preview

Analysis Of David Lynch 's ' Mulholland Drive '

Good Essays

Regarded as one of the most important directors of our century, David Lynch, was born in 1946 in Missoula, Missouri. Lynch is also a screenwriter and producer and is one of the first to make surrealism popular. Through his critically acclaimed films like Elephant Man, Eraser Head and Blue Velvet, he earned his title as the first to make surrealism popular. Like any surrealist worth his salt, Lynch creates his own version of reality, with its own set of often unfathomable and inexplicably, but emotionally and psychologically resonant qualities. In his 2001 film, Mulholland Drive, a mystery film that tells the story of an aspiring actress named Betty, newly arrived in Los Angeles, who meets and becomes friends with an amnesiac woman, who …show more content…

This in fact builds the atmosphere as vaguely disorienting, since the audience has no auditory cues to cling to before they are taken visually by the progression of events on the screen, and all other sounds and speech sound louder and starker against the silence. When a soundtrack is layered in, however, the music is often incongruous with the transpiring actions—for example, the orchestral music played as Betty exits LAX with the elderly couple strikes the listener as a very strange and eerie “aroma” with the strings’ long and mournful notes, and the jaunt and upbeat jazzy music that fills the air as Adam confronts and is thrown out of his house by his cheating wife seems inappropriate for the situation. Lynch’s auditory cues are proposed to further confuse the audience and to mislead them through the plot of Mulholland Drive, but his deceptiveness further allows deeper reflection. This is why Mulholland Drive is such a great example of a film to analyze because of David Lynch’s ability to really portray certain concepts and intentional film elements that are left up to individual interpretations.

Much of Lynch’s directorial skills projected the film as a very highly regarded film. The arrangement of everything that appears in the framing – actors, lighting, décor, props, costume – is called mise-en-scène, a French term that means “placing on stage.” The frame and camera work are also

Get Access