Blog Post #6 (Rewrite)

Mulholland Drive is a film by David Lynch that follows the real and dream worlds of a woman named Diane Selwyn. It is easy to get confused with the plotline of the story because the plot shifts between a dream world that Diane is imagining, and the real world that Diane actually resides in. This film is a terrific example of postmodernism artwork. In order to prove this it is important that we know what the term “postmodernism” means. Postmodernism is exactly what it sounds like. It refers to pieces of art (movies, paintings, television, music, poems, etc.) that were released after and disagree with modernist ideals. Modernist support things like industrialism, progress, and capitalism. So in opposition to this, postmodernism focuses on disputing these ideals and looking for deeper meaning rather than taking them for face value.  Mulholland Drive reflects these postmodernism characteristics because the movie as a whole is a giant illusion that tricks the audience. Throughout the movie, the audience never really knows what the real “truth” is. A scene that exemplifies this is the Club Silencio scene.

As we discover by the end of the movie, most of the movie was just a dream. Things are similar in the Club Silencio scene. At the beginning of the performance, we are told by a man that none of the music that will be played is live, rather everything is pre-recorded. This is first shown by a man who plays the trumpet but it is later shown that the trumpet is pre-recorded. As Diane and Rita watch from the audience a woman comes out to sing. As she begins to sing we notice that her voice is beautiful. So beautiful in fact that Diane and Rita begin to cry. But the woman then collapses as her song continues on. This connects to the movie as a whole. What we thought was a beautiful song was actually pre-recorded. And what we thought was a reality (Diane being a popular movie star) was actually a dream. Lynch is trying to tell us that we can never trust what we think is the truth. It is up to us to create our own personal truth. This is just one example of the multiple postmodernism aspects found in Mulholland Drive.