mulholland drive

[Dave Monroe]

I quite liked The Straight Story, myself, possibly
because of those "nostalgic" (not so sure about
"uncritically") "impulses" (caught a bit of The
Elephant Man on cable tonight, again with those
starscapes ...), because it was full of all those
Lynchian touches within the context of an ostensibly
"straight story."   The sheer fact that he could do an
ostensibly "family" picture, and still be
recognizably, ineluctably David Lynch ...  

The way in which dialogue in some long distance shots
was seemingly recorded at a distance, or, at least,
mixed as if so, now there's a defmiliarizing,
anti-realist (interestingly, precisely because
realistic), Brechtian, whatever tactic.  On those
Lynchian soundscapes, by the way, do see ...

Chion, Michel.  David Lynch.  Trans. Robert Julian.
   London/Bloomington: BFI/Indiana UP, 1995.

http://www.indiana.edu/~iupress/books/0-85170-457-3.shtml

http://www.bfi.org.uk/bookvid/books/catalogue/details.php?bookid=75

http://www.ifrance.com/davidlynch/chion.htm

But I have to admit, I didn't much "get" Lost Highway
until I read the screenplay, and not so much because I
"got" the whole "psychogenic fugue" thing (which had
already been pretty clearly explained by Patricia
Arquette in, as I recall, a Sight and Sound article on
the film), but because it read so much like a nouveau
roman, esp. an Alain Robbe-Grillet novel.  Formalism,
indeed, and a whole lotta messing around therewith
(though cf. as well the opening and closing scenes of
Robert Aldrich's Mickey Spillane subversion, Kiss Me
Deadly) ...

Maybe the problem is, I know it's a refurbished
television pilot, can't help seeing it as such, as
enclosing (if not quite forcing closure upon) what
might have been an ongoing, open-ended production, but
... well, that's exactly what Mullholland Drive feels
like.  Too many characters, elements, whatever,
introduced and discraded, even as others are indeed
returned to, remotivated, even if only ("only")
allusively so ...  

Again, maybe it'll take a screenplay for this one. 
Fire Walk with Me took a video release, just feels
more like teevee.  But, ooh, er, Pynchon, ah, again,
for its, uh, carnivalesque hybridization of the
historic, the anachronistic, and the ridiculous, at
least, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, and for its,
er, postmodern bricolage of the political, the absurd,
and the apocalyptic, Jean-Luc Godard's Weekend ...

--- "Manuel V. Cabrera Jr." <mandelc at ucla.edu> wrote:
> Frankly, I can't see why anyone would have liked
> "The Straight Story", nor how anyone could think of
> it as 'subversive'.  To my mind, all of his most
> uncritically nostalgic impulses were indulged in on
> that film.  The characters were completely
> uninteresting, and its pacing seemed completely
> lopsided.  I think if you watch both Mulholland
> Drive and Lost Highway, you will realize the scripts
> are worked out in meticulous detail.  I know I am in
> a minority, but to me Lost Highway represents
> near formal perfection--every single shot seems to
> be carefully thought out in its relation to all the
> others: the formal parallels and inversions are
> endlessly interesting to me. Mullholland Drive isn't
> quite as formalistic as Lost Highway, but again it
> strikes me as another one of those films where not a
> single shot is wasted, where everything fits
> seamlessly together.  Perhaps this sounds odd, given
> that people generally think these films are
> completely disjointed.  Many people think the same
> of later Godard or Pynchon, while close analysis of
> their work reveals highly complex organization that
> is passed over by the casual spectator (who, of
> course, may simply not enjoy their work enough
> to desire putting in that kind of effort); and I
> think the same thing is going on in much of Lynch's
> work.  Personally, I like Blue Velvet, but don't
> find it remotely as interesting as Lost Highway,
> Fire Walk With Me, and now Mulholland Drive.

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Make a great connection at Yahoo! Personals.
http://personals.yahoo.com