All the World's a Song

Criterion has a David Lynch playlist currently streaming so last night I watched Mulholland Drive again. Not for the first time, I found myself comparing and contrasting the Club Silencio scene with Jean-Luc Godard. I suspect a lot of people who watch Mulholland Drive take the Club Silencio scene as a commentary on movies and art in general. I'd say it's more of a commentary on a commentary, specifically the kind of postmodernist deconstruction Godard made.

In Mulholland Drive, the two protagonists visit an avante-garde stage performance in which a sinister man maliciously reminds the audience that all of the music they hear is not truly live, that it's just a recording.

This reminds me of the musical number in Godard's Une femme est une femme in which Godard repeatedly removes the music from the soundtrack.

Godard's point, as it was in similar moments in Vivre sa vie and Pierrot le fou, is to show audiences how they're being manipulated by the music. The key difference is that Lynch argues there's something sinister about it, that it clearly disturbs Betty, who experiences a seizure. As I was saying in my recent Vertigo analysis, fantasy seems a necessity for maintaining sanity. One could argue Betty/Diane shares some blame in making her fantasy so precarious as to lead to her own destruction. But the ambiguity of just how much control she has over herself is fundamental to the tragedy.