It’s been over twenty years since I’ve seen “Mulholland Drive,” but my friend Kelly and I watched it again the other night with a couple glasses of champagne for one of our movie get-togethers. It seemed especially fitting with David Lynch’s recent death. It’s certainly one of his best movies, and most baffling. If you haven’t seen it and you like David Lynch, you’d probably love it. If you don’t like David Lynch, then definitely skip it. It’s an art film with a capital “A,” dealing with the nature of reality and illusion, and mystery and nightmare, and the way that women are so often used and discarded in Hollywood.
What I especially like about it is the feeling it gives you, the sense that there’s some hidden meaning behind the surface of reality, a meaning that we deliberately hide from ourselves. It’s the kind of movie that makes you look at the world differently. Plus, it has one of the hottest lesbian kissing scenes ever (not the fifth picture below though that’s also a good one!) For so much of the movie you’re watching beautiful Betty (Naomi Watts) and Rita (Laura Harring) holding onto each other and whispering as they try to figure out the mystery that they’re caught up in after Rita survives a car accident and ends up in Betty’s apartment. Plus, Billy Ray Cyrus is in it briefly with some truly weird line readings. Plus lots of other weird stuff.
An interesting bit of trivia: apparently the movie almost didn’t get made. It was supposed to be a spin-off miniseries, much like “Twin Peaks,” imagining Sherilyn Fenn in a Hollywood film noir. But it got cancelled and then eventually got overseas funding to make it as a stand-alone movie, which turned out to be possibly David Lynch’s very best.
The whole thing is so layered and puzzling though that I’ll have to watch it again, probably a couple more times. But it works so deeply, the way poetry does, that I’m perfectly happy with being baffled. I can’t understand though why it took me twenty years to finally watch it again! Highly recommended if you’re in the mood for “cinema.”
