Time Contributor | Joe Apple
Movies and life are won or lost with the aftertaste.
Today, 2001, "Mulholland Drive" was officially released.
The film's greatness is unquestionable, in addition to the Palme d'Or and Oscar nominations, it still topped the BBC's list of "100 Greatest Films of the 21st Century".
Tickets were issued at this year's Beijing Film Festival, and it is still the first film to sell out.
Of course, "Mulholland Drive" is pale and feeble in terms of these measures, because it is a film that cannot be copied, and it is destined to be famous in film history.
Beneath its velvety exterior, no matter how many times it is interpreted, there is always a mysterious core of extreme obscurity and absurdity.
David Lynch, a ghost director who has been a maverick in Hollywood, with his great ingenuity and narrative tricks, has made a great mental offense to everyone who watches "Mulholland Road".
And great art is the one that dares to offend the audience.
Since its inception, countless people have tried to interpret the exact meaning of mulholland road, and opinions are divergent and inconclusive.
David Lynch laughed badly at this: "Audiences are spoiled by hollywood's simple logic, they should try to spend their own brains, believe in their own feelings, and don't pursue standard answers." ”
On the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of the release of "Mulholland Road", Shi Jun also wanted to use this article to try to interpret this fascinating "Goldbach conjecture" in the film industry.
The key to unlocking mulholland drive
Whenever people mention "Muhran Road", there is always one word: brain burning.
David Lynch breaks the classic Hollywood narrative mode in the film, in such a film related to "dreams", he stitches and reconstructs reality, dreams, hallucinations, and memories, making the structure of the film look upside down and confused.
The headless characters, the bizarre scenes, the confusing events, and the mystical visual symbols such as the blue key, cowboy, and the black-faced beggar all give the film a kaleidoscopic and deep color.
Like the billowing smoke in the film, David Lynch abandons each generation of "Mulholland Road" audiences in a huge narrative labyrinth, leaving them to grope, to associate, to interpret.
But the labyrinth is not without an exit, and the last thirty minutes of the film are actually the key to solving the mystery of Mulholland Road.
The story of Mulholland Drive can be roughly divided into two parts: dream and reality.
In other words, if you want to figure out what the "dream" of the first two hours says, let's first see what happened in the "reality" of the next thirty minutes.
The "Reality" section of the film tells the story of the outright tragedy of a nameless person in Hollywood.
Orphaned, Diana, because of the victory in a dance competition, is determined to go to Hollywood to develop her acting career.
In this "dream factory" that has dazzled countless people, she meets the gay Camilla, a dark-haired creature with an air of lust and danger.
Diana's star path is not smooth, she can only receive some insignificant small roles, living in poverty in the rental house.
Camilla, on the other hand, is like a divine helper, not only becoming the heroine of the film, but also hooking up with the young director Adam.
On set, Camilla infuriated Diana by deliberately kissing Adam in front of her. She sees through camilla's cruel and hypocritical nature, and their love has come to an end.
One day, Diana receives an invitation from Camilla to go to a party on Mulholland Road.
Distraught, she looks at the party at a variety of guests, including Camilla's new gay man, a fat Italian man, a cowboy who flashes by, and Coco, who is kind enough to comfort her, Adam's mother.
Adam publicly announced that he was getting engaged to Camilla, and the news was like a thunderbolt on a sunny day for Diana.
Frustrated by her love career, she became angry and decided to buy a murderer.
In the Vish restaurant, a waiter named Betty breaks the plate by mistake, scaring Diana, who is already nervous.
The killer gave her a blue key, and when she was done, she went to the back alley to find a black-faced beggar with a blue box that would contain a certificate that Camilla had been killed.
At this moment, Diana also saw a man with thick eyebrows staring at her at the cash register.
After buying the murder, Diana regretted it, mentally tortured, and even had the illusion that Camilla was still alive.
After a heavy nightmare, she was awakened by a knock at the door of a female neighbor. Neighbors remind Diana that she is being targeted by two detectives.
Looking at the blue key on the table, Diana knew that there was no turning back. In the midst of guilt and despair, she was insane and ended her young life with one shot...
Dream-making and dream-interpreting
With the above realistic basis, the strange dream in the film is much easier to understand.
It should be noted that Diana has reorganized the identities of the people she met in reality in her dreams, thus forming a wonderful sense of dislocation between dreams and reality, which is one of the reasons why many people watch "Mulholland Road" in the clouds.
Such as Diana (reality) = Betty (dream), Camilla (reality) = Rita (dream), cowboy (reality) = behind the scenes (dream), Camilla's new lover (reality) = Camilla (dream) and so on.
These dislocations are not random, but are supported by solid psychoanalytic theories.
Freud believed that dreams were the fulfillment of unfulfilled and repressed wishes in reality.
In other words, how much Diana is depressed in reality, how successful Betty is in the dream; how much she hates someone in reality, how bad that person is in the dream.
If you review Diana's dream, it is not difficult to find that it consists of a main line, a side line and two interludes.
In the main line, Diana incarnates as Betty, bright and beautiful. When she first arrived in Hollywood, she not only got the shade of the star's aunt, but also won the favor of the studio with her superb acting skills, and fell in love with director Adam at first sight.
These are the opposites of her aunt's death, the bleakness of the stars, and the fall of love by Adam's horizontal knife.
In the sidelines, Adam is a incompetent and powerless director.
At work, he was coerced by the gang to use Camilla, a newcomer who had poor acting skills and rose to power through sex trafficking; at home, he was beaten by his wife and ran away from home.
All of this expresses Diana's resentment towards her enemy Adam and her malicious speculation that Camilla has ascended to the throne through improper means.
However, if it is only such a simple virtual reality alignment, it is not enough to make "Mulholland Road" a classic in film history.
Through Rita and two other dream interludes, the film also shows us the fierce struggle between the "self" and the "self" in Diana's heart.
In the dream, Rita not only escaped the robbery, but also escaped from a car accident.
The thick-browed man who was scared to death by the black-faced beggar also symbolized Diana's tangled fear.
In reality, the beggar is clearly a witness to Diana's crimes, and Diana fantasizes about him as a devil in her dreams, meaning that she cannot face her own mistakes.
In the dream, Diana disguised herself as a passerby who met in pingshui, and to a certain extent, she also cleared her relationship with the murder to alleviate her inner guilt.
Another dream episode about the crappy killer is better understood, david Lynch, in a way of black humor, bluntly reveals Diana's deep desire for the killer to fail.
At the same time, Rita is an amnesiac girl who can only rely on Betty helplessly and takes the initiative to give Betty a hug, which is also a subconscious projection of Diana's strong desire for control and possessiveness in reality.
And from Rita's ambivalence of sometimes eager to find out her true identity, and sometimes afraid of learning the truth, we seem to be able to see Diana's repeated pulls.
In addition to the compensatory, disguised, and disorderly nature of dreams, David Lynch shows us another property of dreams: suggestiveness.
Both Easterners and Westerners are keen on dream interpretation, hoping to get some kind of enlightenment or omen for the future from dreams, and this omen is sometimes very magical.
Freud believed that this was not because we got the oracle, but because dreams often "betrayed" the truest information in one's subconscious.
In the dream, Betty and Rita sneak into Diana's room and see the rotting body of the nameless woman on the bed, indicating that in Diana's subconscious, she is ready to commit suicide.
She saw her own body in advance in her dream, which also coincided with the tragic fate of her shooting herself.
Waking up from a nightmare is still a nightmare
Toward the end of the nightmare, Betty and Rita arrive at the Silent Bar to watch a mysterious and eerie performance.
The host repeatedly stressed that all the sounds of this performance were recorded in advance, and everything was an illusion.
The show was a stroke of genius, revealing David Lynch's true intentions for mulholland Drive:
Unveiling the fascinating cloak of Hollywood's dreams, let us see its true face of darkness, hypocrisy and cruelty.
On stage, the wandering actors are pale shells without sound, but they make the audience burst into tears.
Through superb artistic techniques, David Lynch takes us through Diana's crazy dreams, allowing us to witness the distortion and destruction of the hearts of "dreamers" by various dirty transactions and complicated relationships in Hollywood.
The fascinating thing about Mulholland Drive is that it gives us the experience of watching on the fringes of rationality and irrationality.
As an audience, we naturally need to make rational interpretations of the text, and can't help but associate and interpret various visual symbols in the film.
But the film's bizarre atmosphere, vague details, and formal audio-visuals drive us to abandon rational thinking and devote ourselves to the sensory labyrinth carefully constructed by David Lynch, and to fully appreciate the film's nihilistic background.
Perhaps in david Lynch's eyes, clearly distinguishing between dream and reality is a senseless futility.
When we long to return from the dream to reality, or to escape from reality and enter the dream, we have assumed that one is better and more reliable than the other.
But this assumption no longer works in a Hollywood context, because waking up from a nightmare is still a nightmare.
When we come out of the dream-like film and still see all kinds of collusion and deceitful dark scandals, we will find that David Lynch's assertion of Hollywood is so penetrating, and "Mulholland Road" is destined to become a classic of film history that will never be outdated.
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