Okay! This is a series of (unedited & hastily written--but passionate) conversations that have taken place in my little circle of net-acquaintances over the past few months...
#1: There's a man... in back of this place... He's the one that's doing it
I concur with the Flak magazine commenters' broad outline of the film, which you can download here if you haven't heard it--they don't say anything staggering, but it's smart and fun to listen to! So Mulholland Drive is the Wizard of Oz in reverse...
Still, there's more to this film than that... Interpreting "Betty's" adventures as "Diane's" "fiction-suit" protection against the rigors we are exposed to by the last half-hour works, there's no question about that, but I don't see why you have to stop there. There's no place to call "home" in this movie.
Seems to me that there's an overwhelming tendency, amongst critics and other analytical folk, to privilege the "sordid" over the "sentimental". But that's nonsense. Both are human constructions. There's nothing more "real" about a strung-out tinseltown casualty than a wide-eyed ingenue sleuth. One of the major themes of Darkling I Listen (and I'm trying it again--in something called Chimera Lucida) is the connection between romantic comedy and film noir--the fact that these two widely disparate genres affect me in very similar ways...
So why are we so sure that Diane's story is the "base" and Betty's is just "false consciousness"? Isn't it merely because most of us put up more barriers against happiness than despair? Who's to say that Betty/Diane isn't dreaming both parts of the film, after winning that jitterbug contest in Deep River Ontario? (I love that opening sequence by the way: it's like a Rorschach test made out of music, colours, and energized bodies--and isn't that what life is?) Nightmares are dreams too.
From where I sit, the only "real" things in this film are the blue key, the blue box, and the homeless "man" that's "doing it". The key is imagination, the box is experience, and the creature behind "Winkie's" is the director/artist, who strives in vain to adjudicate between these two hopelessly irreconcilable things.
The truth of this film is spread across both of its "parts". "Life" is an uninhabitable planet. Narrative is artificial atmosphere that enables us to walk upon its surface. That's why Grant Morrison's concept of the "fiction suit" (from The Filth) is so apt. But, as Emerson knew, there's no way to bring "it" nearer to ourselves.
I think my jaw dropped permanently during the wordless encounter at the studio between "Betty", Adam, and "pseudo-Camilla", who is auditioning for the role of "love interest". The scene is dominated by crazy Old Hollywood closeups of intense longing and Linda Scott's maudlin/profound bubblegum version of one of my favourite Jerome Kern songs--"I've Told Every Little Star" (why haven't I told you?). But you can't tell the Other how you feel about her/him/it, and you can't even express these feelings very accurately to yourself.
So "opening the box" isn't just "waking from a dream"--it is, literally, death. Whatever's in there cannot even be thought by human beings--despite the fact that getting in there is pretty much all we think about! The way of "optimism" and the way of "despair" intersect at the abyss (although, as Camila notes, the second way is a "short-cut"!), and Lynch's vertiginous transition between narratives at the Utopian moment of expected fulfilment (after Betty and Rita have found the box together) is one of the most incredibly affecting evocations of the Sublime in the history of cinema. Without all of this preparation, the Diane scenes (masturbating, deliberating in the darkness about whether to accept Camilla's purred invitation, the walk from the car to the party, her quiet breakdown at the dinner table, and her suicide: the nightmare counterpart of Betty/Rita's lovemaking--both are the logical climaxes of their respective narratives, and neither succeeds in rescuing the dreamer from the necessity of dreaming!) wouldn't have nearly the impact that they do.
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Ian Brill:
When my friend and I saw this in the theaters how many years ago we came out of that theater with the same sense of awe.
It might be the circumstances of my surroundings but I've always thought of this film as all types of genres of film (musicals, horror even porn) put into one film to create a type of "movie stew."
While I thought the first 2/3rds of the film was just a dream of a wannabe actress I never considered all of the film as a dream but I like the sound of it. I do like your interpretation and think I'll try to watch my DVD of this over the weekend now that I've read your post.
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Charles Reece:
I love MH, and wrote a synopsis of its structure back when it came out on dvd for some friends. There's 2 schools of thought on Lynch, that he's a irrationalist (an image that he tries to spread in his popular interviews) and that he's quite rational (but a certain type, namely one who doesn't provide answers before the question). I believe his narratives are too tightly structured to place him in the former category, as MH demonstrates (contrary to the outlook of, say, Martha Nochimson).
Your dream within a dream scenario points to what I see as Lynch's dismantling of the Hollywood dream while still using film's oneiric qualities (what's Reason to do when it falls through the rabbit hole? The only rational thing it can, adapt). There's too many specific connections between the earlier dream sequence and the later reality sequence and the embedded flashback sequences (e.g., the key being there and then missing and how it clears up the significance of the box) for me to believe that this segment is on the same plane as the earlier one. But the last shot of the ghosts over Hollywood, in what seems a nod to Anger's cover to Hollywood Babylon (but it's a been a little while since I've seen the film), seems to either be a nod to Hollywood's potential and inevitable lure, or a final bit of cynicism, or (probably) both. Anyway, the film strikes me as using dream (i.e., film) to critique dream (i.e., the Dream Factory) while casting a skeptical eye on itself (i.e., being a continuation of the factory through it's allusions to Classic Hollywood to reinforce its meanings, such as the reversal of the homosexual love triangle from GILDA, from which Rita gets her name). But I look forward to hearing the commentary to see where they go with it. Thanks.
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#2: Let's Keep Talking About Mulholland Drive, Shall We?
Good stuff Charles! Although, just to defend my interpretation a bit, what do you make of the fact that "Silencio" is present in both parts of the film--and, even more importantly, that Betty & Rita see Diane dead before this tableau can possibly have taken shape in "real" life? I don't think there are any definite answers to this question, and there certainly is a lot of textual evidence to support the Diane-is-real/Betty's-a-dream interpretation... Still, even if that's what Lynch intended, he can't (as you say) seem to help undermining himself with stuff that doesn't fit with the rational explanation, and I love that! It doesn't suit me at all to believe that the only thing in that box is one paltry crime of passion!
Couldn't the correspondences be more of a comment upon the fact that, no matter what "mode" we think we are dreaming in, we always dream according to certain patterns? And we're never quite able to dream (or live or think!) our way past the moment of ultimate fulfilment/catastrophe? If this were merely the story of one woman's disillusionment, it could never have held my brain in its thrall for this long! I prefer to think of the film as a breathtaking expresson of my own personal credo--the universe isn't broken, it is a break-up!
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Ian Brill:
I don't mind MH talk, it really is one of my favorite films. On the subject of Lynch undermining so there is no rational explanation: I think Lynch has created a sort of mystery that isn't meant to be solved as much as it is meant to be admired for being such a mystery. Not that trading interpretations isn't fun and stimulating but it seems once someone thinks they've got "the answer" you'll find Lynch put something in the film to throw a theory off. What of the clues Lynch includes in the DVD package? I don't think those help anybody solve anything as much as they are just more red herrings to throw you off. That Lynch, he's such a trickster! **********************************************************************************************************************************************************
Abhay Khosla:
mullholland drive has a structure, but is it a "tight" structure? well, its rigorous to itself-- the wacky hitman scene and the director versus the pool boy scene both share the same comedic tone, the bit where the underlings communicates with the single-word speaking midget-y boss occupies the same sense of dread as the Cowboy scenes.
but while i know you dislike considering authorship questions (which... may be oversimplifying or mis-stating and i apologize), the thing i'm always stunned by at the end of mullholland drive is its origin as an ABC television pilot and that sense that he found the movie after that experience had been completed. early on in the movie, it does have a television aura to it (that robert forster cop scene, say)(its what i like about the movie, that so many scenes have so narrative point besides their own texture and, i don't know, sensation), but for an organically created work ... the logic of it feels inescapable. and that organic feel sort of emphasizes the dream like quality in a way. i have a hard time divorcing myself from that knowledge, i guess, is basically all i'm saying here.
(for interest re: the pilot, the tad friend article from the new yorker is a fun read(though likely not one useful for your purposes at all)... i like friend's entertainment writing in the new yorker so i was happy when i found this: http://www.lynchnet.com/mdrive/newyorker.html)
and as for "Diane is real"... given the last image of the movie or second to last (the bit with the old people i need to watch through my fingers), even accepting that premise she can only be real to a point. but again, i'm not sure i watch with that same interest as the more interesting character to me is the Lynch Los Angeles, and Diane and Betty-- neither of those are the real Los Angeles, they're both just opposite poles. though i've never really grasped how the Cowboy fits into Diane's Los Angeles but i overfetishize the Cowboy who's really not that interesting a character probably (besides on the surface -- that guy's cool!- level)... and just that idea that whichever universe you occupy, the other one winds up in your dreams whether you want it there or not... its hard to get wrapped up in the Diane-Betty question since both those Los Angeles's are ... equally unreal places (well, Diane maybe slightly less so)...
geez, sorry, i'm not sure i have much coherent to say about it, but its a fun movie.
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Charles Reece:
Regarding 'silencio': I'm pretty sure that Lynch got that from Fellini. Unfortunately, I can't remember which movie: it's either LA STRADA or THE WHITE SHEIK where the word figures prominently (I think it's the former, which is about surviving crushed dreams, after all), but I'd have to go back and rewatch both to make sure. That and his blue-haired lady are allusions to one of Lynch's favorite directors. I'll have to watch the film again, but it's my memory that the word appears every time Betty/Diane (and the audience) is awakened a little more. Consequently, it's the last word of the film. Just so we're on the same page, Dave, there's 3 narrative realms in the film: the dream, reality and the flashback. The last is embedded in the second, and the second follows the first. Lynch seems to be fixated on destiny figures, such as the White Witch in WILD AT HEART and the Bum and/or the Blue Haired Lady here. I'd argue that the mechanical bird at end of BLUE VELVET functions similarly, namely as a medium between the diegetic and the audience, questioning the reality of the story and of the audience's reception. Anyway, the dream characters are brought back at the end, which suggests to me, not that everything in the diegesis is pure dream, but that anything within the film is artifice ("dream"). But, as the emotive power of the film should indicate, Lynch is a real believer in the artifice.
Anyway, to Ian, 'silencio' is one example where those dvd clues aren't red herrings. What I'd recommend is coming up with a hypothesis of the film and then testing them against those clues. At least, that's what I did, not reading them until after I'd come up with some possible explanations. Another example is the key on the table. It's the "key" for for understanding the difference between what's flashback and what's present in the final 3rd. Anoher is the opening sequence containing the jitterbug (Diane's past) and the subjective shot going towards the red pillow. I either can't remember or haven't worked out some of the others, but I'm inclined to think all are actual clues to the authorial intent.
p.s., before anyone suggests that 'silencio' is Spanish for 'silence,' I found this Italian proverb on the web:
"Il silencio è d'oro e la parola è d'argento." (Speech is silver, silence is golden.)
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Adam Pound:
First, I haven't listened to the Flak commentary, so forgive me if I'm repeating that interpretation.
Now, I'm always surprised at how people view Mulholland Drive primarily as an intellectual mystery to be solved, rather than as one of the saddest, most emotionally devastating movies ever made. Anyway, I'll get back to that. Here are some thoughts...
As far as the two halves of the movie being equally 'real', I think that the film's structure itself prevents that interpretation: the fact that the second half comes temporally after the first immediately makes it more 'real'. Also, it's clearly Diane who falls asleep at the beginning of the movie, as her awakening before 'the second half' is clearly a counterpoint to that beginning. Taking it as a given that Diane is the 'narrator' of the first half, the interesting question, to me, is whether she is still the 'narrator' of the second half. The striking difference between the two halves is that in the first half Betty is never judged (Rita is a non-entity, which Betty/Diane can form as she will), while in the second half she is always judged-- she is cast out of her 'small god' status, cast out into the world, always aware (almost exclusively) of how other people judge her. The distinction has little to do with 'sordid' versus 'sentimental', and everything to do with experiencing the world as being-for-yourself versus being-for-others (to steal Hegel and Sartre's terms). This is why the second half seems more real-- because Camilla is an Other as Rita is not-- Camilla can judge Diane, and Diane is always aware of herself as an object to be judged. Since Camilla's judgements seem imbued with cruelty, I think that it is still Diane who 'narrates' the second half-- an omniscient narrator would not be so subjective. Which only supports your view that both halves are equally real: each half presents a picture of a mode of existence, and both modes of experiencing the world are equally real, and are interdependent.
But, as I said before, the second half is more real because it comes after the first, which brings me to the movie's 'plot'. You describe it as 'one woman's disillusionment', but that strikes me as a tremendous oversimplification. It's not disillusionment, it's heartbreak-- the realization that the Other whom Diane loved (i.e. whom she wanted to be an object for) has chosen another object instead. Since Diane's objectivity has been cast aside by Camilla, her place as an object in the world is unstable, and she can only view herself as the repulsive object that tried desperately to cling to the Subject (Camilla). Thus, she tries desperately to reassert her Subjectivity, by reducing the other Subject to an object-- which she can only do by killing it (a drastic Eternal Sunshine procedure). And isn't this what so many people do after a breakup, when they suddenly decide they must hate that person who they loved a month or two earlier? Of course, Diane really did love Camilla, she really did view her as the ultimate Subject; so, having killed Camilla, Diane only exists through her memories of Camilla-- specifically, memories of killing her. Having killed the infinite subject, Diane has no choice but to kill herself, the finite object.
All of which is why I think the walk up the wooded path to the party is the most stunning scene in the movie, and is filled with an almost unbearable sadness. Although the bubblegum-love-song audition scene is also pretty spectacular.
Of course, I haven't even mentioned the 'dream of Hollywood', which is the dream of being loved by the world, and so reappropriating the world by becoming the central object in it. This seems to be secondary to the love story (although of course they're similar existential stories): Betty chooses to return to Rita in the midst of the audition scene, when she clearly 'could have had it all' right then.
Wow, this turned out to be really long. Anyway, thanks for the many interesting thoughts.
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Dave Fiore:
thanks for the input folks!
Adam:I really like your manner of distinguishing between the two narratives--it's the difference between screwball comedy (in which the protagonists seem to have the freedom to make anything they wish of their lives/story) and film noir (in which powerless figures of desire are pulled by their heartstrings toward an inevitable doom)...
But don't forget! Betty isn't nearly as "free" in her storyline as she (and you) are claiming!
1. if this is a dream (and of course it is), then all of it--including the Adam parts--are expressions of Betty/Diane's plight... "This is the girl!" is not merely a nod to weird Hollywood politics, it's a statement about romantic obsession. Wouldn't you consider the Cowboy's whole speech a judgment of Betty? (the Flak guys interpret it as Diane's vengeance upon/castration of Adam, and there may be something to that--but I don't feel it myself! One of the reasons the audition scene hits me so hard is that, right there, we realize, without quite understanding it, that, in the context of the Betty narrative, Betty is Adam!)
I agree with you about the power of the walk up the hillside. Perhaps it sounded dismissive when I described the "Diane is real" interpretation as reducible to the statement that "this is a story about one woman's disillusionment", but I assure you, I do feel the emotional weight of the Diane sequences (although I don't want to choose between feeling the film and thinking about the structure--I'm compelled to do both!)... I think both aspects of the film are part wish-fulfilment and part self-torture/castigation/admission of powerlessness... "This is the Other I must love" isn't so different, after all, from "this is the Other I must kill"... Each of these hard-determinisms force an ending, an opening of the box, and a silence...
keep 'em comin'!!!
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Adam Pound:
Regarding the compulsion to both 'feel the film' and 'think about it's structure', I couldn't agree more! Of recent films, only Magnolia inspires the same degree of both compulsions.
So, then... You're right, Betty isn't entirely free-- sorry if I implied that. It's Diane, the narrator, who has the power in Betty's narrative: Betty is how Diane wishes she were, and, as such, Betty is an object for Diane. To steal some more terms from Sartre, Betty is the positional self and Diane is the non-positional self (though only in Betty's narrative). But, as far as I'm concerned, even the non-positional self, the 'pure' self isn't really free, though it has power; and this is especially true in Mulholland Drive. Diane has no control over how she views herself, either in her wishful thinking or in her self-loathing-- she has no control over her own narration. The only person who has any control is the 'man in back of this place'.
I'll have to watch the Cowboy scene again to see if I agree that his speech is a judgement of Betty, but I definitely agree that it's not a vengeance upon Adam. Adam is presented as an entirely sympathetic character in Betty's narrative-- it's only in Diane's narrative that Adam is portrayed as despicable. I took this to mean that Diane, in her role as narrator of Betty's narrative, had the capacity to forgive Adam, to view him as 'put upon' as she was (have you seen the Good Girl? It's great). But, as you say, the Adam she forgives is really only a part of herself, part of the story she wishes were her story. I also agree that each narrative contains some degree of the other's defining characteristic; just like experience, the different modes of narrative continually fold together, and, as you say, they also continaully break apart. (It's the Hegelian dialectic depicted in movie form!)
As for loving the Other being similar to killing the Other (or at least similar compulsions), both are certainly driven by the same desire for self-unification (by trying to make oneself entirely object in the first case, entirely subject in the second case), but the way the experiences play out are certainly wildly different!
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Charles Reece:
A few other thoughts:
It's often been said that Lynch is skeptical of language, and MH seems to support that. Hence, silence reveals artifice, leading to realization. The apex of this being at Club Silencio where singing keeps going after the singer stops and instruments keep playing after the player stops. It's immediately after that that the dream breaks down.
And I agree with Adam that the film moves from interiority to exteriority, with all the characters in the first part being a constructed extension of the real Diane ("Betty").
On intellect and emotion: Contrary to the popular division and even some of Lynch's own protestations, the more one thinks about his films (but particularly LOST HIGHWAY and MH), the more emotive they become. For example, the more you understand the story of MH, the more feeling you get out of the Crying scene. At least, that's the way it worked for me. All of this isn't so surprising if one makes the analytic distinction between emotion and feeling, the former (as Noel Carroll argues) has a conceptual component. Lynch's films evoke a lot of feeling (sentiment?), but always filtered through thought.
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Dave Fiore:
Charles (it was Charles right?) wrote:
On intellect and emotion: Contrary to the popular division and even some of Lynch's own protestations, the more one thinks about his films (but particularly LOST HIGHWAY and MH), the more emotive they become
Absolutely! And it's no accident that these two are far and away my favourite Lynch films! I'm not interested in "puzzle films" (I never want to see Memento again--sure it's fun, but what does it have to say about the human condition? nothing powerful, that's for sure. In the final analysis, it's basically just a cinematic version of those SAT questions that ask you to find the next number in the sequence...I kind of like doing them, but once once they're done, that's it! They don't stay with you. That's certainly not the case with Lynch...)
Ultimately, affect and intellect can't be separated from one another! The only reason things affect us is because we are able to conceive of them otherwise! That's pretty basic, but it's true, I think. We tend to be overwhelmed by emotion when the unexpected occurs--but there is no "unexpected" without expectation... There is no joy without our ability to conceive the reverse; likewise, there's no mourning without memory, which both reifies and plays variations on past experience... This is big game--and Lynch pursues it relentlessly!
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Bruce Baugh:
I'm partial to the view that there just isn't a "real" layer in Lynch's films, at least not the ones of his I like best (Mulholland Drive and Lost Highway). I have the impression from interviews that this is closest to his view of things: everything that is solid melts into air, to steal a phrase. ("Trifles light as air", to steal from Alan Moore, while I'm at it.) We project ourselves into the hopes and fears of others; they project themselves into ours; time and chance happen to us all.
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Dave Fiore:
Bruce, we are complete accord in this matter!
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Josiah:
I think that Lynch's films are very logical, but they follow dream logic, which tends to be much more intuitive and fanciful than the real world variety.
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#3: Why/Haven't I/Told You?
Did you know that you could easily spend the rest of your life reading net-musings about Lynch's Mulholland Dr.? Last year, I contributed some words of my own to the tower of babble--but I'm back for more, thanks to Mark K-Punk:
Where was Mark back when Charles and I were having it out in the threads? Clearly, I share his hostility to the Wizard of Ozzing of the film. We're a strange species--the only thing we like better than a mystery is a solution (especially a hard-bought one). Unfortunately, the only way to secure that final-Grail piece is to sell the quest short. You know there's always something missing. You know, because what's missing is "you".The ‘standard’ interpretation of Mulholland Dr claims that its first two-thirds are the fantasy/ dream of failed two-bit actress Diane Selwyn, whose actual life is allegedly depicted, in all its quotidian squalor, in the final section of the film. This would underscore MD’s striking similarities to The Singing Detective, whose complexly-interacting narrative lines are weaved from the fantasies and memories of the convalescent pulp author, Philip E Marlow (Michael Gambon). Yet such a reading is ultimately unsatisfactory. As Timothy Takemoto argues, (you have to scroll down to his piece, ‘Double Dreams in Hollywood’) to see the second part of Mulholland Dr as real is inherently conservative in its assumption that there is an unambiguous reality to which we can ‘return’.
Following Zizek, Takemoto suggests that what MD presents is not an exposed ‘reality’ but a ‘grey fog’ of competing, incommensurable realities, from which desire and will are never extricable. (An homologous case is Kubrick’s near-contemporaneous Eyes Wide Shut, which is standardly interpreted as entirely the dream of the protagonist, Tom Cruise’s Bill. What this reading of Eyes Wide Shut has in common with the dominant readings of Mulholland Dr is a confidence in the possibility of parsing reality from desire, a distinction which both films disturb, as the very title of Kubrick’s film indicates).
This is the age of the second person singular--and we missed it.
We always do.
Mulholland Dr. is its prophet and encomiast.
Play it. Watch it. Play it again. There's no stopping it, really... Oh sure, life goes on--but there's no shaking that prison-bar pause sign, once you've succumbed to this film.
What I find strange is that none of the fascinating pieces that I've read (and I've barely scratched the surface, of course) really does much of anything with--for me--the key scene. Oh sure Silencio is breathtaking, that first conversation in Winkie's lays the foundations for a free-fall and Diane hooked by the phone is intense...but the heart of the film beats somewhere between here
and here:
and what song is playing during this charmed interval?
I make up things to say on my way to you,"I've Told Ev'ry Little Star" (composed by Jerome Kern, with lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II, and deliciously bubble-gummed by Linda Scott) The scene comes exactly halfway through the film, and it's more of a turning point, as far as I'm concerned, than the belated switch-over between Betty's tale and Diane's. Up until this moment, we've been splitting our time between following Betty & Rita's screwball sleuthing and Adam Kesher's bizarre game of "High Noon" with fate. Many people have identified the director and the actress as two aspects of the same dreamer, and I'm right on board with that, so far as it goes--but where exactly does it go? I mean, there it is--the actor (or purposive self) being seen in the way that every one of us wants to be seen (as a ray from the heavens), and the director (or interpretive self) catching that lightning in a looking-glass bottle...but the much anticipated moment of integration never comes! These two halves remain have-nots--Betty has to leave to keep her date with Rita (a date which will bring them face to face with Diane's corpse) and Adam is compelled to refocus his gaze upon the lip-synched spectacle on stage, an elaborate cue for him to speak the much-rehearsed line: "this is the girl".
On my way to you, I find things to say.
I can write poems too, When you're far away,
When you're far away, I write poems too.
But when you are near, my lips go dry,
When you are near, I only sigh, Oh, dear.
Refrain:
I've told ev'ry little star,
Just how sweet I think you are,
Why haven't I told you?
I've told ripples in a brook,
Made my heart an open book,
Why haven't I told you?
Friends ask me:
Am I in love?
I always answer "Yes",
Might as well confess,
If I don't they guess.
Maybe you know it too,
Oh, my darling, if you do,
Why haven't you told me?
And that's it...third-person triumphant!
Forget about not being able to tell "you" what you've always wanted to say...these two candidates for "wholeness" never even meet. As Derrida would say, no letter (especially not a love letter) ever reaches its destination. Each of us spends our entire lives trying to reduce that third person by one--and ramming our heads into "the girl" or "the boy" of our dreams. You can't tell the "whole truth" to a person that you aren't directly addressing, and no one has ever found that Northwest passage to "you". The "shortcuts" (like the one that Camilla unveils to Diane after pulling her from the limo on Mulholland Dr.) aren't even paved with good intentions, but they do lead straight to Hell (which, Sartre to the contrary, is most definitely not "other people".)
And that brings me back to the twin fantasies of pure communion (in love and in hate) that the film offers us--the first in Betty's impossibly poignant declaration "I'm in love with you" (the very expression of which exposes the unreality of her story and her supposed interlocutor) and the second in the consummation of Diane's plot to kill the (sublime) object of her desire... After each of these events, there is only Silencio--and the stark emptiness of a box that isn't a box, but an airlock, sealed against the vacuum of radical otherness. There isn't anyone that wouldn't give their lives to be sucked up into that space--to address those emotions, at long last, to the appropriate place--but the words die still-born in a void. That's why "I" haven't told "you"--and maybe it's a lucky thing too!
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Paul:
What do you think of Lost Highway? Much of what you say in regards to Mulhullond Drive is even more true of Lynch's prior film. LH for me is all a dream with no reality, but most importantly it is the viewer's dream, not any character's, and the movie demands of you "WHY are you having this dream? What does it mean to you?"
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Charles Reece:
I've been watching oeuvres lately and right now I'm going through Lang's (reading Gunning's great book as I go along). But, I'm going to MH again tonight, just to refresh my memory. I'll say that I remain skeptical of any view which doesn't acknowledge what's in a film, namely MH's 2 levels of reality. The first 2/3 is not the same diegesis as the final 1/3 and has tons of linking elements that set up the latter as a ground for the former. But I'll be back.
LH is precursor to MH, in which Lynch borrows a good bit to work out problems of having a pilot that he needs to turn into a feature film. My own theory is that Pullman is being electrocuted at the end after losing his identity in his own personal film, a dream of death.
Also, one doesn't have to accept the final 1/3 as "real" to accept the other portion as diegetic dream. I think Lynch in both LH and MH is playing with filmic reality as artifice, where multiple characters become one, like that of an author's. The "reality" segment is still created within a film.
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Dave Fiore:
Paul! I love Lost Highway too (although it's been a long time since I've seen it and the bastards won't put it out on DVD...I don't have a VCR anymore...) The difference between the earlier film and Mulholland Dr., for me, is that, in the first, we only get the horror of alienation, so to speak... in the second, we certainly get that, but, more importantly, we get the horror of an--almost--perfect communion too!
If LH asks:"why are you dreaming this dream?", MD asks: "how could you possibly dream anything else?"
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Charles Reece:
I actually think there's quite a few similarities between Lynch and Lang: a concern with destiny and desire, where destiny isn't merely given to us by a god, but constructed on a reality of desire. Lynch also loves to put into his films destiny figures: the Good Witch, the Blue-Haired Lady/maybe the Crazy Bum, the mechanical bird, the Mystery Man.
Welp, I watched it again and took some notes. One interesting factor in this that's not been commented on as far as I've read is how much Lynch borrows from his previous films:
1. Rita wandering around, blood trickling from her hairline after a car wreck, cf. WILD AT HEART.
2. Mr. Roque (pronounced 'Rook' as in chess), controlling things from a curtained room, cf. TWIN PEAKS (including chess reference).
3. The Cowboy with a too-big white hat, cf. THE COWBOY AND THE FRENCHMAN.
4. Shifting identities has been the one parallel most noticed, cf. LOST HIGHWAY.
5. What should've been the most obvious, but I don't think anyone has: Rebeka del Rio singing Roy Orbison to a tape (funnily enough, of Rebeka del Rio singing Roy Orbison), cf. BLUE VELVET.
Maybe people want to make something out of 1 and 3, but I'd suggest Lynch loves car wrecks and silly cowboys, the grotesque (see his art of rotting animals) and cheap Americana (see just about any of his stuff). The interesting thing about 2 is that not even Martha Nochimson, who spends a lot of page space on the meaning of the curtained room, as a place of transcendence or where reality becomes possible, has anything to say about why a funny controlling agent who looks quite a bit like a homunculus would be sitting in one of Lynch's favorite rooms. Mr. Roque is the agent of destiny in Diane's dream, controlling Adam, telling him who is "the girl". But he's a construct built on Diane's desire and won't be seen again in the final 3rd. Why is that, if the last 3rd doesn't serve as some basis for the first 2/3's? Mr. Roque's not in control, he's a chess piece. But, just like in TWIN PEAKS, the game isn't what it seems.
As for 4, much has been written, including how it links the film to VERTIGO, so I won't say much, except to question the irrealist reading of Lynch. FTR, I don't think Lynch is irrational, feeling-based, or some anti-metanarrative theorist. Sure, some people shift names, but do they shift identities? Betty loves Rita and Diane loves Camilla. Adam is a director and Adam is a director. Coco is an old Hollywood grand damme and she still seems to be as Adam's mother, Coco. The waitress at Winkie's is the same waitress, just with the name Diane shifting to Betty. Anyway, you get the point. When you have a dream of a loved one acting bizarrely, like I used to have of my sweet mother chasing me around with an axe in a cheap horror film, is the dream still bizarre if the dream doesn't connect up to reality? I'd say no. Likewise, the tragedy, and I think that's what Lynch has created, a tragedy brought on by Dianne's desire and leading Betty to her necessary conclusion, loses its impact if all segments of the film are merely unreal, competing realities. It's interesting that the most prominent interpretations I've seen all fall into the postmodern camp, but that's not the "conservative" one. Isn't it time that we simply recognize the anti-"metanarrative" reading as just another metanarrative. Come on, do we have to still live in 70s film theory?
Consider, further, number 5. Lynch plays on an old joke of his, and one of his most memorable scenes, by doing himself one better: he has del Rio playing herself, lipsyncing to her own song, a Spanish cover of Orbison. This joke loses much of its humor if (1) you fail to recognize the reality of del Rio, an actual person, (2) its connection to the very real oeuvre of Lynch and (3) how its reality might differ from the rest of the film. I note that Betty and Rita stop crying once del Rio falls to the floor, but the music keeps going. That's an odd reaction if everything is equally unreal. It's true that Lynch calls into question the reality of the "reality sequence" (the final 3rd), by putting in the dream characters of the Bum and the Blue-Haired Lady, but that doesn't mean that *within the film* there's not a reality which informs the dream within the film, only that the diegesis isn't reality, despite our emotional involvement, as the real del Rio can attest. Stripping that away, the film loses much of its emotive impact, just like Lynch's joke, and why the girls stop crying once the mechanism has been laid bare.
Does Lynch connect all of this in a purely rational, conscious way? Probably not. But, even if he's purely intuitively driven (which I think isn't very likely given all the puns, rhymes and connections that appear in his films), who's to say his intuitions aren't fairly rational, or coherent?
I could go on (and how), but that's enough for now.
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Dave Fiore:
this is all good stuff Charles, but I don't agree with your assumption that affect must be rooted in some kind of ontological ground... feelings are feelings, and it's a romantic fantasy (you could argue, of course, that my own point of view is premised upon another type of romantic fantasy--and you'd be right!) to believe that just because you feel something intensely, it must therefore be real... who says so?
your point about the song at silencio is a great one though--the song goes on, but when the auditors lose their belief that it is being sung to them, it loses its power... so yeah, no question, humans crave "the real"--but does it follow that they ever get it? or do they just go on manufacturing it, constantly attempting to replace the parts that time and chaos inevitably corrode, before the mechanism (fragile--and fractured--consciousness itself) completely breaks down? (as it surely does in Betty/Diane's case?)
my point is that D/B's breakdown ought to viewed as the result of a loss of faith in both love and hate as effective routes to "the real"... her problem is that she can't think her way past the notion that "this (particular) girl" is the pole star (the "reality", in fact) by whose light she must orient herself...
she becomes nostalgic for the object of a desire that precedes their encounter...mistaking the object for the desire itself...that's a danger that each of us faces--and that's why this film is so poignant... memory is a curse--but the ability to make new ones is a blessing--and the only thing that keeps us going...
Diane/Betty loses faith in her ability to ever make anything "real" again--and once that happens, you are dead!
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Charles Reece:
--------" this is all good stuff Charles"
Right back atcha.
I'm not so concerned with an ontological ground as I am with reference. An object term without an object (of some sort) isn't an object term, but an empty signifier, a sound string. The reality of a feeling is the feeling, just like the sound string is real. Sorry for this tautological shit, but the ontological importance of a feeling is that you're feeling it. The degree to which an emotion has significance, however, is what it's linked up with, its reference. If I'm feeling happy after hearing about my dog dying and I loved the dog, you'd say that's not a proper emotion. The feeling, however, would still have happened. Even if the emotion is brought on by a manufactured diegesis, it doesn't mean that the emotion isn't valid. I think, contrary to the subjectivist take on Lynch, he gives us something like a Goodman-like relativism (which is why I like him): we are as rational as we can be with what's given. That's not the same thing as saying everything is equally true. I think MH pretty clearly sets up different levels of reality, but the connection between them is a subjectivity. Do we crave the real? Yeah, otherwise everything and nothing is just shit. Just because we don't get a transcendent viewpoint doesn't mean everything is nothing, manufactured on the fly by whoever is doing the manufacturing. MH shows that there's real responsibility to one's actions, even if those responsibilities fall out of the desire that led to the actions. I can't imagine what anyone would see as sad about the story of Betty if they didn't acknowledge something about Diane killing Camilla. That's what gives the dream it's emotive force. Putting both segments (Betty and Diane's) on the same level makes hash out of the story, resulting in something like destiny being controlled from without (Nochimson insists it's Mr. Roque changing Betty into Diane -- ugh). The dream says something about Diane's reality, gives meaning to it -- I'm not denying that. However, Lynch doesn't stop there, but goes on to implement the audience, "silencio", i.e., what does this story say about you? (There's also a similar use of silencio here to the way the videocassette is used in LOST HIGHWAY, it keeps reminding the subject to face the facts.) I think it's necessary to recongize the different grounds here, and how the more dream-like worlds (Diane's flashback for her dream, Betty's for Diane's reality, Diane's reality for us) serve as interpretants for the (shifting) ground. It's an interaction of the subjective with the objective, not one or the other.
--------"my point is that D/B's breakdown ought to viewed as the result of a loss of faith in both love and hate as effective routes to "the real"... her problem is that she can't think her way past the notion that "this (particular) girl" is the pole star (the "reality", in fact) by whose light she must orient herself... "
I definitely agree that Camilla serves as Diane's desideratum, but I think there are very real consequences.
-------"Diane/Betty loses faith in her ability to ever make anything "real" again--and once that happens, you are dead!"
Well, that and a gunshot.
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Dave Fiore:
the wonderment continues!
I like what you're saying here Charles...and yet, I resist!
I would call Rita/Camilla/the idea contained within the imperative "this is the girl" (and all referrents in fact!) Betty/Diane's (and paint-smeared-Adam's!) idolodulia (as opposed to her/his desideratum)...
I'm pulling this word from Calvin's Institutes...
While the whole world teems with these and similar delusions, and the fact is perfectly notorious, we, who have brought back the worship of the one God to the rule of his Word, we, who are blameless in this matter, and have purged our churches, not only of idolatry but of superstition also, are accused of violating the worship of God, because we have discarded the worship of images, that is, as we call it, idolatry, but as our adversaries will have it, idolodulia.
I think that Lynch--like Calvin--is saying...hey! there may be a referrent (God, for Calvin), but it is absolutely inacessible to you... and the heartbreakingly human dream of building some ultimate bridge across the gulf between the subject and the object will get you nowhere...
and the best bridges (i.e. those which appear most stable) are the surest routes to hell!
you want to put pressure on the tragedy of Diane's enraged decision to kill Camilla, in light of Betty's overwhelmingly beneficent love for Rita... I want to put pressure upon the idea that these emotions themselves are the tragedy ... you want to hold Diane accountable for her actions (and so do I)--and yet, it's hard to imagine how these events--in either of our accounts--can have played out any other way (does B/D have the power not to want to kill Camilla? does she have the power not to focus the sum total of her desire upon one ersatz sunstitute for the inacessible other?)
If we accept the Adam in Betty's dream as another aspect of the same desirer, I think we at least get a sense of what her other choice might have been, even if we cannot really imagine her making it (that's predestination my friend!)--to wit: Adam could have walked away from "his" film... he did not have to capitulate to the cowboy's (fate's?/biology's) demand... he could have chosen not to report back to the studio at all, and damn the consequences... or he could have chosen to follow Betty out of the audition room, instead of playing his assigned role (in effect, he plays Judas to his own Jesus, by betraying himself to the authorities through the instrumentality of a seemingly superfluous act of "identification")... if he had chosen disobedience, the result would have been an entirely different film!
but he doesn't (he agrees to make a film with a leading lady that has been chosen for him). and betty doesn't (her love burns Rita to the socket). and diane doesn't (she makes a final attempt to bind the fiber of her desire with Camilla's nebulous substance in the dual noose of an assassination cliche).
they all follow the injunction to substitute "the girl" for an unscripted life (a life which is unimaginable and yet, somehow, perversley possible--and without that possibility, there is no tragedy)
and so--I reiterate!--Betty's impossible confession of love TO Rita is just as much a suicide as the one that follows Diane's conspiracy to murder Camilla... "something bad is [, indeed,] happening", and it is all intensely felt, but no one aspect of the tragedy is any more real than any other aspect!
(yikes! I'll bet there are some typos in here!)
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Charles Reece:
Oh, Dave, you make my secular brain hurt with these religious references! I find that an odd sounding interpretation of a theological determinist, but the hell if I'm going to spend any time reading Calvin to test it out one way or the other. Anyway, I think you miss some possibilities living way over their on your egopole. A little bit of Davidson on schemata applied to the subject/object "divide": you have to be in a place of privilege to say one way or the other whether or not they can be bridged and that -- like arguments for the prime mover -- is going to involve you in an infinite regress. You're committing the same sin as the most rabid, old school correspondence theorist of truth by suggesting that we can't (how do you know?). So, you can either assume we can or we can't with equal authority if you want to play skeptical. I'd say you're left with pragmatism, and it's not very pragmatic to assume conversation is impossible. In fact, anyone who writes one word surely doesn't seriously hold that. And there are some good psychological reasons for thinking conversation is possible (e.g., when listing attributes to a word's meaning, subjects' listings tend to collect within certain conceptual dimensions, i.e., "family resemblances"). Now, this doesn't solve any sort of noumenal problems that philosophers might dream up, but it does suggest that, as a human community (I'd say biologically informed, as well, and there's some good evidence for this, too), we're able to live within a world that doesn't need to connect up to an Absolute for us to have some objective ground for communicating (more or less), that is, we don't have to know the Absolute to "empathize" (to use the term as loosely as possible). We deal with the given (however metaphysically ineffable) as best we can. I think the work of Lynch emblematizes this condition: real understanding comes out of the way his characters form real bonds, based on how they grapple with the unknowable, not out of recognizing that empathy is metaphysically impossible, or fundamentally unknowable. That's why Dale Cooper is the Lynchian hero par excellence: he looks at what's given, and works within the parameters of what's possible. That means giving in/being open when he doesn't have control over all the consequences. A subjectivist believes not only that you can justifiably ask any question, but that you can justifiably give any answer (subjectivism is a relativism, but not all relativisms are subjective). I don't think there's much evidence for that sort of radical indeterminism within MH or any of Lynch's films. The most tragic figures are the one's trying to control the consequences (Diane in her dream as Betty, parallel to her life as Diane, Bill Pullman in LOST HIGHWAY). Subjectivistic wish fulfillment leads to misery. Rational openness to the objective is what brings contentment (of course, the objective in Lynch's diegeses is a tad bit off from ours, but the message translates). So, it's not Diane's decision to kill Camilla per se that I'm focusing on, it's her attempt to control what she can't control whence the tragedy derives. She has no control over Adam in reality, but she attempts to control him in her dream (through her homuncular forces), thus I don't see him as a co-desirer, but as an object of her desire (her desire to control). She's the director, but not really. That's not a gaze of love between them, but, I'd wager, one of recognition. She doesn't have control over the consequences and the dream is a realization of that. I think that's what silencio is saying, stop fitting the world to your own private language, let it speak. That we can't connect to the Absolute is neither here nor there, it's more important to recognize that objective conditions fall out of subjective desires. Again, it's an interaction, and you can't have one without the other. Accepting this is rational in the Lynchian universe (and ours).
I should also point out that Cookie, the fellow with an interesting moustache, is one character who I don't think has a parallel in the final 1/3. Maybe this is signficant, but I'm inclined to not wrap up every element in this film as if it's all pointing in the same direction. I'm betting that Lynch liked Forster in the cop routine, so he kept him, likewise, Cookie, and wasn't that concerned with making everything perfectly fit some preordained form.
That's enough from me for now,
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Dave Fiore:
we're more in agreement than you know Charles--pragmatism, after all, is simply a secularized Calvinism (transcendentalism begins with the kind of subjectivism that you impute to me--with a self-reliant rejection of all limitations upon the self that, as you point out, merely reinforces the old metaphysics...but it moves very quickly toward Emerson's "Experience", which is the birthplace of pragmatism, and I'm pretty much still there!)...
I have to disagree with you when you argue that metaphysical doubt is "unimportant", though! Without it--there could be no change, and, so far as I can see, no desire/history/life either! You say that Betty is at fault for desiring to control circumstances... I agree, I suppose, but I would go further and suggest that to accept a given circumstance is also to exercise a form of wholly unwarranted control! As soon as you say--"this is just the way things are"--you are really absenting yourself from the situation, and associating yourself with "Reality"... it's the oedipal shift on a grand scale--"I'm not under daddy's thumb--I am daddy...or, at least, I've imagined myself into daddy's position"... The decision to act only within a set of given parameters is not pragmatic--it's a capitulation...a refusal to admit that sometimes, despite all appearances, the parameters have to be smashed! (and humans have been smashing parameters with alacrity since the Reformation--all I want is a more of the same!)
I can't read Mulholland Dr. as a parable about giving in to circumstance (or, as you put it, letting life speak)... Life speaks whether we let it or not--the question is whether we are going to join in the conversation, even if we know that one side of it has been pre-recorded! We are always hoping that, somehow, through some magic, the recording will halt and the real voice that laid down the tracks will make a spontaneous reply... I think you misinterpret my skeptical position on language Charles (not unexpected!)--I'm not arguing that talking is useless, I'm saying that it never says it all (and I'm not saying that I want it to, I'm merely arguing that our desire to say it all is what drives us forward, and makes us try different means of solving an insoluble problem!)
on Adam--I really disagree with you here... I don't see him as being controlled by Betty in the dream--I think he is Betty... and so, yes, it's definitely a look of recognition, but it's also a look of love...isn't that always the way? Not sure if you caught (or what you think of) my little investigation of Adam's conversation with Cynthia (Katharine Towne), but it's really moving to the center of my analysis of the film... "you don't know what you're missing"... it's true... we never know that... we can't... when you get right down to it--we don't even want to know! it's not control that poisons life--it's certainty... like Morgan Morgan in Minnie and Moskowitz--"I know where my wife is buried"--if you know that, then you know where your life is buried too--if you can be sure of the one, you can be pretty sure of the other...certainty forecloses upon desire...and this is the tragedy of Mulholland Dr.--Diane/Betty's conclusion that there's nothing left to want coupled with our own powerful--but unformularizable--sense that there is someone on the other end of the line, even if we never see them--and we'll never know what we're missing...
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Charles Reece:
I don't see how theological determinism and pragmatism mesh, but I'll trust you that there's some historical connection.
Just keeping with the film, and not necessarily whether I agree with it or not, I think the the dream (you know what section I'm referring to, so I'll just use this term for ease of typing) is a story of failed subjectivity. It's dream of a split identity, not only in terms of the characters being aspect of Diane's readings of others, but in how her homunculus isn't letting her get away with absolute control (Mr. Roque makes Diane's Adam behave in a way that Diane was trying to dream away). Thus, the dream isn't merely her creation, but it's rooted in the given/objective/real/Lynch's narrative. Certain aspects of what's given aren't metaphysically certain, if that's how you were taking my use of "given", but in actions brought on by desire. Diane might've been in control of her actions, but she's not in control of the events brought on by those actions. Lynch uses a similar story device in STAIGHT STORY where this present story is "bent" by the revelation of memories and the responsibility for those memories by Alvin Straight. In MH, however, Lynch inserts the memories towards the end. Lynch is pretty moral filmmaker, his stories tend to be morality tales (among other things, of course). And I think all this talk of smashing boundaries and such is more yours and others wanting to incorporate Lynch into a particular worldview than looking at and reading the film. The film is a given, the interpretation is not. But we've been down that road before. However, I hope that I've made it clearer what I'm talking about as "given". A capitulation is pragmatic if it's useful to capitulate. I'm not quite sure what you're trying to make of the different segments and how they might relate to each other. It seems to me that "breaking the boundaries" is exactly what begins to fall apart in Betty's world each time silencio/shhh is uttered. Your interpretation tends to leave me at the same point that the girls stop crying upon realizing the artifice. It tends to dance around the morality and the empathy that really drives the formal play into a much deeper level.
On letting life (or in our case, the film) speak, is a fundamentalist really living always dreaming of a promise of another life? I'd say no. That pretty much sums up my view on what I think you're missing about the dream (and the film itself). But that's just restating our difficulty here. I agree that language never uses up all the possible meaning of what's being talked about. The irony is that it's often those most skeptical of communication that are the most linguistically focused. But that's an argument for some other time.
On Adam, I hope it's clearer how I read him in the dream by my first paragraph. I agree that he's Betty, but that he's a part of Betty that's not entirely subjective, he's got an objective correlate elsewhere, just like many in her dream cast. There is no objective self, no Cogito.
What the hell, a tad more to go with the other shit.
Dave, are you familiar with Putnam's "meaning is not in the head" view? It's from the analytic side of the Great Divide, but it's apt here. His thought experiment is something like this: Imagine another world exactly like ours, but with the one key difference that what they refer to as water is composed of xyz instead of H20. "Water" behaves the same on both worlds, but knowing this difference, are the people on both worlds referring to the same thing when using the same term? Diane's Adam isn't just referring to herself, but is also referring to the Adam that we see later in reality sequence. Diane tries to escape into a world where all reference leads back to her cogito, but it just can't happen. Reference is knocking on her door.
Alright, I'll shut up for now.
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Dave Fiore:
ahh...but who says that the Adam that is engaged to Camilla is the "real" Adam?
I agree that there's a relationship between Adam 1 & Adam 2...but I don't see that relationship the same way that you do! I don't want to cast Adam as the heavy of the piece... I think that he/they each represent different styles of dealing with desire's inability to reach its objects...
Adam 1 flips out, steeps in his rage for a while, intuits the possibility of a completely divergent storyline (which would, of course, be no less fraught with obstacles) whilst on the phone with Cynthia (I think you could write a dissertation on the use of phones in Lynch), and, finally succumbs to the certainty that "this is the girl" (at the very moment in which the dreamer's fractured subjectivity comes closest to fusion--which, of course, ultimately, merely ups the angsty ante)
Adam 2 is more at his ease because he can, seemingly, take things or leave them...romance is a joke to him, and so is everything else... he wants to marry Camilla, but he clearly isn't depending upon that--or any other--relationship for anything...he sure comes across as an ass--but I think the point is that, in Diane/Betty's view, in a world in which "this is the girl" is not up to you--Adam 2's ambivalence toward the object of desire is the only sane path... and she doesn't want to take it! She isn't crying because she has lost Camilla--she's crying because she realizes that the only that she could have "kept" Camilla would've been to play a role that seems worse than death itself (her own--and Camilla's...for the murder plot unites the two lovers in a way that Adam 2--who is kind of Diane's disciple of "the rules"--and Camilla never could be!)
oh well!
doesn't out continued disagreement over this movie prove anything about the instability of all meaning Charles? As far as I can tell, you resist my reading because it diminishes the impact of the film upon your mind and emotions... I resist your reading for the same reason... there are moments in the film (I've Told Ev'ry Little Star; the phone conversation) that do crazy things to my head & heart that your reading simply cannot account for--and I presume that this goes both ways... and so each of us is left to muse upon the text in our own ways!
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Charles Reece:
Still puttering about online, Dave, but I'll get back to you later. I just wanted to say that you're talking to someone who is obsessed with phones in movies. Particularly ringing. My favorite is in SECONDS (which if you haven't seen, you'll absolutely love) where protagonist (who'll be turned into Rock Hudson) is startled by the ringing of his phone (by the company who's going to do the identity switch). You have to see and hear it, but it just knocks you back. But Lynch is a fucking master of the ring. Anyway, I've had the same thought and evidently someone released a book a couple years ago on the use of phone conversations in film. I read an essay in some film mag about a year ago.
------------------"I don't want to cast Adam as the heavy of the piece... I think that he/they each represent different styles of dealing with desire's inability to reach its objects..."
I'm not quite sure what you're getting at here. I don't see Adam as the heavy, but he's part of the central triad of the film (which I think makes your allusion to NO EXIT a worthwhile comparison, how hell is similar and different in the 2 works; it also relates both to GILDA; all 3 stories, to some degree, question who you are, other's readings of you or your reading of others, or your reading of others' readings of you, etc.). Desire might not be intentionally controlled (I think the movie pretty clearly says that), but it does reach objects, effects conditions one has to live with.
But, we definitely have a difference about the "Ev'ry Little Star" segment. I see fission where you seem to be seeing something like an objective self emerging (by your use of "fusion"), or fighting for air. But I'm not sure what's being fused according to you. You're definitely right to pay attention to the lyrics, since Lynch rarely if ever uses pop songs frivously (although LH might be an exception -- why he'd use that shitty Bowie song instead of the classic Hank song "Lost Highway," I'll never know). But those lyrics are targeted at Diane's relation to Camilla, not Adam. Adam's gaze is an intrusion into this delusional world Diane's created for herself (but don't get hung up on a too literal reading of those last 3 words: Diane clearly fails to do this successfully, she's dreaming a version of herself based on the manufactured illusion sold to our culture by Hollywood). Adam intrudes in the dream just like he intrudes in reality (and, of course, Diane's view of Camilla isn't very accurate in either world). Now, you say that Adam threatens a divergent storyline, and it's hard not to see many segments as somewhat doing that (the dreamer at Winkie's, the assassin sequence), but it's just Lynch includes so many rhymes in the 2 segments of his film, that the simplest explanation is one story that I don't see any way out of reading this as a single narrative that questions the possibility of singular narratives but to postulate another enunciator/dreamer that exists within the diegesis (but what's the evidence?) or to say that the film never pulls things together (which leaves all those parallels unexplained). You kind of go back and forth between these possibilities. I'd prefer parsimony. I think that there's just as much philosophical fallout with the more parsimonious explanation as the approach which tries to make the narrative as difficult as the philosophical issues it tackles.
-------------"She isn't crying because she has lost Camilla--she's crying because she realizes that the only that she could have "kept" Camilla would've been to play a role that seems worse than death itself"
See, I'd use a single explanation here: she's lost her Camilla (which was never really Camilla). Diane's been living a life where either she's playing herself (both as others have made her or as she like to be, based on illusions that weren't completely her own doing). She doesn't have any more control in her dream than she does in reality. She's lipsynching.
As for polysemy, well, there are some wrong interpretations out there. You acknowledge this possibility when you ask, "doesn't out continued disagreement over this movie prove anything about the instability of all meaning Charles?" That is, our continued disagreement is proof that meaning is instable. Is that stable? Sorry to get all liar's paradoxical on you, but you've got a self-refuting viewpoint on this issue, Dave.
I'm not sure that I get exactly how you're connecting the different versions of the characters or the segments. You often say things which are pretty similar to what I'm saying (only with different terms), but resist my conclusions. You seem to approach the film in such a way that any ability to say what's so sad about Diane's arc becomes impossible, since no sequence can serve as an interpretive source for any other sequence (they're all equally valid within the narrative and all equally wrong within the same context). I mean, is Betty Diane, Camilla, Adam, what? You say desire, but who's desire? Obviously, the film speaks to us, but the film also says something about itself. Why, at the end of the "girl is missing" phone sequence, is the final phone that isn't answered the same one as Diane's in the later part of the film? I'm not getting these sort of basic points from you. That's an objective connection on the surface of the screen. So maybe I'm missing something crucial about your position, but I'm not seeing what I haven't covered. Maybe you could point out how my view fails to cover a particular point about the narrative. To get back to the preceding point, you'd have to argue that some point is an important aspect of the film, and that my view simply can't handle it. That, too, entails something more than all meanings are in flux. But, if you're pooped (and I'm getting there), I've enjoyed arguing with you once again.
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Dave Fiore:
I will never tire of discussing this film! (certainly not when my interlocutor is as engaged as you are) and I'll definitely be referring back to these conversations when we reach the film in my class!
but for now, let's see...
----------"I mean, is Betty Diane, Camilla, Adam, what? You say desire, but who's desire? Obviously, the film speaks to us, but the film also says something about itself."
I think this question accounts for most of our difference of opinion--I don't think anyone is desire. Desire just is. (just as when say I that "the universe is a break-up', I purposefully exclude any subject)
When I say that the film is all dream--I don't mean that it's all Betty's dream, but that it's making a bid to become the viewer's dream... I think that's what a great work of art does--manages to convince you that you dreamed it, and makes you puzzle over it in the same way that you would puzzle over one of your own somnambulant sonatas--if you were lucky enough to remember it as vivdly as you can remember a text that you encountered while awake (and the added privilege of flipping back and forth through the pages or the film make only intensifies this)
when I say that another possible story opens up in the phone conversation between Adam and Cynthia, I don't mean that Adam (as a separate character) threatens to take over the narrative--the possibility that I'm referring to is embodied by Cynthia...
That scene, that warning--"you don't know what you're missing"--I find it so powerful, and I can't account for its power in any other way... it just seems to me that her side of the conversation is coming from an entirely different film (call it "This is not the Girl", or "This is a different girl", or somethin')--we know that there's no way to get there, and, moreover, that we'll never see this character again (she doesn't have a double in the second narrative)...that, in fact, there's something vaguely illicit (and, therefore, all the more liberating) about this one glimpse itself! Does it feel that way to you at all?
about the fusion in the I've Told Ev'ry Little Star scene--it's near-fusion, not fusion itself (I don't think that's possible)... like Kitty, in Random Harvest, who is "so nearly the one", this near-meeting of two parts of the dreamer's self only makes the faultline within the self (which I call desire) more apparent... but I don't think that Adam's gaze is an intrusion here, nor do I feel that we are supposed to think that Betty resents it... it's very hard to tell, in this scene, what Betty is looking at... in fact, I would argue that she isn't looking at anything at all--she is merely being seen...but the moment is broken up before it can lead to anything definite (as all of these moments are) by something outside of it, by the circumstances that force Adam to deal with his casting situation, and Betty to deal with her quest to discover "Rita's" history...
I could go on--but I hope this clarifies (although I'm sure it fails to convince you) why I can maintain that none of the characters are "real' (except to the extent that they all mirror the viewer), but that the film nevertheless packs an emotional and intellectual wallop!
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Charles Reece:
I mistyped: should've been "whose" not "who is," but maybe it didn't make that much of a difference. Getting back to the point about what's a conservative reading of Lynch: I've got a collection of books about him, and not one author suggests anything but an illogical/death of author/dissolution of narrative approach. I think this is largely due to a conflation of narrative, linearity, and logic. Just because Lynch critiques certain philosophical ideas doesn't mean that his work isn't logical or that he doesn't work within a narrative structure or even that MH doesn't have a linear sequence of events. That doesn't mean that his selection of elements has to be rational or entirely conscious, but there's a good deal more narrative logic to the way he puts these elements together than he's typically given credit for. Reading a collection of essays on Lynch is pretty much a game of one-up-manships, where each essay begins with how some "radical" reading doesn't go far enough. Much like bad litcrit writing (but I'm most certainly not including you here), the film has to be as muddled as what it supposedly expresses. I bring this up because you seem to be assuming that a separation of diegetic levels in the film would decrease the oneiric feel of what I've taken to calling the reality sequence. Not at all, I think that's what explains the logic of putting those dream/destiny characters at the end: this film affects you in a real way, but it's not real, it's a dream of reality, if you like. That doesn't entail any need to rid the film of it's narrative logic. The way I see it is that it's a narrative that critiques narrative, but still a narrative. Without that, it ceases to be self-reflexive, for their is no "filmic self" to reflect on. The film gives us something. Otherwise, you could apply your reading of MH to any film in existence. There's something other than you applying some limitations to your reading. Theoretically, we might have unlimited semiosis, but that doesn't mean, practically, everyone is randomly applying whatever concepts to whatever objects, a film's narrative is no different. This film is replete with references to the other, a reference beyond the self (Rebeka del Rio being a reference to her actual self in our world at the point that most assume is the center of the film, what Lynch calls his "eye of the duck" sequence). One can assume a diegetic "reality" without thinking of Neorealism or socalled transparent filmmaking, you know?
Another irony is that even though I'm arguing for a more "logical" Lynch, I don't feel the need to tie up every element of the film in a particular philosophical reading. The Cynthia scene could be there because it introduces the reason for going to see the Cowboy, which was all part of the pilot. Not that this makes your "this is another girl" reading wrong; it fits just fine into both of our readings, I think, but I don't see how it has much consequence one way or the other (no more so than the yelling mobster, Adaya or whatever the actor's name is, during the meeting). I mean, she was suggesting herself because Adam's wife definitely wasn't "the girl." However, I think you're right in pointing out a good example of the dialogue meaning something more than what it suggests in the particular scene. "You don't know what you're missing" is definitely saying something to the character of Adam, and by extension, I'd suggest, the dreaming Diane (just like the crazy mystic neigbor at the door). Good point (hopefully you don't feel I mangled it too badly).
As for Adam's gaze, "intrusion" doesn't quite cover it, true. I mean, according to my view, he can't exactly intrude in a place of which he's part. But he's like a doorknob on a door, sort of part of it, but kind of an intrusion as well. Hell, the door knob even kind of suggests intrusion. He both calls attention to himself (a reference to the "real" Adam, your Adam 2), but calls attention to Diane, as well. That's what I meant by intrusion (which, come to think of it, is something like that "eye of the duck" thing -- have you read Lynch's comments on that in the book of interviews with him? If not, and you're interested, I can probably dig up the quote -- that's just another way of saying I don't disagree with you about the importance of this scene).
I'm not familiar with Random Harvest (I initially thought of Red Harvest), but I have the web at my fingertips ...
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Dave Fiore:
ah yes--the web is wonderful Charles!
Random Harvest is an old-time amnesiac-romance by Mervyn LeRoy...came out on DVD recently... I love it! (although Red Harvest is even better!)
I agree that certain critics will purposefully ransack a work looking for a confirmation of their theory, and then leave a mess behind as a smokescreen... and I share your passion for reconstructing narratives (or, at least, for tracing out tentative paths through narratives)... that's what's been happening to me throughout our various discussions of the film, in fact! I'm becoming more and more enamoured of one basic set of assumptions about the ways in which the parts fit together...
1. i.e. that the most important thing about the two Adams is they way that they comment upon each other (and upon a series of available roles vis-a-vis "the girl"--i.e. fight against the command, "this is the girl", and then, later, submit, and disappear from the narrative/then, on the other side of the "this is the girl" divide, accept the imperative, but hedge against self-destruction by "playing it cool" and refusing to truly engage with--despite becoming engaged to!--the object of desire), rather than their respective functions as first puppet the puppet and then the antagonist of Betty/Diane;
2. that the I've Told Ev'ry Little Star scene is just as important as the Silencio scene, and that these scenes comment upon each other as well (in the first, the magic of life as action--agency/self-assertion--and direction--storytelling/memory--blaze off of the screen, without quite soldering the fault-line that separates these two aspects of the subject from each other, and the world--the "you" that "I" can't tell; in the second, we get the reverse: a profoundly demystifying enterprise that nevertheless leaves us feeling less knowing than ever before...sure, it's all a tape, and we're all just spectators, rather than actors or directors, but who did lay down those tracks? No one has ever found that one out--at least, no one that ever returned from their leap into the void within the blue box of experience...pure surface that contains nothing/everything)
3. that the phone conversation with Cynthia stands out in--a way that I'm still wrestling with--by holding out the possibility (which, we know, somehow, could never actually be accepted) of an escape into an entirely new narrative... the fact that both ends of the conversation are filmed creates a kind of wormhole between the two planes... the second of which is a place that we know nothing about, except that we don't know what we're missing there (and thus we correspondingly miss it more!)
next time I watch it (in class, about ten days from now)--I really want to focus on the Cowboy... because I'm still not completely sure what I want to say about that scene...
I'd love to hear more about the "eye of the duck" comments... I've never read any interviews Lynch...and, in fact, I've read almost nothing about the films either (except for the stuff that I've been linking to!)
okay--time to read some Poe for my seminar!
bon weekend!
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Charles Reece:
Lynch on ducks and their eyes:
"Yeah, a duck, its a...well, one of the most beautiful animals."
"I sort of go by a duck when I work on a film because if you study a duck, you'll see certain things. You'll see a bill, and the bill is a certain texture and a certain length. Then you'll see a head, and the features on the head are a certain texture and it's a certain shape and it goes into the neck. The texture of the bill for instance is very smooth and it has quite precise detail in it and it reminds you somewhat of the legs. The legs are a little bit bigger and a little more rubbery but it's enough so that your eye goes back and forth. Now, the body being so big, it can be softer and the texture is not so detailed, it's just kind of a cloud. And the key to the whole duck is the eye and where the eye is placed. And it has to be placed in the head and it's the most detailed, and it's like a little jewel. And if it was fixed, sitting on the bill, it would be two things that were too busy, battling, they would not do so well. And if it was sitting in the middle of the body, it would get lost. But it's so perfectly placed to show off a jewel right in the middle of the head like that, next to this S-curve with the bill sitting out in front, but with enough distance so that the eye is very very very well secluded and set out. So when you're working on a film, a lot of times you can get the bill and the legs and the body and everything, but this eye of the duck is a certain scene, this jewel, that if it's there, it's absolutely beautiful. It's just fantastic."
The eye sort of stands out, doesn't make quite aesthetic sense, but it makes the duck whole, creates its own aesthetic. Used narratively, it's kind of Lynch's McGuffin.
On narratives and theory, the oft-mentioned Zizek says this about LOST HIGHWAY: "In a first approach, one should absolutely insist that we are dealing with a real story (of the impotent husband, etc.) that, at some point (that of the slaughter of Renee), shifts into psychotic hallucination in which the hero reconstructs the parameters of the Oedipal triangle that again make him potent -- significantly, Pete turns back into Fred, I.e., we return to reality, precisely when, within the space of psychotic hallucination, the impossibility of the relationship reasserts itself, when the blond Patrician Arquette (Alice) tells her young lover, "You'll never have me!"" Would anyone argue Zizek's "conservatism" strangles the interpretative possibilities of Lynch? I'll leave the issue of conservative versus radical with that and go on to your points.
1. The 2 Adams do comment on each other, which suggests reference. One problem the film explicitly addresses (but that's probably an issue with all films) is what's being referenced? I'd say that, minimally, one has to recognize a difference in realities/worlds/status as signifier or whatever you want to call it between the 2 segments in order to suggest any commenting is going on (identical twins don't stand for each other). His role in the dream is to play the mouthpiece for the Hollywood Other, where Diane buries the elements of Camilla standing in her way of obtaining her desired object. What functions as uncontrolled irrational otherness in Betty's world turns out to be reality worming its way into the dream's logic. Adam 1 is no more of a puppet of Diane's than Betty. Going back to Zizek, he suggests that ideology is objective to the degree that subjects accept it, or act as if they accept it. I think that's a pretty good way of reading the Hollywood ideology at work in the dream and Diane's dreamy take on Adam's place within that ideology. Diane's repressing things and filtering much through an ideology that's not exactly her own, so it's not like she's a puppetmaster. (I try to avoid psychoanalytic theory as best I can, but it's not easy with Lynch.)
2. I think the Ev'ry Star scene is really important, it sets up the Silencio one, makes it possible, even, but I can't see it as being more crucial. The former is the creaking and screetching of the wheels to the latter's derailed train. I still believe you need a reality to supply the tragedy of the dream and that's what the film gives with the second segment. I do believe the film insists on giving "a reality" and shows it's importance while not having "the reality" (which is where many get derailed into putting both segments into one continuous diegetic line: "they're both equally unreal" -- yeah, but not within the film).
3. Yeah, there's maybe something missing which is alluded to by the Cynthia conversation, but I don't put much importance on it (at least, I'd be surprised if any interpretation would be radically altered by a reading of that scene). Maybe you'll change my mind.
The Cowboy is one of the more vague elements: he only appeared once more to Adam, indicating he did good. But he appeared 2 times for Diane (and us), and one of those times is before she wakes up, and the other is in the past, her memory. Diane certainly never picks "the girl," in dream or reality or memory. And if Adam 1 is Diane (you know what I mean by now), then the Cowboy was addressing her at the same time as Adam 1. I don't know, but I'll be interested in hearing if you come up with anything.
Oh yeah, I copied the Lynch quote from The City of Absurdity ( http://www.thecityofabsurdity.com/quotecollection/ducks.html) and the Zizek one from his "The Art of the Ridiculous Sublime: On David Lynch's Lost Highway."
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John Pistelli:
So I slept on Mulholland Drive and here's what I think: my reading is halfway between the conservative argument and the postmodern one. The first 2/3 is, among other things, an exploration of genre, a structured series of tropes and devices from other films, but there are moments within that structure where the real of Betty/Diane's desire/guilt burn through the conventions: the first time I saw the movie, the scene that impressed me most was Betty's audition where she performed with the old guy, and I take this as one of the first moments where the dream sours into nightmare and the emotions become too much for the material of her fantasy to contain. (The sickening moment where a dream turns into a nightmare is the feeling the movie gives off--I think it's scarier than most horror movies!) But anyway, Silencio: this is where Betty/Diane can no longer deny she's dreaming/fantasizing around an absence (a silence), but the implication of the scene goes to the viewer, because this is what we're doing in the theater. No hay banda is like a koan to meditate on. Obviously it means that we're watching a recording (of a translation of a song that is an allusion to another film, at that) and have no creator to appeal directly to, but it also implies generally that we can't appeal to the real in the film, or to appeal outside the real of our emotions. If there is no band, then there is no origin for the first 2/3 that's more real than others: is it Diane's psyche, or the Hollywood dream factory or the collective unconscious or what? No hay banda. But Betty/Diane misinterprets, gets the key and tries to open the story into intelligibility, into a space where there is a band, where there is more than a recording, but--and here I'm with you--the box of meaning just sucks you into a void, an absence, a silence. I think we have to take the last 1/3 as more real than the first 2/3 to get Lynch's joke that it no more explains away the real of Betty/Diane's desire than any Hollywood convention (the sinister conspiracy behind moviemaking, say) does. That's why the bum behind Winky's reappears: he's an excess in the first 2/3, a seemingly unrelated figure that is nevertheless doing all of this, and Betty/Diane reverts to him as the agent of her torment. The old people initially represent the love/home/support she wished she had, while at the end, even they are revealed as fantasies spun around an absence: no hay banda, and there is no perfect family or perfect love either. So mostly I'm with your interpretation entirely, but I think a slight privileging of the diegetic reality of the last 1/3 makes your point all the sharper. Just because it's real doesn't mean it (or anything else, like the culture industry) is sufficient to reduce Diane's pain into something manageable.
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Dave Fiore:
every time I read anything about this movie, I want to watch it again, and that's just craziness... but let's see if I can say a few quick words without losing another 2.5 hours of grading time in the bargain!
I really like your final point John--and for sure, the main point of contention between Charles and myself was the question of whether Diane's story explains anything that we've seen (or, as you put it, makes it manageable)... I can't believe that anyone could watch that film and come away thinking--oh yeah, it's just a story about a woman scorned (by her lover, by hollywood, etc.) I like Proximo's theory that the film aspires to involve each of us in that scorn (that this is the human condition, not just one unlucky person's melodramatic spiral into murder, suicide and despair)... that the scorn predates experience (and is, in fact, the only ground upon which experiences can be had...)
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Proximoception:
Scorn predates experience? Whoa dude. Not sure I like that. Betty is all Diane's idealization and none of her memory?
I think there is a state of comparative innocence, a castle preceding the ruin. Hell, the Tower of Babel story ties in nicely here. It's the experience that's universal, not the confabulation. Though the experience is strong enough to be inevitably mythed up some. God, imagine a story where it wasn't. It'd make a third with Requiem for a Dream and Shoah.
But the Betty portion is weirded up enough that clearly it's not just memory, not unmixed real-time occurrence, so you may be getting at something. And certainly the mechanic kid in Lost Highway is almost entirely idealization, a projection of an innocent "earlier" self who might evade Fred's mistakes. (The great touch there was the parents: "it would help if my/his parents were cooler; let's give them sunglasses and leather jackets and also they can ride motorcycles and let's have them be both hands-off and caring").
And what would an eighteen-year-old Wordsworth say, handed his own Immortality Ode of fifteen years on?
But life is not storyless, and memory isn't just a Rorschach Test.
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Dave Fiore:
you're right there... about the "scorn"--there I was drawing upon Emerson's "Days"... we may not always see the scorn beneth the fillet of time...but it's there--making history, and stories, possible...
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Proximoception:
Scorn meaning, reality tugging on our leash? I like this. Melvillean/Lynchian addendum: Hard tugs break necks.
Actually one of the most fascinating things about Mulholland is how thoroughly it continues, and how thoroughly it revises Highway. And almost every revision is an improvement; there's immense gain in power and poignance by having the idealized life come first, by having the Everyman be a woman, by hinting how everyone shifts roles in this lover/scorner/hater chamber piece, by representing the moment of change so mysteriously in that past-the-margins apocalyptic middle sequence. And the removal of moral concern is masterful: Fred recognizes what is guilty in himself, if too late, and purges it or wants to (same thing in these inner lands). But how? And even if Lynch knew and could tell us, there is still the story of those who don't know, of the Dianes among and in us--a more compassionate, more essential one. Lost Highway organized Lynch's world into a story but Mulholland organizes that story into the world.
And you know? Early Harold Bloom loved Blake so much that when he called anything Blakean you knew he was giving it the highest praise. I'm a Shelley man and I find this movie deeply Shelleyan.
Proximoception:
I like an awful lot of what all three of you are saying; even where I think you're wrong about this movie you're juggling ideas that I'd like to see new movies embody.
I forget most of my plot theory of Mulholland, which means I absolutely have to rewatch it, hopefully tonight, but I remember it's close to Charles' "conservative" view. Confusion is caused by the vestiges of the series it grew out of, but this is essentially a coherent story, and not a dream: everything happens or directly represents what has happened. The backbone of the television series would have been the neoplatonic heirarchy of evil, or good, or whatever--all those weird characters--resumed from Twin Peaks and then discarded as unnecessary, with just a couple tie-ins later on (the Cowboy at the party) to hide that Lynch was just saving fun, expensive footage.
I forget which of you mentions that the characters, eventually, are all one person. On first viewing, the night it reached my town, I somehow assumed that toward the end three leads, actress director and mystery lady, were exchanging bodies/personalities, and that this meant they really were interchangeable for the purposes of this story, and hence we are too, this is the story of each of us. Forget the extensions and distinctions of plot, the movie seemed to say, all that has gotten you to this point and now I'm dropping the rockets. Here is your own story, and alas.
I was very disappointed in the movie when I rented it a year or so after and saw I'd been mistaken. Not that the movie wasn't essentially going for that, for tricking us into our own secret loves and pains via those of others and thereby merging us; but it hadn't dared to kick free of its scaffolding in the way I'd imagined. And who can blame it, it was losing enough people with the risks it actually took.
It's important to see that this is beyond morality. It's after the deeper compassion, the recognition we're leading the same life. How many times have you heard someone hesitate, and say they don't know if it's the same for other people, but for them...and then read a paragraph of man's autobiography.
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Charles Reece:
I'm having a hard time telling who is whom, but I think I'm pretty much in agreement with proximoception. I posted some recent stuff over on Dave's thread, so I won't repeat it here. I'll add that the Bum is sort of a deterministic force, despite being an obvious construct of a film, that works against Dave's tendency towards a subjectivistic interpretation. There's always something else other than what we/Diane would like it to be that has an effect on our subjective interpretation. The film is, in part, constructing our experience. And even though Betty and Rita stopped crying once they realized the artificial nature of the Silencio show, I still get teary-eyed, even knowing about the Bum.
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That's all folks!
(for now!)
Dave
