"No Hay Banda, and Yet We Hear a Band": David Lynch's Reversal of Coherence in Mulholland Drive
2004; University of Illinois Press; Volume: 56; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1934-6018
Autores Tópico(s)Theater, Performance, and Music History
ResumoAS WESTERNERS, WE TEND TO INSCRIBE various stimuli within the of traditional logic, favoring the idea that the endless series of events, persons, and images that abound in our experiences can be reduced to a singular and cohesive whole. In Mulholland Drive (2001), a film that has puzzled viewers since its world premiere, David Lynch successfully reverses coherence by making the traditional (logic) of the temporal, spatial, psychological, and linguistic conditions of the film's characters and surrealistic world defer to the nonlogical (intuitive and emotional perception) of those conditions. Although critics remain divided on whether or not logical sense can be derived from Mulholland Drive, both sides, when examining or reviewing the film, have either ignored or glossed over Lynch's aesthetic interest in the realm of the unexplained and his distrust of linguistic structure. This failure, one might argue, does Lynch and his film a great disservice. When looking at Drive, it is important to consider Lynch's aesthetic principles regarding the of sense, and provide a close reading of how he defers the of traditional logic to the of nonlogic in the film. This essay examines the character of Rita (Laura Elena Harring) and the Club Silencio setting and scene as examples of this deferral. These examples enable us to see that, once Lynch's aesthetics are kept in mind, we can then more fully appreciate the surrealistic world of Mulholland Drive, a world in which truths about reality are sensed (perceived and known) through the unexplained-the fluid and rhythmic pulsions of the discourse of intuitions and emotions. These can be perceived as contradictions or meaninglessness, and as absences in symbolic language-the blurring of conceptual borders. Indeed, Mulholland Drive is a conundrum as curvy and convoluted as the road for which the film is named. Set in the mysterious and menacing dream world of Los Angeles, the film circles around a trance-like landscape where the actual amalgamates with the fantastic, defying semblances of cohesion. Lynch imbues Drive with the avant-garde deconstructivism prevalent in Angeleno culture. Realities are juxtaposed, identities shift and merge, and unsettled viewers find themselves taking on the role of detective. Like the blackness inside the film's enigmatic blue box, any logical nucleus for Drive remains elusive and indefinable. While audiences might try to perceive some trace of lucidity in the mirages of sound and vision that comprise the film, Drive remains a spiral, a circle, a series of unexplained pulsions that blur and destabilize traditional concepts of intellectual sense. The first two-thirds of Mulholland Drive seem to follow a sequence, though the last third will dismantle this linearity. One narrative involves a dark-haired, voluptuous, and self-assured woman sitting in the backseat of a limo traveling along Mulholland Drive-a long, curvy, and often treacherous road located high in the Hollywood Hills. As the limo stops, the driver points a gun at the woman, telling her to get out. Ironically, she is saved from assassination by a carfull of joy riders, which crashes head-on into the limo. When the woman ambles out of the wreckage like a broken doll, her sensuality and poise seem to have vanished, replaced by innocence and uncertainty-and it is little wonder, for we learn she has amnesia. She remembers nothing about herself, including her name, and appropriates one, Rita, from a poster of the 1946 film Gilda, starring Rita Hayworth. The amnesiac hides in an apartment that will soon be occupied by Betty Elms (Naomi Watts), an aspiring actress from small-town Canada who is staying in her aunt's apartment while the aunt is off filming a movie (in Canada). Betty soon discovers Rita and takes it upon herself to help the amnesiac piece together the fragments of her identity-which, until now, are a considerable amount of cash and a mysterious blue key. …
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