Legendary weirdo David Lynch passed away a few days ago, just shy of marking his 79th lap around the Sun after spending about 70 of those years smoking. The director of Eraserhead, The Elephant Man, Dune (the 1984 bad one), Blue Velvet, Wild at Heart and creator of the Twin Peaks television series had a dedicated fandom who flooded social media with their sadness. For me, it meant it was time to finally open up the Criterion Collection Blu-ray of Mulholland Drive I'd bought in Oct. 2017, nearly 7-1/2 years ago.
Released in 2001, it began life as a rejected TV series pilot filmed in early-1999 for ABC, the network that carried Twin Peaks. According to Lynch, an executive watched it at 6 am while drinking coffee and talking on the phone and hated it so the project was dead. A French producer was able to get funding to convert it into a feature and additional filming was done a year-and-a-half later in Fall 2000 leading to a premiere at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival where Lynch won Best Director. (Shared with Joel Coen for The Man Who Wasn't There)
It opens with a limo driving up the titular Los Angeles road. In the back seat is a gorgeous raven-haired woman (Laura Elena Harring - fun fact: she was Miss USA 1985). The limo stops unexpectedly and the driver and his partner produce guns and are preparing to kill her when a car ex machina occurs, crashing into the limo, killing the assailants, and leaving the woman suffering a head injury, wandering down the hills into the city. She finds her way to an apartment complex where an older woman is leaving for a trip. She sneaks into the apartment and hides, getting locked in, and falls asleep.
We then meet Betty (Naomi Watts), arriving at LAX, saying goodbye to an elderly couple she'd met on the flight. She arrives at the same apartment complex and after checking in with the manager, Coco (Ann Miller in her last screen role), goes to her aunt's apartment and discovers the mysterious woman, who after seeing a poster for Rita Hayworth's Gilda, adopts the name. (Rita, not Gilda.) She has amnesia from the blow to the head, but also has a purse with a LOT of cash in it. Who is she and what's up with the money?
We then get scenes with an incompetent hitman (Mark Pellegrino, Supernatural) botching a job; a man who has a dream about a monster behind a diner; and a movie director, Adam (Justin Theroux), who needs a new leading actress for his picture and is being told by some humorless Italian men that there is one particular actress that he will be casting or else and when he goes home he catches his wife in bed with Billy Ray Cyrus. (He's playing a character named Gene, not himself.)
As Betty and Rita investigate where the latter could be from and where the money came from, they go deeper down the rabbit hole, making a shocking discovery. Later that night, they go to Club Silencio where mysterious blue box appears with a keyhole matching a blue key that was in Rita's purse with the cash. Upon opening it, things get weirder beginning with Betty becoming Diane and Rita becoming Camilla before escalating to an exceedingly weird and abrupt ending.
If this doesn't make much sense it's because Mulholland Drive doesn't make much sense. I saw it when it came out and I'm pretty sure I'd seen it since somewhere, but I never owned it prior to this Criterion. All I really remembered about it was the audition scene, (oddly only) one of the two love scenes between Rita and Betty (seriously, I'm a guy; how did I forget the first one?!?), and the ending was just nuts.
Watching it intently (even during the non-Mr. Skin parts), it's still disjointed and judging from where the new footage takes over from the original pilot (i.e. the pilot has zero swearing, then suddenly the ladies are getting naked), I don't see how this was going to be a series. Robert Forester appears as a police detective at the limo scene and is never seen again. Other bits seem unconnected until the last act and then are recontextualized into new meaning in the last act, but you need to connect those dots.
You're not supposed to admit that you don't understand a movie lest you get hit with the "You didn't get it, man. You're too stupid, so you're opinion means nothing, man!" line of attack, but as with a lot of Lynch's works, I simply didn't get what he was going for. Too often, he seems to be weird for the sake of being weird like when Michael Cera showed up for a scene in Twin Peaks: The Return dressed like Marlon Brando in The Wild One to spout some random gibberish.
Sidebar: The missus is a big fan of Lynch and Eraserhead and I'd bought her the Criterion of that. When we finally got around to watching it, she seemed to be watching me half the time in anticipation of me freaking out over the strangeness. But I didn't, only waiting until the Woman in the Radiator showed up to remark, "And then it got weird." After it was over, I said, "Well, that was something," not the expected, "WHAT THE HELL WAS THAT?!?!?" I got that it was supposed to be this weird nightmare that Lynch willed into existence, making it over a period of years.
But Mulholland Drive's structure didn't make sense to me until I got fed a couple of explainer videos on YouTube which detailed what was reality (pretty much the 3rd act) and what was a dream (everything that came before it). After that, I got what the structure was supposed to be, but the fact that I needed it explained either means me iz 2 stoopid or Lynch's storytelling is too opaque. (I'm going with the latter, thank you very much.) I know he draws heavily from dreams and as such explicitly doesn't explain them, leaving them up to our interpretations, but I think it's a cop-out as much as Anatomy of a Fall basically told the audience to make up their own ending. No, storytellers need to tell their stories, not be A&R guys saying, "I dunno. What do you think?"
That's not to say there's little to recommend Mulholland Drive. Watts' career was launched into the A List off her performance off her complex performance; the audition scene makes an impact for a reason. (It was a shock to see the black-haired Jet Girl from 1995's Tank Girl as a chipper blonde.) Harring somehow didn't despite being totally vavoom. She's appeared in 30 movies and a smattering of TV shows since and I haven't seen any of them except her brief handful of appearances on Gossip Girl which I don't even remember. It's weird how careers diverge for stars of the same film.
Even the random weirdness in isolation is entertaining, but it doesn't amount to a cohesive whole. I just don't easily get on dream logic's wavelength. (I don't need my hand held like a child, but even I was able to understand the symbolism of Elle Fanning kissing her reflection in Nicolas Winding Refn's The Neon Demon.) If you're a fan of the movie, don't let me stop you.
As for this Criterion release, the centerpiece is the new (in 2012) restored 4K scan and restoration transfer supervised by Lynch and director of photography Peter Deming. Colors are good, but sometimes the dark areas get murky as if they were intended for standard def television, which it was. This has also been reissued on 4K UltraHD Blu-ray, but due to the gauzy, dreaming, filtered look often employed, details are fuzzy so save the money and stick with the Blu-ray.
On the supplemental materials front, the bulk are new interviews with Lynch and Watts discussing her casting and the torturous making of the TV pilot and feature (27 mins); casting director Johanna Ray and Watts, Harring, and Theroux about how they were cast (duh) and tales from the set (36 mins); Angelo Badalamenti about his career, his works with Lynch, how he was asked to record low instruments that Lynch then slowed down for his spooky sound design, and how he was cast as the disappointed espresso drinker (20 mins); and cinematographer Deming and production designer Jack Fisk recounting how they fell in with Lynch and the process here (23 mins).
The remainder consists of a single deleted scene with the cops talking about weird stuff for a few minutes and 25 mins of fly-on-the-wall on-set footage showing the grinding process of making a movie. If you're super nerdy about this stuff, it's somewhat interesting, but others may be quickly bored. A booklet with an excerpt of an interview from the book Lynch on Lynch and the trailer rounds things up.
While I remain lukewarm on the film, if you're a fan then this Criterion release will definitely fill the Mulholland Drive shaped hole in your collection. A good transfer and nearly 2-1/2 hours of extras make an easy pickup during Criterion sales.
Score: 5/10 (movie) - Catch it on cable/streaming; 8/10 (disc) - Buy it.
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