Driven to distraction Theories emerge around enigmatic 'Mulholland Drive'

David Lynch's Mulholland Drive has won more awards and year-end acclaim than any other current film. The New York Film Critics Circle, the Boston Critics Society and two online film critics groups have named it best picture of the year, and the movie could nab one more at Sunday's Golden Globes. More than 150 critics also put it on their top-10 lists.

There's only one problem. Few who take this Drive, which expands to more theaters Friday, seem able to follow the plot. And some don't care.

''David Lynch likes to mess with people's heads,'' says devoted fan David Cavallo, 32, a Manhattan waiter. ''If you go into the movie knowing that, you'll enjoy it a lot more.''

Lynch swears that Drive tells a comprehensible story, though he won't reveal what it is. ''There are clues that you can put together,'' Lynch says. ''People need to trust their intuition and enjoy the experience. Intuition is the most beautiful marriage of emotion and intellect.''

Drive at first appears to tell the story of Betty Elm (Naomi Watts), a bright-eyed jitterbug champ who comes to Hollywood to be a star. When she moves into her aunt's courtyard apartment (Betty calls it a ''dream place,'' a possible clue), she discovers the glamorous Rita (Laura Elena Harring).

Rita, who has just escaped from a car accident and an assassination attempt, has amnesia.

The two women decide to become amateur detectives and rediscover Rita's identity. ''It'll be just like in the movies,'' Betty says, perhaps significantly. ''We'll pretend to be someone else.''

A few extra plotlines and some bizarre characters later, the movie has taken more twists than the L.A. mountain road it is named after. By the perplexing finale, almost every actor in the movie seems to have played two characters.

Though Lynch is best known for his complex TV series Twin Peaks -- and such cryptic cult-movie classics such as Blue Velvet and Eraserhead -- he does know how to tell a straightforward story, as in last year's aptly titled The Straight Story and in 1980's The Elephant Man. But he insists that approach would have gone nowhere on Drive.

''A few people might be happy with something like that, but other people would be completely destroyed. Spoon-feeding robs people. There is no emotional or mental activity necessary.''

Lynch refuses to say how the movie differs from the never-aired ABC pilot from which it is derived. He even refuses to confirm that a sexually explicit scene between the perky Watts and voluptuous Harring was added for the big screen.

He says: ''It putrefies the experience'' to discuss the changes.

Enter the movie's devoted fans, who have spent hours discussing every inch of Drive.

* Diane Selwyn, a beaten-down actress also played by Watts, who's not seen till the last third of the movie, dreams the entire first two-thirds as a glamorized version of her sordid story.

''The movie operates on dream logic, not real logic,'' says Jeremy Heilman, 23, an administrative assistant who lives in Brooklyn, N.Y. Heilman also believes that Drive is a commentary on the way Hollywood ''uses up starlets and tosses them aside when it's done with them.''

''Hollywood is like a machine, not a great, big family,'' he says. ''You need particular people for this particular film, and you dip in and get them. You don't care what happened to them before, and you don't care what happened to them later.'' Lynch calls this ''horrible.''

He is, however, tickled by fan Frank Derrigo's theory. The 28-year-old audio engineer from Montgomery, N.Y., says Drive is ''a lot like The Wizard of Oz, except that you don't see Kansas until the very end.''

Translation: Drive is a fantasy featuring people from Diane's real life. You don't see that real life until the final scenes.

''But you do see Kansas in the beginning,'' Lynch counters cryptically.

Other theories:

* Drive is composed of layers, none of them reality, says Christian Hartleben, 32, of Philadelphia. He notes that the film is dedicated to Lynch's real-life former assistant, Jennifer Syme, who was killed in an L.A. car crash while it was being made. (Her death received international press coverage because she was the former girlfriend of actor Keanu Reeves.) Syme played Junkie Girl in Lynch's film Lost Highway and appeared in a role supporting Watts in another movie, Ellie Parker(** diected by Scott Coffey).

''Along the way, you're lost, as you are in life,'' but the Syme connection clears things up, Hartleben says. ''When you understand that the film is dedicated to a young woman who worked with Lynch, it makes sense.''

Lynch says Syme was a ''dear friend'' but that the car crash similarity is a coincidence.

There are other theories, too. Perhaps the waitress at the Winky's restaurant is actually dreaming the dream. Or maybe it's one of her customers. Or maybe the dreamer is the singer in Club Silencio who lip-syncs to a Spanish-language version of Roy Orbison's Crying.

Other Drive theories abound: body-switching, after-death experiences and time travel. One Internet theorist claims that it's really about Alfred Hitchcock and Rita Hayworth.

Non-believers argue that the contradictory interpretations prove that Drive is a failure, a TV movie tricked up with a nude scene and a pretentious twist ending.

Those naysayers are missing out, says Andre Bordeleau, 44, a Montreal Planetarium lecturer.

''It's a lot easier for me to find constellations than to explain a David Lynch movie,'' he says. ''I adored the movie. If anyone else but Lynch had told the same story, it would have been a two-hour version of Murder, She Wrote.''

Mulholland Drive: It's all an illusion

Mulholland Drive is book-ended with a car crash and an apparent suicide, the two most infamous and publicized ways in which Hollywood celebrities - and nobodies - leave this Earth.

In between is a two-hour-plus poison pen letter to the movie business.

It is part film noir homage, part failed-TV pilot salvage job, part Persona-style art film and altogether utterly unique except, of course, in comparison to the past movies of David Lynch. The writer-director responsible for this creepy, enigmatic and startling work has described it as "a love story in the city of dreams."

For the sympathetic viewer, watching a David Lynch movie is akin to an exercise in self-hypnosis. The experience requires the viewer to become utterly engaged in the material and yet give oneself over totally to Lynch, the dark tour guide whose landscapes and scenarios are nightmarish yet convincing, surreal yet true. Nonfans disparage Lynch's stories for being incomprehensible, but films like Lost Highway (his most unfairly maligned work) and now Mulholland Drive are so compelling they seem to be governed by a secret logic, a hidden cause-and-effect relationship that isn't nonsensical but only mysterious.

And what's wrong with incomprehensibility, anyway? It's not considered a debit in a religious or philosophical context, nor do we expect the easy pleasure of a linear narrative from an abstract painting, a dance piece, an experimental William S. Burroughs-style novel or a song like I Am the Walrus. Why, then, do so many people want to hold movies to a more constricting standard?

Mulholland Drive originally was created as a pilot for a television series in the style of Lynch's infamous Twin Peaks. Unsurprisingly, the pilot was rejected, so Lynch reworked the material and shot new scenes to create this feature film. The result is definitely somewhat schizophrenic and may remind viewers of Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, the similarly Frankensteinian feature film that Lynch produced after his first TV series was canceled.

The first two-thirds of Mulholland Drive seem to consist to a large extent of the pilot's original footage. Certain sequences, for example, are as slapstick and overtly comedic (albeit arch and disturbingly deadpan) as anything Lynch has produced. What's more, the two most recognizable actors in the cast, Robert Forster and Dan Hedaya, appear in brief scenes and then disappear for the rest of the movie; obviously, they would have had recurring roles on the TV series.

The movie wastes little time in introducing its linked heroines, blond Betty (Naomi Watts), a fresh-faced, would-be actress who arrives in Los Angeles full of hope and anticipation, and brunette "Rita" (Laura Harring), a similarly attractive but more voluptuous car-crash victim with amnesia who picked her new name from a poster for Gilda, starring Rita Hayworth.

Betty convinces the wary Rita to begin a quest for true identity. "Come on, it'll be just like in the movies," Betty says. "We'll pretend to be someone else."

This leads to a classic Lynch bit that revisits the eerie phone phobia of Lost Highway, as the girls call the number of an apartment they believe may have belonged to Rita. Says Betty: "It's strange to be calling yourself." Responds Rita: "Maybe it's not me." Says the voice of the answering machine on the other end of the line, almost immediately: "Hello, it's me."

As Betty - who calls her new home "a dream place" - and Rita conduct their investigation, the movie to some extent apes the structure of a conventional mystery, despite some satirical sequences about the movie business and several unsettling Lynchian interludes, including conversations in a diner that seem to have been filmed by a camera gently and almost imperceptibly floating in the air, as if the shots are from the point of view of the ghosts of abused and long-dead Hollywood hopefuls who haunt the Sunset Strip. Needless to say for a Lynch film, the soundtrack adds to the uneasiness, as many scenes are underscored with ominous rumblings, Darth Vader-like breathing or sudden scary noises.

A shift in what might naively be called the movie's story arc more or less occurs when the two girls visit the weird "Silencio" theater. At this point, the movie heads into a Lynchian netherworld that contradicts and yet seems to be more "truthful" than much of what we've seen before. This bait-and-switch doesn't work against the film, however, considering that Mulholland Drive is as obsessed with issues of identity and multiple personalities as a Cornell Woolrich noir novel from the 1940s. The identity theme applies not just to the characters onscreen but to the identity of Mulholland Drive - and all movies - as works of art, as viable, "real" worlds in their own right, as filmed records of real people pretending to be what they're not and as highly personal moving-picture diaries of a filmmaker's fears, obsessions, dreams and fancies. As a magician-like figure at the "Silencio" explains to his audience about the music they are hearing, "It is all a tape. It is an illusion." This is dramatized when a woman singing a Spanish version of Roy Orbison's Crying (remember, Orbison's In Dreams played a key role in Blue Velvet) collapses onstage in midperformance, and yet the song continues.

References to Lynch's past efforts and other old movies abound. Although the movie is referred to as Mulholland Drive in its publicity and press notes, what Lynch actually shows us onscreen is not a title graphic but a shot of a street sign that reads "Mulholland Dr." There's no doubt this is an homage to the greatest of all previous Hollywood-themed noirs, Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard (1950), which similarly introduces its title with a shot of a curb that reads "Sunset Blvd." In another nod to the past, Lynch cast famous 1940s musical star Ann Miller as Betty's landlady. The movie also draws from the savage portraits of Hollywood presented in the novels of Nathanael West and Horace McCoy.

The sincerity of Mulholland Drive is revealed during the film's closing credits, which include a dedication to "Jennifer Syme, 1972-2001," who worked as an assistant to Lynch and played the role of the "Junkie Girl" in Lost Highway.

According to a biography of Syme on the Internet Movie Database, "Not much is known about Jennifer Syme," but what is known appears to be tragic or at least sad. The biography concludes: "She died April 2 at 6:20 a.m. after her Jeep Cherokee crashed into a row of parked cars in Los Angeles."

Mulholland Drive is playing exclusively at Malco's Studio on the Square.

Star ratings: Zero stars - stay home. One star - only if you're desperate. Two stars - a mild entertainment. Three stars - good stuff. Four stars - don't miss it.

- John Beifuss: 529-2394

October 20, 2001