Mulholland Drive

[Sir Tokyo Sexwale]

hmmm

 

Did Picasso consider a second stab at Guernica? Could Beckett have come up with Waiting for Godot (Again)? How exactly do you make a sequel to your own masterpiece? It would appear that David Lynch may be about to find out – various observers (me included) have lately been driven into fervour by rumours that Lynch is in the early stages of preparing a Part Two to Mulholland Drive. "I'm very sure it's coming, it's being born – I cannot really tell you how I know," the original's co-lead Laura Harring was quoted as saying this week, an aptly cryptic disclosure, but one that actually seems pretty solid at its centre.

 

Implausible, enticing, more than a little alarming – it's all of that in spades. Because what we had in Mullholland Drive was the most singular film-maker of the last quarter century – and then some – concocting what certainly felt like his definitive moment. It was a movie that reminded you with dizzying force of what cinema could be: mesmeric, beautiful and unhinged, a sustained starburst of brilliance at once descended from the Tinseltown golden age of Sunset Boulevard and Vertigo, and utterly of itself. And I will confess a special interest here – because, what the hell, if it's even possible to reduce the field down to a single contender, then I'd gladly say it's my favourite film.

 

And yet for all that, the one thing I've never wanted was more of it. I've watched it from start to finish maybe 10 times and seen different things on each occasion, but part of the film's allure is that for such a madly serpentine ride, it ends on what feels like a perfect note of resolution. The idea of Lynch now nipping back to pull at a dangling thread unnerves me as much as it excites me, as does the thought of which particular thread it could be. The ongoing confabs between Justin Theroux's hotshot young director and the Cowboy? Another night at Club Silencio? More episodes from behind the Winkies?

 

But then maybe it makes perfect sense. After all, the project initially started out as a TV show, a genesis that would suggest any number of unpursued fancies having lodged in Lynch's imagination. And that aside, it's possible to see his whole career as littered with sequels of one kind or another. What was Twin Peaks if not a followup to the earlier Blue Velvet, the inquisitive Jeffrey Beaumont stepping out of other people's wardrobes and grown up into Agent Cooper, just as Dennis Hopper's demonic gas-huffer Frank found himself reborn as the lurking Bob?

 

The trick was that in revisiting his own ideas, what Lynch created was less a repetition than expansion – the same archetypes in a similar northwest Pacific location, but the results now broader, deeper, allowed to roam off in countless different directions at once. And then, of course, came an actual sequel – the big-screen Fire Walk With Me, chronologically taking place before the series but brought into being after its cancellation, with Lynch eager to simply revive his love affair with the characters, a dynamic you suspect may now be at work once more. Tonally, the much-reviled darkness that resulted was then re-employed in the goth-noir shenanigans of Lost Highway, by which point Lynch's critical stock had never been lower. And yet that same supposed train-wreck acted as a preface to his finest two and a half hours – as the highway became the Drive, with the role of jealousy-addled lover transferred from Bill Pullman to Naomi Watts, that of the object of all that savage desire from Patricia Arquette to Laura Harring.

 

Of course, the other thing to chew on here is the idea that Lynch has already made one sequel to Mulholland Drive, and that was Inland Empire – another giddy headtrip built around another ill-fated movie-within-a-movie. But really, notwithstanding Harring's cameo in the closing credits, Lynch's last project was simply too much off on its own orbit for that. Rather it was, as the New York Times' Manohla Dargis put it, more the "evil twin" of its predecessor, and if a sequel to anything it was probably (for its sheer avant garde spunk) Eraserhead. All of which is to say that, if anyone on earth could pull this one off, it's Lynch himself. The rest, for now, is guesswork.

[muleskinner]

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[fyds]

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[Hieronymus Bosch]

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[fyds]

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[Buzz]

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Edited April 23, 2010 by Buzz