No Hay Banda

So, when John asked me if I was ready for Mulholland Drive and I responded yes, I lied. After watching the movie, and thinking about it for a few days I still am completely confused. I have my theories, but honestly Mulholland Drive is like no other movie I have seen before.
Instead of creating a reality through film, Lynch creates a dream where characters overlap and meld into one another. Furthermore, the direction of the movie changes rapidly without conclusion or logic. As I was watching the movie, I kept trying to figure out the mystery of it, but by the end of the movie, I realized that Lynch wasn’t trying to make a typical mystery movie where the audience plays the role of detective. Instead, his movie illustrates the illusion of film and excites the base fears and desires of the audience. I really wanted to watch the film again knowing what to expect, but I didn’t have time this weekend, so I made plans to watch it tomorrow night. Hopefully, watching it a second time will help me, but for now here are my half-digested ideas on the film:
Throughout the Mulholland Drive, Lynch captures the audience by inducing the audience with basic human emotions: mainly fear, and sexual excitement. The film begins at night. Ominous music is playing as a limousine snakes along a dark road (00:02:13). I think that Lynch made this movie knowing that it would be watched by a audience that has been trained on the pacing and excitement of film. When the audience hears the haunting music and sees the darkness with the bright headlights, the audience knows something bad is about to happen. Like Hitchcock, I believe that Lynch attempts to fully captivate and control his audience by stimulating their base fears and desires.
Lynch fills the audience with anticipation once again during the scene in the diner, Winkies (00:12:18). Here a man recaps his dream. The man becomes increasingly nervous as his anticipation grows and he believes he will meet the same terrifying face he met in his dream. As he turns every corner the audience is filled with suspense and fear and Lynch places the camera in the perspective of the man as he walks behind the diner. Lynch also accompanies this scene with ominous music, thus possessing the audience with dread as they approach the mysterious homeless man. The fear and the sense of mystery is never resolved because the stories don’t end neatly and at the end of the movie, the audience is left feeling like they just woke up from a bizarre dream.
Lynch also includes many scenes of nudity and intense sexuality. The two main characters Betty and Rita (also Diane and Camilla) have a very physical romance and Lynch takes advantage of the attractiveness of his two female leads. The character Betty also has an intense sexual scene with an older actor as she auditions (01:18:45). It seems that at every moment Lynch is either possessing the audience with fear or stimulating the audience’s sexual excitement. Essentially, however, this fear and sexual excitement is proven to be just a part of a dream just as Diane masturbates as she fantasizes about Camilla (02:01:37). It is all an illusion, and the feelings we feel as an audience are just a response to a false stimuli.
Lynch repeats this idea in the scene in which Betty and Rita go into Club Silencio. Here, the two women watch a show in which the man repeats “No Hay Banda” illustrating that the music they hear isn’t from a real source but is instead manufactured. During this scene, Betty and Rita watch another woman perform a beautiful lamenting song and the girls are so moved they begin to cry uncontrollably (01:52:20). The singer then suddenly faints and the music continues revealing that she was only lip syncing. I interpreted this scene as Lynch’s way of demonstrating the effect movies can have on the audience. Just as the two girls were crying because of the (false) beauty and pain of this woman’s song, movie audiences become moved by and relate entirely to the fictional characters portrayed in movies.
In fact, Mulholland Drive is filled with characters and elements of classic Hollywood movies: amnesia, mystery, love at first sight (between Betty and the director -01:23:56), the naïve ingénue, and the cowboy. Lynch presents these characters and ideas together in his movie; thus portraying the ridiculousness of Hollywood cinema. When we are first introduced to Betty, she overacts and speaks in a theaterish way (00:18:40). The elderly couple she meets on the plane is overly enthusiastic and Lynch includes a scene of them in a limousine with plastered on smiles (00:20:04), making it obvious that their emotions are contrived and are not genuine. Later on, Lynch portrays the character of the cowboy. While the cowboy is an integral character in classic Hollywood films, Lynch portrays the character in modern day L.A., portraying the entire concept of the mysterious cowboy appear absolutely ridiculous.
While my analysis of this film helps me tidy and streamline the concepts of the film, there are still so many parts of the film that are just a big question mark to me, -- the blue box and the key, for example, or the end where the miniature elderly couple climbs under the door and chases Diane until she commits suicide. Umm what? I’m sure that Lynch had a reason for these scenes, but I do think that he also wanted his film to contain inconsistencies. Just as a strange dream, these characters identities switch and meld portraying the dualities of their characters and revealing the power of illusion.