The Honoraries: David Lynch's masterpiece "Mulholland Dr"
Tuesday, October 22, 2019 at 6:30PM The Governors Awards (Honorary Oscars) will be held on October 27th, 2019 with director Lina Wertmüller, actress Geena Davis, director David Lynch, and actor Wes Studi celebrated. We'll be discussing each of them.
by Eric Blume
The decision to give David Lynch an honorary Oscar this year is among the Academy’s smartest and most inspired choices. Lynch’s movies are so singular, so not-conceived for commercial consumption, that he was never likely to gain enough popular majority to actually win as Best Director. But he has garnered three nominations over the years: 1980’s The Elephant Man, 1986’s Blue Velvet, and 2001’s Mulholland Dr. Each of these films contains stunning and memorable images, a feverish sensibility, a subversively compassionate worldview, and a mastery of storytelling... even when the story feels incomprehensible.
Mulholland Dr truly merits the term overused word "masterpiece". Lynch is in complete control and it’s a film that could only have sprung from his mind and heart. While we’ve seen many versions of the American Dream story, none has ever emphasized the “dream” portion of that term in the way that this film does...
All of Mulholland Dr feels like a dream. You’re never one hundred percent sure if what you’re seeing is actually happening or not. Lynch places the same characters in recurring patterns, where they’re not maybe the character you saw the first time, but a different version, just the way that this happens in our dreams. He does a similar thing with the locations, which feel both real and stylized, and in the situations presented, which have a hazy disconnect to them that manages to be both alluring and distancing.
Lynch’s collaboration with Naomi Watts in the lead role further plunges us into this dreamland. He gets myriad flavors from Watts throughout this picture, but in the early scenes with her character Betty, Lynch steers Watts to bright, bubbly line readings, and a chipper old-Hollywood style, while simultaneously giving a halting, unreal tempo to the performance: something is decidedly off. When we see Watts shift for the first time during an incredible audition sequence opposite Chad Everett(!), you feel the floor drop out: there’s blood in the veins of this ingénue. Her love scenes with Laura Elena Herring have the self-aware stylization of film noir, while simultaneously being truly intimate. And to top it off, Watts plays a second, dark-twin character, Diane Selwyn, in an entirely separate emotional palette.
Mulholland Dr would be impossible to imagine without this inspired match of actor and director. They keep their work rooted in truth and specificity, giving the audience just enough to insure investment, but they also keep everything ambiguous; you have to come to them. This attempt rates a ten just on the ambition scale. That they pull off this staggering feat is part of the beauty, mystery, and power of the film.
Lynch finds a broad-daylight-nightmare tone for Mulholland Drive that enables a constant evaluation of Hollywood’s cold impersonality. Casting old-studio legend Ann Miller provides an inspired salute to industry weirdness without being too on-point. While the film is a puzzle, and most of the engagement in the picture is intellectual as you try to piece it together, the end of the film offers an emotional gut-punch. Lynch has real feeling for Diane Selwyn, and for anyone who stumbles into the self-punishing and cruel machine of Hollywood.
I’m excited to see Lynch finally get his well-deserved Oscar and can’t wait to hear what he says when they hand it to him.
What’s your favorite Lynch movie?
Reader Comments (18)
one of biggest and most egregious Best Actress Oscar snubs of ALL TIME
I still think this film is overrated and wildly confusing. Naomi Watts is fine, but the performance is nothing special and she has been way better other times.
I agree that the overused term 'masterpiece' can be applied properly to this film. It's amazing. Such a sweet balance between compassion and horror, between Hollywood dreams and Hollywood nightmares, between serious fun and serious tragedy. It is a major achievement. This is my favourite of the Lynch films I've seen. (I'm still yet to see Eraserhead and Dune.) He is a very worthy recipient of an Honorary Oscar.
As much as I like the film I just can't love it, and all those critical accolades of Best Film of the Decade, the Century, All Time are overblown. But Naomi Watts, well no superlatives do her justice. Her work here belongs to the ages, and personally, I had her tied with Julie Delpy in Before Sunset as Best Actress of the decade. Considering the mediocre field that year, it is especially egregious that she wasn't Oscar-nominated that year.
Do you think Naomi Watts will ever win competitively? She is part of the new Game of Thrones prequels so maybe an Emmy nom/win is in her future. Perhaps years from now she will get an honorary award of her own.
This is my favorite Lynch film, although I like some others a lot. It’s a great work.
Eraserhead and Lost Highway are my favorite Lynch outings.
DAVID:agreed.
For me, it's Lynch's best film and the culmination of everything he had done and it all came together.
All Lynch is sacred to me. I still remember going to the theater not long after I first moved to Los Angeles to see this, wondering who this unknown actress was in the lead, and coming out dazed and amazed at the film and Watts' brilliant performance. This movie is one of my all time favorites. I recall getting into arguments about this film with friends who made comments like, "Anyone can take their dreams and throw them up on screen." And I would reply, "I'm sure they could, but what they produced would in no way be as mesmerizing and compelling as what Lynch does with his."
I agree with thevoid99. I believe that "Mulholland Drive" encompasses all of Lynch's (thematic and visual) obsessions and takes them even further. He reaches the perfect balance between concrete and abstract filmmaking to the point that this absolute masterpiece always has something different to offer, even after the tenth viewing.
I remember being fifteen and watching it in my local movie theater with my mom and being blown away to the point that I couldn't even find the words to express how magnificent this movie was. I also remember it coming out either a few weeks after or before "Moulin Rouge!" and how hard it was for me to decide which of them was the best film of 2001 for my personal Film Bitch Awards ("Moulin Rouge!" was my favorite but there's no denying that "Mulholland Drive" was much better).
It's sad that Naomi Watts didn't get more chances to showcase her flamboyant talent. Sure she's had a decent career post-Lynch but nothing that came close to match the intensity and utter brilliance of her performance as Betty.
Tom G. - Only death, taxes, Amy Adams winning one and Helen Mirren winning her second are sure in this world.
It's been a few years since I watched Mulholland Dr. It's finely made and it's certainly Lynch's masterpiece. Watts is dynamite in it.
I do think of it as kind of a heartless and emotionally vacant movie. It's so obsessed with psychology that pathos doesn't really develop. That may be the point, but it doesn't stay with me the way many "masterpieces" do.
I remember when I first saw Mulholland Dr I didn't understand it but I still loved it (much like how I felt when I first saw Kubrick's 2001). I knew it was something special, it drew me in and made me *want* to understand it. David Lynch created an incredibly rich and layered movie, you can watch it a dozen times and always get something new from it. Watts is fantastic in it, too. I'm glad Lynch will be honored at the Oscars - even if it was for just this film he would deserve it (it's his pinnacle as a director), but he has amassed an impressive body of work.
I think it's generally overlooked how good Lynch is with actors who free themselves and step into his world.
JF: But there's so much heart! It's there in Watts and Harring's screen time together, in the look that Watts and Theroux exchange, in the score, in the broken people of the Club Silencio... Everywhere!
I love this movie the scene where the woman comes out in the theater and sings on the stage and then turns into a cardboard cutout it's masterful along with the key and the puzzle there in .such an interesting movie makes you wonder about the possibilities of the human intellect David Lynch is so creative so intelligent and thoughtful to keep this movie moving with all the despairing parts. It's quite an achievement and as it rolls onto the end if you are at least I was mesmerised and confused but thinking and when it was over I was like is that all there is and then realized that I had missed something so I went back and I watched it again and then it clicked I think it's work of genius I never tire of watching it.
I never liked this movie- I left the theater with a headache- yes there are some effective moments but it seem to me like it was made up from others better David Lynch films the only character who doesn't show up is the Elephant Man