This week's readings:
Wyman, Garrone, and Klein, “Everything You Wanted to Know about Mulholland Drive” (I encourage you to read the readers' responses to this essay: click the "Whaddya mean, 'we don't know about the box'" link)
Falsetto, “There is No Band at Club Silencio”
Post your responses in the comments field by 8pm Wednesday night, Nov. 7. (Note the corrected date.)
1) Describe the methods and goals of each essay. (If needed, revisit the tip on determining method, from the first posted reading questions.)
2) There are numerous connections between these two essays and the approaches we've encountered thus far. Find and discuss a conceptual connection between ONE idea you find in these readings and ONE idea or method from Perez (the essay on allegiance/alliance), Bordwell, Keathley, Stern, Doane, Mulvey, Affron, or Dyer.
3) Every reading provides a critical tool we’ll try out on the film under discussion. So, suggest one scene from Mulholland Drive for us to look at in class. What "research question" would you like to ask about that scene? Explain how and why one approach or idea from either one of these essays might be helpful or interesting to use when analyzing the scene. Be very specific.
Note: if either essay should become unavailable online, go to D2L and download the text-only versions in the "contents:readings" section.
11 comments:
Film 320 – Mulholland Drive
Todd Rongstad Todd
1)
The Wyman, Garrone, and Klein article “Everything you wanted to know about “Mulholland Drive” is a brilliant effort to restore narrative order and comprehensibility to one of David Lynch’s more challenging films. They play the role of the smart movie experts, attempting to answer nearly every question and help those unsettled by “Mulholland Drive” to restore some sense of equilibrium. Many people are puzzled after a first viewing of this movie and they want answers! Bill, Max and Andy were apparently just the cinephiles to sit down and provide those answers. All in all, an extremely clever classical-narrative-tradition assault on a film meant to work on an entirely different level.
Falsetto, on the other hand, is writing his article from the perspective of someone who appreciates the mystery and ambiguity in Lynch’s work. Instead of seeking to restore order, he aims for something greater – a textual analysis of the non-narrative elements that make a great Lynch film such a moving film-going experience. Instead of speculating on what everything means, he sets out to examine the strategy and technique that creates the experience in the first place. What is Lynch doing, how is he doing it, and how does this all impact the viewer?
To quote Falsetto directly, “I think it would be wrong to reduce Mulholland Drive to some kind of parlour game where the viewer tries to knit together the various clues, only to decipher the film’s narrative structure and offer up a grand interpretive scheme for what things might mean. The film’s narrative structure is but one element in a complex aesthetic strategy. Its power and mystery depend on many factors. Ultimately, mulholland drive is much more than the sum of its parts. Whatever meaning we might propose for such things as the blue key and the mysterious box that it opens, or the homeless man behind the restaurant, can only serve as partial explanation for the feelings the film generates.”
2)
In his article “There is No Band at Club Silencio,” Mario Falsetto wisely focuses on the significance of the non-narrative elements of a David Lynch film. He discusses how the little details and seemingly tangential parts of Mulholland Drive are often where we find the greatest power and emotion in the experience of the film.
Falsetto goes on to say, “Frequently, what we associate with a film’s style may be crucial to our experience of the film, but not essential to how the narrative functions. Questions of meaning in cinema have never been restricted to questions of narrative. There are all sorts of things in a film that can have profound meaning or impact, such as the look on an actor’s face, or the way an image seems to linger on screen long after it has given up its meaning. Perhaps it’s related to that elusive “third meaning” that Roland Barthes talks about, that level of meaning that resides somewhere beyond plot and style. Cinema is an art of resonance. Cinematic moments linger in our unconscious, and they haunt us unaccountably. They become a part of our waking life as much as they are a part of our dreamwork.”
This observation is dramatically similar to points made by both Laura Mulvey and Fred Camper in their articles on Douglas Sirk. The mise en scene, fragmentary images, the use of objects or color to represent an emotion or moment of particular meaning – these elements and more combine to form a resonance or “third meaning” that transcends the traditional rules of narrative structure. Mulvey writes at length about the relation between style and meaning and how close textual analysis can reveal something mysterious and profound in cinematic art. Camper focuses our attention on color and surreal visual juxtapositions and their “deeply moving” nature. Lynch, and Sirk and Ford are all working with a very sophisticated and complex level of film language. The non-narrative elements in their films are obviously extremely significant to their art and the viewer’s emotional and subconscious experience of the cinema.
Perhaps David Lynch and his “narrative abstraction” are a natural progression from the work of pioneers like Ford and Sirk who were compelled by classical Hollywood to maintain a surface coherence to their work. By dispensing with that classic surface coherence, Lynch is free to explore the tools, techniques and emotions of filmmaking to a place of even greater depth.
3)
I would suggest we take another look at the infamous car crash scene, and focus in on a close analysis of the little details. Instead of engaging in the parlour game of Wyman et al, I would be interested in a close examination of the crash and its immediate aftermath along the lines of the Falsetto article. What is the aesthetic strategy? How does this scene speak to the world of Hollywood? How are the power and the mystery of this scene generated?
The article, "Everything You Want to Know about Mulholland Drive," discusses how the Lynch's narrative is constructed (in a linear fashion) and the questions raised after viewing. They make it clear that Lynch abandons classical narrative structures by intertwining complex narratives and sequence to portray the rise and fall of a Hollywood actress. Acting like clifnotes, the article breaks down the most puzzling aspects of the film, ranging from the cowboy in the Hollywood Hills to the homeless man behind the diner's garbage stalls. Their goal is to answer any unsolved or confusing moments for the viewer/reader. They inform the viewer that this film is not about surface, but hidden meaning which becomes more understandable upon reviewing over and over.
Falsetto, on the other hand, gives a more textual and structural analysis in explaining Mulholland Drive. In "There is No Band at Club Silencio," he discusses how the mise-en-scene and the performance give hints or clues to express the Lynch film. He descibes how Lynch relies on surrealist movements to depict a human's inner subjective meaning in relation to the overriding themes of noir and Hollywood genres. The textual analysis offers how the scenes give hints and clues into how the characters will interact with each other and subsequently tell their story for them. Emphasizing on the theme of abstract, he tries to tie all the complex narrative structures together, even if one is completely opposite than the other. For example, the structure of the film, according to the article, harkens back to works of Antonioni, von Sternberg, Resnasis, to name a few. He points out that the narrative structure will have altered or alienated points that may not necessarily relate to the film sequence, but explain the overall movie structure.
One idea that ties Mulholland Drive to David Bordwell's essays on film structure is how the viewer constructs the film's plot and storyline through the images they process. Going into a movie, the viewer brings their own knowledge of a film structure, and if that structure happens to be linear, than the viewer will have an easier time processing and arranging the images in a linear fashion. Bordwell discusses how the syuzhet acts to construct the overall story and themes visualized through style or mise-en-scene. While Bordwell writes about the structures of the film as the viewer processes them, Lynch's Mulholland Drive as a more complex interpretation to the table. Bordwell seems to talk about how films can be arranged if information known to the viewer is revealed or easily to find. Lynch, on the other hand, relies on subjective and complex narrative structures, where one image does not relate to the next set of images. It does not follow a linear plot line (except if that linear line explains the entire plot of the film). The film acts like a film noir puzzle: the viewer must assembly the pieces, put them in order, and solve the mystery themselves. For example, Mulholland Drive takes a hard right turn two-thirds into the film. If one misses this point (as I did the first time viewing), the rest that follows does not make any sense. Lynch's film is one that needs constant revisiting and attention in order to create a somewhat clear plot structure.
Finally, the question to propose is Lynch's use of abstract narrative structure? Is it really necessary? It acts Shakespearean in some sense: it needs constant decoding and constant revision. Does he purposely create a film like this in order to make the viewer draw upon the structure of viewing a film and making the viewer uncomfortable? One scene in particular is the one of the opening moments about the man scared about the unknown monster lurking behind the garbage bins. Although we are revisited by the symbolic homeless man at the end of the film (apparently that is suppose to be Diane, the faded Hollywood actress), but this man's paranoia is not revisited. Are we suppose to fear the homeless man because Lynch wants the viewer to be aware of the failures in life?
Both essays recognize the untraditional and confusing nature of Mulholland Dr. right away and use this difficulty as a point to jump into their specified analysis. The first article by Wyman, Garrone, and Klein discuss the general narrative of the film by recapping major plot points within the film and acknowledging all the holes along the way helping you understand the film’s confusing storyline much better. A list of questions breaks the article up by directly answering the most confusing issues within the narrative alone. This method was good as a first read since some parts of the plot of the film inhibited me from looking deeper into the representational value and overall construction of the story. Mario Falsetto’s article was much more about the construction of the film’s different elements and how each can be a container of possible meaning. I think that Falsetto’s article on the different aspects of Mulholland Dr. was organized in the same diverse manner as Richard Dyer’s article on character construction. There’s really so much to go back and watch but if I had to choose one part…I would like to revisit the “shift” in the film, right after the dream (first 2/3rds of the story) ends and where we revert back to the true reality. Outside of story or plot, what feels different about these two parts?
Both of the articles expressed how confusing and deliberately obscure David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive is, and both attempt to study and discover the meanings behind all the things that left us confused after watching it. The first article reads like a FAQ board and lists all of the usual questions related to the movie, after which a lengthy, involved answer is given. It is also very nonchalant with the voice of the articles author, seeming more like you’re talking to a good friend, rather than a film analyst. The second article seemed more obscure and relative to the film in that it doesn’t tell you the answers but it gives you the tools you need to watch a David Lynch film and come out of it understanding at least half of what you saw.
The scene that I liked the best was the nightmare at the diner scene. To me, I really loved how abstract and individual the scene was, and how suspenseful. The character talks about a hideous monster that he sees in his nightmare and how he never wants to see it again. Of course, the scene turns into the dream itself and we’re left to dread the inevitable reveal of his fears. In my mind, this could be a direct in dream reference to the main character Betty having this elaborate dream sequence for a large part of the movie.
Reid Goldberg
The article, “Everything You Wanted to Know about Mulholland Drive,” Wyman, Garrone, and Klein provide a walkthrough of the entire film, furthermore providing answers to many of its puzzling questions. This article seems to be aimed mainly at first-time viewers of the film, acting as a sort of guide to understanding the underlying layers and provide an overall better interpretation. The authors use this step-by-step examination as their method in order to cover every inch of Mulholland Drive. I found this method to be very similar to Fuchs’ method for her article on Taxi Driver, in which she also retraces major plot points throughout the film to find a more important, overall meaning to it.
However, Falsetto’s article “There is No Band at Club Silencio,” delves more into the film’s unique qualities as a representation of the real and surreal intermingling. Rather than simply trying to understand the film scene by scene, Falsetto comments on its surreal qualities, some of which are throwbacks to familiar genres, while others are there to serve the story’s dreamlike elements. He claims that Mulholland Drive pays homage to classical genres through abstraction as well as sensuousness, which combine to overtake traditional narrative logic. This forces the viewer to see the first hundred minutes of the film completely objectively and with little understanding, until the final forty minutes connect all the previous pieces together.
The methods used in Bill Wyman, Max Garrone and Andy Klein’s essay “Everything you wanted to know about ‘Mulholland Drive,’" are both auteur theory and narrative recap, although the essay does hit on some plot analysis one cannot considered it “close analysis” The goals of the essay are to place “Mulholland Drive” in the context of Lynch’s overall career, and to categorize the film as anomalously articulate in comparison to Lynch’s typically arcane films. At the opposite end, Mario Falsetto, in his essay “There is No Band at Club Silencio: Thoughts on David Lynch and MULHOLLAND DRIVE,” uses auteur theory to assist his very close analysis of the formal structures of the film; how the aesthetics of “Mulholland Drive” lead the casual viewer to learn patience with regard to fragmented or the reversal of narrative structure. The goals of Falsetto’s essay are to laud the manner in which Lynch’s surrealist tableaux render the perceivably trite into something more magnificent. For instance, as Falsetto submits: “The audition scene [of Rebekah Del Rio] is crucial because it is a sublime example of how someone can imagine that they can transform the most banal dialogue into an artful scene” (1).
Indeed, while both essays utilize auteur theory on some level, each essay has strong ties to “Cinephillia” as delineated by Keathley. For example, Falsetto is reminded of childhood fairytales by the “over-flowing masses of hair” and “long cape” of the ditzy (wo)man neighbor of Betsy. The cinephillic moments experienced by Wyman, Garrone, and Klein are more difficult to compare with Keathley’s definition of it, since their entire essay is essentially cinephillic rumination after rumination—can one ask “why” of a David Lynch film? Alternatively, their constant comparisons of the film’s images with their previous knowledge of those who engender them, such as their options regarding Lynch's longtime composer Angelo Badalamenti or Lynch’s previous work in television or the fact that he does construct some of the items in his films, fall nearer to Dryer’s notion of character (and auteur) in cinema.
Tomorrow, I would like to revisit the dream scene at Winkie’s and use the same method Falsetto does when exploring how Lynch transforms “banal dialogue” into art to ask: how does camera movement in this sequence assist the dialogue in the construction of anxiety? To be clear, at what points does the camera’s movement fill in the more terrifying holes of the dream while it’s being re-told?
Both of this weeks articles examine the style and form of Mulholland Drive from what amounts to a reviewer's perspective.
Lynch's previous films are referred to as well, giving them a context in a coherent body of work that is appropriate when considering them as auteur films. Lynch revisits his loose temporal structures and meticulous sound and image constructions in film after film and it is this form and style which both articles attribute power to as well as artistic presence.
Looking at these films through past theory, I feel that one must rest on Lynch's relationship to Bordwell's theories on narrative structure. Mulholland drive subverts the standards of narrative leaving endless narrative links in a chain of often confusing events that appear, because of the viewers predisposition to the narrative language of film, to have meaningful consequence to the narrative. The film itself is filled with McGuffins. The money in the purse, the cheating director's wife, the relationship between the two stars. Elements of narrative are treated stylistically as though they have meaning, and yet the meaning never materializes completely. In a Lynch film, narrative is lost to meaning, as Falsetto points out, "Questions of meaning in cinema have never been restricted to questions of narrative." Yet the structure supports the idea of a story, just as do our dreams, Which is easily a hallmark of Lynch's work. It is that Bordwellian structure that we see, and that is subverted finally by the film itself in the final conceptual transformation.
I think it's important to note Dyer's ideas of foreknowledge as well. If one is familiar with the staus of Mulholland Drive as a Hollywood and filmic icon, then it is easy to infer that this film is about Hollywood and the dreams associated with it.
In particular, in this vein, we can connect the scene where Naomi Watts and Laua Harring are in bed and Harrings character begins saying "Silencio" over and over again. This scene is given the treatment of revelation, of importance, and yet it does not further a narrative. It only seems to further Lynch's artistic statement.
The film “Mulholland Drive” by David Lynch is a complex and disjunctive edit of a film that is meant to confuse and throw the viewer into disarray. The article by Wyman, Garrone, and Klein takes a look at the narrative plot that is caught in the midst of this non linear fashion film. They talk at length about the story line and how the movie twists and turns from a story line that is somewhat conceivable to a plot that is complex and in need of a mental re-edit. The narrative structure that is usually associated with the films of Hollywood is abandoned and puts the viewer back into the hot seat to find meaning of the film without it being given to the viewer pablum.
The second article by Falsetto was very interesting in its emphasis on the surrealism of the film. Taking examples from German and Italian surrealist films he tried to look at the film from that level of understanding. Taking in the entire film and allowing it to go through the filters of the mind and then “spitting” an understanding out at the end of that processes is what needs to happen with the viewer and this film.
I suggest that we watch the two scenes on Mulholland Drive, and try to understand the correlations between the two. After we have this idea of the film, beginning and end, we may be able to come to an understanding that Falsetto was talking about.
The first arcticle by Wyman is an attempt to explain everything in Mulholland Dr. Its written in a way that he is basically in a conversation with someone and going through the movie trying to explain each part and its possible meanings. I liked how he had a quick overview of the movie because this was my first time watching this movie and so much happened it was nice to have a little recap to refresh my memory. Everything except the box seems to be explained and have an explanation, and I'm not so sure all of the answers are that easy to explain, mainly the first question, what the fuck is going on? I dont think that she did kill herself, and I'm dont think that the assasination actually worked out.
Falsetto's arcticle goes through Mulholland Dr. focusing more on the dream aspect of the film. The part I liked most of this arcticle was when he talked about how Lynch creates characters that function as different aspects of self rather than whole characters. Since the majority of the film is how Diane made up events to explain what was going on in her life, I really noticed how it showed her different personalities and her different views. He related a lot of Mulholland Dr. to different films to really show how complex this film is, as if that wasn't obvious enough by itself.
Falsetto really reminded me of reading Bordwell. They both are very interested in what the viewer is experiencing and what is going on subconsciously. Falsetto went into the dream aspect and the viewers ability to piece together a narrative and Bordwell was always interested in what was going on in the viewers mind, even when they didnt realize that it was going on, to explain movies.
The scene I would like to look at again would be when they finally open the blue box. That scene really stuck out to me and I would like to view it again because I think that is pretty close to the turning point in the film when the viewer starts to question everything that has happened. I think the blue box finally being opened reveals the fallout from Dianes dream world back to the real world.
Authors Wyman, Garrone and Klein bring forth different methods in their article, “Everything You Wanted to know About Mulholland Drive,” such as the comparison between the viewer and the film. Mulholland Drive, directed by David Lynch, is a very surrealistic film that provides an interesting outlook on the hidden narrative. In the article, “Everything You Wanted to know About Mulholland Drive” breaks down the many plot lines and tries to answer the numerous questions that are asked by the viewers. This informal article aims to decipher the dream state and how it relates to the plot in Mulholland Drive.
Falsetto’s article, “There is no Band at Club Silencio” enlightens the reader on Falsetto’s views on the structural analysis behind Mulholland Drive. This article looks at how the viewer is affected by the film and how the viewer may relate different plots to each other, as well as connect certain objects to the film. Falsetto tries to break down how to actually view a David Lynch film, by relating Mulholland Drive to many of his past films.
One thing that both of these two articles relate to is Bordwell’s theory on how the structure of the film can relate how the viewer creates the film's plot by recreating the images in their head. Both authors in “Everything You Wanted to know About Mulholland Drive” and “There is no Band at Club Silencio” attempt to decipher the surrealist structure behind the film, and Bordwell’s theory describes the relationship between the viewer and the plot and how they can feed off each other to produce a different film for each viewer.
One scene that I would like to look at more closely is the scene right before the film flips into reality. I mean, what made Lynch cut the film there and wake Diane out of her dream state? Is there possibly something there that made her crack and snap back into what is actually happening? Is it possibly something to do with the blue box?
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