Weird time well spent (Mulholland Drive)

So a little while ago my wife asked me what movies from Netflix were currently in the house, and I mentioned that David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive was in one of the red envelopes. This prompted a little bit more questioning from my wife, because the title rang a bell but she wasn’t sure why, so I filled her in a little bit although I was going into the movie mostly unspoiled myself. The upshot was that when I was done she said, “You know, I’d kind of like to see that, too.” And I was only too happy to oblige her, because it’s rare that we sit down together to watch a movie at home (not to mention the fact that I knew Mulholland Drive contained a certain amount of adult-oriented visual content which, as always, I’d be reluctant to force upon my fellow commuters if I watched the film on the train).

Thus, on a weekend night after the kids had been put to bed, we watched Mulholland Drive. We managed to make it through the whole movie in one, uninterrupted sitting, too (which is not always a given) and although we traded a few observations back and forth, mostly we were both just kind of entranced for the duration. (We had lowered the lights and everything.) Not necessarily entranced by the movie, mind you, but quite possibly entranced by the mental activity of trying to parse the movie as it went along, which was by no means easy.

The reasons why my wife and I rarely sit down and watch movies together in our den are mostly logistical: we both work, and we both share responsibility for housework and shopping and child-minding and all that, so we have very little downtime, and very little of that comes along in great big contiguous chunks. It’s much easier to flip around on cable and watch things that begin and end inside a half an hour, and also don’t require great concentration, so that we can be simultaneously catching up on each other’s day, and/or paying bills, and/or indulging in online forum surfing, and/or shuffling loads of laundry, &c. And frankly even when we do have two or three unstructured hours ahead of us, sometimes the weariness brought on by jobs, housework and beloved-yet-maniacal offspring leaves one or both of us too mentally drained at the end of the day to focus on anything more challenging than reality tv competitions. And I’m saying “we” a lot, but there are some fundamental differences at play, too. My wife is pregnant, and that’s draining on a whole ‘nother level. She also has the more demanding job(s) and is more prone to finishing a shift overwhelmed, whereas I’m more likely to be bored at work and look forward to the mental stimulation of a feature film (or graphic novel or whatever) on both ends of my commute to give me a reason to get out of bed in the morning.

So I might be more inclined to watch more movies at home, while my wife has entirely valid reasons for giving that idea a pass. But that doesn’t mean that we don’t both enjoy putting our focus on challenging things. My wife is smarter than I am, and has the soul of a humanities major, and all things being equal I know she would derive a great amount of pleasure interpreting puzzlebox movies on a regular basis.

I’m going on and on about all this at length rather than discussing any of the intricate details of Mulholland Drive because, to a certain extent, even though I’ve now seen Mulholland drive, I’m not really prepared to talk about it. As the movie ended, my wife’s initial reaction was something along the lines of “Seriously?” And I knew what she meant, as the film revolves around multiple mysteries and does not remotely spoon-feed the audience a solution at the end which will make everyone go “Aha!” as all the pieces click into place. If anything, it seems to defy the notion of those mysteries being solvable. I suggested to my wife that it might be one of those movies that you need to see more than once in order to fully appreciate what it’s doing and what it’s all about. I hesitantly suggested this, you must understand, because of course I always carry around this small but significant amount of guilt about everything above, how I have a relatively leisurely life with my cakewalk job and my constant consumption of pop entertainment on a daily basis, and so when an opportunity arises for my wife to watch a movie with me I should take care to make sure she at least enjoys the experience of indulging me. At any rate, my wife acknowledged that I was probably right, but she also immediately declared that she was not going to be watching Mulholland Drive again anytime soon, or possibly ever again. It was just too much. Given that one point near the end a miniature giggling elderly couple walks under the bottom of a door and right into someone’s freak-out, flat refusal to go through all that again struck me as hard to argue with.

Ah, but here is one of the many reasons why I love my wife: we kept talking about the movie and what little meaning we were each able to glean from it. And then within a few minutes my wife had her smartphone out and was looking for further reviews and analyses. And we talked about it some more. And by the next morning, my wife had changed her tune completely, saying that she definitely did want to see the movie again someday. There are people who would have that reaction to challenging pop art, and people who would not, and I really am grateful that my wife is the first kind of person.

Mulholland Drive is surreal in almost every aspect: its narrative structure, its visuals, its performances. I think that last one is especially important to note; I thought Naomi Watts was laying it on a bit extra-thick in the early going, and only much later in the film did I realize that yes, she was, but intentionally so. As I’ve already said, I believe it is a movie that rewards multiple viewings, but at the same time I think it’s a movie which should be seen for the first time with open eyes and few if any preconceived notions. So that’s another reason why I’m posting about watching the movie and reacting to the movie much more than I’m posting about the movie itself. I think that’s largely the point, to watch it and then go back over it in your mind. Or, even better, out loud, so see it with a friend and then try to determine if they had the same viewer experience you did.