Dazed and Confused (1993)

Written and Directed by Richard Linklater

Starring: Jason London, Matthew McConaughey, Wiley Wiggins, Christin Hinojosa, Joey Lauren Adams, Ben Affleck, Parker Posey, Michelle Burke, Anthony Rapp, Adam Goldberg, Marissa Ribisi, Nicky Katt, Milla Jovovich

Richard Linklater loves to make films about time, where his stories are compressed into a particular time frame, which informs the nature of the film. His debut feature, the microbudget Slacker, takes place over 24 hours in Austin. The Before trilogy (Before Sunrise, Before Sunset and Before Midnight) each take place nine years apart, and each one takes place over the course of a portion of one day. Tape takes place in real time. Boyhood was filmed over the course of twelve years and tells the story of a family and a boy growing up over those twelve years. And his second feature film, Dazed and Confused, my second favorite film of all time, follows in that tradition.

Dazed and Confused takes place over fifteen hours during the last day of school in May of 1976, in a small unnamed Texas suburb. The film has an ensemble of approximately twenty-three actors, the characters comprising sixteen high school students about to enter their senior year and five middle schoolers about to enter high school, along with two "townies," alumni of the high school who like to relive their glory days by partying with the younger set. From about 2:00pm in the afternoon to about 5:00am the following morning, these twenty-three characters will attend school, drive around, party, fight, make out, smoke, drink, and generally discuss their various existential malaise. There's nothing else to the film, but there's so much there.

I believe I first saw this film when my parents rented it from Blockbuster right after it was released on video for the first time. My parents were around the age the incoming freshmen would have been, so they were interested to see the cultural aspects of the film (the clothing, the music, et cetera). I was completely bored out of my mind, but then again, I was ten and obsessed with vampires and Star Trek. I rewatched the film as a college student - an Irish roommate of mine for the summer was in love with the film, and it so happened that it was showing in a few Fridays at midnight at the NuArt on Santa Monica. I decided I'd go with her.

And I fucking fell in love with it.

Anyone who knows me knows that I love teen films and teen drama. That's not to say that I'm not discerning on the genre - I am really picky about it - but I love it a lot. It's one of my favorites. I love the idea that everything is heightened to teenagers, that every little event is life or death. That they are characters who are caught between being kids and being adults. And that even the most lascivious actions are tinged with a bit of innocence.

Michelle smoking a joint, presented with judgment or morality.

Dazed and Confused is such a film, and even a bit more avant-garde than that. Unlike most other teen films, there is no major story in this film. There are smaller characters arcs and beats throughout the sprawling ensemble, but a good plot descriptor is literally the one from a few paragraphs up. Kids being kids at the beginning of summer - drinking, smoking weed, partying, and being young generally. The character arcs are so low-stakes - things like deciding if you're playing football next year - but that's what makes them so authentic and relatable. The likelihood is that as teenagers, we didn't have to deal with friends getting murdered or rotating sexual partners or stricken with cancer or the kinds of plots we experience through most of the genre. Our highs and lows at that age may be related to romance, but also to what you were wearing on one particular day or one word you said to someone. The funny thing is that these kinds of stories are never told because they lack a dramatic weight that Hollywood seems to believe all stories involving teenagers must contain. With Dazed and Confused, the lackadaisical tone and mundane nature of the stories makes it most people's high school story.

The opening slo-mo shot of the film dictates the tone of the film.

While being incredibly universal due to its storytelling nature, it is also incredibly atypical for the genre in another way because of how it treats one of teen drama's favorite tropes - the class structure (I mean, in a societal way, not in the literal grade sense). A lot of teen films (The Breakfast Club is the most blatant example of this, but also in films like Clueless, Heathers, Brick and Mean Girls) concern themselves with the clique-y nature of being a teenager, which is a completely correct concern to have. High school might be the most stratified society left on Earth after the demise of Edwardian England and New York. But, while that is an aspect of high school life that is very true to life, the fact of the matter is that a lot of times, the class system is much more fluid than what one might think. Dazed and Confused follows this path, having the closest character we have to a lead, star quarterback Randall "Pink" Floyd (Jason London), navigate his way through the various cliques without any reprisal (save from the head football coach, which causes the most conflict for him) from any of his peers. He is equally at home with all of them - and even more shocking for the genre, all of the students are pretty much okay with each other. We have various groups - the football players, the geeks, the stoners, the popular girls, and the mean girls - who all attend the same social functions throughout the evening, and no one is made to feel out of place. And this is helped by the film's loose three-part structure: 1) last day at school, 2) looking for something to do that night, and 3) the late night party at the Moon Tower. All the characters experience the same general beats during these three parts, showing that all of them are more similar than their strata might suggest.

Quarterback Pink's comfort with both popular cheerleader Michelle (left) and geek Cynthia is incredibly atypical for a teen film - as is the two girls' comfort with each other.

That's not to say the film is devoid of conflict, but the conflicts, typical of Linklater, are much more of a philosophical nature. Pink, along with the other football players, are informed by their coach that they have to sign a form promising that they won't drink or do drugs during the summer so that they'll be ready for "a championship season in '76." While the others guys recognize it as bullshit and sign it as a formality, Pink has an existential crisis over it - by signing it, he feels like the administration is holding much more control over him than he is comfortable with, a crisis that his friends don't understand. Other conflicts include standing up to bullies, confessing your feelings for someone else, and the debate between passivity and joining in. These are all common conflicts in teen drama, but the casualness of the presentation in Dazed makes them all incredibly realistic, if for no other reason because the stakes of these situations are the consequence of the actions itself. There is no outward pressure for any of these things to happen - no one is graduating, so this isn't the last time these kids will theoretically see each other, and there's no literal life-or-death Sword of Damocles hanging over anyone. These conflicts arise because they do organically, not because something in the narrative formula demands it.

Another reason why Dazed has such a laid-back feeling is the kick-ass soundtrack. The low-stakes narrative and relatively lax setting (suburban late-1970s life has less tension than the upheaval of the 1960s or the excess of the 1980s) provide a perfect jumping off point for a film that is wall-to-wall with great tunes. But why the soundtrack is especially awesome in this film is how the songs are used. Dazed isn't the only film to have a nostalgia-laden soundtrack, but it is one of the few films that uses the music almost like a musical does. Now, go with me on this for a second: Any good piece of musical theater has songs that further the plot or create atmosphere or do something else to enhance the piece as a whole, rather than using it as a filler or background noise. From the opening slo-mo shot of stoners Pickford (Shawn Andrews) and Michelle (Milla Jovovich) pulling into the school parking lot in a gorgeous Pontiac GTO to Aerosmith's "Sweet Emotion," the tone of the film is set: laid-back and nostalgic, but with a bit of an edge. Every other song comments on the scene it's accompanying, from the hazing rituals set to Alice Cooper's "No More Mr. Nice Guy" (for the guys) and War's "Why Can't We Be Friends" (for the girls) to the montage of all the characters driving around town looking for something to do set to Edgar Winter Group's "Free Ride" to freshman Mitch (Wiley Wiggins) wandering around lost amidst all the seniors while Dr. John's "Right Place, Wrong Time" blares at us. However, as appropriate as the songs are, the songs are never too on-the-nose, mostly because either dialogue is layered over the song in such a way that they never draw attention to themselves or because they're so fucking fun to listen to and Linklater is showing us equally fun images over them that we never think "Gee, that's fucking obvious."

One of the closing shots of the film, a slightly drunk Mitch listening to his headphones, reinforces the importance of music and the soundtrack to the film.

But just because the film presents a wonderfully chilled version of the 1970s doesn't mean that the film is wearing rose-colored glasses. There is a lot of existential dread in Dazed that gives it a bite that other teen films do not have. These kids are the last trickle of the Baby Boomer generation that sprouted in the decade and a half after the end of World War II, and growing up with the knowledge that the bloodiest war in human history was a mere thirty years prior and watching the horror and cultural upheaval of the 1960s firsthand, they are all in the habit of questioning everything rather than accepting the world at face value. Linklater is a master when it comes to stoner philosophy, and in Dazed so many of the characters, in particular the geeky trio of Tony (Anthony Rapp), Mike (Adam Goldberg) and Cynthia (Marissa Ribisi, question so many things that are expected of them. And they do it like maturing teens would, not bratty adolescents. Like Pink questions the nature of the document he's supposed to sign, the other characters question the necessity of the hazing rituals for the incoming freshmen, the idea that high school and college are presented as necessary steps to get to a point in life that is completely unknowable, the debate between college and working, the horror that your best years might be ending at seventeen, and, of course, the "every other decade theory," which Cynthia states as such: "It's like the every-other-decade theory, you know? The fifties were boring. The sixties rocked. The seventies, oh my God, they obviously suck. Maybe the eighties will be... radical!"

It's a hilariously ironic line. Of course, we know this is not the case, but it's completely accurate that a seventeen-year-old girl would espouse this theory. The sixties didn't rock - while the cultural revolution it ushered in was incredibly important and integral in certain disenfranchised groups getting their rights or respect (see: the Civil Rights Movement, the Sexual Revolution, the advent of feminism), the decade was littered with assassinations, bloodshed, and the nation throwing itself headfirst into the disaster that was the Vietnam War. And, obviously, the eighties weren't radical - the money-hungry excess brought in by Ronald Reagan's economics also separated the social classes in a way that hadn't been as blatant since possibly the Great Depression, and popular cultural became a strange mix of exemplifying Reagan's vision of America and more surreal and artificial displays of addictive but ultimately hollow shallowness. As Linklater stated in a documentary on the Criterion Collection DVD of Dazed, Cynthia would obviously hate the seventies because every kid hates the decade they're in the middle of, and it isn't until years have passed that you look back and appreciate the time period. But the seventies weren't fantastic either, with widespread drug use almost acting as either a numbing agent for the horrors of the previous decade or a way to connect with the more subversive aspects of the decade. Either way, Dazed doesn't present the seventies as either awesome or awful - just as happening.

Tony, Mike and Cynthia debate the nature of the importance placed upon high school and college while driving around looking for a party.

Another reason why this film is amazing because it served not just as a launching pad for a group of brilliant actors who are now a combination of box-office stars, Oscar winners, Tony-Award nominees, and veritable character actors. Casting director Don Phillips hit the jackpot in being able to cast Oscar winner Matthew McConaughey as pervy townie Wooderson (who offers up perhaps the film's most iconic line, when he comments on the girls wandering around local hangout The Emporium: "That's what I love about these high school girls, man. I get older, they stay the same age"), stars Ben Affleck and Parker Posey as the "villains" of the film, two seniors who get off way too much on ruling over their respective hazing rituals, character actresses Joey Lauren Adams and Christine Harnos as two different popular girls, Affleck-collaborator Rory Cochrane as the king of the stoners, and a variety of other well-known actors in some of their best work. And the fact that these actors were all unknowns when filming this adds an ease (and a lack of ego) that make all the interactions feel incredibly authentic. You feel like they're all friends and have been friends - or at the very least, known each other - for years and years.

Wooderson offering up his iconic lines while standing outside of The Emporium.

There isn't a whole lot more to say about Dazed and Confused, yet I can talk about it endlessly. It's more of a frame of mind film than anything narrative. It's a feeling I get whenever I watch it that I can't describe. It proves that you can make interesting, fun, and engrossing cinema out of something that is incredibly ordinary and mundane (which, frankly, is what Linklater has done with a majority of his films). And it also proves that you can make a film where most of your characters are stoners and not make a stoner film. This film has a reputation (and was marketed as such, with the stupid "See It with a Bud" tagline) for being a druggy film, but there is nothing further from the truth. This film doesn't poke fun at the stoners or glorify weed in any way. Like everything else in the film, it's just something that's there, that's a part of life. And isn't showing life in all its imperfect glory what art is all about?

Mulholland Drive (2001)

Written and Directed by David Lynch

Starring: Naomi Watts, Laura Elena Harring, Justin Theroux, Ann Miller, Robert Forster, Mark Pellegrino, Dan Hedaya, Melissa George, Patrick Fischler, Lee Grant

I'm not exactly sure when it became apparent to me that David Lynch's Mulholland Drive was my favorite film of all time. I didn't think it at the time, but then again, I was a nerdy awkward eighteen-year-old who bought the DVD on impulse at my college's local Tower Records (God, I miss that place). But I know that sometime in my twenties, when someone asked me what my favorite film of all time was, I instantly answered: "Oh, dude, easy. Mulholland Drive."

It's not an easy film to watch. It's not a film I watch a lot. There are films that I hate that I've seen more times than this. But when I do decide to watch it, it hits me like a ton of bricks.

A lot of people would say that in order to enjoy this film, you have to be a David Lynch fanboy. I don't know if that's true, but then again, I am a fan, though I wouldn't say I'm a fanboy. There are a lot of his oeuvre that I can't deal with - Inland Empire and Lost Highway frustrated me and, while I think there are cool and fun parts to it, the blend of trashy camp with fairy-tale realism in Wild at Heart doesn't work for me. But when Lynch is working at his optimum (this film, Blue Velvet, and the entirety of the first season and select snippets of the second season of "Twin Peaks"), I get him. He's labeled as a weirdo director who likes to make things weird for the sake of weirdness, but I think that while he is definitely avant-garde and a surrealist, he isn't doing things just to be weird. There is a strange logic to everything he does and, since I primarily view him as an extremely emotional director with an interestingly conservative worldview (how many of his films can be summed up with the phrase "Only True Love can defeat the evil darkness that engulfs the world"?), I can enjoy and even be enraptured by his work when viewing it within an emotional lens.

As is so with Mulholland Drive.

What makes this film incredibly disconcerting even for Lynch acolytes is that there is no mooring - at least not at the beginning. In his most accessible work, there is always a character who is an audience stand-in, who functions as the one Normal person in this universe through which we see the bizarre and nightmarish happenings and root for to make it through unscathed: Jeffrey in Blue Velvet, Agent Cooper/Sherriff Truman on "Twin Peaks," Fred and Pete in Lost Highway. But Mulholland Drive begins with no such anchor - while it seems like Betty should be that character, her presence fits in with the brightly-colored archetypal vision of Hollywood that permeates the first two thirds of the film and is far from a Normal Person the audience can identify with.

The basic premise of the film is doled out over fifteen or so minutes. Betty Elms (Naomi Watts, in her breakout role and what I consider to be the finest performance of hers to date) is an aspiring actress, a bubbly blonde who is the second coming of Doris Day, and arrives in Los Angeles to stay in her aunt's vacant apartment, discovering a mysterious and slinky brunette amnesiac (Laura Elena Harring) who has taken refuge there after being in a car wreck on the titular road. Betty naively finds nothing wrong with this scenario and, after a few minutes with some typical Lynchian iconography - a black purse, lots of money, a strange blue key - the two set out on an adventure to find out the brunette's identity and the circumstances of her accident. The brunette by this point has taken to calling herself "Rita," after seeing a poster of Rita Haywarth in Gilda.

Rita staring at the Gilda poster on the bathroom wall, creating her identity from Hollywood archetype.

David Lynch loves Old Hollywood. He, for one, is one of the few filmmakers working - and definitely the only avant-garde filmmaker of his ilk - that unabashedly loves LA. And both this and "Twin Peaks" are full of references to old Hollywood classics. As I stated before, Mulholland Drive - or at least the first two thirds - take place in a Hollywood that is purely fantasy, made up of characters and sequences that are completely archetypal. While Betty and Rita are both inspired by Hollywood star actresses of the past (Betty modeled on Doris Day and Rita on her namesake), they both also represent female archetypes from Lynch's favorite genre, film noir: Betty is the Girl Friday, the plucky and cheerful girl always up for an adventure or two, and Rita is the Femme Fatale, mysterious and oozing with sexual energy. The side characters - the put-upon director Adam Kesher (Justin Theroux), Betty's landlady Coco (Ann Miller) and creepy neighbor Louise (Lee Grant), and Joe the hitman (Mark Pellegrino) - also feel as if they're stock characters from other film genres; in these cases, Adam and all the characters in his subplot representing conspiracy thrillers, Coco the movie musical, Louise the supernatural mystery, and Joe a kind of slapstick early-Tarantino gangster film.

And I think once you view the first two thirds as a pastiche of classic Hollywood genres and tropes (with your usual unsettling Lynchian moments throughout - are there any moments creepier in film than the moment where Betty's elderly airplane mates are alone in their limo laughing to themselves? And let's not forget the infamous "Dream Scene," where a terrified man (Patrick Fischler) tells his companion about a horrific dream he had the previous night as he realizes that it is happening at this very moment), it's a lot easier to understand the rest of it. When I first saw the film with other people, a classmate of mine commented that he hated how fake it was. But I think that's precisely the point - Los Angeles is a place whose main business concerns artifice, and the selling of that artifice to the masses. In Lynch's worldview, the surface of things is paramount - it is what characters from Blue Velvet to The Elephant Man fight to either destroy or uphold, so it is appropriate that a good chunk of this film revels in just exploring the surface, with all the acting choices that go with it.

The first reason I latched onto Mulholland Drive so quickly, I think, was this vision of Hollywood. Anyone who ventures to Los Angeles trying to make it in the entertainment industry has a vision of what it's going to be like: like something out of Sunset Boulevard - struggling actors and writers hanging out together and living in old Spanish-style ivy-covered apartments while waiting for their next big break, everyone being glamorous despite their standing, and every day an adventure out of the dream factory. This is what I thought LA was going to be like when I moved there for college - a land of opportunity, mystery and excitement. I quickly learned that LA is a very different animal in reality, one that I liked, but not the one I thought it was going to be.

But it's this naïve vision that's presented to us - and Betty - for two-thirds of the film. She and Rita are caught up in the mystery of Rita's true identity, being pursued by hit men and mediums all the while; and then it turns out that Betty is a brilliant actress herself, killing it at an audition for an aging producer where she unleashes a dark sexuality hiding behind the bright blond bob, the first instance of the darkness inside her. She's quickly ushered to see Adam auditioning actresses for the lead of his new film - the moment they view each other, it's clear that there are sparks there, in an almost ridiculous way, soundtracked to Linda Scott's super-fifties "I've Told Every Little Star" (to go along with Lynch's constant 1950s milieu). But we also know that despite the outrageous talent that Betty suddenly possesses, Adam can't cast her in this lead role due to the cabal of Mafia businessmen conspiring to have the enigmatic Camilla Rhodes (Melissa George) be cast. And isn't this what you'd want Hollywood to be like? If you don't get the role, it's not because you aren't talented - it's because there is a conspiracy against you the whole time.

The shots of Adam and Betty gazing into each others' eyes across the soundstage is so outrageous in its Hollywood romance trappings, emphasizing the artifice of this portion of the film.

This is where the film begins to fall apart in its narrative, but gets really strange and exciting and Lynchian. Though a series of guesses and intuitions, Betty and Rita have tracked down a woman named Diane Selwyn to a seedy apartment building in the east of Hollywood, believing her to be the key to solving the mystery of Rita's true identity. At said complex, they discover bespectacled figures wandering around, a shifty female neighbor, and, most importantly, the apparent dead body of Diane in the apartment, a discovery that literally causes the film to shift. After emerging from the apartment, the two women are terrified, and the film literally duplicates, creating several Ritas and Bettys, signaling to us that things are about to get incredibly weird.

The duplicating of the images foreshadows the final act of the film in both literal and symbolic fashion.

As I said above, I think of David Lynch as an incredibly emotional director. All of his choices, especially the bizarre ones, are rooted in some sort of emotion, which allows you to understand the beat in your heart but not in your head, and this is where the most controversial leap of the film stems from. Back in her aunt's apartment, Betty has come up with the idea of dressing Rita like her, getting a blonde wig and placing it on her statuesque friend's head, a total shoutout to Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo. The idea of there being two Bettys now is paramount to the final act of the film, which begins with Betty then telling Rita to share the large bed with her instead of the couch, which naturally leads to the two women having sex. It's a big leap from a storytelling standpoint - there has been no inkling that either Betty or Rita are attracted to other women, let alone to each other. A potential love interest for Betty has been introduced, for Christ's sake! But the sex scene, in my opinion, is done beautifully, and not because it's two gorgeous women making out and fondling each others' breasts. It's because I believe it. I believe that somehow, Betty has fallen in love with Rita and wants to show her. There's nothing more gratuitous than the nudity and it's the rare instance on film that I've seen where passion and intimacy are being shown on my screen. Betty's feelings for Rita, and arguably Rita's in return, are the key for the rest of the film. This sequence, which Lynch films in dark lighting and soft focus in order to prevent pervy teen boys from posting it all over the internet (not that that's stopped them), ends with a beautiful shot that encapsulates the last part of the film - a shot of the sleeping Betty and Rita, both their faces joined together to form one beautiful, but off-kilter, face. This shot, to me, explains the entire theme of the film: the duality of Hollywood, the schizophrenic nature of it that is at once fantasy and reality, archetype and not, beautiful and incredibly alien. And, as we'll discover, the duality of Betty Elms herself.

The shot that explains everything - sort of: Betty and Rita, after their sexual encounter, have become almost one person.

The bizarre sequence afterwards - quite possibly the most Lynchian scene in his entire canon - involves Rita, remembering something, taking Betty to a strange club in downtown LA, called Club Silencio, where we are treated to a performance where the MC constantly reminds us that the performance is just a performance, a completely artificial pantomime - almost like the first portion of the film. The point is drummed into Betty and Rita (and us) that "No hay banda! There is no band! And yet, we hear a band" that, for the uninitiated, it seems like "Okay, I get it. What's the fucking point?" We are then treated to an even more anvillicious example, as singer Rebekah Del Rio arrives onstage to perform a beautifully heartbreaking a cappella version of Roy Orbison's "Crying" in Spanish, entitled "Llorando." It's a beautiful song sung incredibly emotionally - it drives both Betty and Rita to tears. And why this is incredibly Lynchian is because, again, we have a film where a fairly insignificant character to the story performs an old 1950s song that causes our more important characters to cry. Dean Stockwell's lip-synching of "In Dreams" in Blue Velvet causes Dennis Hopper to burst into sobs, and Julee Cruise's various backwoods performances on "Twin Peaks" would drive our leads on that show to emotional epiphanies. As you're caught up in this particular song, Rebekah collapses and the song continues, really hammering us with "This is all fucking fake! Even this thing that was so beautiful is a fucking lie!" At this moment, Rita discovers a blue box in her purse, the girls return to the apartment to open with it the blue key, and we are literally going down the rabbit hole into the final third of the film that either ruins the film or, in my opinion, elevates it into a masterpiece.

It's well-known that Mulholland Drive was originally conceived as a pilot for ABC, to get back into television after eight years away from "Twin Peaks." When ABC balked at the final product, David Lynch went to his French producer Alain Sarde and persuaded Sarde to give Lynch funds to add an extra portion to the pilot to make it into the film. I'm not sure where the pilot portion ends in the film, but I assume it's when Rita and Betty emerge from Diane Selwyn's apartment, because all the pieces of a television pilot are present beforehand - setting up future plotlines (Betty and Adam's future romance, the hit man hot on Rita's trail, the two stock cops from the first twenty minutes referencing a possible serial killer) and ending on a hook of an ending. While there are Lynchian moments, there aren't that many - it's a pretty straightforward narrative with a pretty off-kilter tone. But after that is when things get weirder and weirder until we get to the split. Now, Lynch is famously evasive about aspiring meaning to his works, including Mulholland Drive, but a common theory (and one that I ascribe to) is that the first two thirds of the film are a dream and the final third presents us with the reality of the world.

And that reality? Diane Selwyn, played by Naomi Watts, has just dreamed up her fantasy version of Hollywood, one where she is an incredibly talented actress who doesn't get work because of the dark forces all around her, and one where everyone, from Adam to Rita, fall madly in love with her. But the reality is much more tragic. Diane lives not in a glamorous Hollywood alcove, but the seedy East Hollywood complex, alone and disheveled, a chain smoker whose closest brush with movie stardom is being an extra on some of Camilla Rhodes's films. Is this Camilla Rhodes the vapid moll played by Melissa George in the first part? No. She is none other than Laura Elena Harring, transformed from an innocent amnesiac into a cruel ex-lover, every bit the femme fatale she was presented as at the beginning of the film. 

This final third of the film presents all the same characters we've encountered in the first part in drastically different contexts, coloring Diane's romanticized vision of them in interesting ways. Adam is not a potential love interest of hers, but Camilla's boyfriend. Coco is not a mother figure to her, but Adam's mother. The dream version of Camilla Rhodes? An anonymous lover of Rita/Camilla's. The Mafia conspiracy? All guests at the most humiliating dinner that Diane has ever gone to. 

That dinner scene is what makes this my favorite film. It's a scene that I've been in in real life. The scene in the film: After cruelly telling Diane that their relationship must stop, Camilla has constantly humiliated her by making out with Adam on the film set they're working on, forcing her to watch (a game that, frankly, it seems Adam is in on). This leads to an uncomfortable (but incredibly realistic) scene in which Diane, tear-streaked and sweaty, masturbates bitterly, attempting to block out the dreck that is her life by trying to reach some sort of emotional release, but unable to do so without breaking down. But to make amends, Camilla has invited Diane to dinner, implying a reunion of sorts, walking her hand-in-hand through an enchanted drive until they reach the top of the hill - her Neutra-esque mid-century modern home she shares with Adam. And a dinner party. The dinner party is a fairly cringeworthy scene to begin with, as Diane, seated with Coco and a variety of other people she doesn't know, has to explain her relation to Camilla without letting them know that she's been in love with her for some time, then goes into her own sad background - being a winner of a dance contest back home then deciding to come to Hollywood to make it, and never really doing so. It's already so sad that when Camilla slyly makes out with an ex of hers, smirking at Diane while this conspiracy of guests all stare at her pityingly, and then announcing her engagement to Adam, it feels almost sadistic. We can feel the rage and hurt that Diane feels at that moment.

I had this same experience. I had just been dumped by a girl who I thought of as the love of my life (how wrong we are when we are twenty, but at the moment, she was my life), and after I felt okay enough with her to be in the same room, we went to a birthday dinner of one of our classmates together. There had been a rumor going around that she was dating someone else, a rumor that some of my friends tried to keep from me. But I'd heard it, but thought nothing of it. But seeing it in the flesh was something I was not prepared for: this guy shows up to this dinner and sits next to me, and they decide to go on sucking face. In front of me. And in front of all these people we were friends with, all of them looking at me with pitying eyes. It's an experience that I imagine other people in the world must have experienced, but you rarely see on film. Watching that scene now takes me back there instantly, and it is equally heartbreaking for me as it was in real life, and just the teary glare in Naomi Watts' eyes, which should have earned her at the very least an Oscar nomination, kills me.

Diane stares in rage and hurt at the sadistic scene put on by Adam and Camilla - a far cry from the Doris Day-esque Betty from the first part of the film.

Which is why her decision to hire Joe the hitman, this time not so incompetent but ruthlessly dangerous, to kill Camilla for her makes complete sense. The phrase "This is the girl," once used in the opening two-thirds of the film as a command from the Mafia to Adam to cast Camilla, now takes on a chilling new significance as it is the command from Diane to take her ex (and love of her life) out. The blue key, once a bizarre design in the first part, is now completely mundane, but incredibly creepier now. And then, a smash cut to the final sequence of the film: that same blue key, which Joe has stated he would leave for Diane as a sign that the job had been completed, now sits on Diane's coffee table, a sign that it is over. Camilla is dead, and Diane has killed her. But it brings no comfort, but more heartache, causing Diane a Lynchian breakdown of operatic proportions, where a yeti-like creature from the shadows, first glanced upon in the Winkie's "Is this a dream?" scene at the beginning of the film, opens up the mysterious blue box, releasing diminutive versions of Betty's airplane companions, who crawl into Diane's apartment, grow to human size, and haunt her until she shoots herself, ending the story. 

Weird, huh? This sequence, while taking place in the "reality" portion of the film, is completely symbolic in my mind, with its basis in Greek tragedy: Pandora's box is opened, releasing the Furies, who will hunt down anyone who has killed in revenge, and haunt them til the end of their days. This is what symbolically happens to Diane, who is already grieving and probably regretting her decision, and it ends up killing her. Diane ends her life on her bed in the same position we were introduced to her, the room suddenly engulfing itself in smoke.

The final few images of the film are incredibly arresting: The first shot of the film is a group of dancers jitterbugging (or just two couples, but endlessly duplicated, foreshadowing the duality theme)

superimposed with an image of Diane, beautiful and radiant, bathed - almost drowned - in a spotlight. After Diane's death, we have images of Los Angeles at night, superimposed with an image of Betty and Rita-as-Betty, laughing, in love, bathed in a spotlight.

The bookended images - a hopeful Diane ready for stardom, and Betty and Rita, happy and in love.

And then our coda: We're back in Club Silencio, the stage empty, and the lights turning off, before a blue-haired patron whispers "Silencio." That's Lynch again, telling us again: "This was just a film! The whole thing you saw? None of it was real because I made this film!" And... black.

I think this is David Lynch's finest work. It may not be the most accessible - you can argue that's either Blue Velvet or Wild at Heart (I'm not counting "Twin Peaks" in this debate) - but I think it's the film that encapsulates everything he likes to talk about in the best way possible. His work almost always concerns itself with the disconnect between the surface of life, often represented by 1950s-tinged images of Americana, usually suburbia but in this case Hollywood, and the dark nightmarish underbelly. In Blue Velvet, he accomplishes this by the symbolic shot of a perfectly manicured lawn, then panning down and underneath to show a nest of dark and almost carnivorous insects crawling in the sediment. But, here, he devotes the entire structure of the film to show this disconnect, and by narrowing it down to the viewpoint of one (or two, depending on how you look at it) character, it makes the theme that much more integral to the story as opposed to an academic or critical exercise.

And because of this narrow focus, you care more about the characters in it than in any other Lynch film. There are reasons for loving any of his other films, but no other of his films (save for The Straight Story) are so invested in the relationships that the characters have with each other and how love and loss are tied directly into their motivations. Like I've said, if you view Mulholland Drive through a prism of emotion, the entire thing makes sense and is completely moving. Whenever I watch it, I mourn for Diane and Camilla's lost relationship, for their deaths, and I even mourn for the fantasy version, for Betty and Rita's angelic coda, representing an entire life with each other that they'll never have. It is a testament to the tremendous performances and chemistry that Naomi Watts and Laura Elena Harring have with each other, and it is a testament to the filmmaking that their love scenes never feel like they were manufactured to titillate me as an audience member, but a loving show of physical affection that just so happened to be caught on camera.

And there are tons of things to analyze. I mean, I just wrote a novella about this film, and I'm barely scratching at the surface. I could have talked about shot composition, which is completely ingenious - notice how in the first part of the film, Betty and Rita are almost always in the same shot with each other, usually their faces incredibly close to the other's. In the latter part, Diane and Camilla are only in two shots together - one outside the dinner party and one where Diane tearfully ends her relationship with Camilla. I could have talked about Angelo Badalamenti's hypnotic score, or the soundtrack choices, or the theory that another filmgoer suggested to me: that Coco and Louise represented two witches from Disney films. But I didn't because I don't have that much patience.

But this is my favorite film of all time. It moves me, it makes me laugh, it reminds me of moments in my life and, most importantly, represents a period of my life where I was Betty Elms, a young newcomer to the City of Angels, hoping to break in to the film industry and hoping for an adventure doing so.