Occasionally 8 Ball goes to **The Movies **, especially when he gets in free!

This is the first of an even more occasional series of comments on them not reviews - movie reviewers are a bad lot - licensed consumers who fight to the death to keep their annual, all fees paid, trip to Cannes and their right to bore you to death on SBS for a living. They will tell you what ever it takes. The only operator 8 Ball wants in his life is a good brain surgeon.

The movies are about consumption and only consumption – brave new ways of eating the world or good excuses for refusing to eat, if you don’t have the money. The late Bourdieu’s damning ‘discovery’ that so called "art movies" are, overwhelmingly, the cultural form of choice for petit bourgeois wannabes, – arriviste assistant bank managers, denizens of Northbridge, architects, directors of alternative arts spaces and other assorted scum, long ago put Godard, Truffaut and Depardieu in the same bag as Pretty Woman or Men in Black, which is where they always said they were anyway.

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The Luna premier of Mulholland Drive was off to a good start with rustling of wrappers, shifting of seats, posing, nibbling, murmuring, then the Asian girl next to me began, and kept up, an SMS conversation through the movie, her phone had a deep blue screen – very sexy flashing. This was a roomful of people with teeth in their eyes, waiting for D Lynch to throw them bone, or a bun or a hamburger,whatever their little wannabe hearts were after. Since that is what he does best, they would go home satisfied.I was already having my usual Lynch problem.

From the luminous plastic chicken in Eraserhead, Lynch always builds his movies from consumption back to vision- give ‘em what they want, even if they don’t know it yet, was always a good show biz move. So here we are with the titles, a forties lindy hop montage then a car with two men, a beautiful, if nervous, woman with long black hair and a black dress in the back seat, heading up the LA Hills in the dark, red tail lights doing very well, past Sunset Boulevard to Mulholland drive. Car pulls up unexpectedly, man points gun at woman, she is about to get her head blown off when two high speed fun buggies filled with debrained teenagers mpact and the men die in flames. The woman loses her memory and identity escapes by hiding in some middle aged biddy’s apartment just as she leaves for Canada and takes the name Rita from a Rita Hayworth movie poster

In fact, this is the ‘fantasy’ of a murderess, a failed bit part actress, who hired a hit man to kill her one time lesbian lover now a star – he did and she is busy condensing and displacing her LA life into a more redemptive narrative in which she rescues the bitch with the long hair from movie making gangsters and such like, after she turns up from Kansas (shades of Dorothy) after winning a jitterbug contest, to occupy the very same apartment while her aunt is away. That is what we see for most of the movie, segued into odd bits of real time, like a vignette of the same hit man messing up a simple office kill by shooting a grotesquely fat woman, who is selling health products next door, through the wall then having to kill her and the corridor cleaner and shoot up his, (still polishing) polishing machine for no extra money and make the whole thing look like suicide ! – Hitchcock to a tee, but not that funny.

Of course, Lynch never tells you that this is one of his ‘in your brain’ movies. The guy is a rotten cheat, he wants you trapped forever inside the diegesis, if he can manage it. With his record you know that already, so I’ve spoilt nothing.With Lynch remember Magritte – "This is not a Pipe", that’s how he treats film. This is not a Movie, it’s a pattern, a deadly double that resembles some aspects of a movie. More precisely its a machine designed solely for consumption, by over knowledgeable wannabes. Lynch does this by turning the standard consumer form of the movie inside out like a used condom, all the sticky bits on the outside.

Has Lynch never heard of the flashback? The guy is addicted to movies made around the forties, so he must have - Sunset Boulevard is one long flashback from a body in a pool - put the two protagonists in Mulholland drive together and you might just get one Norma Desmond. Then there’s Phillip Marlowe’s bottomless dark pool, smeared across the screen by a cosh, and Laura – a cop remembers falling in love with a murder victim whose face was erased by shot gun. Most important for Mulholland Drive there’s Double Indemnity, told by a wounded/dying murderer to his colleague/pursuer/revelator/captor, an insurance investigator with the incredible name of Keys, in an attempt to comprehend his self destructive actions. You can get these movies at any video store, I’ve no time to work through them. Only a berk would buy the nonsense about Lynch creating a weird nightmare world. His transactions are far more banal He recycles the consumer driven formats of the forties as a cool obsessional collage, a fun fair hall of mirrors, distorting and reshaping desire at every step – (another forties flashback image of course - The Lady from Shanghai). The substantive revelatory nightmare of film happened in the forties the flashback as a barely controlled decay of the image into a smear of consciousness across the screen.

Lynch is a mere retailer but with lots of class. .

Indeed film reached its peak, achieved everything possible, for film as film, artistically and technically, in the forties/early fifties when the audience was both literate, demanding and, above all, huge. Perhaps this is true of popular culture as a whole. It was the iconic time par excellence. Lynch believes it. The major dilemma, the driving force of his movies is how to compete with that once for all heroic revelation. That’s why he can’t use flashback, to bracket his movie with an acknowledged narrative would be to surrender to the inevitable, to admit defeat and remake The Big Sleep – Just think of that title! .

Instead he wants to peel away the consumer clues, to lay bare the fragile fragments of desire and hope smeared over the screen. His use of facial close up is all about this – lipstick worn away like a frayed rug might skid all over the lens if you blinked, you could drown in the make up, details like this all threaten the integrity of the screen as a dream skin. For Lynch such existential pricks are endless.

Mulholland Drive is his best try yet at a functional autopsy of the forties, right where it happened. Its hard to avoid the thought of Lynch as a celluloid Frankenstein using his movie as a dissection table looking for the key to life in a monstrous remake. The apartment itelf is straight out of Nathaniel West -try "The Day of the Locust" (more consumption!.) As Lynch moves the camera around it, to highlight its plenitude of objects and textures, he wastes a whole shot, several shots, on books, more on other signs of loving fulfilled consumption and cultural memory, as in the bathroom scenes where the naked flesh has no priority Lynch is a past master of turning an interior inside out so that it speaks for/instead of the action He does this repeatedly in Mulholland drive, its well worth watching, even the obsessional scenes in the Winkies hamburger joint. – the man who sees evil on a garbage bin out back and the making of the contract to kill Rita "This is what I want most in the whole world."

Its difficult to describe the relationship between memory and consumption. Both are bound up with individual identity and with culture, indeed at a fundamental level they are rivals for the destiny of the subject. The actress becomes/remembers Rita the consumer artefact she can’t remember her name but she clearly remembers how to put on her make up. Forties movies began to stage this relation, - this deathly power struggle – in flashback, (that is to say, as concluded inconsequential, not in the prescient, present moment.) as a conflict between good and evil, in which ,memory/cultural memory acts for the good and the indifferent/amoral consumer is also the killer – remember Chandler’s mean streets. In Minima Moralia, Adorno, looking at LA in the forties chronicles his realisation that consumption and memory are entering into this struggle for the subject. Indeed this might be a useful way of relocating his famous concept, The Culture Industry, so that it remains transparent, open to the complexities and contradictions of use, the modalities of culture versus consumption that Adorno’s, apparently judgemental, position bricks out.

The recent rash of succesful films with amnesia as their main theme suggests that the stability of genre, plot, even character and motive, as the key triggers for consumption in movies, are in serious danger from the collapse of memory as an independent realm.It began with Bladerunner and the beautiful android with a totally artificial childhood- if any childhood will do why not have the best. Amnesia is no longer a tragedy, merely a way clarifying one’s relationship to consumption as a subject, totally dependent on consumption for its identity. Lynch uses Rita’s memory a karaoke club – Silencio, and its motto No Ai Bando – (we have no band), as a site to demonstrate the total corruption of the subject by a literal performative consumption. In Karaoke we do not imitate the original artist, we consume ourselves in a parody of the act of consumption – ‘its all a recording!". .

The experience of the cinema audience was always similarly performative, a la karaoke, one’s whole of life as an ambitious karaoke performance - that’s how the consumption mechanism for the movies was driven. Lynch plays with this relationship by presenting a studio audition as Karaoke-like miming in a fifties costume to a doo-wop tune in a perfect facsimile of an ancient booth recording booth, brightly lit in a darkened film studio, the landscape of productive apparatus.The murderess fantasises a succesful audition with a little help from the Mafia - ‘That is the Girl!’.

Its too easy to label Lynch’s situation as post modern, its time to be much more specific. The absolute victory of consumerism as a way of life has collapsed the transient space, the moral modalities, which forties movies aimed to occupy. His solution, to turn everything inside out, must end in tears. At some point things will fall apart,- in karaoke land no one is responsible for anything, so you need a stop gap, a devil or monster to glower with baleful silent satisfaction at the evil which men do. The logic of Lynch’s dilemma, the condescending failure of his "in your brain movies", must produce an embodied evil.In Mulholland Drive it sits, most appropriately on a garbage can.

This is my Lynch problem. In the end he is a coward bound to the needs of the movie audience wannabes for a doubly crossed resolution –now you see it, now you don’t.- blink and you’re brain dead.