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?