Bonus Episode: The Screening Room – Mulholland Drive

Zeth Lundy (0:17)

What's going on, everybody? My name is Zeth Lundy, writer, showrunner and good doctor here at Double Elvis. And it's Friday, which means it's time yet again for another installment of The Screening Room. This is our weekly episode of the podcast in which we watch a movie that has something to do with our main episode's subject and themes of the week. And then we talk about it. This week, we ran our scripted and sound designed episode from the archive on David Lynch, which if you haven't heard that, it's two episodes back in your feed. And then on Wednesday in the Wrap Party, I talked about Lynch's ideas. I talked about movies as dreams. I talked about movies as mystery. And I also talked a bit about what Lynch has meant to me. But what I want to do here is get into what is arguably one of his greatest films, Mulholland Drive. Mulholland Drive came out in the States in October of 2001 It was written and directed by David Lynch. It was his ninth feature film. And it would prove to be his next to last feature film. It stars Naomi Watts, Laura Herring, Justin Theroux. 2001, this was the year of the Lord of the Rings, Fellowship of the Ring. This was the year of Training Day, Memento, AI Artificial Intelligence, Donnie Darko, the Royal Tenenbaums. This was also the year of the Coen Brothers, The Man Who Wasn't There, their black and white noir starring Billy Bob Thornton. And both Joel Coen and David Lynch shared the award for best director at the Cannes Film Festival that year. The Man Who Wasn't There, also very dark. I recently watched that, rewatched that again for the first time in a while and I was struck by, I loved it at the time when it came out, but I guess I had forgotten about how strong a movie it is. It's really, it's gotta be in the top five Coen Brother films in my estimation. Just incredible. So again, not nearly as dark as Mulholland Drive, but definitely there was something in the air that year.

And I distinctly remember when this film came out, Mulholland Drive, because I had just moved to LA and the real Mulholland Drive, the actual Serpentine Street up there in the Hollywood Hills, you move to LA and that road already has this deep mythology to it. It's where Jack Nicholson lived and it's where Marlon Brando lived. And as a new resident of LA, one of my favorite things to do was drive around, especially Mulholland Drive and especially at night, because it was just, I don't know, there was a, it was both romantic and mysterious, 100% cinematic. All the houses are like snuggled away in nature, these hideaways that are overlooking the streets of LA that are twinkling down below. There was even a stretch of Mulholland that you could, I think you could pull over and you could look directly down on the Hollywood Bowl down below. So, you know, moving to LA and then for this movie to come out about LA, about Hollywood, about Mulholland Drive, it was exciting for me. It was equally exciting because as a David Lynch fan, this movie comes right after he did Twin Peaks, right after he did Lost Highway, but also immediately right after his film, The Straight Story, which one could say is the weirdest movie David Lynch ever made and he made a lot of weird movies. What made The Straight Story weird for David Lynch was that it was rated G, it was made for Disney, it was this warm-hearted tale about an old man who rides a tractor across the Midwest to go make amends with his estranged brother. I really, really enjoyed The Straight Story, but I will admit, I was pumped when I heard Mulholland Drive because it was Lynch in the Lynch Zone. It was a return to form, so to speak. I hate that phrase. I hate when people say, oh, return to form because I feel like it denigrates stuff that artists create that's outside their usual lane. But I think that phrase actually applies here perfectly because The Straight Story was really the only time that Lynch went out of character like that. Maybe Dune as well, maybe The Elephant Man. All right, so maybe The Straight Story isn't the only time. But it's such an outlier. So anyways, I go to see this movie at the theater, 2001 I don't know, I don't remember what theater I saw it at, but I want to say it was in Pasadena, I think. I was floored by it and I was also just utterly baffled by it. And I was floored by how baffled I was, I think. I don't know that I was expecting such a vicious poison pen letter to Hollywood. It was very much Lynch's own personal version of The Player, which is a movie that's still on my mind since we talked about that recently. And speaking of The Player, Robert Altman cast Lyle Lovett in that movie, that was one of the singer-songwriter's first film roles. And Lynch was almost like, hold my beer. And he went and he cast Billy Ray Cyrus as the guy who's cheating with Justin Theroux's wife in this. The movie is also very much in conversation with David Lynch's past work. You get a little Twin Peaks action with Michael J. Anderson, the actor who spoke backwards in the Red Room in Twin Peaks. It also has the Angelo Battlementi score that is so evocative of what he did for Twin Peaks. It's got this singer at the Silencio Club singing Roy Orbison in Spanish, which is evocative of Dean Stockwell singing Roy Orbison in Blue Velvet. There's also this whole construct in this club, the Silencio, where they demonstrate how this is being done with the woman who's singing and the people who are playing the music, they're not actually performing their lip syncing to a tape. And that has a Twin Peaks quality to it as well. And then you also have more than a than a wink to cinematic history, you know, to Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard, to Ingmar Bergman's persona, to Hitchcock's Vertigo with all the Doppelgangers and Naomi Watts as the Kim Novak slash Grace Kelly stand in, which of course also gives a nod to Lynch's own Lost Highway, another film about Doppelgangers with echoes of Hitchcock running through it.