If you're a David Lynch fan, it's been a good time to have The Criterion Channel. In addition to having his first film, Eraserhead, the channel also has Fire Walk with Me, numerous interviews with and about Lynch, and the two movies most people regard as his greatest, Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive. Mulholland Drive leaves the service at the end of this month so I took the opportunity of watching it again. I realised it'd been quite some time--I don't think I've watched it since before Twin Peaks season three aired in 2017. I found it a different experience, watching it through the lens of a post-Twin Peaks 2017 viewing.
The ends of Twin Peaks and Mulholland Drive are a bit similar. They move the characters out of one reality and into another in which familiar characters have different names and identities. Even Cooper leading Laura by the hand is similar to Camilla leading Diane by the hand. The most popular interpretation of Mulholland Drive is that the first half is a dream Diane has before her death. What if it's another reality? The film could then be a statement on just how potently aware someone is of the alternate possibilities in their lives because those alternate paths actually play out somewhere.
An explanation isn't so important, though, as much fun as it is to speculate. Lynch isn't presenting a puzzle to be solved but a puzzle that compels you to contemplate it. The juxtaposition of experiences is the important thing, an explanation would only be a distraction. The differences and similarities between Betty and Diane, Camilla and Rita, are interesting regardless of whether or not they're in any sense explicable.
Clearly Diane is in some way aware of Betty. Or of the aspects of herself that resemble Betty. I assume Diane must have met the elderly couple at some point. But, then, maybe she only glimpsed the encounter between them and Betty through the interdimensional mists.
I find myself thinking of the lines from the Eddie Vedder song, "Running out of Sand", he performed on Twin Peaks--"Who I was I will never be again . . . There's another us around somewhere with much better lives." It's amazing to think that the song wasn't written for the season and that it was Laura Dern who recommended Vedder's inclusion in the series.
What a cruel thing Hollywood is. Or maybe it's better to say, what a cruel thing a dream is. Of all the masterful scenes in the movie, the one that haunts me the most is that dinner party near the end, where Diane watches Adam and Camilla together. She sees Camilla kiss another woman and Camilla is clearly in some kind of relationship with Adam. It isn't just that Camilla has broken up with her, Diane is realising how different Camilla is from her impression of her. She's not Rita, maybe she never was. Or did Diane see something in Camilla that Camilla has buried? It's the kind of question we can't answer for sure about our relationships with people in real life so Lynch appropriately avoids answering it, too. But he does present possibilities.
Is it better to have loved and lost than to never have loved at all? I find that a difficult question to consider because I can't imagine never having loved anyone. Unless, of course, I've unknowingly never experienced the depths of true love. Either way, it's an unanswerable question. All we can consider is possibilities. I suppose you could say Diane's downfall is her need for the impossible--for a stable reality and identity. The end of the film clearly implies her horror at the contrast between who she's become and who Betty was. She can't accept that any more than she can accept the differences between who she thought Camilla was and who Camilla seems to be now. Diane's motivation to protect her worldview with violence would be seen as admirable in another context. How often has corruption come from a desire to protect purity?
It would be cheap to condemn her for it. It would be heartless of us. We've shared in her vision and, if we're watching with feeling, we've, to some extent, loved the things she's loved. What's the alternative to not having something you love so much that you'll lose your mind when you lose it? To have nothing? Or does one inevitably have nothing? I'd say the point of the Club Silencio scene is to say that, however hard someone tries to prove something isn't real, it's still real if you feel it. It's the opposite of what Jean-Luc Godard did by randomly shutting off the score in Vivre sa vie and Une femme est une femme. Or further down the same train of thought. Godard seems to be saying the music is making you feel something unwarranted, Lynch seems to be saying your feeling is warranted because of the music.
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