California dreaming

>> Surrealist auteur David Lynch turns the camera on Hollywood in his ultra-strange epic Mulholland Drive

by MATTHEW HAYS

Those looking for straightforward characters, easy-to-follow plot turns and tidy endings might not want to see Mulholland Drive. The two-and-a-half-hour epic, the latest from pop surrealist David Lynch, shook up crowds and critics at both Cannes and the Toronto International Film Festival this year.

And the film, a mystery-romance-suspense-dream-within-a-dream-within-a dream, won't be one that will let you leave the cinema easily. Audiences seemed to emerge with bipolar responses to the movie: either they loved it or were simply baffled, left scratching their heads in anguish over the film's countless conundrums.

Pursing his lips around an American Spirit cigarette, basking in the glory of sheer adulation at the Toronto fest, Lynch says he wasn't the least bit surprised about the reactions to Mulholland Drive. But when people say they don't get it, Lynch says this response effects him emotionally.

"No, it hurts me," Lynch insists. "They do understand it. Learning from listening to reactions, you find there are two kinds of people: real literal-minded people and people who love to kind of go into another world and roll with the flow. The literal-minded people, generally speaking, don't trust their intuition. They do have an understanding, but they want it to come in a literal way. If they sat down and started talking about it, they would realize they knew way more than they gave themselves credit for. The other people, they don't demand a pat explanation--they kind of love getting lost in an abstraction." And what category do you fall into, Mr. Lynch? Not too surprisingly, he says with his thick drawl, "I'm more the get-lost-in-an-abstraction type myself."

West coast love story

What will confound the literal-minded types will leave Lynch fans thrilled, enthralled and exhausted. Mulholland Drive is a dark, intense, occasionally erotic, often hilarious and deeply disturbing film. And those desperately seeking simple explanations shouldn't bother looking to the film's press material. Under the word "synopsis," the press kit has one sentence: "A love story set in the city of dreams."

The film opens with a stunning sequence involving Laura Harring. Pulled over on a quiet patch of road, she's about to be shot dead in a mob-style assassination, until a spectacular car accident inadvertently saves her life. Barely conscious, the concussed Harring heads to Mulholland Drive and manages to pass out on someone's couch. Her host and newfound friend is the blond, beautiful, wide-eyed aspiring actress Naomi Watts, and the two have a mystery to solve: Harring can't recall a thing and, struck with a nasty case of amnesia, she must try to figure out who she is and why someone was trying to kill her. Amid all the mystery, Watts attends auditions, desperate to break into the film biz. What unfolds is Lynch at his very best: unsolved mysteries, off-kilter humour and knockout casting. (Screen veteran Ann Miller is a standout as Watts' loopy landlady.)

With its psycho-sexual overtones, disturbing revelations and bizarre caricatures, Mulholland Drive is a film that heavily recalls Lynch's '86 landmark feature, Blue Velvet. That film was hailed as a masterpiece by some upon its release, but also prompted a battle between critics over its place in the cinematic Zeitgeist. "A film that fuses sexual terror with murderous, bottomless-pit anxiety is so far from the easy-viewing fare we've been getting at the movies," Peter Rainer wrote at the time, "that Blue Velvet has the effect of a sick, black joke on an industry that has given up on the magic of movies."

Roger Ebert dissented, arguing that the problem with the movie was "a story that's marred by sophomoric satire and cheap shots. The director is either denying the strength of his material or trying to defuse it by pretending it's all part of a campy in-joke."

Truth not necessarily out there

Lynch's oeuvre, from Eraserhead to his realistic, ripped-from-the-headlines The Straight Story, certainly leaves one wondering what inspires him. For his part, there seems to be no deep Freudian or Jungian language he's speaking on screen. And though a true gentleman, Lynch doesn't seem the least bit interested in waxing philosophic about the meaning behind the symbolism in his movies.

"The surprises come with going into the unknown," he says. "When you get ideas, sometimes they can be very surprising and thrilling. It's conscious at a certain point because the ideas pop in. Sometimes if you sit in a chair with the desire to catch ideas, it's like daydreaming, and you go along thinking about this or that, and bang-o! Something'll fly in. It wasn't there and now it's there. How did that happen?"

Uh... I don't know. I was asking you about your inspirations.

"I tell the story that I read about Nikola Tesla. He was sitting there on a park bench and he was looking at the sky, and zing-o! In comes the alternating-current generator motor. Every wind of wire, every screw and the knowledge of how it works. All he had to do is go back and build it. And it's like, where did that come from? All the knowledge of it and how it works?"

Lynch then compares filmmaking to one of his other favourite creative outlets, furniture design. "It's like chairs: you're going along and zing-o! You come up with the idea for a chair and then you go and build it. My ideas rarely come fully formed. They hardly ever do. Just fragments at first. But fragments that are so thrilling that you start to fall in love with them. Then you're set. All you gotta do then is stay true to your ideas."

Thanks for the hatred

Staying true to the ideas in Mulholland Drive did prove challenging for Lynch. The project began as a series for ABC; after Lynch screened the early footage for network execs, they balked, expressing horror at the wonky narrative and the sheer un-marketability of the entire thing. After the network pulled the plug, suddenly Mulholland became a movie instead. "I have to say, I'm thankful to ABC for hating it. Because it started out as one thing, as a pilot, and then to go to feature length, it was a problem. So the mind has to come up with a solution. So you have to try and come up with other tricks." Lynch pondered digital video briefly. "I'm loving DV, but I wanted to do this on film. If you're painting, then you're painting. If you're doing DV, then certain stories come about. But some things are meant to be told in film."

Has the man behind the legendary, if short-lived, Twin Peaks sworn off TV again? "I think so, but never say never. I'm a sucker for continuing stories, and TV is very good for that." Was the Web considered for Mulholland? "You're kind of stuck with the Web, in a sense, with five-minute segments. Not everyone's modem is so fast. The quality is pretty questionable. But it's undoubtedly a place for freedom. It's a place that didn't exist long ago, but now it's massive. I am working on a Web site, which will be launched later this year." Which left Mulholland Drive with one option: it was back to the big screen. "It's a risky thing, to ask people to back it as a movie, after it was going to be something else. It felt a bit like Mel Brooks' High Anxiety."

Though the mysteries in his films, his use of mirrors and his creation of suspense is often likened to that of Hitchcock (whose work High Anxiety was a parody of), Lynch says movie history was not something he thought about while making Mulholland, despite the film sets and movie types populating the film.

"I just thought about what was at hand. In 100 years of cinema, there's nobody that can make a film that someone can't compare to something that came before. You should concentrate on your ideas and work 'em till all the elements feel correct, so you're not thinking about other things. Anything beyond that world is a problem. It starts with the ideas. Sometimes the ideas are a character. You walk along, and bingo! A character will appear and start talking. And they talk in a certain way, and the next thing you know it's like it existed, they existed, and you're just a radio, picking them up."

Again, Lynch seems like a sweet, naïve carpenter when discussing the surprising imagery in his latest. The white-hot lesbian love scenes between Harring and Watts? "That came out of those particular characters. As you can see, one of them might be a hair more obsessed with the other. But it's a desire, a love, and this came out of that." And those recurring red curtains Lynch seems so endeared to? "I love curtains. I don't know exactly why. It's to do with the theatre. Something about, there's the curtains, and what's behind the curtains? It's just a beautiful thing. And then when the curtains open, it's a thrill. Any number of things could be seen behind them. There's something about them that is pretty telling.

"And when you think of the different colours the curtains could be, the best is red."

Mulholland Drive screens at the New Film Festival, which runs from Oct. 11-21. See next week's Mirror for additional festival highlights