Director David Lynch, famous for his difficulty and dreamlike setting that stands out for uniqueness, gave the audience a chaotic movie experience with Mulholland Drive. Chaos film is a film genre that dismantles traditional narrative continuity and reflects the chaos and complexity of modern society through nonlinear narratives and sensory excesses. ‘Mulholland Drive’ dismantles atypical narratives and narrative structures, making it difficult for audiences to distinguish between real and fictional. By the movie’s second half, the story faces a sharp turn, and making it for audiences to distinguish whether what they have seen so far is real or a dream. According to Chaviro’s theory, post-cinema immerses audiences in visual and auditory excesses beyond traditional narrative delivery (Shaviro, 2010). Mulholland Drive is an example of maximizing this visual immersion and narrative confusion. The characteristic of ambiguity he used in the movie is ‘Dream’. It is expressed, described, and composed faithfully, reflecting the characteristics of dreams. The main character Diane’s repressed desires and potential obsessions are stored as unconscious feelings, distorted, and mixed with reality. The video structure, in which the seeming ambiguousness is continuous, seeks the expression of the complete dream world in the realm of unconsciousness. 

In addition, David Lynch conveys the element of ‘dream’ to the audience by using a place called ‘Hollywood’. Hollywood is a factory of dreams. It is a place where the boundary between reality and dreams is negated and where reality and fantasy converge into one. That is why the attempt to distinguish between reality and fantasy becomes meaningless.

David Lynch creates tension in the audience by utilizing intense images and sound design. At the beginning of the film, he says he saw a terrible- looking man at the corner of an outside the building in his dream, and he blacked out after seeing the man at the end of the scene in real life. The scene was intentionally intensely directed, and no scene surprises the audience after this, but the audience takes the initial tension until the latter half.

In conclusion, the film conveys room for interpretation and intense film experience to the audience and shows most of the typical characteristics of a chaotic film. Shaviro explains that post-cinema focuses on immersing the audience through ‘visual and audit processes’. (Shaviro, 2010) David Lynch excessively stimulates the audience’s senses with intense colours, dark and dissonant sounds, and surreal scenes. For example, chaotic narratives in the latter half of the film and performance scenes at Club Silencio maximize sensory immersion, making it difficult for the audience to distinguish between reality and fiction. Chaos Films provides an experience that makes the audience lose their way within the film and find meaning in chaos through this sensory immersion. Shaviro’s theory of ‘sensory excess’ plays a vital role in explaining this.

Bibliography

Shaviro, S. (2010) ‘Post-Cinematic Affect: On Grace Jones, Boarding Gate and Southland Tales’, Film-Philosophy, 14(1), pp. 123–143.

Reference

https://youtu.be/UozhOo0Dt4o?si=FqM4124bb3bMH6G2

Jiho Lee 33764256