Jacob Goldberg: "This is Not a Pipe (but it will do)"

(Jacob gives us a response that would make David Lynch smile--a Lynchian critique of a Lynch film!)

“This is not a pipe (but it’ll do)” A Response to Mulholland Dr.



It was Tom Waits, on the album (and in the play) Frank’s Wild Years, who sang “You’re innocent when you dream.”
In a world racked with infinite inquiry, it’s easy to find resolution in the most proper pertinacity, propriety often decreeing scientific fact as master, or at least seat-warmer, of this throne for truth.
I took physics in eleventh grade.
In physics class, I was taught by E.p.a.t.e. Don Juan Sopér that a scientific fact constitutes the concurring observations of competent observers.
In an internet quest for a more veritable definition, I found that “The Free Dictionary, By Fairlex” is in concurrence with my observations: “an observation that has been confirmed repeatedly and is accepted as true (although its truth is never final)”.
I find scientific facts to be of the utmost legitimacy.
In David Lynch’s orgiastic “mindfuck” phantasmagoria Mulholland Drive, the idea of legitimacy is explored to depths that should shrivel the mind of any willingly conscious viewer.
I assure you (reader) that this dissertation will be an absolute regurgitation of what you’ve more than likely already read about “mindfuck” films, and more importantly Mulholland Drive, for what else does one have to legitimatize their explanations with except the aforementioned ideas of our intellectual forefathers?
It has been said that Belgian surrealist René Magritte (yes, Bernard Jaffe’s tree-blanket) was obsessed with the seduction of images.
I’ve seen his “La trahison des images”.
It ravishes me.
It destroys me.
It picks up the pieces and rebuilds with a near infinite supply of Marshall Plan aid money at its disposal.
It smells like butter.
Interestingly, French aesthetic faitour Andre Breton beget the idea of pure psychic automatism; it’s better known as Surrealism, a title lifted from a French criticism of the 1917 play The Parade, which described the set design’s juxtaposition with the acting as producing a “sur realisme” or “super realism”.
Ignatz throws a brick.
It may sound simply silly, for I’m sure you’ve (reader) have seen at least one surrealist presentation, even if bastardized (the use of Dali’s “The Persistence of Memory” in Porky in Wackyland), but Surrealism is said to divine truth beyond the rational constructs of man, within an unconscious realm that exists beyond our perceptive obscurity.
You know, David Lynch, much as he has done the same with 1977’s Eraserhead, and just as Kubrick also did with 1968’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, has said nothing of the meaning[(s)] of Mulholland Drive.
It (Mulholland Drive) is really open to any interpretation.
I think that’s the way Lynch wants it.
I think, personally, that Lynch presents Betty to be just as real as Diane; after all, Maximilian Le Cain says, “For Lynch, the unconscious is a real place, as real as anything in our waking life.”
I often wonder, what is real?
I hope you wonder, too.
I could win the lottery.
I could be a professional celebrity.
I could take Viagra and learn my wife love me, or better yet: I could take Viagra and earn a wife a wife to love me.
I could stop all motion throughout the universe by merely setting the universal thermostat to -273.15oC.
I’m told that’s a monumental feat.
I enjoyed Mulholland Drive.
I enjoyed the colors.
I especially enjoyed the soundss.
I think Diane illustrates one of the more infallible legitimacies mankind has divined: emotional legitimacy.
I think that emotions are uncannily beyond our understanding, unless you think of them as head-hung chemicals stirring about in “good” versions and “bad” versions.
I’ve read that Dwayne Hoover is a testament to this theory.
I’m told reassuringly that we have medication for gents like him, though.
You know, my friend “Billy” Brandt agrees with me.
I’ve heard him say, “I’ve read that Dwayne Hoover is a testament to this theory.”
In our concurrent observations, it must be infallibly correct thus, emotions are mastered by factual, scientific, concrete, real whathaveyous, opposed to this oppressive whathopeyouistic state they’ve resided in for so many years.
I’ve realized, though, that Mulholland Drive doesn’t tangibly note scientific realities.
I don’t know what I’m talking about.
I’m correct in so many ways.
It says everything about emotion, and “nothing. Nothing at all.”
“That’s not it at all. That’s not what I meant at all.”
I’ve thus deduced my scientific critiques as flawed and superfluous.
I enjoyed the superfluity in Mulholland Drive, but I’m not sure if I really saw any.
I think Mulholland Drive acts under a variation of Hemingway’s iceberg theory, which attempts to present things simply, and objectively, so as to allow the reader (you) to provide your own interpretations through your own attributed experiences.
It (Mulholland Drive) acts as a variation of this in its denial of simplistic, economic, minimalist presentations, exuberantly asserting itself in photon fusillades of incomparable celluloid excess; yet, contrariwise and in concurrence with the iceberg theory, this excess is so very ambiguous, that it allows one to abet/attribute/inculcate individual, personal, phenomenological meanings unto the work.
“You can’t believe everything that you breathe.”
I liked the lady with the blue hair; I liked the nook in her hair.
I liked the nook in her hair.
Bettiane’s emotional struggle is at the heart of the film, for it, at least for me, legitimized her illusory lunacy.
All of the characters are presented as superficial shells of individuals, so as to express the hollow dreams that surmise the down-trodden, crest-fallen, quest-deviated Hollywood Starlet archetype every girl dreams to be, a dream inculcated upon them by the Heartless misogyny callusly constructed within American gender roles so as to oppress the women and keep the man folk in his “proper” position, on top.
It (Mulholland Drive) presents a very feministic view through the realistic depiction of Camilla (“Rita” in the second half) via her almost sadistic, homicidal control over Diane (“Betty” in the second half); women, too, can wield the sword; they aren’t mere sheathes.
Sexuality is at the base of Mulholland Drive, and in the reality segment, it is presented as grand an anxiolytic as cinema itself, physically blurring the coarse, caustic emotional conditions Diane must endure.
Mulholland Dr. presents the individual (Betty) as an innocent among the heartless, virile, corporate film entity that rejects her befitting hopes; in the end (the last forty-five minutes) Betty becomes quite deranged, succumbing to the fantastically nightmarish world of Diane Selwyn. In this fantastically schizophrenic state, she can resort solely to suicide as her pain and panic’s only remedy.
A film is like an individual: we press ideas unto it, and thus it conforms. What ideas are right and wrong is for the audience to decide. The Zeitgeist dictates it? Perhaps. But beyond even that, the audience plays God.
Directors play God in the way they create an almost tangible universe of celluloid that people will consume edaciously, unconscious of how much fact or fiction they’re eating. Same goes for the television. I often tell my younger brother that “If it exists in reality, it must also exist in the television. If it doesn’t exist in the television, it’s not real.”
One goes into a film and is transported into a dream, absorbed in the flicker-fused, phenomenally phi illusion of cinema; in the struggles and emotional plights of others; in the moral universes so symbolically crafted; that magic lantern throwing “nerves in patterns on a screen”; the adventure; the torment; the joy; the good; the gall; the glory; the political appeals; the sheer entertainment of it all; that orgasmic blade that chops two hours into twenty seconds. It’s like how eight hours of sleep melt away in four-minutes of dreaming. It’s all about entertainment. It’s all about escape.
You know, on any DVD David Lynch has control of (of his own films), he cuts out all of the chapters; films shouldn’t be interrupted or seen piecemeal.
The cover of the Mulholland Drive DVD has always struck me as the depiction of quite a hollow woman, all make-up.
In believing Betty and Diane to be equally legitimate characters, for the life of the mind is such a powerful thing; and us all being divided and constrained in our own phenomenological bubbles of perception; where axioms are different all across the board, six-billion times over (and even beyond that if you go the Regan route and count all of the animals, and perhaps the vegetables, and even the minerals, too); I’ve contructed a more befitting portmanteaux in discussing them (or her?): Bettiane; Detty just sounds far too impoverished
to me.
Not only does Mr. Lynch utilize a “total cinema” in presenting his picture(s), he has as well created an expressionistic ideal of “perfect perspective” through which everything is filtered; some angles seem to defy this, such as the aerial views of Los Angeles, but the first one-hundred minutes being irrefutably a dream, the varying omniscient angles are justified by Diane’s dreamscape. That’s just how dreams work.
I believe that the Betty sequence is real, and that the Diane sequence is fantasy.

It’s just the most logical way of looking at it.

It’s all so Sisyphean, how she ultimately succumbs to suicide finding no solace in her conscious existence; yet is death really any solace? Richard Linklater’s Waking Life argues, perhaps, that it is not.
“The time is out of joint. O curséd spite// That ever I was born to set things right!” Hamlet cried, and so does Diane from Mulholland Drive. Much like Hamlet, Diane marvels at her own moral dilemma, whether or not to do herself justice by slaying Camilla. Betty/Diane’s ambivalence about Rita/Camilla betwixt the two portions is an infallible testament to this.
“Given! A way a lone a last a loved a long the” – Finnegan’s Wake: “a book which demonstrates that narrative plotlines based on mindfucks are not confined to celluloid” – Johnathan Egg
I adore music.
I’m listening to The Arcade Fire’s version of “Brazil” right now; they say:


“ Tomorrow was another day The morning found me miles away With still a million things to say Now,
As twilight dims the sky above Recalling thrills of our love
There's one thing that I'm certain of Return I will to old Brazil. ”


I often find myself lost in music.
It’s interesting.
Is it really being lost in music, or perhaps being found?
Is stealing wrong?
What exists beyond this life?
Who’s to say?
Who will say?
All must say?
Your
Congressman you say?
Can you count your Congresswomen on two hands?
Is that really necessary?
Is that the man in me talking?
Is this a gender war, or just societal ignorance brewed before any of us were born; and would that justify it, though?
Will the lamb open the seventh seal?
Is dexter dexterous or sinister insidious?
How many times did I repose the same theory?
How about Cookie’s mustache? Henrik Ibsen? Not on your life.
You know, I don’t think I’ve ever found myself lost in silence.
Have you ever been lost in silence?