*Twin Peaks Style reverse speech*
I'm Rantasmo, and Mulholland Drive Needs More Gay.
♪ Upbeat intro music ♪
Here is actual footage of David Lynch, directly after
being asked to explain the plot of any of his work.
[Laughs wildly] No.
[Laughs]
So yeah.
If you watch the new season of Twin Peaks,
whether or not you've seen the original series,
there are probably at least a few moments
that made you go...
*Dramatic pause*
What?!
And if you haven't noticed by now,
that's kind of David Lynch's thing.
Even in interviews, he's notoriously evasive when it comes to answering questions about his movies.
Questions like, for example:
What is this movie about?
And that makes sense when you're talking about a film that's largely abstract.
Which, many of Lynch's films are.
You probably wouldn't ask Jackson Pollock
what one of his drip paintings is about
and expect to get a...
fully coherent answer.
To a significant degree, it's up to the viewer
to decide what the work is about.
Mulholland Drive is my favorite David Lynch movie.
One of my all-time favorite movies ever.
And it might not be a coincidence
that it is also his gayest.
It's a doozy of a movie to try to summarize;
I will try,
but know that if you haven't seen the movie yet,
you should really go do that first.
To those of you who just watched Mulholland Drive
for the first time before watching this video, uh...
hello.
You have questions.
And I'm going to do my best to help you out.
Naomi Watts, in her first breakout role,
initially plays Betty, a bright-eyed, aspiring actress
who's recently moved into her aunt's
Hollywood apartment,
only to discover a mysterious amnesiac
who goes by the name 'Rita',
and appears to be at the center of a dark conspiracy surrounding a shadowy, mafia-like organization,
manipulating the inner workings of the movie industry.
Betty and Rita become romantically involved,
but things abruptly take a surreal turn
and they come across a mysterious blue box.
The camera goes inside of it and we find ourselves
in what seems to be a parallel reality,
populated with the same characters, but their names, histories and personalities have changed dramatically.
Rita is now Camilla, a highly successful actress,
and Betty is now Diane, Camilla's jealous ex-lover
who is embittered and envious of Camilla's success.
Driven by rage, Diane hires a hit man to kill Camilla, but is so haunted by guilt that she ultimately kills herself.
2001's Mulholland Drive is the middle film
in what you might call Lynch's 'LA trilogy'.
Which also includes 1997's 'Lost Highway'
and 2006's 'Inland Empire'.
All three movies take place in Los Angeles, 
operate on a surreal dream logic,
and play with the idea of shifting identities.
Either by having actors play multiple roles,
or by having characters literally transform into
entirely different characters midway through the film.
This is a theme that shows up in Lynch's other work too.
Doubles and doppelgangers are a recurring theme throughout much of Twin Peaks,
and here I think they serve a very specialized purpose.
The most common interpretation of the films
in this unofficial trilogy,
is that when we see two different versions
of the same character or event,
what we're really seeing is the same character or event from two different perspectives,
one true and the other false.
More specifically, in each movie we're seeing
different versions of the events surrounding a murder,
as seen by the murderer trying to distance themself from what they've done.
In each movie, we see a harsh, uncomfortable reality alongside a more comfortable, idealistic fantasy,
But in all cases that fantasy inevitably collapses
under the weight of the truth,
as the murderer processes their feelings of guilt.
In Lost Highway and Inland Empire, those multiple versions of reality bleed into one another quite a bit.
But in Mulholland Drive, they're more clearly delineated.
We enter the blue box,
and Betty suddenly wakes up as Diane.
This leads many viewers to interpret the first
two-thirds of the film as Diane's dream.
"It was all a dream" is usually the quintessentially
bad way to end a story, but,
here I think it's a more meaningful device
than you might initially think.
The fantasy world that Diane creates isn't
a utopia where everything is perfect,
but rather where all of the bad things in her life
have one, very specific external source.
In her dream, the casting of movie roles is manipulated by a mysterious evil, shadowy organization
with a network of assassins.
When in reality the machinations of Hollywood are often much more... mundane and petty.
Like a lot of Lynch's other work, Mulholland Drive
is heavily influenced by the film noir genre,
and in particular the figure of the femme fatale.
The femme fatale, or 'lethal woman', 
is a complicated archetype,
one that reinforces stereotypes about women being manipulative seductresses,
while also granting them a degree of agency.
Femme fatales defy the expectations of society
by taking control of their own sexuality.
The femme fatale is aggressive, confident.
In her own way, she queers femininity
by expressing more traditionally masculine attributes.
Mulholland Drive, along with other, more contemporary neo-noir films like 'Bound' and 'Basic Instinct',
have allowed that queer, subtextual aspect
of the femme fatale
to bubble up to the actual surface of the text itself.
Camilla is in many ways the Veronica to Diane's Betty,
but the line between darkness and light 
gets a little bit hazy.
Mulholland Drive is a tragedy about queer women who, by the end of the film, are both probably dead,
and plenty has already been said about how tiresome that particular trope has become.
In that respect, I think Mulholland Drive
is not without flaw,
but unlike a lot of other queer stories
with tragic endings,
I feel like the tragedy of this particular story
is more complex than just a cheap, shallow way
to get you to empathize
with the poor, sad, brave lesbians.
It's fundamentally a story about
a poisonous relationship.
One that also sheds light on the dark side of Hollywood.
The fact that it involves queer women
mostly feels incidental to the larger narrative,
but at the same time,
I feel that it's not without relevance.
All three of the movies in the LA trilogy,
and really, you could argue, Lynch's entire body of work,
is on some level about finding out
who one's self is.
About reconciling who you are,
with who you want to be.
I think that's one of the reasons why Lynch has
such a strong queer following.
Because even when it's not literally about lesbians, it has a certain sensibility to it that appeals to queer people.
That... and...
Laura Dern.
♪ Upbeat credits music ♪
