Note: This entry has nothing to do with the Hotel Earle, or with Barton Fink as a whole. Instead, I'm piggybacking off my previous ADoaL piece to go into a bit more depth about my comments therein on Lynch's Mulholland Drive. I promise that I won't do this too often. Also, considerable spoiler warning.
What makes Mulholland Drive such an enduring experience, sixteen years after its initial release, is that it's a deliriously joyful film to get lost in. Assuming that you can find the pleasure in being lost, of course. Lynch's film is nothing if not a polarising one - either you'll depart feeling peeved at Lynch for wasting your time and offering no closure to the intriguing scenario he set up and had you invested in for over two hours, or you'll fall in love with the film's unflinchingly discombobulating nature and find yourself twitching for a repeat experience, hoping to figure out where you strayed off course and if any comprehensible route can be mapped out across this dark and tumultuous terrain. You go back, anxious for another glimpse inside that mysterious blue box, wondering if perhaps on this occasion you'll prevent it from getting the better of you. Watching it becomes a game, the objective of which is to beat the box, and yet an addiction to the box and to the darkness within is what really drives us. Much of what Mulholland Drive appealing is that it's a puzzle with seemingly no answer, and yet it beckons us to take up the challenge and, like its spirited young heroine, play-pretend at being detectives. It's a film which goads us to get lost, over and over again, and yet we go along with it because venturing off course and finding ourselves out in the middle of nowhere offers so much joy and excitement (as well as frustration) in itself.
I was first introduced to Mulholland Drive in 2003 while looking through a stack of DVDs my brother had just purchased. Before then, I was still a virgin to all things Lynch (although The Straight Story had been sitting on my To Watch list for at least a year). What caught my eye about this film was the little document that came nestled in the DVD insert, entitled: "David Lynch's 10 Clues To Unlocking His Thriller". As a marketing gimmick, it definitely worked on me, because I immediately wanted to take a crack at it. I sat down and watched the film, from beginning to end with the clues at hand, thinking that I could lick this. The mere existence of those clues had me confident that there was a definitive answer to be gleaned from this puzzle, and that I could figure it out with a little persistence and by paying close attention to the prompts in Lynch's words. 146 minutes later, my Lynch virginity was gone and I was more than a little startled and bewildered as to what had just happened. At best, the clues had made me a bit more receptive to certain details (the recurring mention of The Sylvia North Story, for example) but as a map to prevent me from completely losing my bearings they were of absolutely no use. Already, I could feel the addictive nature of that discombobulation taking a hold of me, for my impulsive response was to go back and a second look, in case I had overlooked or misinterpreted one or two important details. It was then that I picked up on the fact that there was no scene access encoded into the disc, meaning that if I wanted to study a specific scene I would either have to rewind or fast forward manually, or just watch the film from beginning to end again, as seemed like the less headache-inducing option. This was the first inkling I had that Lynch was maybe a bit of a scallywag. I didn't quite grasp this at the time, but that might as well have been clue no. 11. Lynch clearly delights in playing with his victims' heads, so who's to say that the clues themselves are entirely trustworthy, or if Lynch's goal is simply to impress the illusion that there is indeed a puzzle that can be solved? The clues undoubtedly have their uses in offering a starting point for discussion and analysis, and in training the viewer to be attentive to the minute details of the film, but ultimately they too should be taken with a pinch of salt.
From that very first viewing, the moment that really caught me off guard and haunted me long after wasn't the game-changing moment where Rita opens the box and vanishes into thin air, but what follows immediately after, when Aunt Ruth suddenly appears, glances around the room quizzically and then walks away. The last of Lynch's clues is has to do with Aunt Ruth, more specifically her whereabouts, so I figured that this must be very important. She had to be important, or why else would Lynch save her clue for last? When, finally, my urge to go online and check out what other people had been taking from the clues became too overwhelming (initially, when I believed there to be a definitive correct answer, I feared that this might be "cheating"), I was disappointed on so many levels, not least because nobody seemed to share my deep interest in the character of Aunt Ruth and what she might represent. Most had picked up on the fact that Aunt Ruth is around in the "Betty" portion of the film but, after the blue box has been opened and we find ourselves trapped in Diane's nightmare of an existence, the only reference to we get to an aunt is to one who's long-dead (Diane never actually specifies that this aunt was named Ruth, by the way), and most were content to interpret this as yet another discrepancy between Betty and Diane's realities. There was a common assumption that the amount of glaring contradictions between the two meant that the Diane portion of the film automatically invalidated the Betty portion - that Diane's reality was the "genuine" one and that Betty's was simply a lovely idealised dream she had indulged in and which had slowly succumbed to the forces of corruption (much like her "real" life). That remains by far the most popular interpretation of the film but it left such a queasy taste in my mouth that it very nearly destroyed my affection for the film then and there. Surely, I thought, the answer to this beautiful, intricate mystery couldn't be that sickeningly shallow? The Betty portion of the film is so busy, so rich with different characters, story threads and striking images (Club Silencio, the bum behind Winkies) that the notion that it could all be hand waved as the desperate wish-fulfillment of an out-of-work actress immediately rubbed me the wrong way. I considered the evidence pointing toward the "dream" interpretation. The first of Lynch's clues advises us that two very important details occur before the credits, and sure enough, we do see things from the perspective of someone sinking down into a pillow right before we move into the sequence where Rita narrowly escapes an attempt on her life. Then, as Betty's story comes to an abrupt halt and we enter into the Diane portion of the film, things do indeed kick off with her being roused from a deep sleep by the cowboy (Lafayette Montgomery). On that basis, I could see why others found the explanation so persuasive. If you make the connection between those two moments and can accept that everything that happens in between is simply Diane's dream, we get a fairly simple explanation, from which point onward it becomes a matter of identifying parallels between the two worlds and what these might indicate about Diane's psyche.
Still, when attempting to make sense of Mulholland Drive I think it's important to keep in mind that it didn't start out as a self-contained theatrical feature. Lynch conceived the project as a TV series and shot a 90-minute pilot for ABC, which gets as far into the story as Betty and Rita discovering the decaying corpse in Apt. 17 and Rita attempting to disguise herself by restyling her hair. After ABC took a number of issues with the pilot and finally voted to pull the plug on the series, Lynch came up with a new conclusion which incorporated the Club Silencio sequence and the "alternate" Diane reality, and salvaged the project into a feature film with funding from StudioCanal. Watching the finished product as an abandoned pilot which could potentially have become the basis of a much bigger, more drawn-out storyline, it's possible to account for the large number of story threads which appear to either trail off or become total loose ends. From that perspective, I think you also become aware of just what an intensely messy picture it is for the first 90 minutes or so (which is not to infer that it's any less of a joy to watch). Robert Forster's detective initially looks like he's going to be of major importance, but he disappears from the story immediately after one scene (he appears more in the original pilot). There's that strange sequence where Mark Pellengrino's hit man, Joe, is attempting to retrieve a black book and bungles at every turning, which gets a curious amount of focus for a character who likewise disappears from the story soon after (to reappear briefly in Diane's arc), taking the "history of the world in phone numbers" with him. And of course there's the extensive emphasis on the turmoils of Adam Kesher (Justin Theroux), whose arc looks as if it's going to collide with Betty's but never quite does; the two of them lock eyes during the casting sequence as if gripped with an overwhelming sense of common destiny, but this is quickly aborted. Adam's arc ends abruptly when he complies with the forces seeking to cast Camilla Rhodes in his film, and he doesn't reappear until we've crossed over into Diane's arc, where things have undergone a dramatic shake-up. (Note: in the original pilot, Adam was revealed to be a friend of Wilkins (Scott Coffey), the Havenhurst resident whose dog's butt Coco (Ann Miller) threatens to bake for breakfast, and since Wilkins agreed to put Adam up during his financial troubles, it's a safe bet that Betty and Adam would have become neighbours and things might have worked out very differently between them). The film has so many drawn-out interludes which seem so disconnected from Betty's story that supporters of the "Betty's reality is Diane's dream" theory often have their work cut out in figuring out how they all fit together into this single individual's wish-fulfillment fantasy. Some interpret them as additional, more cryptic manifestations of Diane's guilt, fears and desires (eg: Camilla betrayed Diane for Adam, so Diane wants Adam to suffer severely in her idealised reality) but it's a messy business, in no small way because Lynch did not initially write these sequences with this outcome in mind (if he envisioned such an outcome at all). Still, it all works out perfectly in the end. Mulholland Drive is fundamentally a playful film, and much of that playfulness manifests in Lynch deliberately toying with his viewers' expectations. The Betty/Adam collision seems destined to happen, but the film seems to purposely back out of it and take an altogether different turning the second that it begins to open up. It is as if the film itself has been prevented from following its intended course, which has echoes of the overarching conspiracy to get Camilla cast in Adam's film over an actress of his choosing.
So where is Aunt Ruth in all of this?
Aunt Ruth is seen leaving her apartment at Havenhurst at the start of the film, reportedly to shoot a picture in Canada. She goes back into the apartment to collect her keys and fails to detect Rita lurking underneath her table. When she reappears at the end of the Betty/Rita arc, her role is once again having an incident of great importance slip right beneath her nose - this time, the universe literally unraveling on her carpet. In my previous comparison between the blue box scene in Mulholland Drive and the pipes sequence in Barton Fink, I suggested that Aunt Ruth's casually oblivious reaction to the occurrence functions as a kind of "punchline" to the entire Betty/Rita story, and that the butt of the joke is essentially the viewer. Ruth walks in right after Rita has opened the blue box, which both she (and the viewer) had anticipated might shed light upon the film's central mystery, only to uncover a dark, deadly, all-consuming nothing that apparently plucks Rita right out of existence. Ruth then randomly appears; she is visibly reacting to some kind of disturbance, implying that she at least heard something coming from the bedroom, yet when she peers in she sees absolutely nothing amiss. We too no trace of Rita, Betty, the blue box, or any of their activity - it is almost as if their entire arc has been erased and we have landed back at the beginning of the narrative, with Aunt Ruth never having left the apartment. Having been teased with the possibility of finally getting to the bottom of the mystery, the viewer instead bears witness to the mystery devouring itself and finds themselves eerily deserted by the two characters who up until now had been commanding their emotional investment. There's a definite archness to how Lynch concludes this sequence, with the appearance of a character who is visibly confused by what has gone on, but ultimately dismisses the disturbance as "nothing" and walks away. The film steers its mystery into a dead end, then casually shrugs it off and calls it a day.
Lynch's clue places emphasis specifically on Aunt Ruth's location, and I've seen it suggested that her being in Canada while Betty occupies her apartment should be taken as a clue that she's dead, as there's an old joke in the acting industry that dead actors "really go on to act in Canada". I was intrigued, but so far my research on the matter has yielded very little about the existence and origins of this euphemism. If this is indeed what Lynch was going for, then fans of the aforementioned dream/reality reading would no doubt take this as further proof that Diane is re-imagining her life in order to suppress a few uncomfortable realities, in this instance accounting for her deceased aunt's absence by packing her off to a shoot in Canada - but on that note, what are we to make of the fact that both Betty and Diane state that they came to Hollywood from Canada? Ruth and Betty never encounter one another in person (although they do converse over the telephone), and when Betty is removed from the story, Aunt Ruth returns. In Betty's story, Aunt Ruth has a tendency to be wherever Betty is not. There is a cyclic quality to the movements of both characters, which begins with Aunt Ruth moving out of Havenhurst so that Betty can take her place as a Hollywood success, only for Ruth to be recalled to her original position when Betty ultimately fails to assume that identity. Ruth is, in effect, another doppelganger of Betty's - perhaps she is the future self which Betty, at one time or another, was destined to be, before corruption (in the form of the forces seeking to get Camilla Rhodes cast in Adam's film) seeped in and redirected her story down a very different, far more sinister path, one which Ruth herself is perpetually oblivious to. In Diane's story, the aunt (who, again, is not specifically identified as Ruth) plays a somewhat different role. She is deceased but has left her niece an inheritance which is ultimately used to hire the hit man Joe to rub out Camilla. If Diane represents a corrupted Betty, a Betty who's been pushed down the wrong path and now harbours no hope of redemption, merely retribution, then the death of Aunt Ruth signifies the death of those aspirations. Unlike many other characters in the Betty arc, Ruth does not cross over into Diane's arc, because Diane, unlike Betty, has not even the vaguest promise of a future. She is on an irreversible course to crash and burn and it is ultimately the aunt (her estranged future self) who facilitates that destruction.
We might also consider Lynch's fifth clue: who gives a key, and why? After all, there are three possible individuals to whom this might refer - in Diane's story, Joe leaves Diane a blue key (evocative of the key used by Rita to unlock the blue box) as a signal that the hit has been successfully carried out. In Betty's story, Coco gives Betty the keys to the apartment at Havenhurst on behalf of Aunt Ruth, so that she can stay there and effectively assume Aunt Ruth's life while Ruth herself is away; as Coco hands across this all-important key, she comments that she is doing so on the basis that Betty and Ruth "probably have an understanding", although that "probably" casts doubt on whether such an understanding actually exists. When Louise (Lee Grant) shows up at Ruth's apartment, she infers that Betty is an imposter, which would appear to support the common assumption that Betty is simply Diane acting out her silly fantasies, but then a penchant for play-pretense is an integral aspect of Betty's character regardless. Betty spends much of her story in a kind of cloud cuckoo land, veering between pretending to live out the life of a genuine movie star and acting as if her life genuinely were a Hollywood movie. Watts plays Betty with an exaggerated, child-like vivaciousness which early on we're goaded to see as indicative of the character's fundamental naivety as a young and hopeful outsider to the Hollywood system. All the same, there are times when Betty's naivety is laid on almost a little too thickly - for example, when she discovers Rita in Ruth's apartment and accepts that this unexpected guest has every right to be there with next to no suspicion or caution. Is Betty really too naive for her own good, or is she just too good at assuming the role of the naive young newcomer? Our assumptions about Betty are further turned on their head when we witness her audition scene and a startlingly different persona emerges, which runs contrary to her earlier, more melodramatic rendition of the exact same material with Rita. Betty tells Rita that she would "rather be known as a great actress than a movie star, but sometimes a person ends up being both." Initially, this appears to be a playful dig at the hollowness of celebrity, with its insinuation that stardom does not necessarily equal great talent (see Lynch's eighth clue), but perhaps Betty alludes here to her own skills as a master manipulator. She plays the role she sees herself as having been cast in order to gain access to Aunt Ruth's vacant apartment and take her place among the Hollywood elite. Is her status as Ruth's niece even genuine? We learn from Coco that Ruth has some concerns about who is staying in her apartment and our natural assumption, much like Coco, is that this refers to Rita, but perhaps Betty merits her own share of suspicion. When the blue box is opened, Betty is stripped of her identity and finds herself cast in a very different role - that of Diane Selwyn, who had previously appeared as a corpse in her story - and the part of master manipulator instead shifts over to Rita, now reborn as Camilla. As Diane, Betty's vulnerabilities are laid horrifyingly bare and she loses whatever social wiles she had.
Clue no. 5 also calls to question if we are supposed to see any symmetry between the key to the apartment at Havenhurst and the key to the blue box. The latter unlocks darkness, oblivion, the ultimate nihilism underpinning the world of Mulholland Drive, while the former opens up a world of glamour, luxury and promise, all of which Betty discovers to be nothing more than hollow illusions (a-UNTRUTHS?) when that nihilism finally comes out of hiding and has its cold and callous way with her. In the end, all that remains in Betty's world is Aunt Ruth, who haunts the empty apartment like the ghost of What Could Have Been, the future which might have awaited Betty had the treacherous twists and turnings of Mulholland Drive not willed otherwise. Of course, Lynch offers yet another sly subversion in having Aunt Ruth assume the role of the haunted, reacting to a strange and ultimately inexplicable disturbance which has invaded her tidy domestic space. Perhaps we are meant to question if Betty and Rita are the real apparitions in this story, intruders who wandered into Ruth's apartment from an alternate reality in order to act out their mystery. After all, while Rita finally is sucked in and devoured by the blue cube, Betty pulls off off a far spookier, spectre-like disappearing act by vanishing into thin air within the split-second that Rita's back is turned on her. Betty is gone before the box is even opened - was her fate already sealed by that point, or was she never actually a part of this world to begin with? It plays out like the ending to an archetypal ghost story. We might consider that character assumed to be Diane Selwyn is already dead in Betty's story, and that the film opens from the perspective of an unseen being who is slowly sinking out of consciousness upon a pillow (the common assumption here is that we are entering into a dream world, but perhaps what we are really witnessing are the final distorted flickers of life of an individual upon the verge of death). If we place Diane's death as happening chronologically before Betty's story begins, then the possibility opens up that Betty, more than a mere projection of the person that Diane wishes she could have been, actually is the spirit of the deceased Diane, acting out a form of vengeance upon her former erstwhile by leading her into a sticky web of mystery and confusion, a game which finally stops when Rita is coaxed into looking inside the mysterious blue box and confronted by the cold, sinister reality that defines their relationship? The general impression at the end of the film is that Betty/Diane is the character whose dreams and ambitions have been fundamentally thwarted, yet it is Rita, not Betty, who unsuspectingly opens up the box and gets destroyed. Betty remains unaccounted for.
Judging by Ruth's reaction, she is totally unwitting to the events in question, but what of the actual key-giver, Coco? She's evidently not a fan of Rita/Camilla in either of her incarnations, so might she have knowingly assisted in her destruction? As with just about every question that Mulholland Drive raises, the jury are unlikely to ever return a verdict, but it offers something intriguing to chew on.
Aunt Ruth represents A Un Truth ( play on words)
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