I Don't Like Mulholland Drive (the Film)

"Wait, you're telling me I went through all that mental anguish over a dream? What a cheat!"
-- Darkwing Duck, "Dead Duck"

Mark and I recently watched Brazil, a film I hadn't seen since high school. It was pretty awesome, but the end irritates me. It turns out that, gosh, Sam Lowry has been dreaming his happy, idyllic flight out of the city with Jill, and in fact he's perhaps been hallucinating/dreaming since the moment of his rescue. None of it's true, he's really just gone insane during his torture. I know that there are many examples of this particular trope, but at the time I couldn't help but think of the finale of Newhart, when Bob wakes up and we learn that the entire season has been a dream.

Watching Brazil made me think about Mulholland Drive, a film that I come close to loathing. Perhaps I'd loathe it less if I didn't love Lynch's other films so much, or if friends I love and respect didn't always talk about how great the visuals and non-linear elements of the film are. In general, I appreciate the whole broken dreams in Hollywood thing, and I like convoluted fantasies that conflate/confuse self-image with love object, desire is always a good theme, and I have no problem with a non-linear or non-narrative structure. But but....

I know that Lynch likes to work with cliches, dreamy surrealist fantasies, and dreamy surrealist visuals which ask viewers to try and decide for themselves the relationship between fantasy and reality. However, the relationship between fantasy and reality had better be interesting. Ultimately, I think that's what irritates me so much about the film. When the film really gets nonlinear and the line between fantasy and reality becomes even more porous, the film, for me, becomes boring and rather vapid, not fascinating. I know I'm being subjective, but the characters' fantasy structures are dull.

In fact, from the moment Betty and Rita take off their shirts, Mulholland Drive feels like a postmodern cliche. After a really hot sex scene, Rita puts on a blond wig that makes her look a lot like Betty (hint hint, Lynch may be saying something about identity and fantasy), and they go to Club Silencio where they are told that everything is an illusion. Oooh, deep. Betty becomes Diane, etc. The narrative gets even more dreamy and druggy. Diane's idolizing love for Camilla is as boring as Camilla's shallow indifference and cruelty. Betty gets to have hot sex, Diane can't even successfully jerk off. Camilla is all satisfied and voluptuous. Snore...

Many of my favorite stories, novels, and films play with dream sequences and/or drugs and/or insanity as a way of calling attention to the highly subjective nature of reality and experience--again, perhaps that's part of what irritates me when such sequences feel like cop outs. A random, incomplete list:

• Young Goodman Brown
• Haunting of Hill House (Shirley Jackson)
• The Wizard of Oz (Ok, so I'm no huge WOZ fan, but it's an obvious example)
  
• The Cabinet Of Dr Caligari
• Alice in Wonderland
• At Play in the Fields of the Lord (Peter Matthiessen)
• Let it Come Down (Paul Bowles)
• The Tartar Steppe (Dino Buzzati) and the film version Desert of the Tartars (Valerio Zurlini)
• Poe and Borges stores are full of dreams and drugs. Gerard de Nerval, etc...
• Picnic at Hanging Rock (Peter Weir)
• The Last Wave (Peter Weir)
• Solaris (Stanislaw Lem) also Andrei Tarkovsky's film version. The more recent Steven Soderbergh version is more vague.
• Turn of the Screw, The Innocents (Henry James)
• Lots of Philip K. Dick
• Time Bandits and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (Terry Gilliam)
• Nightmare on Elm Street (Duh)
• Probably a lot of films by John Cassavetes that I haven't seen

I'm not so interested in hearing about why you think Mulholland Drive is a great film. But I am interested in hearing about your favorite dreamy, druggy films and books--ones that distort reality in ways that more fascinating, interesting, and illuminating than Mulholland Drive.

I need to clean my bathroom

As a child, I made endless diagrams of horse barns and bathrooms. As I've probably said before, I never fantasized about my future wedding, but I did imagine building the perfect horse barn and one day having a very large bathtub in a clean, sunlit atrium with lots of plants.


I wish I still had some of these old diagrams--sometimes the bathtubs were basically swimming pools. Blame it on my early experiences in the blue baths in Rotorua, New Zealand. Apparently the buildings surrounding the baths are also amazing, but I remember nothing about Rotorua except the water.

Blogger thought this blog was a spam blog, so I couldn't post for a few days.

The reading in LA was great. I've hung out with Dana Ward in a number of cities, but I'd never heard him read--it seems like he's playing around with a variety of tones at the moment, though all very much within a kind of experimental lyric context. And I don't want to write like Susanne Dyckman, but I felt like I learned a lot from her extremely precise images and use of texture--I enjoyed both their readings.

Plus, Michelle Detoire and her partner came down for the reading! Yay!

I'm starting to feel familiar enough with LA audiences that I'm a bit more comfortable and relaxed reading, although a certain amount of nervous energy is essential to the way I perform. I was also glad to be able to see Stan before he heads off to Tampa for the foreseeable future. I read a brief section from See it Everywhere about a swimming, leaping iguana in honor of Stan and Tampa (and canals and Florida rivers).

To blog about later:

1. My little sister Sarah and her love of coconut shells and how she (like I used to and probable many other people) projects her longing onto seemingly bizarre objects.

2. How I never fantasized about my future wedding or house as a child or teenager, but I did spend hours diagramming the perfect horse barn, or cat jungle gym. So the fact that I have been fantasizing about building Lester a cage that is both inside and outside is nothing new. (How this also sounds, rhetorically, like frat-boy fantasies of having a permanent keg or a keg in the truck, etc).

3. I forgot