Mulholland drive la full#

Characters’ identities are blurred and circumstances are quite different - a shaken-up assemblage of the elements that made up the first part of the movie. It suddenly dawns that the first two thirds have been a dream. “It is an illusion.” This is the breaking of the spell, the key to the film. Then the singing continues as she collapses on the floor. “It’s all recorded,” the club MC says. Rebekah Del Rio stunningly performs Roy Orbison’s “Crying” in Spanish. Rita takes Betty to “Club Silencio,” where music plays independently of its human performers. The film invites you to join in solving the mystery of Rita’s identity, but the clues only make the identities of both women increasingly murky. There’s even an absurdist noir scene in which a hitman botches a job and ends up also killing his target’s secretary and janitor. A subplot unfolds about the mob interfering with a director’s casting choices. Dazed and suffering amnesia, she stumbles down to the city, where her story intertwines with that of Betty, an aspiring actress who has just arrived from Canada. We meet Rita, who narrowly escapes a murder attempt, thanks to a horrific car crash on the film’s namesake street. When I saw Mulholland Drive, it was like I’d encountered the idea of film as a hallucinatory alternate reality, deconstructed.Īt first, the film seems to be a conventional mystery. Going to the movies can be a dream-like experience in the dark you’re captive, motionless and witness to events that have no effect on your corporeal self. This resolves to a POV shot moving across bedsheets and down onto a pillow. Ethereal, overexposed faces fade in and out over the images of the dancing as the sound and music distort. The film opens with a moving collage of couples dancing the jitterbug. I was transfixed by the surreal Hollywood dreamscape that he created with the combination of image and sound. As part of my coursework during those first months in LA, I watched David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive. What interested me most about filmmaking were the possibilities afforded in combining images, performance, story, sound and music - the alchemy that allows a film to become more than a sum of its parts. When I saw ‘Mulholland Drive,’ it was like I’d encountered the idea of film as a hallucinatory alternate reality, deconstructed. I’d look for excuses to take Mulholland Drive up into the hills, where I could look out over the sprawl of the city. We were housed in the Oakwood apartments in Burbank, and I remember being enthralled by the relentless sunlight, impossible traffic and the coyotes that watched me park my car.

Mulholland drive la full#

LA was full of interesting people doing creative work and I wanted to be part of it. I didn’t like it here at first, but my apprehensions took a back seat to my ambitions. I was a film major at Emerson College in Boston and, during my final semester, I took advantage of the school’s LA program to make the move to Los Angeles.

As a child growing up in Minneapolis, I thought it’d be crazy to live in an arid, season-less place where earthquakes could strike at any moment, but at some point I realized that moving to California would be inevitable.