Most Disturbingly Beautiful Movie Scene Ever?


In a recent conversation about favorite movies,  David Lynch's Mulholland Drive came up.  For me, this film embodies all the psychological and imagistic depth of Lynch's best work while continuing to be comprehensible as a narrative (albeit a complex, fragmented narrative that features several suspensions and diversions).  In this scene, our two protagonists--Betty Elms (Naomi Watts) and Rita (Laura Harring)--arrive at a mysterious theater called Club Silencio, where they view a moving performance of "Llorando," the Spanish-language version of Roy Orbison's "Crying," sung a capella in the film by Latina recording artist Rebekah Del Rio.  Just as the performance reaches its apex (honestly, it gives me chills every time I watch it), the singer collapses, and we understand the horrific false-ness of the moment--the singer is a propped up corpse, somehow animated.  So many things about the scene are amazing.  Its position in the narrative of the film is crucial, as the protagonists are beginning to sense that their lives are not what they appear to be. In fact, Betty and Rita are, in my reading of the film, the after-life echoes of Diane Selwyn (Watts) and Camilla Rhodes (Harring), who were tragically star-crossed lovers in their "real" lives, and are now  paired in a post-mortem effort to understand what became of them.  Their sleuthing eventually leads the audience to the realization that Selwyn, after being abandoned by Rhodes, has hired a hitman to kill her former lover and then, once that deed is done, has subsequently killed herself.  As we watch Betty and Rita react to the powerful performance of "Llorando," we sense them realizing that their own condition parallels that of the singer--they are animated but not alive.  The brilliant shooting of the scene really emphasizes this doubling.  The contrast between the incredible vividness of the close-up shots of the vocalist and the dead-looking wide shots of her standing, bloated, corpse-like on stage, really reinforces the dual perspective the film enacts.  From one perspective, Betty and Rita are very much alive.  From another, they're very much dead.  Most of all, though, Del Rio's performance--nested as it is within all these layers of psychological, spiritual, and criminal drama--stands out as an absolute cinematic gem.  As the pinnacle moment of that rarest of things in movies--an artistic film that achieved mainstream critical  recognitions (best director at Cannes and Oscar nomination for best director, plus a number of critical nods for best film of the decade)--this scene echoes through all of my cinematic viewing.  Most filmmakers don't have the imaginative and artistic capability of David Lynch, so maybe it's unfair to hold their films to a standard of beauty and drama that they could never even conceive, but... there it is.  It's my favorite scene ever in a film.

Here's hoping David Lynch has another great film left in him.  Wouldn't it be amazing to see him direct an adaptation of a Murakami novel?  The two are so simpatico in their vision of surrealist narrative--it would be an amazing pairing.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Layli Long Soldier's "38"

I'm reading Whereas, by Layli Long Soldier, and in the poem "38," linked here , I learned some history about the Dakota 38 and the "Sioux Uprising" of 1862, also known as "The Dakota War of 1862" (as an aside, this is the same historical event involved in the controversy at the Walker Art Center over the sculpture, "Scaffold." Long Soldier's poem was published by Graywolf, out of Minneapolis. It wouldn't surprise me if the poem was part of what catalyzed the Walker's awareness of the issue, but... that's just me speculating). I learned many things in the poem: I learned about the 38 men who were executed. I learned about Lincoln's presidency and the historical record of his presidency. I learned about the commemorative horseback ride each winter, preserving the memory of the events and of the 38 who were executed. And I learned of Andrew Myrick, who was killed in that conflict. When asked about the condition of the s...
Read more

Beautiful Doom: Heizer's "City" and Scott's "Blade Runner"

Image
There’s a striking similarity between Douglas Trumbull and Ridley Scott’s pyramidal design for the “Tyrell Corporation” headquarters in Blade Runner (1982) and the photos I’ve seen of Michael Heizer’s monumental plaza, Complex City , which has been under construction in Garden Valley, Nevada since 1972.  I’ve not seen any evidence that Trumbull & Scott would’ve been influenced by Heizer. I think the resemblance is probably nothing more than some shared archaeological interests. Still, I love the fact of the resemblance, because it really opens up a web of thinking about art and architecture’s relationship to the future. Both works explicitly and implicitly imagine futures, and both works have monumental properties:  they commemorate the present for a viewer in distant time. I want to start by outlining the web of connections, here: Both City  and Tyrell Corporation are obviously pyramid st ructures, and the structures really are similar—it’s as if Heizer’...
Read more

10th Anniversary Poets & Artists

Image
Ten years ago, the inimitable publishing force of nature known to the world as Didi Menendez expanded her empire from MiPOesias  and MiPOradio  to include a new magazine known as Oranges & Sardines . That's right. After the Frank O'Hara poem, "Why I Am Not a Painter." You know the one:  ---- for instance, Mike Goldberg  is starting a painting. I drop in. ... "You have SARDINES in it." "Yes, it needed something there." ... But me? One day I am thinking of  a color: orange. I write a line about orange ...  There should be  so much more not of orange, of words, of how terrible orange is, and life. Days go by. ... My poem is finished and I haven't mentioned orange yet. It's twelve poems, I call it ORANGES. ---- Yeah okay it's better if you read the whole thing .  But Didi wanted to put painters and poets together in a magazine and when she wants to do something she does it. I had been w...
Read more