Mulholland Drive

I must say visually this movie is extremely stimulating whether you have any sort of handle on the story or not. The deep colors and beautiful scenes catch your eye every time. I especially loved the scene at Club Silencio, it was so visually pleasing. This is Scopophilia, right? The pleasure of seeing.

I saw Mulholland Drive once when I was 18 and I had no idea what the hell I had just seen. It made almost no sense to me, and then when we watched in class again I was almost just as confused as ever, but I must say thank goodness for class discussion.

This film was obviously post modern to me, but I kept trying to reconstruct it in a way that put Betty in the center of it all and I just could not make sense of it. When we discussed the postmodern aspects of the film and that perhaps Betty didn’t belong in the middle of it all things started to come together for me.

I really liked the idea that this film is Hollywood torn to pieces and messily glued back together again. You can blatantly see the different conglomerate of films in this movie: film noir, slasher, love story, mob story, a little bit of western. Each scene of the movie seems to be tapping into a different genre and each character is a character we’ve all seen before.

You’ve got the dickhead director, the hopeless romantic, the girl with stars in her eyes, the temptress, the hit man, the mob boss, a cowboy, and the cooky landlord, to name a few. All of these characters have already been created in other movies and other roles and they seem to be stuck in this movie to add to the idea of Hollywood retelling stories to itself.

Postmodernism uses references and this movie certainly has enough of them. It also takes something and puts it back together in a new and strange way that isn’t like anything we’ve seen before and Mulholland Drive achieves that too. I think that our protagonist is Hollywood and if you watch the movie from that perspective it’s obvious that it all circles around Hollywood. It’s about the people who reside there, the way the industry works, and all of the different pieces that make it up.

I felt like this whole movie was very dream like, or nightmare like is more like it. The characters are lost in a dark, twisted world and we are right there with them lost in the mist.