No Hay Banda: It Is All an Illusion Mulholland Drive by David Lynch; David Lynch Review by: Richard Stein The

San Francisco Jung Institute Library Journal, Vol. 23, No. 3 (August 2004), pp. 77-84 Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. on behalf of The C.G. Jung Institute of San Francisco Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/jung.1.2004.23.3.77 . Accessed: 06/12/2013 19:37
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THE SAN FRANCISCO JUNG INSTITUTE LIBRARY JOURNAL, 2004, vol. 23, no. 3, 7784.

NO HAY BANDA: IT IS ALL AN ILLUSION

Mulholland Drive, 2001, Screenplay by David Lynch, Directed by David Lynch. Reviewed by Richard Stein The music is fast with a straight downbeat, and the screen is full of dancing gures, young people bouncing and ying, ipping over and swinging o each other. It is a jitterbug contest. Perhaps it is Deep River, Ontario. When, we dont know. Perhaps Betty is the winner, or maybe it is Diane. We havent met these people yet, we dont ever know if they are real. As the credits fade, the scene shifts to a bed with red sheets, and the camera moves slowly into the red pillowcase. Now were in a dream, someones inner drama, but whose? A black limousine moves slowly through the night. It stops and the driver pulls a gun on the beautiful dark woman in the back seat. What are you doing? We dont stop here, she says. He tells her to get out. Two cars full of teenagers race side by side into a head on-crash with the limo: explosion, re, death. The woman is unconscious, stumbling, wakes up stunned. She doesnt know who she isand neither do we. This is how David Lynch begins Mulholland Drive, his latest exploration of the American dreamscape, of his own psyche, of mine. If you dont know the lm, it may be better to see it before you read this. It is your dream youll be watching, and you dont want my interpretation to alter your experience of it. Mine keeps changing, each time that I see the lm, as it is like the unconscious itself, always hinting and suggesting, providing a story line with characters who seem to have lives and relationships, always to break down into new puzzles and possibilities. Lynch is a master of suggestion and symbolism in the surrealist tradition of Fellini and Bunuel, but he also has an eye for detail and the feeling for suspense of Hitchcock and Kubrick. The lm is about murder. But this is no ordinary murder. Is the victim alive or dead, was the hit successful or botched, and is she

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even a real person or more a gure of the imagination? Or is it really about a suicide, real or symbolic? Lynch portrays two anima gures, one darkly seductive, the other as bright and sunny as she is nave. The dark woman, played beautifully by the Mexican-born, Austrian actress Laura Elena Harring, is a carryover of the victimized jazz singer in Blue Velvet.1 She is vulnerable yet dangerous, and her amnesia from the car accident adds to the mystery. Harring plays the amnesiac Rita, but her role blends seamlessly into a femme fatale movie star named Camilla Rhodes who is wickedly seductive, even sadistic. There is another Camilla Rhodes, too, a blond puppet of the Maa bosses, but were never sure about her reality, even as the two of them kiss each others lips briey near the end of the lm. Betty, played by the Australian actress Naomi Watts, arrives from Deep River, Ontario, where she won a jitterbug contest and a chance to act in Hollywood. She exudes youthful hope and optimism as she enters the lm at Los Angeles Airport, accompanied by an overly warm older woman who cant wish her enough success. The woman and her elderly husband kiss Betty goodbye as she gets a taxi to her aunts apartment. The old couple drive o in a limo, smiling with self-satisfaction, smiles that turns into demonic laughter, sadistic glee. We are in Lynchs psyche. Aects spill out in excess, then turn strange corners and become alien partners. It can seem like bad acting at rst, until we begin to get the sense that these arent real people, but aect-laden images in the psyche. Something a bit crazy is going on here, as it does inside us all. Lynch might well be described as an aective surrealist, an artist dreaming a big dream for us all, for the American psyche, to help us face our own shadow. The dazed dark woman makes her way on foot down the Hollywood hills, crosses Sunset Boulevard, and ends up hiding out in the apartment of a middle aged woman who is leaving on a trip. We soon realize, as Bettys taxi arrives at her aunts apartment, this same art deco apartment with the yellow kitchen, that the drama between her and the accident survivor has begun. Betty nds her in the shower and navely lets her stay. The dark woman sees a poster for an old Rita Hayworth lm on the bathroom wall, and tells Betty her name is Rita. In reality she doesnt know what her name is or anything else about herself. They look in her purse and nd a huge stash of $100 bills and a blue, triangular key. It is a Lynch pin, a symbol of entry into something deeper and darker in the lm, a portal to mythic reality, to evil, to something we feel but only see much

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later. As Bob Dylan put it, Time is owing backwards, and so am I. Time moves in stranger ways once that key is used, once we enter the realm of pure myth. Justin Theroux plays a movie director named Adam. Like his name, he is the rst and only real man in this drama. Sure there are incidental male characters, the demonic maa bosses, low-life hit men, a terried therapy client and his odd therapist, the evil gure behind the dumpster, and the devil himself in Club Silencio, but Adam is really the only esh and blood man we meet, the only one with human personality and dimension. But then, he too takes on a surreal edge after he loses his soul, or rather sells it to keep control of his lm. Is the movie about that sell-out, about an idealistic director who gives in to the power shadow of Hollywood and loses his young bright anima? Is it about Lynchs own struggle to maintain artistic integrity in a world of phonies and hustlers? Perhaps, but that seems too easy. Like Rita, Adam is having a very bad day. Two maa bosses show up in his oce to force him to choose a certain blond actress for the lead role in his new lm. This is the girl, they say. And its all they say. She is the Camilla Rhodes we never know. Adam storms out of the meeting and smashes up their limo with a golf club before he races o in his Porsche. On the way home he learns that theyve shut down his movie, closed the set, red people. He gets home to nd his wife in bed with the pool guy, has a ght with her, pours pink paint in her jewelry box, and gets thrown out of his own house by her lover. Bloodied, but not bowed, he retreats to a cheap hotel in downtown Los Angeles. Hes already lost his lm, his wife, and his home, when he learns from a messenger that he has no money or credit. Next he has to meet a strangely philosophical character called the Cowboy, late that night in a corral up in the hills. Lynch can be really funny. Wearing an oversized hat and geeky Western clothes, the Cowboy asks ever so dryly, A mans attitude ... a mans attitude goes some ways ... to how his life will be. Is that something you might agree with? Adam nally gives in and agrees to cast the lead actress the way they want it. The Cowboy says, Now, you will see me one more time if you do good. You will see me two more times if you do bad. Good night. Adam does what they want, but in a strange twist, we see the Cowboy twice again. He did what they wanted, but you get the feeling that Adam did really bad. Then there is the sound track. The music is by Angelo Badalamanti, who has worked with Lynch on other projects including

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Blue Velvet and Fire Walk with Me.2 He actually plays the part of a maa boss in several scenes. He is quiet and powerful, using silence to control, as do most of the demonic gures in the lm. But the sound track is anything but quiet, with eerily sustained dark tones in the string bass section to stretch time and ones endurance of suspense. The rst time I saw the lm was in a stateoftheart theater with a sound system that could handle the powerful and persistent throb. Like the overly exaggerated acting and aect, I thought it was too much, too obviously an attempt to use a chest-shaking rumble to heighten the viewers sense of apprehension. But again, one has to surrender to Lynchs use of the senses to get the full surrealistic impact of the lm. There are musical themes that work and rework mythic recurrences, as in Star Wars,3 and the uidity of sound ambience adds to the sense of dream. We are nally brought to a fuller awareness of the meaning of sound in Club Silencio, but that comes later, when we nd out that it is all pre-recorded, nothing is live, that nothing is alive in the underworld. Lynchs use of color is equally suggestiveand alchemical in connotation. The underworld is a thick, smoky blue, contrasted with bright reds. The esh tones are exaggerated, the lipsticks are re-red, and the contrast of the blonde Betty and the raven-haired Rita couldnt be starker. Then there are the blue keys. The rst one is triangular, three-dimensional, luminescent, and symbolic. It ts the mysterious blue box which opens to another world. The other is an ordinary door key, a lighter blue, which is used as a sign of the completed murder. Betty/Diane hands over a bundle of cash to the low life hit man, and when he shows her this key, she asks what it opens. As hes putting it away, he just laughs, like hes saying, Honey, you dont want to know. Back to the story, such as it is. Betty is rehearsing for an audition, while like a schoolgirl detective she tries to gure out the mystery of Ritas identity. Rita remembers a car accident, Mulholland Drive, and later the name, Diane Selwin, whom Rita thinks she may be or at least know. A search ensues, which leads to an oddly similar, yet strangely plain-looking lesbian couple who resemble Betty and Rita, but are far less glamorous. Seeing the lm a second time, I wondered if Rita isnt a fantasized idealization of Dianes rather ordinary looking lover, while Betty might be her idealized image of herself. If so, is Diane trying to destroy them? Meanwhile, Betty transforms brilliantly before our very eyes in her audition, the silly ingnue becoming a powerful and sexy young

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actress. She is whisked across to the studio where Adam is casting the lead role in his new lm, their eyes meet, and it looks like Hollywood love at rst sight. But Adam takes the fatal step of giving in to the maa boss and casting the blond Camilla Rhodes, saying what he was told to say: This is the girl. Thats all it seems to take to set death and destruction into motion. Betty rushes o to meet Rita, but after her failure to connect with Adam there begins a decline in her personality which leads to her disappearance, replacement, perhaps her demise. Adam never sees her again, and what we see is the disintegration of her bright and hopeful personality as she turns gradually into the pathetic and suicidal Diane. Betty and Rita take a cab to Diane Selwins apartment and nd, to their horror, her decomposing body in the bed. We share the shock. Rita is shaken, terried, and fears that whoever killed Diane will be after her. They rush back to the apartment to change her hair, put on a disguise. She ends up in bed that night with Betty, and the erotic tension between them spills over into a predictable sexual encounter. As they begin to make love, Betty asks Rita if shes ever done this before, and the amnesiac replies, in a coyly seductive tone, I dont know. I heard about the lm from someone who saw it as a gratuitous sex scene, but I think Lynch is far more sophisticated than that. It is a central coniunctio image. If Lynch is working the theme of two animas, light and dark, then their union should move things in an entirely new direction, and it does. After Adam abandons Betty by casting Camilla Rhodes, her erotic energy turns to Rita and to a descent into the deeper unconscious. The next scene shows the two women asleep in one anothers embrace. The prole of Ritas face blends seamlessly into the frontal shot of Bettys, giving the impression of a painting by Picasso or Chagall, or better yet, the two becoming one in the art of alchemy. In her sleep, Rita murmurs, Silencio, silencio, silencio, No hay banda. She shifts to Spanish, speaks from the unconscious, wakes Betty and herself to an eerie, 2am cab ride to the mythical Club Silencio, where we meet the devil himself, the master of illusion. The music is all on tape, there is no band, yet there is the appearance of musicians. The evocation of the devil literally shakes Betty to her core, and suddenly there is a role reversal, with Rita gaining strength and self-assurance as Betty loses it. Betty looks like a weak and frightened child, the rst glimpse of her decline into the pathetic gure of Diane. The master of ceremonies, alternating between Spanish and English, shows us Maya. It is all an illusion. We hear the

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trumpet, but the man playing it is a fake: it is only a tape. We hear a trombone, a clarinet, all unreal. Then a singer comes on, Rebecca del Rio, introduced as La Llorona de Los Angeles. She looks like a hooker, too much make-up and hair spray, yet with an incredibly plaintive voice as she sings a capella the Roy Orbison song, Crying, in Spanish. Lynch is evoking something deeply Hispanic here, as la llorona or the one who wails, is a mythical gure in all of Latin America. She is the one who cries for her lover, for her lost children, for her own private pain. The song goes on and on. Both Betty and Rita are crying as Betty reaches into her purse for a tissue and nds a blue box, which we immediately recognize as tting the triangular blue key in Ritas cash-laden purse. The two rush back to their apartment to open it. As Rita searches for the key, Betty disappears into another dimension, never to be seen in the lm again. As Rita opens the box, we fall with her into a deeper darkness and she disappears as well. There is no Betty, there is no hope, there is no bandit is all an illusion. The thrill is gone. From here the lm fractures: time, space, character, plot, and the pieces of personal and mythic unconscious move among dierent images and sequences. Reality is uid, memory shaken, as we strain to t the splinters back together into a whole. Why the recent spate of lms playing with amnesia, time loops and distortions, identity splits and fragmentation? It started with Pulp Fiction,4 but has continued with Fight Club,5 Memento,6 Matrix,7 A Beautiful Mind,8 and more recent entries like Being John Malcovich9 and Eternal Sunshine.10 Lynch taunts us with story line, only to rattle us with senseless disjunctures and confusing transformations. Is modern life imitating art, time going backwards? There is too much in the post 9/11 landscape that is hard to believe. How can the soul take it in, make sense of it, survive it? Did someone say there is an enemies list again, that J. Edgar Hoover and McCarthy were reincarnated in W and Ashcroft? We must be dreaming. Lynch holds a mirror up to the dreams of the collective psyche and shows us a nightmare. We are in the grips of a cultural complex, the extremes of overweening power and arrogance leading to the loss of the feminine. Eternal painHades rape of the Kore, Agamemnons sacrice of Iphigenia, the abduction of Helenand now, the murder of Polly Class, the capture of Jessica Lynch. The old myths are alive in the unconscious, at deep levels where time has no meaning. We see the Cowboy again as he enters Dianes bedroom, as he

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says to the rotting corpse, Hey, pretty girl, time to wake up. She does. Dark movements underground, memories we didnt know we had, begin to stir like a repressed trauma coming into consciousness, like Kore lost to the underworld. We see Dianes pathetic attempt to hold onto the beautiful and dangerous Camilla/Rita, her jealousy turning to darker envy and desire for revenge, her handing over a stack of $100 bills to the hit man. We see the other blue key, the sign of murder complete, then the homeless man behind the dumpster, a hidden Dionysus unleashing evil forces like a whiskey pint from a crumpled paper bagreleasing the old smiling couple, who drive Diane into total insanity and suicide. Americas parental imagoes have gone mad, mom and pop aint what they used to be, the Cold War shadow of the 1950s is alive and well in the collective psyche. A gunshot wound to the head. Blue smoke billowing up. Whats become of Debbie Reynolds and the high school prom, of teenage romance in suburban safety? Fade to faint white images of Betty oating like an angel in the night skyline over the city of Angels, faint image of the Evil One behind the dumpster, jitterbug music from the fties, from when it all started, when we were so nave and expected so much from life in the land of the free, the home of the brave. There is no band; it is all an illusion, even the tears of la llarona are fake. The old woman with blue hair watching over the stage has the nal word: Silencio.
ENDNOTES 1 Blue Velvet, 1986, Screenplay by David Lynch, Directed by David Lynch. 2 Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, 1992, Screenplay by Mark Frost and David Lynch, Directed by David Lynch. 3 Star Wars, 1977, Screenplay by George Lucas, Directed by George Lucas. 4 Pulp Fiction, 1994, Screenplay by Roger Avery and Quentin Tarantino, Directed by Quentin Tarantino. 5 Fight Club, 1999, Screenplay by Jim Uhls, based upon Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club, CITY?, PUBLISHER?, DATE, Directed by David Fincher. 6 Memento, 2000, Screenplay by Christopher and Jonathan Nolan, Directed by Christopher Nolan. 7 The Matrix, 1999, Screenplay by Andy and Larry Wachowski, Directed by Andy and Larry Wachowski. 8 A Beautiful Mind, 2001, Screenplay by Akiva Goldsman, based upon Sylvia Nasar, A Beautiful Mind, CITY? PUBLISHER? DATE? Directed by Ron Howard. 9 Being John Malkovich, 1999, Screenplay by Charlie Kaufman, Directed by Spike Jonze. 10 Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, 2004, Screenplay by Charlie Kaufman and Michel Gondry, Directed by Michel Gondry. ABSTRACT David Lynch is a lm director whose interests have always been on the margins

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of Hollywood, yet he has shown a keen awareness of the psychological shadow of Americas optimistic persona. In his most recent lm, Mulholland Drive, he portrays the emotional decline and eventual suicide of a failed actress, in a disturbing and at times darkly humorous exploration of the world of actors, producers, and directors in Hollywood. This movie review is written in a verbal style to match the dream-like experience which Lynch creates in the lm, and like the lm itself, is an expression of the suggestive, yet not explicit, interaction of plot, character, and disjointed time sequence. The reviewer hints at mythic themes in Lynchs exploration of the American cultural shadow, most notably the abduction and rape of the young feminine, known as Kore in Greek mythology, in an eort to show the emptiness of all showy persona when the feminine soul is absent. The title of the review refers to a pivotal scene in which the music apparently being performed is only a tape, and the musicians and singer are all a charade: No Hay Banda, meaning there is no band. KEY WORDS Film, psychology, myth, cultural shadow, soul loss, emptiness.

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