ragool

Apr 03, 2022

Mulholland Drive

BBC was wrong to consider Mulholland Drive the best film of the 21st Century: as revolutionary as linked to classical cinema and having its roots in that Old Hollywood Lynch mentions several times (probably feeling nostalgic about), it’s actually the last great masterpiece of the 20th Century.

As Shutter Island, Mulholland Drive is a film about dissociation, but in spite of Scorsese’s main interest into assembling a great human drama within his movies, Lynch prefers to be exclusively focused on the oneiric dimension. The Trauma, the Dream, and the dream as trauma. Mulholland Drive is the greatest study of a dream – and therefore of a trauma – ever seen in theatres, which takes place on three interlacing and overlapping levels – Reality, Dream and Subconscious. As usual, this happens without any explanation being given and leaving the viewer the task of putting things in a particular order (). There is no mystery to be revealed nor thriller involved, there is no peculiar human tragedy. In order to love and understand the movie, one has to necessary go with the flow and enter the dream.

Diane Selwyn (Naomi Watts) is an aspiring Hollywood star who has never managed to break into acting and she has recently ended her relationship with Camilla Rhodes (Laura Harring), a well-established actress who gives her a hand to get minor roles in several movies. After being invited to a dinner party by Camilla and riding in a limousine on Mulholland Drive, her ride is interrupted: waiting for her along the road her ex-girlfriend surprisingly arrives to walk her up to a party at Adam Kesher’s house (Justin Theroux), director of their upcoming film. Diane’s deep shock after Camilla and Adam announce their engagement during the party forces her to hire a hitman to kill the woman has betrayed her. The killer shows her a blue key: when Diane sees it again, it will mean the job has been fulfilled. Although this is a turning point, it’s not placed at the beginning of the movie, but just before the end, so everything else happening in the first two hours of Mulholland Drive is nothing but Diane’s dream and her subconscious mind struggling to deal with her love affair and guilt over the decision to have Camilla killed.