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[edit] Mulholland Drive Stuff

[edit] From An Oneiric Fugue: The Various Logics of Mulholland Drive by David Andrews

General point: refers to "Lynch's nonlinear, associational storytelling." (31)

"...the film is replete not with logic but with logics, which requires viewers to hold multiple understandings in suspense." (25)

Multiple viewings reveal a "seemingly unitary interpretation," yet "this clear narrative architecture is something of a red herring, for, on closer inspection, the film proves to be as open, as indeterminate, and as multiple as Lost Highway" (Lynch's previous film in a surrealist mode). (25)

Oneiric reading

For Andrews under the (straightforward) dream reading of the film, the second section of the film provides two different frames. The larger frame encloses the entire first half of the film, which is simply Diane's dream.

"The smaller frame encloses the second section itself: the shots of Diane in her robe are the present, and those scenes in a sense circumscribe all the other shots, which are either flashbacks (the party scene, the Winkie's scene, the masturbation scene) or hallucinations (the Camilla-comes-back scene, the Terrifying Bum scene). Just as the first section is viewed from the dreamer's perspective and is thus unreliable, the second section is viewed from the perspective of a paranoid woman on the verge of madness and suicide—and is also unreliable." (30)

The second section is meant both to provide naturalistic explanations for the content of the dream that was the first half of the film, but also "to reveal the mental deterioration of a mind from within that mind." (30)

Prelude and coda of film are both fade-outs under this reading: the first to sleep and the second to death. In death Diane loses her guilt, from which she was escaping via the dream in the first place. "Waking life, Lynch almost seems to say, is as illusory as dream life. For those troubled by a sense of unpardonable sin, this is a great consolation." (32)

Kinks in the oneiric reading

Problem is that oneiric reading of the film does not allow for "supernatural possibilities" in certain sequences of the film. (33) Andrews believes providing a certain amount of legitimacy to the supernatural is central to Lynch's overall body of work. (32-33)

Film's perspective is solipsistic, thus no naturalistic account is fully plausible and the film is still open to supernatural readings. (33) Ultimately there is "no ideally closed reading of Mulholland Drive." However the oneiric (i.e. naturalistic) reading should not be dismissed, nor should more supernatural readings and "the viewer has to find a way to accept that, to tolerate it, and ideally, to enjoy it." (34).

[edit] Comparisons to other films

• Persona, opening scenes of both as "an oneiric fade-out" (Andrews 38)