MULHOLLAND DRIVE in the rearview, with Deborah Levy

Enigmatic women, their doubles, and an unmistakable air of strangeness… Award-winning author Deborah Levy (HOT MILK) on the hallmarks of David Lynch’s storytelling, and how the filmmaker has inspired her own work.

LADIES OF LYNCH explores the subversive female characters created by the late David Lynch, and the singular women who helped shape them. Season 9’s guests include celebrated actor and filmmaker Isabella Rossellini; Lynch’s daughter Jennifer Lynch; his producer of more than 30 years, Sabrina Sutherland; TWIN PEAKS co-creator Mark Frost; and the award-winning novelist Deborah Levy.

Written and guest hosted by culture writer Simran Hans, these conversations with actors, writers, producers and craftspeople who worked directly with Lynch reveal insights about the enigmatic and much-missed filmmaker, and the provocative women he put on screen.

MULHOLLAND DRIVE is now streaming on MUBI in the UK, Ireland, Germany, Italy and Turkey. 

HOT MILK is now streaming on MUBI in the UK, Ireland, Canada, Germany, Latin America, India, Italy and Turkey. 

MUBI is a global streaming service, production company and film distributor dedicated to elevating great cinema. MUBI makes, acquires, curates, and champions extraordinary films, connecting them to audiences all over the world. A place to discover ambitious new films and singular voices, from iconic directors to emerging auteurs. Each carefully chosen by MUBI’s curators.

Transcript

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Heads up, this episode touches on some sexual themes and includes a few spoilers, but it doesn't include me. Your regular host, Rico Galliano. This season, I've handed the hosting reins to UK film writer Simran Hans. You should read her work in <i>The Guardian</i>,<i>The New York Times</i>, and many more. She is a great guide to all things Lynchian. Enjoy. A few years ago, the novelist Deborah Levy was living in Paris. It was summertime and she was about to turn 60 when... Something incredible happened. One of Deborah's friends, Emeka Ogboh, was deejaying at a club in the second arrondissement. He thought it would be a good idea if for my birthday, I invited some friends to dance to his music in the nightclub Silencio.

Yes: 0:47

Club Silencio. You might recognize the name from the David Lynch film <i>Mulholland Drive</i>. There's a reason for that. Every room was designed by David Lynch. My daughters couldn't believe their mother was so cool as to be partying at Silencio. This is Deborah reading me a passage she wrote about that night. It's from one of her memoirs called <i>Real Estate</i>. Silencio had the perfect atmosphere for my 60th. Its design was mysterious, glamorous, a dimly lit inward world tucked into this world. And it was part of the history of cinema. There was even a smoking room. And this chamber in which one could fume was designed to resemble a forest of mirrors. There were nooks and crannies to have conversations, and there was the adrenaline of the dance floor itself. Emeka's playlist drew us all in, and then it sent us crazy. Every now and again I would look up at him on the stage, headphones over his ears, his arms in the air, our arms in the air. He gave us energy and conquered the room. I mean, that was such a birthday. I just love that image of you on your 60th birthday in David Lynch's nightclub in Paris. Tell us about why it was significant to celebrate that milestone in literal Lynch-land. Well, it was a fluke, you know. It happened by accident. But it was so important to me because Lynch probably has been the biggest influence on my novel writing, so much more than any other writer. Welcome back to the MUBI Podcast. MUBI is the global film company that champions great cinema, and on this show we tell you the stories behind great cinema. I'm your guest host, Simran Hans and this is season nine. We're calling it 'Ladies of Lynch'. Conversations about the subversive female characters created by David Lynch and the singular women who helped shape them. This is the last episode of the series, and to mark it, I want to discuss Lynch's women with someone who really understands them. My name is Deborah Levy. I'm a writer of novels of plays and performance texts, and also of three memoirs. Deborah's brilliant novels include<i>The Man Who Saw Everything</i>,<i>August Blue</i>, and <i>Hot Milk</i>, for which she was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. She's also a massive David Lynch fan. Deborah didn't work with Lynch directly, but her writing is definitely in the spirit of Lynch. They're both visual thinkers who know a thing or two about strangeness. Deborah has so many insights when it comes to the craft of Lynch's storytelling. Looking at the first episode of <i>Twin Peaks</i>, I'm absolutely amazed at how perfect it is. Everything we need to know is there in the first image. And a few theories about why the women of <i>Mulholland Drive</i> are so magnetic. He does work with stereotypes, but because he makes them very turbulent, he gives them an inner life. So when we spoke, that seemed like a great place to start.<i>The New York Times</i> recently declared <i>Mulholland Drive</i> the second best film of the 21st century, which is kind of underselling it. Released in 2001, it's a dark fairy tale about an aspiring Hollywood actress named Betty, played by Naomi Watts. Betty is dazzled from the moment she lands in LA.<i>Oh, I can't believe it.</i> But the arrival of a mysterious amnesiac brunet who goes by Rita causes things to veer off track.<i>I don't know who I am.</i><i>- What do you mean, you're Rita?- No I'm not.</i><i>I don't know what my name is.</i><i>I don't know who I am.</i> Betty's dream morphs into a nightmare. Here's your spoiler warning if you've not seen the film. In the second half, we discover that Betty is a fantasy, a kind of wishful identity of a down and out actress called Diane. And as for Rita, she's actually a more successful actress who's gone missing, whose real name is Camilla. In <i>Mulholland Drive</i>, once again, Lynch is playing with the trope of the angelic blonde versus the seductive brunette. We've seen this play out in <i>Blue Velvet</i> and Twin Peaks and even in Lost Highway.- I asked Debra what she made of it all.- The brunet Rita and Naomi Watts blonde, blue eyed, naive, eager young actress wanting to make it. Why does he do that? That's a stereotype. And he does work with stereotypes. But because he makes them both very turbulent, he gives them an inner life. They always suffering is men that make them suffer.<i>Mulholland Drive</i> I guess this is his satire. Or should I say critique? Maybe that's a better a word, a satirical critique of Hollywood. So he's looking at Rita Hayworth and how she was constructed. And Camilla is constructed to very much resemble her. A satire and a critique of the Hollywood dream machine of the constant, exhausting performance required to become a star. And the shameless lies that must be swallowed in order to keep the dream alive. I wonder what you think of that amazing scene in <i>Mulholland Drive</i> when Naomi Watts is going for her audition, and she's doing a line run with Rita. The scene that they rehearsing, I think it's the male predator, there's a conversation with him.<i>If I tell what happened, they'll arrest you and put you in jail.</i><i>So get out of here before...</i><i>- Before what?- Before I kill you.</i><i>Then they'd put you in jail.</i> And the two women are very playful with each other, and they are laughing at the lines, and they don't take them that seriously.<i>Then I cry, cry, cry.</i><i>And then I say with big emotion,"I hate you! I hate us both!"</i><i>Such a lame scene.</i> And then she does the actual audition. And this really creepy act-- Male actor with orange makeup. Very like Trump does his whole patter with her, and she really puts a flame under the lines.<i>If you're trying to blackmail me... it's not gonna work.</i><i>You know what I want. It's not that difficult.</i><i>Get out.</i><i>Get out before I call my dad. He trusts you.</i><i>You're his best friend.</i> And you kind of see how straight female sexuality in that scene is a performance for men, it's very knowing.<i>I hate you.</i><i>I hate us both.</i> He's sort of taking the piss, I think as well. David Lynch in that scene. It really shows you how many different things Naomi Watts is doing in that film, because when we meet her as Betty, we're sort of not sure whether she's going to be a good actress or not. But we're introduced to her and she's so kind of lovable and optimistic. Then when she's rehearsing the lines, you know, we think, "Can she do it?" And then you put her in this scenario and she blows everybody away with her talent, which of course, by the end of the film, we know doesn't necessarily mean success, doesn't mean happiness doesn't mean deliverance in any way. Yeah. Naomi Watts is extraordinary. I think she is just an incredible actress. To be given such a lot to do by Lynch in the directing and in the script is really very unusual. Naomi Watts thought it was unusual too. Here she is with Lynch in 2015, speaking in an interview with Criterion.<i>I'd spent ten years of auditioning in Los Angeles, where you lucky if you get</i><i>to meet the director and if you do, it's a quick five minute meeting.</i> But when she met David Lynch, it was a totally different story.<i>David looked at me right away, eyes and connection,</i><i>and he just was beaming with light,</i><i>and somehow I just suddenly felt like his energy relaxed me</i><i>and I was able to show myself,</i><i>because I think from so many years of rejection, I'd built up veneer</i><i>after veneer and thought, "Okay, who do they want me to be?</i><i>"Am I supposed to be funny, sexy, smart, shy, quiet?"</i><i>And I didn't know who I was anymore.</i> Watts says she walked out of the audition in floods of tears. Finally, a director who saw her vulnerability and didn't look away. And he'd create opportunities for Watts to express that vulnerability in the film. Like in a love scene between Betty and Rita. I found that a very moving scene, actually, when Betty says,"Oh, don't sleep on the sofa. You can get into bed with me."

And then they kiss and she says: 11:43

<i>I'm in love with you.</i> And she's so startled at that thought. That's how she delivers it, Naomi Watts, in a sort of bewildered way. In a new way. Because how are you ever going to say that in life and on screen?"I think I'm in love with you in a new way." Well, this is her genius. And I think it's Lynch's genius too. Lynch's view of female sexuality, I think is really interesting because he seems in awe of it. He seems very sort of reverent towards it, but also sometimes he seems even a little bit scared of it as well. What do you think that kind of says about him and his worldview? Well, I think he's quite right to be scared of it. Women are very powerful. Simone de Beauvoir said it best the sort of need to oppress and suppress women is very mysterious. Maybe he's giving his own desires a bit of an airing. He's certainly respectful and compassionate and funny, although I think, is there much humor and wit in his female characters, maybe more in his male characters, but the female characters are so powerful they fill up the screen. And he's exploring their turbulence in a really interesting way because he makes them very, they're very constructed, they're glamorous, which I love personally. They're very made up. Their hair's perfect and their makeup is perfect, and their costumes a kind of shield for the turbulence. I think it's kind of a celebration of beauty in a way. And it's about constructing a surface so that you can get inside. What Deborah is getting at here is that in a David Lynch film, the surface conceals hidden depths. Things are never as they seem. This is maybe why, as we've learned in previous episodes, Lynch didn't trust words. So it's ironic that his work had such an impact on someone from the literary world like Deborah. What lessons can writers learn from Lynch's films? That's after the break. All right, everybody, your regular host, Rico Gagliano, here to tell you about MUBI. It is the global film company that champions great cinema, bringing it to you wherever you are in as many ways as we possibly can. We stream movies, we produce them, we release them in theaters. Movies from any country, from legendary auteurs or brilliant first timers, we have always got something new for you to discover. And after hearing this episode, here's something you might want to discover the screen adaptation of our guest Deborah Levys novel <i>Hot Milk</i>. It is the story of a young woman on the sun drenched coast of Spain who discovers the folks in her life, including her mother and her lover, may not be who they seem. Which leads her on a quest to solve mysteries and open doors that might be better left closed. Can you detect the Lynch influence in that synopsis at all? Among the movie stars is Irish acting legend Fiona Shaw, who we actually interviewed last season. Back in our episode about Ireland's filmmaking scene. She is in top form along with Vicky Krieps, costar of Paul Thomas Anderson's<i>Phantom Thread</i>, and you can see <i>Hot Milk</i> on MUBI right now in the UK, Ireland, Latin America and many other countries. Head to mubi.com to subscribe and dive in. As usual, we've got all the info and links you need in the show notes of this episode. Speaking of which, let's get back to Simran as she closes out this episode and this season with Deborah Levy. One of Lynch's gifts as a director is his ability to create atmosphere. In all of his films, there's an overwhelming sense that something is off. You might even call this feeling Lynchian. I asked Deborah what people really mean when they use that term. Maybe it's something like an interest in the irrational an interest in the unconscious, in strange thoughts that you don't quite understand, but that might obsess you. The uncanny, something vaguely surreal. He had a logic, and sometimes a kind of logic that he's interested in is, as we know, the logic of dreams. I think it's somewhere there. Lateral storytelling. What was the first David Lynch film you remember seeing? I think it must have been <i>Blue Velvet</i>. And, I mean, it just blew me away. He has a very glossy surface to quite a few of his films, particularly <i>Blue Velvet</i>. That opening scene with the hyper real roses, the very green grass, the white picket fence. And he has to do that because under the grass, Jeffrey, the young student, is going to find a human severed ear. So he's very good at setting up a reality and then subverting it. I always feel I'm in safe hands with the Lynch film, even if there are parts that are just totally mysterious. All the better as far as I'm concerned. I know that he has a complete conviction of ideas. I want to talk a little bit about Lynch's female characters, because this show is meant to be a kind of celebration of his more subversive female characters, and also a kind of an attempt to try and understand them a little bit better as well. How would you describe the particular version of femininity that Lynch puts on screen? Do you believe his female characters? Well, I kind of do. I was talking about them with my daughter. Why do you think they always suffering from male abuse? Can they suffer from something else? And she's 25. And she said to me, "I just feel in my gut that he's onside with me.! I don't feel in any way undermined by his excellent characters, really. They have such a lot to do. In <i>Blue Velvet</i> you have the very reconstructed Dorothy Vallens. Isabella Rossellini. And she's dark and mysterious.<i>Bluer than velvet was the night</i> And when we see her singing in the nightclub, watched by Sandy and Jeffrey. I just fell completely in love with her, as she sang <i>Blue Velvet</i>. And Lynch knows what he's doing. So it's erotically charged, she kind of disappears into this mysterious blue light as she sings.<i>Bluer than velvet were her eyes</i> She's yet another one of his abused women. She's also kind of steely. There's a lot going on inside her. I mean, if you were going to really force me to find something that could be improved in <i>Blue Velvet</i> I do think the part of Sandy is underwritten.<i>- Sneak into her apartment.- Yeah.</i><i>Are you crazy?</i><i>Jeffrey, she's possibly involved in murder.</i><i>This is giving me the creeps.</i><i>Alright, just settle down.</i> So she's kind of the blonde, apple pie, homecoming queen that he's going to explore later in <i>Twin Peaks</i>. Visually, Laura Dern, she's in these little pink tops and dresses. We never really know what she thinks and feels about Dorothy Vallens. Apart from some kind of sexual jealousy because her boyfriend's screwing this woman, you know? Okay, understandable, I get it. But maybe she could think about that a little bit more.<i>You can tell me any plan you want,</i><i>but it's not going any further than this diner.</i> But really, <i>Blue Velvet</i> is perfect. Laura Dern's-- She doesn't have the opportunity to do all the things that we know that she can do. Although it's actually quite, like, a complex performance in the film, I rewatched it recently, and I was really kind of struck by how nuanced it is and how intelligent that performance is. But Lynch worked with Laura Dern several times over the years. They had a long collaboration, and each role offered her more, each role offered, you know, more opportunities for complexity. Definitely. And what a collaboration, really. You've spoken before about how you've been inspired in your writing by Lynch's approach to structure. What's unique about the way his films are structured and laid out? What's unique about Lynch's films is the pace. Looking at the first episode of <i>Twin Peaks</i> I'm absolutely amazed at how perfect it is. Scene one, episode one. Everything we need to know is almost there in the first image. Do you know that little robin in the tree? Our introduction to the logging town. Quite ominous. Epic music full of angst and longing. So he spends a lot of time on the setup. And so do I in my novels. Takes me longer to write the first 12 pages of any novel than the rest of it. Because everything the reader or the viewer needs to know is kind of embedded there in the beginning. And then if you go for something really wild like <i>Mulholland Drive</i> in terms of structure, where if you're me going,"Wait, what what what's going on? What's happened there?" I really always believe that I'm not kind of being tricked, that there is a sense to his structure that is psychologically true. And then maybe uncannily true.<i>When you least expect it.</i> Like in <i>Twin Peaks</i>, the bad boys are in jail for a night. It's Bobby and somebody else, and they start to howl like wild animals in their cell. It's just like the savage wildness under suburban America. What other rules do you think he disregards when it comes to telling a story? He's going to leave things open. He's not going to answer every single inquiry that we might have of his story. He's just not going to do that. He's not interested. He's not going to answer it directly, at least. But he's very good, I think, at tension and suspense. When I was writing <i>The Man Who Saw Everything</i>, I wasn't really thinking about Lynch, but we share an imaginative response to things. Debra's novel <i>The Man Who Saw Everything</i> definitely feels Lynchian. It's about a man named Saul Adler, who's hit by a car in London in 1988 and again in 2016. The second time it happens, we start to question what kind of reality we're dealing with. By which I mean Saul Adler in my novel is crossing the Abbey Road in London, this famous pedestrian crossing in the Beatles cover for <i>Abbey Road</i>. And so I knew the novel was going to start there. And I think, hey, what if Saul Adler crosses the road and falls through the road and ends up in communist East Germany? He just falls through the tarmac. I was so excited by that idea. Oh my goodness. But when I came to write it, I thought, well, then I've got nowhere to go because I've set up this Alice in Wonderland-ish reality and anything can happen. And that's quite boring. Nothing has consequences. So I'm going to have to go right back to the reality of that crossing, to how it's painted, where the cars are parked, which way the traffic is. So in a sense, that's like the set up of a film the kind of very concrete realities that Lynch sets up before he churns them over in all his films. I think you can really see that in something like <i>Mulholland Drive</i> where we can kind of interpret the red curtains at Silencio as a kind of portal, but it's not a literal portal.- You know?- Yes, exactly.- Lynch was fascinated by doubles.- Yes. And in <i>August Blue</i>, your novel, you also play with doubles. Why are they so appealing for both you and Lynch? Wow. I mean, the double or the doppelganger? That's an old subject, isn't it? Our first doppelganger is our shadow. When we're kids, you know, the way we chased our shadow. And especially in Gothic literature, the double is literally a split person. At its most basic Jekyll and Hyde sort of thing. It's the bad self and the good self. But we know there's no such thing really, as something as binary as that. And so the double is a really good way of exploring the complexity of the split person. I do that in <i>August Blue</i> and Lynch is obviously fascinated by it in <i>Mulholland Drive</i>, how the desires or things that we can't quite handle or that shame us, we can sort of project it onto an Other. Lynch famously didn't like analysis. He didn't like his work being analyzed. He was very suspicious of words and of people trying to describe and interpret his films, because he felt that kind of killed the meaning somehow.- What do you make of that?- Yeah, I mean, I think he's right. It's Silencio all the way. He wants to keep it open. Why would he want to not give us the pleasure of having very different responses? You and I, for example, to any one of his films. That's what art is. Art isn't there to kind of nail down interpretations, anxieties and to make things certain. We lost David Lynch this year. He passed away in January, and I wondered what effect his passing has had on you and how you'll remember him. I grew up as a young artist with David Lynch as an older, more sophisticated artist. But I grew up with his evolving strategies for making films. I was very much in a sort of conversation with those films in my head when I was writing my books. So I was as upset at the news of the death of David Lynch as I was with David Bowie. Ziggy Stardust had walked into my imagination age 13 and basically never left the room. And I think that's the same with Lynch. Deborah is right. Art isn't there to make things certain, and Lynch's films were not designed to be taken as objective, definitive critiques of the things that obsessed him. More than anything they express a feeling. He was fascinated and troubled by seemingly perfect appearances, suburban neighborhoods, Hollywood glamor, and conventional family life. He knew facades often concealed a much darker and more complex reality. And the same was true for women and their inner lives. Lynch didn't shy away from depicting violence towards them, maybe because he was attuned to it. But he was also attuned to their fantasies, fears, ambitions and flaws. He respected female sexuality, wisdom and power. And maybe that's why he surrounded himself with such intelligent, creative women. Speaking to them, it's clear he left his mark on them. And in almost every detail, you can see the mark they left on his films. And that's a wrap on this season of The MUBI Podcast. Follow us for more deep dives into great filmmaking. Next time your regular host, Rico Gagliano, returns for a live conversation with director Joe Wright. In his Oscar winning movie <i>Darkest Hour</i> he painted a portrait of Winston Churchill. But his latest project takes on a darker World War II character. I was really shocked when making this in Italy, talking to people, lots of people talking about how, you know, "He was okay"Mussolini, he fell in with this guy Hitler."He was a bad apple. But Mussolini himself was okay." Joe Wright on his TV series<i>Mussolini Son of the Century</i>. Follow us so you don't miss it. I've loved making this series, and if you loved it too, please leave a five star review wherever you listen. And if you've got questions, comments, or you're Laura Dern and you fancy recording a bonus episode, our email is podcast@mubi.com And now, let's roll credits. This show is written and hosted by me, Simran Hans. Ciara McEniff is our producer with help from assistant producer Kat Kowalczyk. Christian Koons is our editor. Our booking producer is Ollie Charles, Martin Austwick composed our original music. Special thanks to this season's amazing guests Isabella Rossellini, Mark Frost, Jennifer Lynch, Sabrina Sutherland, Heidi Bivens, Debbie Zoller and Deborah Levy. Thanks also to Fitzrovia Post, to Paul Smith, to Margaret Publicity and to the MUBI team for all their hard work in making this season happen. This show is executive produced by Efe Çakarel, Rico Gagliano, Michael Tacca and Daniel Kasman. And finally, to watch the best in cinema, subscribe to mubi.com Thanks for listening. And in case you were wondering,<i>no hay banda</i>. There's no band. It is an illusion.