Chris Danby

Film 201

2/14/10

The Application of Formalist Theory Within the Construct of Reality in David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive

To describe David Lynch’s 2001 film Mulholland Drive as phenomenally resourceful filmmaking would be a gross understatement. Those familiar with the project’s development know that originally, the film was meant to be the pilot episode of Lynch’s second foray into television following the immense success of his cult classic, Twin Peaks. Network executives were unimpressed with the pilot however, and the project was shelved leading Lynch back to the drawing board. He was able to scrape together enough funding to turn the project into a feature, but; was as a result posed with the problem of resolving plots that were designed to take a season or more to develop in what would eventually become a two hour and twenty minute feature. How did he do it successfully? The answer lies in a word which many Formalist theorists spent a great deal of time and effort investigating: montage. In the final sequences of Mulholland Drive, Lynch offers his audience an extended sequence of short scenes, which, primarily through their construction and order, fill in all the gaps and questions left in the first part of the film, specifically those dealing with the identity and reality of Betty/Diane. Additionally, this sequence operates as a near perfect embodiment of Arnheim’s theory on montage and Balasz’s theory on cinema as the filmmaker’s purposeful humanization and distortion of reality through formal technique.

In good formalist fashion, Lynch is constantly reminding us that we are watching a movie. Whether he does this by cutting to a point of view shot or cutting from one scene to another which appears completely unrelated, the film as a whole is dramatically cinematic. Lynch uses one such reminder as his mode of transition from the film’s more typically Hollywood first act to its avant-garde second act. In a scene eerily reminiscent of Lynch’s thriller, Blue Velvet, protagonists Betty and Rita attend a performance at the Silencio where the club’s host explains to the audience in a bizarre monologue that “this is all a tape recording” and “it is an illusion” before disappearing in a superimposition shot over smoke. Following the scene Rita opens a mysterious blue box which ironically brings the audience out of Diane’s fantasy and into her own twisted reality. I say ironically because Diane’s fantasy is so much more conventional and “realistic” in terms of its adherence to continuity of time and space and its unobtrusive editing than her reality which is strikingly avant-garde and shown entirely through extended montage.

Each shot presented after the blue box is opened has little significance when considered without either the shots adjacent to it or shots earlier in the film. What is even more fascinating, is that Lynch goes far beyond solely graphic conflict and has shots conflict on temporal, metaphorical and a host of other levels as well. For instance, the first shot of the film’s second act is one of Diane (who we still think is Betty) lying in bed in a slightly curled up position with the cowboy trying to wake her up. We see reminiscent shots to this in at least three other places throughout the film, firstly in act one when Rita and Betty break into Diane’s apartment and find a decaying corpse on the bed curled up in the same position, then in the second scene after the blue box is opened when Diane is woken by her neighbor knocking on the door and finally, when Diane collapses on her bed in tears before she commits suicide. If we rearrange these in correct temporal order the first shot is of Diane being woken by her neighbor, the second is of her killing herself, the third is her dead body not responding to the cowboys voice and the fourth is the decaying corpse. Without careful consideration of all the shots in-between however, this would be nearly impossible to intellectualize. By itself the shot of Diane sleeping means nothing other than the fact that a woman is asleep, but when she doesn’t respond to the cowboy and when we remember the shot of the corpse in the same exact position, we realize that she has died somehow and then, the final scene of her suicide explains to us how it happened. This all barely scratches the surface of the various complexities in this montage sequence and there are countless other examples. Remaining with this one for the sake of brevity we can comfortably arrive at the same conclusion that Eisenstein did in his explorations of montage: that the true creative element within film is found within the conflict that occurs between shots and that the shots only arrive at their true meaning within the context of that conflict and when considered as a part of the whole.

When we add to the equation Balasz’s writings on the humanization of reality we come to realize how much of a testament to the medium this film was as the humanization and then decoding of that humanization of reality is more or less the focus of the film. Consider for a moment the multiple levels of reality present in the film. Firstly, we have the references to actual real events in the form of a dedication to Jenifer Syme, a 29 year old actress who had worked with Lynch and died in a car accident the year of the film’s release, and also the subtext references to the Elizabeth Short story (her nickname was Betty and like the character Diane she may have been involved in prostitution/pornography)(Shaw). Secondly, we have Diane’s fantasy version of reality which makes up the better part of the film’s first hour and fifty minutes and finally, we have her actual reality as shown in the final half hour of the movie.

So, on one level we have the entire film as an “ode to… young women whose lives are destroyed during their pursuit of a Hollywood career”(Shaw) and Lynch’s “distortion” of this tragic reality into narrative. On another we have Diane who has distorted her own reality into some sort of twisted fantasy world in which her dreams were beginning to come true and her feelings for Camilla are reciprocated and then we have the final revelation in which her true circumstances are revealed and we realize that she has had Camilla assassinated and can’t cope with the guilt so she commits suicide. The final reality is not presented to us in any sort of cut and dry way and in this (among other things), Mullholland Drive differs significantly from the twists and plot changes typically found today in Hollywood cinema. Lynch distorts the reality to such a degree that we can barely figure out what’s going on and that in order to do so, we must be fully attentive and intellectually engaged with the film. He takes it all the way up to the point which Balasz writes about where things become too distorted to comprehend and stops just short of it, leaving the audience with an intricate puzzle which yields the reward of understanding to those who successfully complete it.

Lynch’s purposeful disorientation of events is both cinematic and physical in nature. I have already discussed the disregard for continuity of time and space in terms of scene order and this acts as a more physical disorientation, however; Lynch goes even further when he begins to distort things on the cinematic level. In one scene we see a depressed Diane making a pot of coffee. She then takes her cup with her across the room towards a couch which Camilla is lying on. Diane then proceeds to hop over the couch and put her glass down on the table but, instead of the coffee cup she had just been nursing, it appears to be an alcoholic beverage of some sort. The frame then stays focused on the glass even after Diane has moved mostly off frame as if to alert the audience that things are slightly out of place. Additionally, Diane no longer appears depressed and distant but playful and engaged. A few scenes later and we come to realize that there has been a temporal shift mid scene and that Diane was in fact walking across the room and into a flashback of the day Camilla ended their relationship. Through this extreme distortion of events and interweaving of what is “real” and what is fantasy we can apply Arnheim’s discussion of Gestaltism as in order to process what is going on not only must we consider what is going on in the scene within the context of every other scene but it all develops meaning within the mind and it is at this point that the narrative can be truly experienced to its fullest degree. In essence this film is experienced much more so within the mind than it is on screen.

The relationship between Mulholland Drive and formalist theory is relatively clear in my estimation. The number of times when concepts addressed by theorists such as Arnheim, Eisenstein, Balasz and Munsterberg extend far beyond the scope of this essay alone. This film is about much more than theory, however, it is an intellectual exercise in cinema on an infinite number of levels and at the same time remains true to a compelling and heartbreaking narrative. It is a compelling piece of what most of the theorists we have read would consider film as art. All I can say is thank goodness the network executives didn’t like the pilot or we’d be missing out on one of the greatest films the millennium has seen to date.

Works Cited

Shaw, Alan. "A Lament For Fallen Angels." Lost on Mulholland Drive. 28 Jan. 2010. Web. 12 Feb. 2010.