“Mulholland Drive,” the latest feature from director David Lynch, is exhilarating — two hours and 25 minutes of macabre thrills, highly charged erotica and indelible images. But it’s also confusing. Bits and pieces of plot dribble out; characters appear and disappear; the film takes an incomprehensible turn two-thirds of the way through; and there seem to be three or four disparate story lines that have virtually nothing to do with one another.
In this way, the film is similar to Lynch’s “Lost Highway,” his cinematic scud missile of 1997. In that film, the 40-something Bill Pullman languishes in a locked prison cell. He then, without explanation, turns into the 20-something Balthazar Getty and is released from prison, and the movie goes off on a new story tangent. That was just one puzzling development in a film whose plot was regularly described as a Möbius strip by reviewers.
“Mulholland Drive” is a movie along those lines, though its filmic palette is broader, its setting (Hollywood and the film industry) more portentous, and its themes plainer. Beyond that, the narrative is intricate and playfully surreal rather than opaque and frustrating.
Indeed, it may be the most conventional and coherent of Lynch’s “hard” movies (“Eraserhead,” “Blue Velvet,” “Twin Peaks,” “Fire Walk With Me,” “Wild at Heart,” “Lost Highway”). All the themes that cycle through his work — strange figures pulling the strings behind the scenes, random acts of extreme violence, bizarre character fixations and the feeling that the surreal is an active part of our everyday life — are present here, but he’s tied them to a narrative structure that, in the end, resolves itself. For aficionados, there are red herrings that will maintain many a debate, but others will suspect that Lynch is finally coming out and telling us what he’s all about.
Still, of recent American movies, only “Memento” is remotely as challenging, and it’s still almost impenetrable on first viewing. What follows includes a synopsis of the plot and then questions and answers about what in the world is going on in “Mulholland Drive’s” strange universe. So stop reading now if you haven’t yet seen the film.
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Here’s the basic plot: The film opens with garish, distorted footage of people jitterbugging; it’s a hellish version of a Gap ad. Then we see washed-out superimposed footage of a young woman with a sort of beatific homecoming queen smile on her face.
Then there’s a few seconds of a red blanket; breathing sounds pulse on the soundtrack.
Then the movie proper starts, with a few parallel stories: In one, a gorgeous woman is in the back of a limo, climbing the winding curves of Mulholland Drive above Los Angeles. The driver stops unexpectedly and points a pistol at her. But before he can fire the limo is rammed by one of a pair of drag-racing cars. The voluptuous woman gets out in a daze and stumbles down the hills into Hollywood and ends up sleeping in an apartment whose owner is away on vacation.
Then we see a diner, with an odd, nervous, nerdy-looking young guy talking to a more composed middle-aged man. The younger one says he’s had a dream about the diner and a monster outside. They go outside and see the monster! The young guy collapses.
Someone is after the woman who wandered off from the car wreck. We see a strange man pick up a phone and hear that they haven’t found her yet. He calls a number and passes along the message; we see a dirty yellow wall phone picked up and accept the message. Then we see that phone hung up, picked up and dialed. A phone rings on a coffee table next to an ashtray, but no one answers.
We are introduced to another character, Betty, as she gets off a plane, chatting gaily with an elderly couple she met on the flight. Betty is a bushy-tailed, almost painfully chipper young woman just arrived in Los Angeles to make her fortune as an actress. The older couple effusively wish her luck.
In yet another narrative stream, a young director, Adam, is being forced by some evil Hollywood studio types to cast a certain ingénue in his film — a blond named Camilla. Arrogantly, he refuses; a strange man in a spooky room orders that the film be shut down. Adam leaves for home in despair and finds his wife in bed with the pool man, who beats him up.
Meanwhile, a scruffy blond-haired guy is talking to a long-haired guy in a shabby office, who mentions something about an accident. The blond guy pulls out a gun and shoots the other, apparently to get a mysterious black book that has some sort of connection to the attempted killing of Rita. But a shot goes awry and hits a woman in the next office. The hit guy tries to strangle her, then shoots her. Then he shoots a janitor who wanders by. Then he shoots the janitor’s vacuum cleaner and starts a fire, which sets off alarms and sprinklers.
Betty is staying in the vacant apartment of her aunt, in a building run by an older woman who calls herself Coco. Betty stumbles on the bruised woman hiding out in the shower! She’s under the impression, at first, that she’s a friend of her aunt’s; but it eventually is revealed that the strange guest is suffering from amnesia. She christens herself Rita, after seeing Rita Hayworth’s name on a movie poster; the pair find $50,000 and a mysterious blue key in Rita’s pocketbook. This suits the Nancy Drew-like inclinations of the out-of-towner perfectly, and they set out to figure out the secret of Rita’s life.
The director is thoroughly menaced by some dark forces, including a very scary guy in a cowboy hat in a deserted corral at the top of Beachwood Canyon, high above Hollywood.
The cowboy, calm but dangerous, tells the director again to hire Camilla, the ingénue. “If you do what you’re told, you’ll see me one more time,” the cowboy says calmly. “If you don’t do what you’re told, you’ll see me two more times.”
Betty, meanwhile, is preparing for her first audition. She and Rita practice her lines; she’s clumsy and conventional. But at the actual audition she turns into a sensual bombshell — and blows away the producer and everyone watching!
Then a casting agent walks Betty over to the director’s movie set. It seems to be some sort of ’50s period piece. We see a woman sing Connie Stevens’ “16 Reasons.” Then Camilla, the ingénue the bad guys are shoving down Adam’s throat, sings Linda Scott’s “I’ve Told Every Little Star.” “This is the girl,” Adam says.
Betty and Adam’s eyes meet. But she runs home to Rita.
The two women follow clues to the apartment of another young woman, Diane. They speak to Diane’s neighbor, then break into her apartment and find her dead and decayed in her bed!
Shaken, the two return home and dress Rita in a blond wig as a disguise. Betty invites Rita to share her bed that night. Rita makes a pass and the pair find comfort in each other’s arms.
“Have you even done this before?” coos Betty.
“I don’t know,” replies Rita, “– have you?”
Betty says, “I want to, with you. I’m in love with you.”
Rita has a dream about a stage show in a nightclub. She drags them to the club, which is called Silencio. There, musicians and singers pretend to perform, but the music is all canned. Says the emcee: “This is all a tape recording. It is an illusion.”
Up in the balcony, the pair begin crying. Betty shakes and weeps in some hyperemotional response to the music. Without explanation, she finds a glistening blue box in her purse.
They go home. Rita turns to the closet. When she turns around, Betty has disappeared. Rita uses the key to open the box. She’s apparently sucked into it; we zoom into it, presumably from her point of view, and it drops to the floor.
The movie suddenly changes. We’re back at the dead Diane’s apartment. We hear knocks at her door; we even see the mysterious cowboy again! “Hey, pretty girl, time to wake up,” he says.
Her neighbor, whom we met before, finally wakes her up. Diane is a haggard, dirty-blond with a nervous twitch and a beaten-down look. She notices a blue key on her coffee table.
She’s involved with a taunting but cold brunet — the amnesia victim, Rita! The brunet’s real name, we learn, is Camilla — which is the same name as the ingénue the studio bad guys are pushing. But that woman was blond and much shorter — an entirely different woman.
The two women have sex on the couch, but Camilla suddenly goes cold. Camilla says, “We shouldn’t do this any more.”
Diane, horrified, says, “Don’t say that,” and tries to force her way with her.
This Camilla is suddenly the object of the charms of the young film director, now happily separated from his wife. We see him putting the moves on her on his movie set. Camilla makes sure that Diane can watch, which she does, glowering.
Later we see Diane masturbating in an unhappy frenzy.
The phone rings; the phone she picks up is the one that isn’t answered at the beginning of the movie. Diane is taken in a limo to the party — the same limo, it seems, we saw Rita in at the beginning of the film. It’s on the same ominous trip up Mulholland Drive, too.
But she’s not about to be shot. Instead, she’s greeted at a party by Rita, who is now Camilla. The host is the director, and the weird Coco is now the director’s mother! She questions Diane with a look of disapproval on her face. We learn that Diane was a teen jitterbugging champion in Canada who came to Hollywood after her aunt died and left her some money. Diane says she’s acted a bit, and met Camilla at an audition for a big part in a movie called “The Sylvia North Story,” directed by Paul Bruckner. But she lost the part to Camilla.
Diane, humiliatingly, is forced to watch first as the blond Camilla from the first half of the movie comes over and kisses her Camilla, deeply on the lips. And then Camilla and Adam make out in front of her at the table. They seem to be about to announce their engagement.
This scene abruptly cuts to one in which we see a distraught Diane sitting again in the diner, paying the shaggy hit man $50,000 to kill her girlfriend. He’s holding a black book. She’ll find a blue key on her coffee table when the deed is done, he says.
The camera pans out into the back lot of the diner, where we see the monster again. It’s a homeless man, it turns out, his face filthy and his hair matted. He’s turning the mysterious deep blue box over in his hands.
We suddenly are reintroduced to the cheerful elderly couple who accompanied Betty off the plane — incredibly tiny, and crawling out of the mysterious box. Now they are shrieking and horrific. They chase Diane around her apartment in a phalanx of terror. She flees to her bedroom and shoots herself in the head.
The couple laugh maniacally.
We see the ominous L.A. cityscape at night. Spectral washed out images float over it, just like at the beginning of the movie. This time we can see Betty and Camilla’s faces.
Then there’s a shot of an odd, heavily made-up actress from the club the women went to.
“Silencio,” she says.
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This all leaves a number of questions. Let’s take them in order. (Feel free to send us suggestions, quarrels or further thoughts on the film.)
What the fuck is going on in this movie?
Well, it seems that Diane had her girlfriend murdered. Then, in a masturbatory fantasy cum fever dream in the moments before she commits suicide, she reimagines her ruined career and failed relationship with the woman she loves.
The dream begins with Camilla/Rita miraculously escaping the hit Diane had taken out on her. From there, Diane, a product of Hollywood, imagines the story in cinematic fashion: She sees herself as the naive wannabe starlet Betty, who succeeds on sheer talent and solves whatever problems are thrown her way. She even gets the girl!
Thematically, Lynch seems to be working out a number of things: the enticing but empty imagery of the movie screen; the accompanying imagery that is used as stardust to cover up the unpleasantries of the movie-making process; the imagery that the ambitious use to reimagine and remake themselves; and the imagery and imagination actors put to work to create their characters.
Wait, go back to the Diane and Rita stuff. Where does Betty fit in?
Diane and Betty are the same person.
Get out!
Some viewers see that it’s the same person right away; others are flummoxed because they just seem different. If you look closely, you see they’re the same actress. The actress, Naomi Watts, delivers a technically dazzling performance. It’s difficult to believe that chipper Betty and the ground-down Diane are the same woman, but they are.
As a reader points out in a letter to the editor, Lynch even slips in a wry joke. “It’s weird to be calling myself,” Rita says as the pair call Diane. “Hi, it’s me,” Diane says immediately afterward, on her answering machine.
Fine: “So it was all just a dream.” Is that the cliché you’re contending Lynch is giving us?
Well, it’s a little more complex than that. It certainly does explain the exaggerated gestures, heightened emotions and odd plot turns in the first part of the movie. Seen as dream motions, Betty’s hokey “I’m goink to be a stah, darlink” schtick makes more sense.
Diane’s fantasy is a number of things. It’s obviously a dream of a world in which her relationship with Camilla was different — a place where Camilla loves her and is dependent on her. But it’s also a requiem for her lost career, and arguably an elegy to a lost Hollywood as well. But Lynch seems rather ambivalent about the lost Hollywood, which by analogy undermines Diane’s dream vision, too.
Lynch may be telling us that this is the dream we all share when we watch Hollywood movies, and reminding us at the same time that it is a dream — that it is wishful, and says a lot about the dreamer. The movie’s most problematic conceit is Diane’s hallucination of the mad powers behind the scenes in Hollywood. Are those imaginings the incoherent ones of a cockeyed youngster turned sour by failure? Or the unvarnished truth of someone who’d seen it happen, up close and personal?
Indeed, Diane herself is someone who deals with personal rejection by hiring an assassin. Lynch does a great job intertwining the dicier sides of Diane’s character with a wider critique of Hollywood as a business and the complex relationship between Hollywood as dream factory and its audience. It’s possible Lynch sees consumers of popular Hollywood fare as unable to work out their grievances in their real lives, so they resort to fantasies of revenge.
What’s the time period of the movie?
It’s apparently the present, but the dream part of the film is an eras-spanning romanticized netherworld of ivied Hollywood apartment buildings, aging stars and picture-perfect period re-creations on busy sound stages. (In “Blue Velvet,” too, Lynch pulled off the trick of creating a modern setting that seemed somehow to have previous decades still hanging heavily in the air.) The women ride around in cabs a lot, an anachronistic touch. But the thuggish hit men and crack-addled hookers wandering around are up to the minute. Overall it’s typical of the fine line Lynch walks between the fantastic and the real, all set against a malevolently filmed skyline, harsh parking lots and the endless expanse of light that is L.A. from the hills at night.
Speaking of which, despite a few night scenes, this is one of those odd noirs in which terror lives in broad daylight.
OK, so what about the box?
We don’t know about the box.
What about the monster?
The monster, who hides behind the diner where Diane contracted the killing, seems to be the demon Diane metaphorically begins dealing with when she decides to have her girlfriend knocked off. In the end we see he’s just a homeless man, a reminder of the grimy Hollywood Diane came to know after her jitterbug-queen optimism got beaten out of her. And, OK — he’s also the keeper of the box, the symbol of Camilla’s death and perhaps reality contained (sort of like a movie). Once it’s unlocked, Diane has to return to the physical world and accept that she’s done an inhuman thing.
Readers see a lot more in the box: Several found an amusing — and hard to argue with — sexual connotation. (Maybe that’s why the hitman laughs when Diane asks what the key opens.) Others make a case that it’s a television. The multiplicity of meanings fits in well with the film’s texture.
The blue key is supposed to mean Camilla’s dead; but we see her alive after that.
After the fairly straightforward narrative of the film’s first two-thirds, the last part of the movie is a staccato sequence of flashbacks. Diane sees the key, and understands that the deed is done. (She probably understands that she’s going to pay a price for it, too; her neighbor even tells her that “Those detectives were here again.”) She starts reflecting on how she came to be in this position, from Camilla’s coolness to her flirtations with Adam to the unforgivable humiliations at the party. Diane sees that she’s been reduced to an object of pity and contempt by even someone like Coco. That takes her into the downward spiral that produces the hallucinogenic first part of the movie and then her decision to shoot herself.
Let’s talk about the 50 grand. Diane gives it to the hit man; why is Rita carrying it?
This is a good example of Lynch’s dream logic. Diane fetishizes it, and it turns up in an odd place in the dream. Same with the mysterious blue key. The hit man says he’ll leave a normal blue key in her apartment when the deed is done. This transmogrifies in her fantasy into that futuristic one. Both are also necessary to Diane’s dream mélange of film clichés, particularly noir film clichés (and the director’s deconstruction of the genre as well: “A dame appears out of nowhere with 50 grand in her purse and a mysterious key.”)
Watch the movie carefully and you see that many characters and props in the last third of the film are picked up in Diane’s mind and repurposed for the dream: The hit man’s black book; her grouchy neighbor; the waitress at the diner; the director’s mom; the director who didn’t give her the movie part; the woman Camilla kisses at the party; the cowboy; even her aunt.
What mélange of film clichés?
Diane seems to have imbued herself with the worlds of film, TV, even pop-culture camp, in her time in L.A. Much of what she and Rita attempt are procedures right out of a Sam Spade noir handbook by way of Nancy Drew — peeking into windows, talking to neighbors, making anonymous phone calls and so forth. When the two are in their bed together, there’s a double-profile shot that’s an homage to Bergman’s “Persona.” Betty helps Rita turn herself into a blond, a rough doppelganger of Betty, à la “Vertigo.” The sequences in which the director is bullied into using Camilla in his film have a tangential similarity to the conversations leading up to the infamous horse’s head scene in “The Godfather.” Readers note that “The Wizard of Oz” is in there too, as well as a strange pattern of parallels to “Pulp Fiction.”
There are also vague echoes of TV soap operas, pornography and a lot of other things, not to mention the presence of Chad Everett (the guy Diane does the audition with), ’40s hoofer Ann Miller (Coco), Lee Grant (the aunt’s weird neighbor), Billy Ray Cyrus (the pool guy), Robert Forster (a cop), and others.
The references all seem to be what the theorists call “blank,” just memories ricocheting around in poor Diane’s head at a really bad time.
Fine, fine. Isn’t the cowboy just sort of a twist on the menacing Robert Blake character in “Lost Highway,” the reindeer man in “Wild at Heart” etc., etc.?
It certainly seems like it. The goofy Roy Rogers getup is also another echo of a prelapsarian Hollywood when the studio system ruled and studio heads of virtually limitless power really did pull the strings.
The director did what he was told. Why did we see the cowboy twice?
Well, the cowboy appears once to Diane as a transition from her dream back to reality, apparently part of her fantasies before she kills herself. In the “real” last third of the film, we see the cowboy passing out of the party at the director’s house. To us, caught up in the backward dream logic of Diane’s fantasy, this would have been the one last time the director would see him, since he agreed to put Camilla in the movie. But in reality he was just someone she once saw out of the corner of her eye who was then incorporated into the paranoid fantasy of her dream.
What about that hooker the hit man questions and then ushers into his van? And what about those diner waitresses?
They seem to be Lynch’s nods to the milieu he’s filming in and the diverse women Hollywood chews up in various ways. Diane imagines herself as Betty in the dream after seeing a waitress named Betty when she’s talking to the hit man. In the dream, Betty meets a waitress named Diane.
Betty loses a part in “The Sylvia North Story” to Camilla. Who’s Sylvia North?
Beats us. But note that the director of that movie is Paul Bruckner — the milquetoasty guy at her audition.
That weird old couple?
They appear in the opening jitterbug sequence as well. They may be the judges of the contest she won, or her parents. In the end, they seem to be signs of her innocent past come back to terrorize her.
The film’s dedicated to Jennifer Syme. Who’s that?
Syme was an actress who appeared in “Lost Highway.” She died in a car accident. The tragic death was noted in the tabloids because she used to date Keanu Reeves.
What about the Silencio Club?
In the dream logic of Diane’s imaginings, it’s part of the glamour of Hollywood, and the out-of-body existence of many actors, and perhaps the ultimate emptiness of the reality that films purport to give us. The unexpected focus on sound, as opposed to image, which is what the rest of the film seems to be about, is typical for Lynch as well: His soundscapes, here as in his other difficult films, are extraordinary, and he regularly conflates sound and image. Remember that in “Blue Velvet,” which also dealt with the reality beneath the surface image, young Jeffrey, the Kyle MacLachlan character, is introduced to that netherworld via a severed ear.
Lynch’s longtime composer, Angelo Badalamenti, plays the espresso-drinking movie exec at the beginning of the film, incidentally.
Also, speaking of “Blue Velvet,” Dorothy Vallens lived in the Deep River apartments. Betty is from Deep River, Ontario.
What is the point of that scene with Chad Everett, Diane’s audition?
This strikes us as possibly the heart of the movie. It’s the linchpin of Diane’s idealized image of herself. Yet beyond that, the care with which the sequence is set up and the scene’s immense punch seems to suggest that Lynch believes, perhaps passionately, that there is such a thing as acting, even great acting. It may be his tribute specifically to the miracle of character imaginings like Diane’s and, by extension, to the creation of self in our subconscious and the many selves we don’t know. Actors make it up out of nothing more than sheer imagination and persuade the audience to believe it. Lynch has been doing the same thing explicitly over his entire career.
Again, Naomi Watts, the actress, should be given credit for balancing the many levels of control needed to convincingly act the part of a ground-down starlet imagining herself as a chipper and idealistic young thing who then can convincingly deliver a unexpectedly searing audition performance — and then have the levels of the conceptions make emotional sense to viewers at the end of the film. Brava!
The hit man thing is confusing. Who is the long-haired guy he murders? And what about the prostitute he ushers into the van? Is that Diane, too?
The guy he shot so perfunctorily made some remark about a car accident. The implication seems to be that he was in one of the joyriding cars that hit the limo, and that he ended up with some sort of black book that the guys who were about to kill Rita possessed. In the logic of Diane’s dream, the hit man needed that as a lead to where she was. We know that it’s not going to help him find Rita, but he doesn’t know that.
The scene is also another movie nod, this time to the absurdist modern black noir; here it allows Lynch, at his bleakest, to film a senseless carnage that out-Tarantinos Tarantino. It’s also part of the confusing background noise Lynch likes to put into his movies. It is a deeply felt contention of his that not everything makes sense. Less charitably, you can say it’s a loose end from the TV series that never got made.
What TV series?
“Mulholland Drive” was supposed to be the pilot for an ABC TV series that was going to both make ABC the network of the moment and put Lynch back into a “Twin Peaks”-like limelight. Fat chance. The network approved the script, but balked when execs saw the two-hour-plus result. Lynch apparently tried to slice off the last 40 minutes, but the network didn’t like that either. He eventually found a French film company, Studio Canal, to put up some money. He reassembled the cast, filmed some more and created the feature version out now.
So what is Lynch trying to say about Hollywood?
You can’t help noticing that no one comes off very well in this fetid world. In interviews Lynch has been putting the screws to ABC. While he points out that the network had approved the script before he filmed it, it’s hard to believe any sane person would expect broadcast television to air a movie anything remotely like this. And we’re somewhat suspicious when a director like Lynch — who’s been given tens of millions of dollars to make extraordinarily dark, sometimes positively inhuman (“Wild at Heart,” for example) movies for more than 20 years — whines about Hollywood. He’s been nominated for a best director Oscar twice. What does he have to complain about?
All that said, the movie is certainly no polemic. Lynch seems pretty detached from this. The character of Adam the director seems a mocking version of himself. Lynch’s nuances and implicit respect for the magic of the art make the film a complex portrait of the industry.
And the artistic rationale for the extended sequences of lesbian sex would be …
He’s playing explicitly with how Hollywood uses women predominantly as sex objects — except he’s turning the formula on its head, making the women’s world a closed one, at least in Diane’s fantasy of it. But of course, in the end she’s doing the same thing a Hollywood movie normally does to a Camilla — imagining that she’s an empty object that she can possess.
In the end, “Mulholland Drive” is Lynch’s most sympathetic film, particularly to women. Even if Betty’s dream is an extended apologia for a terrible crime, the density of her character, the expansiveness of her dreams and desires, and the catch-all giddiness of her imagination all make her something close the one the thing she always wanted to be: the ultimate movie heroine.
And she’s just part of the film’s dense milieu. The network of aging actresses and incoming starlets ineffably captures the implacable Hollywood mill. Lynch seems to accept the manifold processes by which women come in to self-invent themselves: by sheer talent, the way Betty does; desperately, as Diane does; by hook or by crook, as Rita does, plucking a new identity off a movie poster; or sexually, the way Camilla does. All, he seems at pains to point out, are ultimately in the business of dream fulfillment, which is why we as consumers go to the films as well. Right?
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After the change of pace of 1999′s “relatively” normal “The Straight Story” — a G-rated film released by Disney — director David Lynch is up to his old tricks again with “Mulholland Drive,” a film that is likely to satisfy and provoke his fans, while irritating and provoking those who don’t respond to his particular brand of skewed reality.
When Lynch made his feature debut with “Eraserhead” in 1977, it seemed clear that he wasn’t destined for a Hollywood career. An extraordinarily weird exercise in surrealism, “Eraserhead” demonstrated amazing technical control, a bizarre but undeniable sense of humor and (most of all) a dazzling visual style, all in the service of a horrifying dreamlike narrative that made little traditional sense (unless your notion of tradition is Dali and Buñuel). One would have guessed that Lynch would spend the rest of his life putting his dreams and nightmares up on the screen in little, low-budget, personal films.
But Mel Brooks had the inspiration to hire the director to helm the version of “The Elephant Man” he was producing — leading to a best director Oscar nomination for Lynch and thus Tinseltown credibility. The result has been one of the strangest bodies of work ever to emerge from the American film industry. A big-budget adaptation of Frank Herbert’s sci-fi perennial “Dune” was a catastrophe that almost threw Lynch back into midnight shows at art houses; but the deal he cut with “Dune” producer Dino De Laurentiis allowed him to make the sensational and disturbing “Blue Velvet,” a perfect blend of his distinctive style and concerns with traditional Hollywood genre conventions. “Blue Velvet” — which ended up near the top of any and all polls of the great films of the ’80s — led to “Twin Peaks,” the TV show that (briefly) made Lynch a household word.
The “Twin Peaks” phenomenon was a roller-coaster ride that took the show from national obsession to old news within about eight months. For a brief time, Lynch seemed to be on the cover of every national magazine, and analytical speculations about where the show was going appeared in quarters where analysis had rarely been seen before; but, as soon as the murder mystery at the center of the plot was “solved,” the show tumbled downward in both the ratings and in critical opinion.
Since then, the director has done other TV shows and directed the Cannes palm d’or winner “Wild at Heart,” as well as “Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me” (a sort of prequel to the series) and the radical puzzle movie “Lost Highway.” While his feature projects have been distressingly few, he has kept himself more than busy with his still photography and artwork, his comic strip “The Angriest Dog in the World,” producing record albums, and now with an ambitious Web site, which he hopes will be ready any day now.
“The Straight Story,” his last feature, was surprising only in how “unsurprising” it was: that is, it was by far his most conventional project, the true story of Alvin Straight, an old man who rode a lawn mower a few hundred miles to visit his ill and estranged brother. It had Lynch’s stamp if you looked close enough, but it represented another unexpected career turn.
“Mulholland Drive,” on the other hand, “feels” like Lynch, most particularly like “Twin Peaks,” transported from the spooky woods of Washington state to the spooky world of Hollywood. It’s hard to describe the plot without destroying the film’s pleasures, but suffice it to say that it centers around two women: Betty (Naomi Watts), an apparently naive, starry-eyed blond, who, in the tradition of a million small-town girls before her, has come to Hollywood to be a star, and “Rita” (Laura Elena Harring), a dark-haired beauty, who has lost her memory after a car wreck on Mulholland Drive. As the two of them attempt to reconstruct Rita’s past, their lives intertwine with a bunch of other L.A. players: some inept hit men, a temperamental Hollywood director whose ability to deal with executives is no better than his ability to deal with his marriage, a mystically withdrawn studio boss and a scary guy in a cowboy hat.
“Mulholland Drive” may seem like a reflexive response in the opposite direction after the experience of making “The Straight Story,” but in fact it was in development around the same time as “The Straight Story” and was shot shortly thereafter. Its genesis is unique for a major studio release: The current version is a two-hour, 27-minute retooling of a script originally shot as a 94-minute pilot for a TV series; ABC, which had approved the script, chose not even to air the pilot once it was done, despite Lynch’s efforts to cut the project to their liking.
It was a strange and frustrating decision: It seemed as though they made a deal with Lynch and were then shocked — shocked — when he turned out something weird. What did they expect from a man who has been called (among other things) the Wizard of Weird, the Sultan of Surrealism and the Boy Next Door (from Mars)?
So a feature-length work by one of America’s premier directors was left in a legal limbo: ABC owned it, but didn’t want to show it.
“I was so happy with the cast and all the people involved with that show,” Lynch said when I spoke to him by phone recently. “It was so much fun, I can’t tell you. But they weren’t behind that, not one little bit. It could have had a life, and people might have enjoyed it.”
Of course, what had Lynch himself expected? After “Twin Peaks” crashed and burned, ABC had also ordered up (and then rapidly abandoned) “On the Air,” an intensely strange sitcom.
I ask Lynch why, given these experiences, he would ever want to work in TV again. Hadn’t he learned his lesson? “You do learn from your past, but sometimes it’s like, you’re a dog, and you love chocolate, and you get sick from chocolate, but you’re going down the street, and you smell that chocolate shop, you’re gonna go in there again. And then you don’t think about the painful side of the past. You just get kinda euphoric about going there again.
“I mean, I’m a sucker for a continuing story. That’s one of my problems. And that’s why I wanted to do it as a series. I had no frustrations with it until ABC saw the pilot and hated it and in a sense killed it.”
I tried to get him to snap at ABC, but he wouldn’t take the bait. “Looking back,” he said, “I see that they did me a huge favor. Number one, by allowing it to get going as an open-ended pilot. And number two by killing it. Then we were at a very strange place, because we had this open-ended pilot and a desire to turn it into a feature. But my friend Pierre Edelman of Canal Plus [the French production company] saw the pilot, saw the possibilities, knew of my desire to turn it into a feature and got Canal Plus to work over the next year to get the rights.
The buyout gave Lynch the wherewithal to turn the pilot into a feature, and apparently allowed him to put the original story into one of his “Lost Highway”-like puzzle boxes. “I was very fortunate,” he said. “I sat down one night, and these ideas came into me, showing me how to do it. Up until that point, I didn’t know what I was gonna do. And so the ideas that came in were only possible because it had started open-ended. It’s strange how what went before was so necessary to the final form. And I don’t think it would have been the same at all if it had started out being a feature. So it’s an interesting trick of the mind.”
So in the long run, is he basically happy that the show didn’t get picked up?
“Oh,” he said, in his most endearing Jimmy Stewart stammer. “I’m … I’m … I’m … next door to euphoric!”
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Lynch had engaged in a similar process on “Twin Peaks”: For a European theatrical release, he added extra footage to the American broadcast pilot to “wrap up” the mystery. (Curiously, in America, the European version is available on video. But in Taiwan, you can buy the American version. Go figure.) He eventually recycled some of that material for the series, most notoriously the first of the “Red Room” sequences, with the dancing dwarf and the backward-sounding dialogue.
Lynch said: “One of the greatest experiences of my life was getting the idea for the Red Room and what that led to finally. So you never know where ideas are going to lead.”
I ask him to compare that to the even stranger retrofitting process on “Mulholland Drive”: More than a year after finishing the original pilot, he reassembled the cast and shot an additional 45 minutes or so of footage, designed to change the open-ended pilot into a complete work. I tell him I’ve glanced at a version of the original script that’s floating around the Internet; this gave the impression that the first hour and a half or so of the film is pretty much the pilot, with all the new footage at the end.
“No,” he says. “That’s not right. What is interesting is that the ideas that came in affected the beginning and the middle and the end. What happened was that what had gone before was suddenly seen from a different angle. Many things went out, and a bunch of new things came in, which affected what had gone before, because of the new angle. And then the new footage fit in, at the beginning and the middle and the end. It was like a brand new ballgame, but the ballgame was built on what went before.
“It was great, because, you know, you don’t know for sure if you’re going to catch these ideas, and there was a period that was sort of filled with anxiety before they came in, because here’s this company that’s bought the rights and spent a lot of money, and I didn’t have the ideas yet.”
While he’s loosened up a bit in recent years about discussing his work, Lynch has a reputation for refusing to elaborate on intentions or the creative process beyond the evidence on the screen. (The single most emphatic reaction in our conversation came when I asked about rumors he was doing a commentary track for the upcoming DVD release of the first season of “Twin Peaks”: ““No! I don’t believe in commentaries.”)
Nonetheless, I push for more specifics about the different versions of the project — unsuccessfully. “Let me tell ya, Andy,” he said. “First of all, I only go by, you know, what I feel, and when I go see a film I want to know next door to nothing: I just wanna go in and have a pure experience and have it be my own experience. And it doesn’t really matter how a film gets to be the way it is in its final form. It’s interesting maybe, looking back, or a couple of years down the line. But whatever overlay you put on a film that an audience takes into the theater can putrefy the experience and cause so much trouble.
“The beautiful thing is that in pretty nearly every film, I think, when you’re writing, an idea will come that deals with the ending, maybe even before an idea that deals with the middle. So how the ideas come in doesn’t really matter. It’d be nice if they came in fully formed, but they don’t. But it doesn’t make any difference if they finally form together into a story that you love enough to translate to film.”
In other words: Back off!
In the phone conversation, I gave it one more shot, asking about a few specific scenes that struck me as, well, too daring in their explicitness to have been conceived for television — things that I couldn’t picture ever being allowed on the Disney-owned ABC.
“Well, I don’t know what to say about that, because I don’t want to introduce certain thinking into people’s minds.”
I’m about to give up and move on, when Lynch shows some mercy: “But I would say that there are a lot of different ways to skin a cat. And in television you can imply things; you can do much more than you think. You just have to do it a hair differently. I found out in ‘Twin Peaks’ that a lot of the restrictions in television led to some very interesting things that were even better. You know: Your mind goes to work to solve a certain problem, and, because of this need, sometimes the solution is pretty interesting.
“Sometimes the restrictions are great. And sometimes no restrictions is great. You know, we each draw a line somewhere, and the line is different within each of us. And there are certain lines you don’t cross over.”
While “Mulholland Drive” is in no way a retread, the peculiar blend of deep creepiness and offbeat humor is most reminiscent of the tone in “Twin Peaks.” (If “Twin Peaks” was “The Hardy Boys Go to Hell,” then “Mulholland Drive” is “Nancy Drew in La-La Land.”) And Lynch aficionados will recognize, not merely familiar themes and moods, but even specific scenes that invoke the earlier show, as well as “Eraserhead” and “Fire Walk With Me”. Most of all, there is a major plot element — which it would be churlish to mention — that calls to mind Lynch’s 1997 “Lost Highway,” one of his best and least commercially successful films, and certainly the strangest since his debut with the utterly singular “Eraserhead.”
In “Lost Highway,” the protagonist, jazz musician Fred Madison (Bill Pullman), is in jail for the alleged murder of his wife (Patricia Arquette). He has no memory of killing her and claims he’s innocent; and we — being locked to his point of view — haven’t seen the murder either.
Then one morning the guards arrive to find that Fred isn’t there — or, more exactly, that he’s turned into (or, in some utterly inexplicable way, been replaced by) someone else entirely — a young and callow auto mechanic named Pete Dayton (Balthazar Getty). Of course, the authorities have to let him go. He leaves and gets involved with a mobster with a sexy moll, played by … Patricia Arquette. Then things get weird.
It’s an insane concept, one that doesn’t vaguely map onto the real world and has very few precedents in cinema, yet — even more unbelievably — “Lost Highway” was one of two films that year to use the idea. I ask Lynch if he’d seen Steven Soderbergh’s wacky, low-budget “Schizopolis,” which came out within a few months of “Lost Highway.”
“Yeah! A whole different take on the same thing!” he laughs. I wonder about the coincidence. Was there something in the air … ?
“It’s O.J. Simpson, Andy.”
“What?”
“That’s what did it,” he says. “Think about it: I wasn’t really aware of it at the time, but it must have been inspired by, subconsciously anyway, the O.J. Simpson trial. And how O.J. Simpson’s mind had to be tricked, so that he could go out and play golf, rather than commit suicide for the deed he did.”
I think about asking Lynch if he has a similar key to “Mulholland Drive,” but it’s become clear that, if he does, he’s not revealing it. At least not now.
As the usual string of expensive summer blockbusters unspools, with its unpredictable array of commercial triumphs (“The Mummy Returns”) and disappointments (“Pearl Harbor”), it should be heartening to film fans that a classic sleeper can still find room in a marketplace filled with bloated extravaganzas nurtured by gray-suited greedheads. For a quick spiritual pick-me-up, consider this: On Monday, the per-screen average for writer/director Christopher Nolan’s “Memento” — a challenging art-house noir made for $5 million and released by a novice distributor after no other company would touch it — was but $2 less than the per-screen average of “Pearl Harbor,” a $200 million mediocrity, whose lavish, flag-wrapped premiere probably cost about the same as “Memento’s” entire budget.
“Pearl Harbor” was playing on a lot more screens and making a lot more money, of course, but per-screen average is a good indicator of overall audience enthusiasm for a film. “Pearl Harbor” was also midway through its fifth rapidly declining week in release while “Memento” was still hanging in there for its 15th week. More to the point, one film represents a triumph of writing, directing and performance, while the other is a triumph of money, hype and … and … more money. The slight possibility that, in a few more weeks, “Memento” could be taking in more in absolute dollars (rather than per-screen dollars) than “Pearl Harbor,” despite the full force of the much-vaunted Disney promotional machine, is enough to make one cackle.
Why has “Memento” held on for so long in the most competitive season of the year? For one, the word of mouth has been phenomenal. After three-something months in release, the film even entered the list of top 10 highest-grossing films last month, and it’s been resting comfortably just below the top 10 ever since.
And there’s no question that this is a film that encourages repeat business: That is, its puzzles are so intriguing and so impenetrable at first viewing that filmgoers are almost forced to go back for a second look if they want to figure out just what the hell was going on. “Memento” is like “The Sixth Sense” and “The Usual Suspects” in that nearly every scene takes on a different meaning once you know where the film is going.
Or should that be “where the film has been”? Unlike “The Sixth Sense” and “The Usual Suspects” — indeed, unlike almost every other celebrated “puzzle film” in cinematic history — “Memento’s” puzzle can’t be undone with a simple declarative explanatory sentence. Its riddles are tangled up in a dizzying series of ways: by an elegant but brain-knotting structure; by an exceedingly unreliable narrator through part of the film; by a postmodern self-referentiality that, unlike most empty examples of the form, thoroughly underscores the film’s sobering thematic meditations on memory, knowledge and grief; and by a number of red herrings and misleading clues that seem designed either to distract the audience or to hint at a deeper, second layer of puzzle at work — or that may, on the other the other hand, simply suggest that, in some respects, the director bit off more than he could chew.
All of the notices about the movie have told us that the story is told in reverse order. We hear that Leonard, played by Guy Pearce (“L.A. Confidential”), kills the murderer of his wife in the film’s first scene, and that the film then moves backward from that point, in roughly five-minute increments, to let us see how he tracked the guy down, ending with what is, chronologically, the story’s beginning.
It turns out that this is a substantial oversimplification of the movie’s structure — and that’s just one of the surprises that unfolds once you look at the film closely. Some have found the film daunting, and some critics panned it. They’re entitled to their opinion, but many of the negative reviews make it plain that the critics didn’t quite grasp what Nolan was doing. It’s heartening, however, that most critics at the country’s major papers understood that the film has immense thought behind it, both technically and thematically. Still, given the way the film business works, critics usually have only one chance to see the film and have to dash out a review before deadline, so even many of the positive reviews couldn’t begin to chart the film’s depths.
Yet, in Web communities, critics and film fans have discussed “Memento’s” structure and meaning without letup. I thought I would take the time to get to the bottom of some of its mysteries. I’m going to attempt to peel away a few layers of this prickly artichoke of a movie.
What follows is an explication for those who have seen the film — if you haven’t seen it, beware, because I’m going to discuss the plot and its revelations in detail.
Not everyone may wish to go quite as far as I have — four theatrical viewings, three of them with copious note taking; a fifth viewing on videotape, with lots of whipping back and forth to check for differences in “repeated” shots, and slo-mo attention to quick-cut subliminal moments; reading the published script and comparing it to the film; reading the short story, “Memento Mori,” written by Nolan’s brother Jonathan and credited as the film’s source; and a few trips through www.otnemem.com, the film’s official Web site, also by Jonathan Nolan. More than anything, I’m grateful to everyone who posted ideas about “Memento” in the movie conference of the Well — you know, “America’s pioneering online community, see www.well.com” — a whole gang of enthusiastic, contentious, brilliant, pigheaded and articulate fans, who have more than once opened up for me some movie that I simply did not get.
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As I mentioned above, asserting that “Memento” is a tale told backward is actually superficial — even misleading. Nolan has in fact done something more complicated and way more clever than that. The shocking opening credit sequence, in which Leonard kills a corrupt cop named Teddy (Joe Pantoliano, the ubiquitous master of sleazebag characters, who played Ralphie on “The Sopranos” this year), is the only scene that literally runs backward: In it, we see a Polaroid photo undevelop, a bullet fly back up the barrel of a gun and Teddy come back to life briefly “after” the sound of the shot.
This scene, which is in color, is immediately followed by a black-and-white bit in which we see Leonard, in an anonymous motel room, explaining a little about his circumstances in voice-over. The next extended scene, back to color, finds Leonard meeting Teddy at his motel and then traveling to an abandoned building, whereupon we see Leonard shoot Teddy again. (This time it’s even more disturbing.)
The movie then proceeds, alternating black-and-white and color sequences. The main narrative of the story is the backward, color one. We stumble back in increments, and meet “new” characters — Teddy; a classic noir moll, Natalie; her boyfriend Jimmy; and a drug dealer named Dodd — each scene stepping back to put the previous one a bit better in context and providing a lot of shocks, jokes and horrors along the way. And in between each we see Leonard back in his hotel room, in black and white, talking on the phone and telling an oddly parallel story.
Here’s what we figure out as we go: Leonard Shelby (Pearce) is a former insurance investigator. In his previous life, intruders rape and kill his wife one night. He kills one of them, but the other bonks him on the head and gets away. The injury leaves him suffering from a condition called anterograde amnesia, which means that he can’t create new long-term memories. Leonard can remember everything prior to the accident, since his old long-term memories are still intact; but his current attention span lasts roughly 15 minutes (and even less when he’s stressed or distracted), and in no case can any of these current memories be permanently implanted in his brain.
Since he can’t experience the passage of time, his wife’s death is always fresh to him; and so he is passionately determined to find the remaining intruder and kill him. He reminds himself of what he’s doing through a series of notes, a pocketful of Polaroid snapshots with helpful information written on them and (for really important stuff) tattoos. We see that he’s developed a number of clues to the killer’s identity, each of these burned onto his body. The killer’s name is John or James and his last name begins with a “G.” He’s a drug dealer; Leonard even has the killer’s license-plate number. As the movie lurches backward, we see how and where he gleans each piece of the puzzle.
At the same time, the black-and-white scenes, which run in forward order, find Leonard in his hotel room talking on the phone. In these sequences, Leonard tells that parallel tale, illustrated for us with visual “flashbacks.” As an insurance investigator, Leonard had a curious case: a man, Sammy Jankis, who had an accident and wound up with, yes, anterograde amnesia. Leonard investigates and ruthlessly denies the man’s medical claim on the grounds that it was a mental problem and not a physical one.
But Sammy’s wife can’t deal with the condition: She doesn’t quite understand Leonard’s ruling and think it means Sammy is in a sense faking. She suffers from diabetes, and it’s Sammy’s job to deliver her insulin shots. So taking advantage of Sammy’s memory problem, and knowing that her husband loves her and wouldn’t do anything to hurt her, she asks him to give her three or four insulin shots in quick succession. In doing so, she has the satisfaction, as she sinks into an irreparable coma, of proving to herself that his condition must be real.
But it’s important to remember that this Gothic noir is dribbled out to us, largely in voice-over, in short black-and-white scenes in chronological order that alternate with the much more kinetic and confusing main backward story line, which is told in color.
The first of the film’s cosmic jokes is revealed in the final color scene (which is of course the first scene chronologically of the color story). We see Leonard kill Jimmy, who we know is Natalie’s boyfriend; with this act, Leonard thinks he’s killed the man who killed his wife. But then Teddy appears to articulate something we’re just beginning to understand: Leonard has already tracked down his wife’s killer: He just doesn’t remember it. It’s one of “Memento’s” delicious ironies that the avenging murder we’ve already seen Leonard accomplish is different from the one Teddy’s talking about, but the net effect is the same: to give us a sudden and monstrous realization of Leonard’s sanguinary condition.
Teddy even shows Leonard a Polaroid of Leonard, bloodied but beamingly happy, pointing proudly to an empty, untattooed spot on his breast, where we know he wants to imprint the news that he finally avenged his wife’s death. Teddy says he’d taken the photo right after the deed to give Leonard evidence that he’d achieved his desired revenge.
Teddy explains to Leonard that he has manipulated Leonard to kill Jimmy and possibly several other similarly loathsome bottom feeders before that. He says something to the effect that it was “to give you something to live for”; of course, Teddy also has to admit that his own motivation had a little bit to do with the $200,000 in drug money stashed in the trunk of Jimmy’s Jaguar.
Leonard gets angry, and Teddy, apparently frustrated by his lack of memory, hits him hard with some uncomfortable truths: Leonard’s wife hadn’t even died, Teddy tells Leonard. She actually survived the assault. Leonard himself had killed her, by administering insulin shots. The Sammy Jankis business is a dreamy conflation of a real story with events from Leonard’s own marriage, events so horrifying and guilt-causing that Leonard has had to project them onto someone else — poor, hapless Sammy Jankis.
This astonishing scene at once solves one part of the movie’s puzzle but creates a new one in its place. For the first, we understand that Nolan has upended the conventions of the film noir, in which a flawed hero tries to find some measure of justice in an unjust world. Leonard has suddenly become an Everyman in a potentially infinite purgatory, blindly trying to revenge an act that has already been avenged, and finding himself manipulated, over and over, by people who would use a splendidly configured avenger for their own ends. (It has been hinted along the way that even Teddy’s death may be the handiwork of another manipulator, with a few hints pointing at Natalie as the possible perpetrator.)
Nolan lets us bask in this revelation for all of a minute before unleashing another cosmic joke.
Leonard, having learned this, struggles to deal with it. He knows he won’t be able to remember what Teddy is telling him. So he empties his gun, to fool himself into thinking he hadn’t used it. He burns the bloody and triumphant photo of himself. He pulls out a Polaroid of Teddy and writes on it: “DON’T BELIEVE HIS LIES”; and he copies down Teddy’s license-plate number. He drives off to have the number tattooed on his leg as a clue to help himself track down the killer later. In effect, he turns himself into a time bomb, ready to go off when, at a period sometime in the future that he won’t be able to appreciate fully, he will finally “solve” his wife’s murder again, and wreak vengeance on Teddy.
In the end, “Memento” rights itself, and the wronged will somehow be avenged, in a corrupt way that is the only way to achieve justice in a corrupt world.
Right? Perhaps.
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Once you see “Memento” a couple of times, you figure out the devilish scheme Nolan has constructed. Here’s how I think it works. If we give letters to the backward color scenes and numbers to the monochrome scenes, then what Nolan presents us with is this:
Credits, 1, V, 2, U, 3, T, 4, S, 5, R, 6, Q … all the way to 20, C, 21, B, and, finally, a scene I’m going to call 22/A, for reasons I’ll explain in a minute.
What is beautifully clever here is that black-and-white scene 22, the last sequence in the film, almost imperceptibly slips into color and, in an almost vertiginous intellectual loop, becomes (in real-world order) scene A, the first of the color scenes: This then serves as the link between the forward progression of black-and-white material and the backwardly presented color stuff.
Even neater is that Nolan shoots this in such a way that very few viewers notice the switchover: Leonard enters a dark building; after some crucial action, he takes a Polaroid; as he shakes the photo and the Polaroid’s color image fades in, so does the color of the entire scene.
So, if you want to look at the story as it would actually transpire chronologically, rather than in the disjointed way Nolan presents it — oh, will this ever be fun to do on DVD! — you would watch the black-and-white scenes in the same order (1 to 21), followed by the black-and-white/color transition scene (22/A). You would then have to watch the remaining color scenes in reverse order, from B up to V, finishing with the opening credit sequence, in which we see Teddy meet his maker at Leonard’s hands:
1, 2, 3 ,4 ,5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22/A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, S, T, U, V.
Reading the film this way, here’s what happens in real-world chronology. While things may seem confusing when you first watch the film, Nolan has been very careful to make sure that, when reassembled, everything in the main part of the film — everyone’s behavior and motivations — makes perfect sense.
Leonard has been sitting around room 21 at the Discount Inn, poring over police files, trying to locate his wife’s killer. He’s talking on the phone, explaining his condition to someone on the phone. He relates the story of Sammy Jankis. Then he gets paranoid and hangs up the phone. But the person on the phone is persistent, even slipping notes under his door. The motel clerk finally tells him there’s a guy, a cop, waiting in the lobby for him. Leonard relents and goes out to meet him. It’s Teddy. We now understand that this is all a routine that Teddy has undergone with Leonard many times before.
Teddy’s in the midst of a manipulative plan to have Leonard kill Jimmy Grantz, a local drug dealer. He gives Leonard the address of an abandoned building where Jimmy, who Teddy claims is the murderer Leonard is looking for, is due to arrive. Leonard, wearing blue jeans and driving a pickup, drives off, with Teddy following a few minutes behind.
At the building, Leonard kills Jimmy. He switches into Jimmy’s clothes and takes his car keys. Teddy arrives and throws water on Leonard’s triumph: You’ve already tracked down your wife’s killers, he tells him; you just forgot. There’s no such person as Sammy Jankis. Leonard’s a mental case, Teddy tells him frankly. Teddy wants the $200,000 that he knows is in Jimmy’s trunk.
The pissed-off Leonard decides to manipulate himself, setting up Teddy as his next suspect; he writes himself a note, identifying Teddy’s license-plate number as belonging to his wife’s killer. Leonard drives to the nearest tattoo parlor to get the number tattooed on his thigh. Teddy follows him there and tries to get Jimmy’s car keys from him. (He wants that two hundred grand in the trunk.)
Leonard sneaks away, still wearing Jimmy’s threads; by now he has no idea when or where he got these clothes or this spiffy car. But he finds a note in Jimmy’s pocket and, assuming it’s meant for him, he heads for Ferdy’s bar to meet Jimmy’s girlfriend, Natalie (Carrie-Anne Moss). Natalie sees the car pull up and is surprised that the driver isn’t Jimmy. Leonard enters the bar. Natalie’s heard of a guy with Leonard’s condition hanging around. After testing his disability, in an unappetizing fashion, she’s persuaded that he’s is on the level, and takes him to her house.
After he watches TV and consults his notes for a few hours, Natalie returns. She surreptitiously hides all the pens and pencils in the room and then starts insulting Leonard, provoking him until he punches her. While Leonard desperately searches for some way to write a note to himself about what has just happened, Natalie goes outside, sits in her car and smirks. After a few minutes, she slams the car door, knocking Leonard’s concentration off track, and reenters, crying about how someone named Dodd has beaten her up.
Moved, Leonard agrees to defend her from this supposed batterer. She writes a description of Dodd for him. He gets in the car to go after Dodd, but is immediately distracted: Teddy is waiting for him in the car. Teddy tells him not to trust Natalie and suggests that he stay elsewhere. He recommends the Discount Inn. Leonard has now forgotten about the Dodd business and, more amusingly, has also forgotten that he’s already checked in at the Discount Inn, in room 21. Friendly, greedy desk clerk Burt gladly rents him room 304 as well.
Leonard sets up shop in 304 and calls an escort service for a hooker. He has her try to re-create the scene from the night he and his wife were attacked. He discharges her and drives to a trashy construction site, where he ruminates about his marriage and burns some of his wife’s belongings. He stays there all night. As he leaves the construction site in the morning, Jimmy’s car is spotted by Dodd — a drug dealer who was Jimmy’s boss. Wanting to know what’s become of Jimmy — and the money he was carrying — Dodd gives chase.
Leonard slips away and goes to Dodd’s motel room — Natalie had given him the address — and waits for Dodd to arrive. But he forgets where he is and why, assuming it’s his own motel room. When Dodd shows up, Leonard mistakes him for an intruder and beats him up and tosses him in a closet. Desperate, he calls the only phone number he can find — Teddy’s. Teddy comes over and together they send Dodd packing. Teddy again makes efforts to get access to the keys to Jimmy’s car.
Knowing from his notes that his run-in with Dodd had something to do with Natalie, the agitated Leonard goes back to her place, demanding an explanation. She placates him, agrees to help him identify the owner of the license-plate number on his thigh and takes him to bed. The next morning, they agree to meet for lunch, after Natalie has had a chance to look up the license number. Leonard forgets to take his motel key and leaves, but Teddy is waiting for him. They go have lunch, after which Leonard returns to the Discount Inn. Realizing he doesn’t have a key, he asks Burt to let him in. Burt takes him to room 21 instead of room 304, and Leonard realizes he’s being ripped off. But before Leonard returns to 304, he finds his note about having lunch with Natalie and dashes off to see what info she has for him. After some banter, Natalie gives him the DMV information, fingering Teddy as the killer — just as Leonard had planned.
He goes back to his room and calls Teddy, telling him to come right over. At the front desk he tells Burt to let him know if Teddy shows up, but Teddy gets there while they’re talking. Leonard drives Teddy out to the same location where he killed Jimmy — having gotten the address from Natalie — takes him inside the building and shoots him. It’s the same shooting that we saw in reverse during the opening credits.
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On this level, “Memento” is a persuasive piece of work — a seemingly straightforward murder mystery that ends up turning the genre inside out. But what has seized the attention of its fans is yet another level of meaning that Nolan seems to be working on. Throughout, the film features visual hints — some so brief as to verge on the subliminal — that call everything else in the film into question.
For one, as Leonard narrates the conclusion of the Sammy Jankis story, we see a serene, extended shot of poor Sammy in an insane asylum. A figure walks across the front of the camera — and suddenly, for literally a split second of screen time, we see Leonard himself in Sammy’s chair. Similarly, as Teddy berates Leonard at the abandoned building, we see shots of Leonard himself administering insulin to his wife’s thigh. But a split second later, we see him merely pinching that same thigh — a “memory” that we have seen before.
In the film’s final sequence — the bravura 22/A — as Leonard drives around in a frenzy of mental activity, we see a rushed glimpse of him relaxing in bed with his wife — with the legend “I’VE DONE IT” tattooed on his breast.
These scenes call into question the film’s back story — everything that happens “before” the black-and-white scenes. No matter how jumbled the movie’s chronology is, everything I’ve described in the narrative above is stuff that we in the audience actually see. It may be confusing, and we have good reason to doubt that anyone is ever telling the truth, but we see what we see. We have no reason to doubt the accuracy of what transpires. But the back story is presented to us in flashbacks, flashbacks from the memory of a man with brain damage.
We are told by Leonard — who, remember, is a less-than-reliable, brain-damaged source of neurological information — that, in his form of amnesia, his recall of his previous life is left intact. Even if we accept that, there’s no reason to believe that “intact” is the same thing as “accurate.” This point may be the source of a number of odd, unanswered questions: Leonard has a copy of a police report, but we are given to understand that some pages are missing. Presumably the missing pages would have included the information that Leonard’s wife didn’t die in the original attack. But who took the pages? And why?
It seems that Teddy’s outburst at Leonard in scene 22/A answers all the film’s questions. But if what Teddy says about Leonard is true, and if Leonard can remember fully his life before the attacks, why doesn’t Leonard remember his wife had diabetes? He says flatly that she didn’t. If she didn’t, then Teddy’s not telling the truth.
And what’s the thematic point of the Sammy story in the first place? Is it a hint that Leonard’s condition may not be real? As Leonard tells the tale, the crucial point is whether Sammy had suffered physical brain damage or if his affliction was somehow psychological. In the end, has Nolan taken refuge in a new version of that hoary thriller cliché, “It was all a dream”? Are the confusing final scenes just evidence of Leonard’s brain synapses misfiring as he sits in the asylum?
On the other hand, what’s the point of a good movie about memory if you don’t leave a few things up for grabs? As Leonard himself tells Teddy fairly early on, “Memory’s unreliable … Memory’s not perfect. It’s not even that good. Ask the police; eyewitness testimony is unreliable … Memory can change the shape of a room or the color of a car. It’s an interpretation, not a record. Memories can be changed or distorted, and they’re irrelevant if you have the facts.” This is the very heart of the film. “Memento” is a movie largely about memory — the ways in which it defines identity, how it’s necessary to determine moral behavior and yet how terribly unreliable it is, despite its crucial role in our experience of the world.
In its own weird way, it’s also a tribute to grief. Grief is an emotion largely based on memory, of course. It is one of “Memento’s” brilliant tangential themes that relief from grief is dependent on memory as well — and that is one of the chief hells our unfathomable hero is subjected to. “How am I supposed to heal if I can’t feel time?” Leonard asks.
Still, even after so many viewings, after reading the script and discussing the film for months, I haven’t been able to come up with the “truth” about what transpired prior to the film’s action. Every explanation seems to involve some breach of the apparent “rules” of Leonard’s disability — not merely the rules as he explains them, but the rules as we witness them operating throughout most of the film.
The scene of him and his wife in bed, the triumphant tattoo on his breast, can’t be a flashback. We’ve seen already that he doesn’t have the tattoo, so he can’t have had it in the past. How can he remember lying in bed with his living wife, with the tattoo “John G. raped and killed my wife” visible on his chest? It has to be a fantasy, which would make sense in the context. He thinks he has just avenged her (or has just set in motion a plan to avenge her). He’s visualizing his own sense of satisfaction and peace.
Did Sammy kill his wife with insulin? Or did Leonard? For Leonard to have killed his wife and then have transferred the story onto Sammy (as Teddy claims) would require that Leonard remember an event that happened after his accident. Yes, Leonard has a quick memory flash of injecting his wife, but it’s followed by a repetition of an earlier version of the memory, where he was merely pinching her. So, of course, the injection memory is just the other memory distorted by Teddy’s suggestion.
Except, several hours later in the chronology — which is to say earlier in the film — Leonard, sitting at Natalie’s house, has another momentary memory flash of preparing the injection. (It appears to be the exact same shot as before.) Even if the image was a false one, influenced by what Teddy said, how can Leonard still remember it hours later?
Who ends up in the mental hospital? Well, Leonard tells us that Sammy ends up there. But Teddy tells us that Leonard’s nuts, and then there’s that flash in which we see Leonard himself there. And Jonathan Nolan’s authorized Web site — which apparently counts as part of the official canon — is unambiguous about Leonard being an escapee from an asylum.
Is there an answer? I don’t know. Christopher Nolan claims there is one. In an article in New Times Los Angeles on March 15, Scott Timberg writes: “Nolan, for his part, won’t tell. When asked about the film’s outcome, he goes on about ambiguity and subjectivity, but insists he knows the movie’s Truth — who’s good, who’s bad, who can be trusted and who can’t — and insists that close viewing will reveal all.”
But, at this point, I no longer believe him. The only way to reconcile everything is to assume huge inconsistencies in the nature of Leonard’s disorder. In fact, in real life, such inconsistencies apparently exist, if Oliver Sacks is to be believed. But to build the plot around them without giving us some hints seems like dirty pool.
Still, even if it turns out that Nolan has cheated like a two-bit grifter in fashioning his story, “Memento” remains an extraordinary achievement. Not only has he devised a film that challenges its audience, demanding the sort of attention and thought that Hollywood would never ask of viewers, but he has used his cleverness to stir up questions and feelings about the most basic issues of how we experience reality. In addition to being a puzzle, “Memento” is a philosophical tragedy that considers issues the makers of “Pearl Harbor” could never dream of.
