Filmography
Feb. 21st, 2007 08:35 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
the_lady_lilyMulholland Drive
We watched this on our anniversary weekend, and I've been meaning to write about it ever since, so I'd better get on with it. First off, it migrated up from four stars immediately after viewing up to five stars when I realised just how much I was thinking about it, and all the interpretative possibilities, and the aesthetics, and how much I wanted to watch it again with various theories rebounding.
The plot is... kind of hard to explain if you haven't seen the film. A woman is involved in a hold up above Beverly Hills, which turns into a car accident; she gets amnesia, wanders down into the town, and hides in an apartment just as the lady who owns it is leaving on a trip. Her bright perky neice Betty, planning on making it into the film industry, arrives, discovers the woman, who is quite clearly in shock, but now calling herself Rita. Betty promises to try and help Rita work out who she is, and why she has a bag full of money and a strange futuristic blue key. Betty then does a brilliant audition for a film part, and is taken over to the set of another film, where the director has been coerced into casting Camilla Rhodes in the part whether he wishes to or not, via some really creepy stuff including a cowboy with no eyebrows. Betty runs away from the set as she has agreed to meet Rita, to trace down someone she remembers called Diane Selwyn. They find her, but she's dead. Rita panics, tries to disguise herself; Betty helps her, turning her from a slinky black-haired beauty into a platinum bombshell. Lesbian goings-on occur that evening; but in her sleep, Rita mutters out 'Silencio!', waking to take Betty along with her to Club Silencio, which frankly is odd. Betty discovers a blue box in her handbag; they return to the flat; Rita tries the blue key in the box; and this is where it all goes a bit mad.
We appear to segue realities here. Suddenly, Betty is Diane Selwyn and Rita is Camilla Rhodes. Camilla has broken off her affair with Diane in order to get together with the film director we saw earlier; at a big celebratory party, they announce their engagement, while at the same time Camilla has a big eroticised kiss with another woman. It's not quite clear which of these facts enrages Diane more, but she engages a man to do - something - to Camilla with a big bag of money. He says when the job is done, a regular key painted blue will appear 'in the place I told you'. The key has appeared. Diane appears to go mad and shoot herself with remorse, although in fairness the last five minutes are really odd.
This is missing out the sub-scenes of the cave man behind Winkies and the hopeless hit-man who tries to steal a book of names/numbers/contacts and ends up making a complete hash of it, as well as the rest of the director's subplot and all the stuff that happens at Silencio's. But yes. That's the bare bones of it.
The thing is, for the first two thirds, you're convinced there's a hermeneutic there. There must be a correct interpretation, and you're happily gathering all the clues... and then Lynch pulls that rug out from under you. The most common interpretation is that the first section is all Diane's dream and the second section is reality, but this leaves a lot to be desired in other elements of the plot, which I shan't go into here unless a discussion starts in comments. There are psychoanalytic interpretations which are quite interesting - for instance, when Rita wants to hide herself, Betty makes her into almost a mirror image of herself. But what particularly interested me was an aspect of the aesthetics.
The camera style and the acting style, you see, in the first section are both highly stylized. They're not quite cartoonish, but they're definitely formulaic. When we jump to the second section, suddenly we're faced with much more 'gritty' acting and a less stylistic set/filming style - with two important exceptions. I want to pull these together in a so-called 'aesthetic of lesbionics', because these scenes are the 'break-up scene' between Diane and Camilla, where for some reason despite the emotional angst they're both topless, wearing really tiny jean shorts, and the colours of the set are bright primaries; and the cut where Camilla kisses the anonymous woman at the celebration party, the filming style of which is very eroticised and completely different to the mood of the filming of the rest of the part scene. Both of these elements are much more reminiscent of the stylized aesthetic of the first half, there are no other scenes that replicated that in the so-called 'reality' section, and the feminine sexuality element seems pretty important.
I don't know quite where I want to stand on this, but I'm certainly not going for the 'Diane's Dream' theory, as it leaves loads of holes.
What do you think of it?
We watched this on our anniversary weekend, and I've been meaning to write about it ever since, so I'd better get on with it. First off, it migrated up from four stars immediately after viewing up to five stars when I realised just how much I was thinking about it, and all the interpretative possibilities, and the aesthetics, and how much I wanted to watch it again with various theories rebounding.
The plot is... kind of hard to explain if you haven't seen the film. A woman is involved in a hold up above Beverly Hills, which turns into a car accident; she gets amnesia, wanders down into the town, and hides in an apartment just as the lady who owns it is leaving on a trip. Her bright perky neice Betty, planning on making it into the film industry, arrives, discovers the woman, who is quite clearly in shock, but now calling herself Rita. Betty promises to try and help Rita work out who she is, and why she has a bag full of money and a strange futuristic blue key. Betty then does a brilliant audition for a film part, and is taken over to the set of another film, where the director has been coerced into casting Camilla Rhodes in the part whether he wishes to or not, via some really creepy stuff including a cowboy with no eyebrows. Betty runs away from the set as she has agreed to meet Rita, to trace down someone she remembers called Diane Selwyn. They find her, but she's dead. Rita panics, tries to disguise herself; Betty helps her, turning her from a slinky black-haired beauty into a platinum bombshell. Lesbian goings-on occur that evening; but in her sleep, Rita mutters out 'Silencio!', waking to take Betty along with her to Club Silencio, which frankly is odd. Betty discovers a blue box in her handbag; they return to the flat; Rita tries the blue key in the box; and this is where it all goes a bit mad.
We appear to segue realities here. Suddenly, Betty is Diane Selwyn and Rita is Camilla Rhodes. Camilla has broken off her affair with Diane in order to get together with the film director we saw earlier; at a big celebratory party, they announce their engagement, while at the same time Camilla has a big eroticised kiss with another woman. It's not quite clear which of these facts enrages Diane more, but she engages a man to do - something - to Camilla with a big bag of money. He says when the job is done, a regular key painted blue will appear 'in the place I told you'. The key has appeared. Diane appears to go mad and shoot herself with remorse, although in fairness the last five minutes are really odd.
This is missing out the sub-scenes of the cave man behind Winkies and the hopeless hit-man who tries to steal a book of names/numbers/contacts and ends up making a complete hash of it, as well as the rest of the director's subplot and all the stuff that happens at Silencio's. But yes. That's the bare bones of it.
The thing is, for the first two thirds, you're convinced there's a hermeneutic there. There must be a correct interpretation, and you're happily gathering all the clues... and then Lynch pulls that rug out from under you. The most common interpretation is that the first section is all Diane's dream and the second section is reality, but this leaves a lot to be desired in other elements of the plot, which I shan't go into here unless a discussion starts in comments. There are psychoanalytic interpretations which are quite interesting - for instance, when Rita wants to hide herself, Betty makes her into almost a mirror image of herself. But what particularly interested me was an aspect of the aesthetics.
The camera style and the acting style, you see, in the first section are both highly stylized. They're not quite cartoonish, but they're definitely formulaic. When we jump to the second section, suddenly we're faced with much more 'gritty' acting and a less stylistic set/filming style - with two important exceptions. I want to pull these together in a so-called 'aesthetic of lesbionics', because these scenes are the 'break-up scene' between Diane and Camilla, where for some reason despite the emotional angst they're both topless, wearing really tiny jean shorts, and the colours of the set are bright primaries; and the cut where Camilla kisses the anonymous woman at the celebration party, the filming style of which is very eroticised and completely different to the mood of the filming of the rest of the part scene. Both of these elements are much more reminiscent of the stylized aesthetic of the first half, there are no other scenes that replicated that in the so-called 'reality' section, and the feminine sexuality element seems pretty important.
I don't know quite where I want to stand on this, but I'm certainly not going for the 'Diane's Dream' theory, as it leaves loads of holes.
What do you think of it?
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no subject
Date: 2007-02-21 04:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-02-23 03:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-02-21 07:35 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-02-23 03:04 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-02-21 10:15 pm (UTC)My dad is obsessed with this movie. We argue about details a lot. =)
I sort of love and hate it, as is often the case with David Lynch. And if you ever see Twin Peaks, which you should, I want to know what you think. =)
no subject
Date: 2007-02-23 03:07 pm (UTC)And I could go on, but will refrain. There are lots of edges that just don't fit into a nice dream-based puzzle, and I'm not sure how one would juggle them in - it seems a far too simplistic reading of the material to me.
Twin Peaks? Netflix ahoy!
no subject
Date: 2007-02-23 07:53 pm (UTC)Also, not dream, but a half-deliberate daydream; she's trying to tell herself a story of how things Should Have Been, trying to convince herself that's how it all should have happened; it fails partly because it isn't true and the pieces cannot be made to fit, and partly because of her own self-destructive tendencies.
My belief was that the cowboy is part of her explanation for why she didn't get the part--obviously she was would have been the director's first choice, in a classic eyes-meeting-across-the-room scene, except that the director was being forced by an inexplicable conspiracy to pick another girl. Also the cowboy is Just One Of Those David Lynch Things, because David Lynch is a weird, weird, weird person. If you want a theory into which all pieces will fit nicely, David Lynch is not for you, because he will always have jagged edges (usually of nightmare) that cannot be made to fit anywhere.
That said, watch Twin Peaks anyway. It's fascinating.