she tells them. (I should note that I thought she did a nice job in Flirting With Disaster, so it's not like I've got anything against her.) She just seems a little detached from everything, which I guess could come off as alluringly hard to reach, but for me at least comes off as kind of disinterested. On the other hand, her final line is effectively delivered, and effective; at what seems like the moment of sexual climax with Balthazar Getty, she leans down and whispers "You'll never have me," which is the heart of everything Bill Pullman was afraid of. And like the cowboy's gentle invitation for Diane Selwyn to wake, this is the invocation that returns Bill Pullman to Getty's body, so he can do whatever it is he does that brings us back to the beginning.
What Lost Highway lacks - aside from superior, magnetic performances, though Robert Blake is something awesome here - at least for me, is Mulholland Drive's rich, captivating visual imagery. The whole dream of the film gives us a rich tapestry not only of imagery but characters and behaviors and the totality of Diane Selwyn's dream is captivating for me, or to me. I've seen the film too many times, because I wrote a paper on its sound design in college, and had to watch it seven times in a row with nothing better than the occasional fast forwarding to get me to the points I wanted to see, because Lynch apparently doesn't trust DVDs with chapter divisions. But I still think it's a masterpiece, Lynch's most intoxicating and successful film, at least for people like me. Maybe that's in part because it just looks better, for what are likely reasons of technology and the quality of DVD transfers, but Blue Velvet, on DVD at least, seems flat by comparison to the lush and inviting colors - and imagery - onscreen in Mulholland. And invited in I'm completely given up to the weird Hollywood of Diane Selwyn's imagination and the ultimate tragedy it reveals.
By comparison Lost Highway is alternately shadowy and kind of dull, and the Lynchian affect of the performances seems here more narcotized and less genuinely odd. Putting aside the explicitly surreal work of Eraserhead and Inland Empire - coming soon to a blog post near you, since I already saw it a couple of weeks ago - I think the success of Lynch's more "realistic" films, at the least superficially realistic, is correlated with how closely they track to something like a severely tweaked verisimilitude. In Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive we're mostly watching strange behavior in a fairly recognizable world; in Wild at Heart and Lost Highway we're watching in some ways less odd people in an odder world - or we're watching equally odd people who seem less odd by comparison to their surroundings - and unfortunately part of the oddity of those films becomes a decreased focus on the characters. However off-kilter Jeffrey Beaumont and Frank and Betty Elms and Adam Kesher may be as people, they're full people, whereas Bill Pullman and Balthazar Getty are barely character sketches of jealousy and addled lust, respectively. Lost Highway appears superficially "realistic" - by Lynch's standards, at any rate - but is really a long step towards the nightmare logic of Eraserhead. I don't know if Lynch is incapable or merely, so far, disinclined to marry the more extreme elements of his imaginative superstructure with the more interesting depths with which he can endow his characters, but perhaps he believes or recognizes that in some sense those impulses are ultimately incompatible. Real people can be incomprehensible, but people in dreams are outside the ken of the waking.
Since I'm sort of trailing into babbledom, I should stop, because I've basically exhausted what I had to say about Lost Highway, and while I have a great deal more that I could say, both inquisitive and laudatory, about Mulholland Drive, I think I'll let this end here.
Silencio.
(This might get more spoiler-y than usual, or at the least, it's going to unfold the commonly understood explanation of "just what the fuck was going on" in Mulholland Drive, which I guess is like a spoiler for watching the film two or three times.)
(Also: I entirely refer to characters in Lost Highway by actor because I don't remember the character names, and because the notable thing in that film is that two actors play what ends up being, sort of, in some ways, the same character. I refer to the characters in Mulholland by character name because I recall them without having to refer to a castlist, and because the notable thing in that film is that Naomi Watts plays what appear to be, in some ways, two different characters.)
I was right to pull The Straight Story out of order because Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive really do share commonalities of style, theme, and structure, and really they stand together, and stand apart from the rest of Lynch's filmography.
Actually, let's break this down real fast: Lynch has made three films that were either written by other people or written by Lynch yet significantly "controlled" in script style by source material - The Elephant Man, Dune, and The Straight Story. The remainder of his work was either completely produced by Lynch or the result of a collaboration (Twin Peaks) or adaptation (Wild at Heart) that Lynch's personality dominated throughout the creative process. And in that group that I consider more or less Lynch's product from genesis to final cut, there are three subgroups: three works made consecutively that have relatively linear and comprehensible plots (Blue Velvet, Wild at Heart, and Twin Peaks), two works that at first seem to have linear and comprehensible plots but ultimately subvert that expectation (the two films under discussion here), and two films that are overtly dreamlike and most aggressively "Lynchian" from the get go (Eraserhead and Inland Empire).
Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive not only share a vague similarity in the structural confusion of their scripts, they have in common a theme that seems to animate that structural confusion: sexual jealousy. The details of how each film perverts your understanding of the narrative structure differ, but what really ties them together is that in a very real way it seems that the distorted structure is a result of sexual jealousy (and other stuff, but it's the emotion in common between the main characters). The emotional force of Bill Pullman and Naomi Watts contorts the fabric of reality. Now, in Mulholland Drive it seems clear that most of this stuff happens inside Naomi Watts' head, whereas in Lost Highway it all seems more or less real.
The blemish on the filmstock here is that Mulholland Drive was initially intended to be an ongoing TV show, and the majority of what's onscreen in the film was actually the pilot. When the project wasn't picked up, Lynch reshot some scenes and wrote a bunch of new ones to turn the whole thing into a movie. Now, all along, I've somewhat intentionally underread Lynch interviews and Lynch scholarship, so it's possible that I could have gathered a great deal more information about what was in the pilot and what was new for the film, and how much the overall conception changed from one project to the next. I kind of wanted to just see the films and experience them on their own, and suppress my natural urge to overread on a subject of new interest. I have a suspicion that the real structure of Mulholland Drive was conceived after the pilot was rejected, and that Lynch more or less intentionally drew inspiration from what he'd done in Lost Highway, though the execution is quite different. There's nothing wrong with this, of course, especially since Lost Highway is in my opinion quite the inferior film.
I mean, it's not bad or anything, but in comparison to Mulholland, which I think is a masterpiece, Lost Highway suffers. It's also the more difficult film to understand, as the final line of the film (which turns out to be the same of the first) upends what was already an overtly surreal film world. It sends you back looking for the hitch in time where the film kinked around on itself (or, you know, it would've done that if I'd enjoyed it enough to watch it immediately again, which I didn't). Lost Highway differs from Mulholland also in that it takes place in a world not only Lynchian but supernatural; things happen that cannot be explained away by the shifting narrative, whereas ultimately Mulholland can be easily understood in a realistic context - which should not take away from its magic. I'm not really sure what to say about Lost Highway other than rehashing its story, which isn't really interesting to me and not really why I bother to ramble on in these posts. But to return to what I wrote above, Mulholland Drive is a film where the force of a character's emotions (including sexual jealousy) drive her to murder (via hitman), then suicide, and in her last moments (falling, gasping into the pillow in the film's first moments) she dreams or desperately imagines everything that follows. The characters of Diane Selwyn's real life are reconfigured into an emotionally satisfying fantasy - not precisely wish fulfillment, but the self-satisfied fantasy of someone certain she's been wronged. The fantasy cannot hold, though, and grows progressively darker until "Betty" - Diane's alter ego in the fantasy - finds the dead body of a woman named Diane Selwyn, and not long thereafter the mysterious cowboy tells Betty it's time to wake up, and she does, and we see what led up to those final breaths into the pillow, as the real Diane fell apart.
But Lost Highway is more structurally daring, less easily explained, more sterotypically Lynchian. Bill Pullman's character appears to possibly murder his wife, and might have done so out of what seems like suspicions of infidelity, and then once sentenced to death row transforms himself into another man, played by Balthazar Getty, with a complete life of his own (but an incomplete memory). I'm honestly not sure whether Getty's character is meant to be diegetically real, and an actual transmigration of some sort took place, or if he's meant to be a fully realized fantasy brought on by extreme emotional duress, like the Diane/Betty dyad. I'm not really sure it matters, either, because I can't see how either possibility could make the film's pieces hook up as neatly as Mulholland's do. Balthazar Getty meets Bill Pullman's dead wife, but she's not her, she's her sister, (except there is no sister), and she turns out be everything Bill Pullman was afraid she was. Patricia Arquette ... doesn't quite make this all work. She's attractive enough to believe that men are going to be as drawn to her on first sight as they are, but not a good enough actress - in this role, at least, which let's be honest isn't what I'd call a rich or rewarding one - to sell the seduction necessary for us to believe they'd stick around and do what she tells them. (I should note that I thought she did a nice job in Flirting With Disaster, so it's not like I've got anything against her.) She just seems a little detached from everything, which I guess could come off as alluringly hard to reach, but for me at least comes off as kind of disinterested. On the other hand, her final line is effectively delivered, and effective; at what seems like the moment of sexual climax with Balthazar Getty, she leans down and whispers "You'll never have me," which is the heart of everything Bill Pullman was afraid of. And like the cowboy's gentle invitation for Diane Selwyn to wake, this is the invocation that returns Bill Pullman to Getty's body, so he can do whatever it is he does that brings us back to the beginning.
What Lost Highway lacks - aside from superior, magnetic performances, though Robert Blake is something awesome here - at least for me, is Mulholland Drive's rich, captivating visual imagery. The whole dream of the film gives us a rich tapestry not only of imagery but characters and behaviors and the totality of Diane Selwyn's dream is captivating for me, or to me. I've seen the film too many times, because I wrote a paper on its sound design in college, and had to watch it seven times in a row with nothing better than the occasional fast forwarding to get me to the points I wanted to see, because Lynch apparently doesn't trust DVDs with chapter divisions. But I still think it's a masterpiece, Lynch's most intoxicating and successful film, at least for people like me. Maybe that's in part because it just looks better, for what are likely reasons of technology and the quality of DVD transfers, but Blue Velvet, on DVD at least, seems flat by comparison to the lush and inviting colors - and imagery - onscreen in Mulholland. And invited in I'm completely given up to the weird Hollywood of Diane Selwyn's imagination and the ultimate tragedy it reveals.
By comparison Lost Highway is alternately shadowy and kind of dull, and the Lynchian affect of the performances seems here more narcotized and less genuinely odd. Putting aside the explicitly surreal work of Eraserhead and Inland Empire - coming soon to a blog post near you, since I already saw it a couple of weeks ago - I think the success of Lynch's more "realistic" films, at the least superficially realistic, is correlated with how closely they track to something like a severely tweaked verisimilitude. In Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive we're mostly watching strange behavior in a fairly recognizable world; in Wild at Heart and Lost Highway we're watching in some ways less odd people in an odder world - or we're watching equally odd people who seem less odd by comparison to their surroundings - and unfortunately part of the oddity of those films becomes a decreased focus on the characters. However off-kilter Jeffrey Beaumont and Frank and Betty Elms and Adam Kesher may be as people, they're full people, whereas Bill Pullman and Balthazar Getty are barely character sketches of jealousy and addled lust, respectively. Lost Highway appears superficially "realistic" - by Lynch's standards, at any rate - but is really a long step towards the nightmare logic of Eraserhead. I don't know if Lynch is incapable or merely, so far, disinclined to marry the more extreme elements of his imaginative superstructure with the more interesting depths with which he can endow his characters, but perhaps he believes or recognizes that in some sense those impulses are ultimately incompatible. Real people can be incomprehensible, but people in dreams are outside the ken of the waking.
Since I'm sort of trailing into babbledom, I should stop, because I've basically exhausted what I had to say about Lost Highway, and while I have a great deal more that I could say, both inquisitive and laudatory, about Mulholland Drive, I think I'll let this end here.
Silencio.
Labels: Film, Lynchathon
posted by medrawt at
17:57
