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Mulholland Drive
When word leaked out earlier this year that David Lynch was making
his return to television with a new ABC series called Mulholland
Drive, it was cause for jubilation among those who never quite got
over that strange Northwestern town with the dancing dwarf and the
damn fine cup of coffee, Twin Peaks. The most innovative and haunting
TV program of the 90's, Peaks burned brightly for a few short months,
as millions of viewers tuned in to catch the latest piece of the
show's central puzzle, "Who killed Laura Palmer?" Once
the mystery was solved however, Lynch seemed to lose interest, disappearing
from the show for long stretches and leaving it in the hands of
more conventional television talent. By the time he returned to
take viewers on one last trip through the red curtain, it was too
late. The audience was already gone.
Would Lynch learn from the mistakes of the past and devote his creative
energies fully to the new series? Would lightning strike twice,
with Mulholland Drive equaling the phenomenon of the earlier show?
When ABC's fall line-up was announced, the answers to these questions
were nowhere to be found. After funding the pilot episode, the network
chose to pass on the series. Instead, according to the September
6th issue of the New Yorker, the pilot will air later this season
as a stand-alone movie-of-the-week. Embittered, Lynch has vowed
never to work in television again.
The increasing irrelevance of the networks has been thrown into
sharp, painful relief by the success of such cable originals as
HBO's Larry Sanders Show and The Sopranos, which racked up more
Emmy nominations than any other show this year. Here was an opportunity
for ABC to get back in the game, and they blew it. Word has it they
were thrown by Lynch's dreamy pacing and oddball tangents (the director
was forced to trim his two-hour-plus cut down to less than ninety
commercial-friendly minutes). Perhaps the participation of Ron Howard's
Imagine Television led them to expect a more mainstream, family-friendly
Lynch (his new G-rated Disney feature The Straight Story is reportedly
just that). Whatever the case, it appears that this ride down Mulholland
Drive will be a short one indeed.
And that's a real shame because a viewing of the pilot reveals the
potential for a unique and unsettling oasis amid a wasteland of
Friends and Party of Five clones. Lynch has assembled much of his
regular team (composer Angelo Badalamenti, production designer Jack
Fisk, editor — and Lynch's significant other — Mary Sweeney)
to create a moody, engrossing opening chapter of feature film quality.
While hardly groundbreaking territory for Lynch, it nevertheless
stands head and shoulders above almost anything else on network
television today.
The show opens with a jolt: A black Cadillac pulls over to the side
of the titular street in the Hollywood Hills. Inside, two men order
a dark-haired woman (Laura Harring) out of the car at gunpoint.
A pair of cars loaded with joyriding teenagers come screaming around
the blind curve ahead. One of them slams into the Caddy, killing
both men and leaving the woman to wander the streets of Los Angeles
in an amnesiac daze.
The woman — who takes the name Rita from a movie poster for
Gilda , starring Rita Hayworth — finds refuge in an apparently
vacated apartment. She is startled by the arrival of Betty (Naomi
Watts), a wholesome midwestern blonde who has come to L.A. seeking
fame and fortune. Together, the two attempt to solve the mystery
of Rita's true identity (not to mention the pile of cash and odd-shaped
key in her purse).
The third major character is Adam (Justin Theroux), a petulant movie
director who throws a fit when asked to "entertain suggestions"
(Where does Lynch get his ideas?). Of these three rather colorless
leads, Theroux makes the biggest impression, though Watts shows
signs of darker impulses beneath her cornpone veneer. As is often
the case in Lynchville, some of the more interesting characters
lurk on the fringes, including Robert Forster and Brent Briscoe
as a pair of LAPD detectives so deadpan they make Joe Friday look
like Jim Carrey.
Dopplegangers and questions of identity are familiar touchstones
in the work of David Lynch, and Mulholland Drive is no exception.
Here it is the city itself that seems haunted by a shadowy double
— the restless ghosts of Hollywood past. This is a vacuum-packed
Los Angeles; there's not a traffic jam or hazy skyline to be found.
Cool earth tones are the order of the day; oak-paneled rooms, woodgrain
conference tables and creamy wall-length draperies abound. Shades
of brown are so omnipresent that the occasional flash of color —
a blue key, ruby-red lips or the pink paint Adam pours all over
his wife's jewelry when he discovers her infidelity — stands
out vividly in contrast.
Obsessive followers of the Twin Peaks chronicles will have a field
day picking out Lynch's recurring motifs. Michael J. Anderson, the
disturbing, backwards-speaking "Man From Another Place"
returns — or at least his head does, perched atop an improbably
large, paralyzed body — as the equally enigmatic Mr. Roque,
a studio mogul whose offices recall nothing so much as a reconfiguration
of Peaks' hellish waiting room, the Black Lodge. The Cowboy is an
ethereal presence akin to the previous series' Giant, and his arrivals
are likewise signaled by flickering electricity and cryptic epigrams
("You will see me one more time if you do good. You will see
me two more times if you do bad.") Even the trademark Peaks
coffee humor is back, in the form of a menacing Mob figure with
very particular espresso needs.
Mulholland Drive, however, maintains an ever-tightening, claustrophobic
grip that all but eliminates the slack quirkiness that too often
plagued the earlier show. An early scene of inadvertently escalating
violence builds with queasily comic horror. And when Adam first
locks eyes with Betty while auditioning actresses lip-synching to
old girl-group hits like "16 Reasons", it's a delirious
shot of pop culture kitsch bliss.
While nothing in the Mulholland Drive pilot matches the emotional
wallop of the discovery of Laura Palmer's body wrapped in plastic,
the director has achieved a consistent tone of enveloping dread
that suffuses even the most banal of scenes. Lynch's sixth sense
is one of impending doom, and nobody does it better. The final kicker
before the end credits roll is one of those hair-raising moments
of near revelation that made Twin Peaks the number one water cooler
topic back in 1990. Unfortunately, this is one cliffhanger even
Special Agent Dale Cooper couldn't resolve.
- Scott Von Doviak
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