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.