Driving through Dreams: Mulholland Drive

This movie is crazy…but crazy good! I have never watched a David Lynch movie, and I am kind of glad this one was the first one. I knew that Lynch’s auteur style is more on the non-mainstream style, and I definitely saw that. I had to go into a surrealist mindset to sort of understand this film. This film is very “dream-like” and not everything I watch I will fully understand. This may be frustrating for some of the audience members, but it is not really for me. It wasn’t until the reading; I sort of understood/explored the possible meanings behind this film. 

I really feel that this film takes the perspective of the dreamer being Hollywood. Dreams are “learned habits of the mind” that usually “fail to support our needs, but often loom as frightening adversaries in our struggle to cope” (Nochimson). This dream we see reveals a sad, horrific, confusing, grotesque results, such as Betty/Diane’s suicide (Nochimson). Usually the Hollywood we see isn’t always happy ending.  This dream seems mechanical, a “mass-market machine that feeds on genuine, not imaginary, creative impulses and turns them into waste products” (Nochimson). Life and death. Lynch also plays on those usual Hollywood stereotypes, but then twists them to the unordinary, not seen personas. Hence the artificial acting (at first). We root for Betty and her success, but as soon as she has everything, she loses everything in one moment. A missed opportunity of meeting with Adam, the famous Hollywood director, which later results to a “butterfly effect”. It was from the moment on that things started going downhill. 

This dream we are watching is created by a culture industry, Hollywood, which has a lot of power and control. It is filled with life and death, defeat and hope…we see all of that in various films, especially the classic ones (Nochimson).  There are lots of illusion, and void within this dream-like film, especially when Betty and Rita go to Club Silencio. We hear the band, the singing, but there is nothing there. The film ends with Club Silencio, with a woman saying “Silencio” (which means silence in Spanish). This phrase resonates on the audience, hence the long black screen before the credits…”full of signs of both empty illusion and fullness of possibility” (Nochimson). I agree with the reading, this brings a questionable future not for the characters, but for Hollywood/popular culture (Nochimson). But also for us. Possibilities can come out of this dark void, but also death.   

The Deepened Roots of Daughters of the Dust

Daughters of the Dust at first caught me off guard. I was annoyed that most of the movie, I did not understood what any of the women and men were saying. Without knowing what the characters were saying, I did not know the plot. Yes, I understood that these women were going to the Americas, learning about the modern times, and having conflicts with new ideas such as religion…that was basically it. It wasn’t until I read the reading that I began to understand the context of the narrative, and the reasoning behind this film. This is a film about family, and passes the Bechdel Test: 1. It has to have at least two [named] women in it, 2. Who talk to each other, 3. About something besides a man. 

In addition, this film is not the ordinary mainstream film, it breaks a lot of barriers. First, it has “intentionally broken with mainstream filmmaking approaches that too often reduce the complexities of black life to homogenized, ready-made film commodities...” (Everett). Second, “Her goal was to tell a story as an African griot would, with an unfolding, like women’s weaving” (Everett). Third, it is not plot driven, but “heavily influenced by foreign films…” (Everett). Fourth (and fifth), she experimented with film speeds and speculative fiction. This film isn’t supposed to be easy for the audience to watch, because it is not the norm…especially if the audience member is white. Dash desires to “rewrite cinematic images of black women and break completely with traditional film stereotypes” (Everett). We are watching these women through a different lens, not an urban setting with gangs, poverty, etc. or a civil war/slavery in America context. We are like the character Trula. Dash says, “Trula was the vehicle used to represent the audience. This is why she does not speak. She is like the audience—she does not understand the dialect [nor] the religion” (Everett). We don’t understand this film because it breaks away from the usual film portrayal of African Americans. 

Daughters of the Dust is a “more accurate representation of African disaporic cultural traditions”, filled with Gullah dialect which “reflects the dislocated Africans’ retention of remnants of their language” (which we have to really listen while watching), and the influence of African American jazz/blues on the visual aesthetic (Everett). What we see and experience in this film is ancestry/roots. Dash describes this film as “a film that was like a heirloom itself… I wanted to create these tableaux images like frescos in your mind…” (Everett).  I hope the next time I watch a film like this, I do not get frustrated at the abnormality, but embrace it, because Dash really reveals a whole new outlook on African American women.

A Stream-of-Consciousness Blog about Do the Right Thing

After watching parts and pieces of this film and reading “A Theater of Interruptions”, there were many small thoughts involving this film, Do the Right Thing, which sparked my interest. So this blog may seem very “stream-of-consciousness”…so bear with me.

Do the Right Thing has a lot of juxtaposing ideas jumbled up in a hot and tense atmosphere (literally and metaphorically). Radio Raheem blasts Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power” on his boombox and wears two four-fingered rings that say “love” and “hate”. Also, Smiley has pictures of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. –quotes from both of these figures end the movie. The idea of whether or not to act in love or in hate is one of the main turmoil’s in this film. Tolerance can be seen in some of the characters, but most of the characters at the end of the film result to acts of hate and violence. Not only in this fictionalized world have we seen this conflict, but also in our reality. Should we love everyone, and not act out in violence, even those who hate our race, gender, sexual orientation, etc? Or defend ourselves with violence? 

Sharon Willis describes Spike Lee has “always provoked discord” (Willis). He has! Especially being in an artistic position of “representing the communities from which [he has] come [from]” (Willis). The audience, like with other directors such as Hitchcock and Woody Allen, are not sure the role the director plays as a director and as a character in his film. Lee in most of his films “circulates his own image…whose roles from film to film vary dramatically” and this disturbs the “on-screen and off-screen realities” (Willis). This film disturbs this reality even more because Lee also casts his own sister as a character. Breaking the fourth wall and having the director in the film makes the audience aware that the film is fictional, but also makes the “directedness” of being addressed more personal/involved with the film. We see this in the scene when the characters are “sharing some thoughts on ethnicity”. The camera zooms in close; the characters are looking directly at the camera, and they share their thoughts to the audience not the other characters. These “soliloquies” that “interrupt dramatic action and verbal exchange” through a series of vignettes makes this film seem not part of the Hollywood conventions of cinema (Willis). I really enjoy that!

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Mess around with different lenses (such as the fish-eye), personify the camera, montage editing, break the fourth wall…have fun! Be creative! It is not like I oppose the some conventional Hollywood films, but I give and extra “kudos!” to the directors who mess around and go away from the usual. Hitchcock, Lee, and Allen are all defined auteurs; it is because of their unconventionality. I just wish more of the popular films today didn’t always follow the conventions and changed it up a bit (not the same song and dance)…well maybe that is why there are called “mainstream”.