March 12^th, 2003

NOTE: These essays deal with cinema theory and how it applies to Mulholland Drive. If you’d like an explanation of the plot, I recommend reading Salon.com’s Everything you wanted to know about Mulholland Drive

  Christian Metz writes that studying connotation in film allows us to see that film is truly an art-form apart from all others – the “seventh art”^[1]. Connotation is the concept that inherent meaning can be carried with the images of the cinema. Not so for photography, which only accomplishes denotation in that it is a mechanical representation of reality, devoid of connotation. This idea of uniqueness stems also from the theories of medium specificity. These state that the cinema is fundamentally different from all other forms of art and is, in fact, the only form that is truly necessary for a modern culture. This may seem exaggeratory but the fact that the cinema has firmly ingrained itself in modern society is clear. The theories of film semiotics, however, state that though the public may enjoy movies and even see them regularly, few people are actually able (or even want to) truly understand and appreciate the language of cinema. With Hollywood’s continuous output of formulaic, unchallenging films, the public is becoming more and more calloused and rejects anything that can really be considered “good cinema”. David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, for example, is good cinema. To watch it is to fall into it – and to understand it, one must actually think.

  In a way, Mulholland Drive plays with semiotics. It acknowledges and references a variety of genres and styles while remaining original. It uses well-established cinematic devices to incite a proper response at a proper time, only to use that response to play with the audience. It is also a movie about the movie business and in that it puts itself under the microscope along with the movies it pays homage to. Metz says that “connotative meaning extends over the denotative meaning without contradicting or ignoring it.”^[2] This means that from each image, shot and scene in a film, a meaning can be (and probably should be) extracted. But the image, shot and scene are not there simply to provide a vehicle for meaning and connotation; they exist complementary to these psychological ideas.

  In Mulholland Drive, as critics have pointed out again and again, everything means something. Lynch goes into symbolic overdrive and weaves an incredibly complex story which, however, can still be explained if analyzed from the point of view of cinematographic language. Most of Metz’s units of film vocabulary^[3] (i.e. autonomous segments, syntagmas, sequences, etc.) are easily identifiable in Mulholland Drive but the way they relate to each other and the way they tell the story is not standard. This is like speaking an unfamiliar and grammatically different dialect of English while attempting to recite poetry to elementary school-children. It is hard to grasp the meanings and connections in Lynch’s story without seeing the film more than once. But this is good in that even though the audience might not understand everything the first time through, at least they were using one hundred percent of their brain it trying to figure it out. At the same time, Mulholland Drive also beautifully illustrates Panofsky’s argument on medium specificity.

  Erwin Panofsky says “if all serious lyrical poets, composers, painters and sculptors were forced by law to stop their activities, a rather small fraction of the general public would become aware of the fact and a still smaller fraction would seriously regret it.”^[4] Now, many of us who actually value other artistic forms may disagree with such hyperbole but Panofsky’s segue, “If the same thing were to happen with the movies, the results would be catastrophic.” is right on. The movies have buried deeply in modern culture and with cinema being produced in nearly every country, the affect is international. The film has been compared to the play and the novel in terms of its artistic structure. A better argument can probably be made for the novel as a parallel to film because both take advantage of unconfined story-telling. Each can be as epic or as confined as the writer envisions. The play, on the other hand, though visual and story-driven like the film, is confined in space and is timeless only in its writing rather than its production. Hamlet can be set three hundred years in the future but it would still be Hamlet. A film, however, is seldom remade from its original version, so usually, once a film is done, it will never change.

  Also, Panofsky observes that, over the years, film has developed a series of common plot devices, character types and clichés.^[5] We can see that these develop into formulas. Certain formulas have been adopted as ones that make block-busting films and so we see these films about twenty times per year from every major studio. But Lynch uses (and quite unconventionally so) the very strands of formula to move Mulholland Drive along. As mentioned, clichés are used throughout the film as traffic lanes that lead straight into rotaries, spinning around the viewer’s expectations. Overacting (Naomi Watts in the first two acts), standard type-casting (Robert Forster’s detective), genre parody (the Tarantino-inspired hitman scene) are all used to create a world that can exist in neither reality nor a self-respecting movie. But this world does exist and Lynch endows it with its own reality which, in turn, he completely transforms.

  Genre is something Lynch also uses to his demented advantage. Mulholland Drive cannot really be placed in a genre unless that genre is “A David Lynch Film”. Elements of genre, however, are always apparent. Thomas Schatz, as Christian Metz did for semiotics, attempts to relate film genre to language. He states, though, that such a comparison is inherently flawed because of the differences between the two. He quotes Ferdinand De Saussure, the founder of semiotics, “What is natural to mankind is not oral speech but the faculty of constructing a language, i.e. a system of distinct signs corresponding to distinct ideas.”^[6] And so, the genre is such a system of signs. A film genre is a combination of aesthetic, thematic and characteristic elements which remain more or less constant from film to film. In Mulholland Drive, each of the parallel stories drifts in and out of various genres. For the main story of Betty and Rita, there are elements of mystery, romance, and even suspense thriller. For the thread involving the young director, there is situation comedy, relationship drama and even a mix of the supernatural-brought-down-to-earth with Hollywood’s secretive shadow syndicate and its mysterious all-knowing Cowboy figure. In the various other storylines, we can spot action, crime, noir… even glimmers of the musical with the opening jitterbug sequence and the extended band-less Silencio club scene. All these are mashed together in order to drive members of the audience in predetermined directions and then do things to them that cannot be foreseen.

  In addition to its complex narrative structure, Mulholland Drive is also a technically mature film. It uses camera motion and technique to further the story and against popular practice, does so visibly rather than invisibly. Transitions fade from moving palm trees to crossed arms at similar angles, for example. The viewer cannot help but notice. Sound, too is used masterfully. The first two acts of the film take place in a dream and the sound subtly reflects this. Traffic is audible usually but not always. Minor details like ceiling fans, vacuums, the click of high-heels on the pavement and various other diegetic sounds are sometimes either inaudible or exaggerated. Lynch even draws direct attention to sound in the Silencio club scene. The characters find themselves at a club where singers lip-synch and the announcer makes reference to a tape in the background. “This is all a tape recording. It is an illusion,” he says. Some have offered the interpretation that the club represents the out-of-body experience actors go through and that’s paralleled by the focus on sound over image in this one scene. John Belton says that the sound track “corresponds not, like the image, directly to ‘objective reality’ but rather to a secondary representation of it.”^[7] And that would make sense in Lynch’s dreamscape. But whatever Lynch’s reasoning, it is an especially masterful scene with thematically excellent sound-work.

  Combining the technical prowess of the sound-work, the plays on genre and the exploration of semiotic ideas, Mulholland Drive reinforces the argument behind medium specificity and reestablishes cinema as a unique artistic outlet. It may be one of the more extreme examples of why cinema is worth studying, investigating and encouraging, but Mulholland Drive is truly a brilliant work of writing and direction. Film is the seventh art – completely independent of any other – and one needs to look no further for proof than David Lynch.

^[1] Film Theory and Criticism, 70 (Metz)
^[2] Film Theory and Criticism, 76 (Metz)
^[3] Film Theory and Criticism, 80-86 (Metz)
^[4] Film Theory and Criticism, 280 (Panofsky)
^[5] Film Theory and Criticism, 287 (Panofsky)
^[6] Film Theory and Criticism, 643 (Schatz)
^[7] Film Theory and Criticism, 379 (Belton)