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:

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).

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".

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.

Article Author: David Fiore

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