Mulholland drive gay

🔥 Hollywood's biggest night is here!

This week is David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive.

Everything is sex
Except sex which is power
You know, power is just sex
Now ask yourself who’s screwing you
— Janelle Monáe, “Screwed”

When Stanley Kubrick’s final film, Eyes Wide Shut, was released six months after his death, it was, to quote Martin Scorsese, “severely misunderstood.” The year after Wild Things, the same year as Cruel Intentions, audiences expected an erotic thriller.

This recontextualization is enough proof that the depths of the first two hours go beyond the simple “Diane’s dream” explanation.

After all, if the first two hours are a work of Diane’s storytelling, the whole film is a work of Lynch’s. Representation doesn’t really have a lot of weight when the under-represented group portrayed on the screen doesn’t even get the part.

But art is not meant to be solved — it’s meant to be felt, it’s meant to be discussed, it’s meant to be pondered.

And, besides, if you’re looking for plot coherence, Mulholland Drive really isn’t that complicated.

David Lynch has made other films — like Lost Highway, like Inland Empire — that live in a world of narrative abstraction.

But David Lynch’s 2001 masterpiece has a thematic core that has been largely ignored.

Mulholland Drive is a film about power.

***

The DVD copy of Mulholland Drive I first rented from the library over a decade ago came with an insert of clues. Especially when Bill is encouraged, for his safety, to let.

Who is actually making the decisions that impact the lives of everyone in the film and television industry? Like a magic show, everything seemed real until it’s revealed to be an illusion. Hollywood goes for sensationalized versions of any story in order to fit a marketable narrative, but the statistical commonality of real-life LGBT+ mortality doesn’t align on this very sensitive subject.

Even something like QAnon, believed by some of the worst people to maintain the power of even worse people, is a response to something real.

It’s far more likely that a person is at the whims of corporate decision makers.

Even for people whose jobs are steady, other aspects of life are controlled by faceless entities. Director Adam longs instead for Betty, seeing her only once but knowing she’s the one who should really get the part.

And, in Diane’s fantasy, Adam’s approval is not all she desires.