Playback / Mulholland Drive
Mulholland Drive · 2001
Silencio
A theatre announces that everything you are hearing is a recording, then breaks the audience with it anyway.
Watch for
- The compere's insistence that there is no band — the scene narrating its own sound design.
- The moment the singer collapses and the voice continues, proving the point.
- How sound is deliberately unmoored from its apparent source throughout.
A worked reading · COCA
CContention
Lynch makes the artifice of film sound the subject of the scene, then shows that knowing it is constructed does not stop it working.
OObservation
At Club Silencio a compere repeatedly announces that everything is a recording; a singer then performs, collapses mid-song, and her voice carries on without her while the audience weeps.
CConnotation
Separating the voice from the body demonstrates that recorded sound was never tied to its source, and that emotional effect survives the exposure of the trick.
AAudience
We are told exactly how we are being manipulated and are moved regardless, which is the film's argument about cinema itself.
Your turn
- What is the difference between diegetic and non-diegetic sound, and which is this?
- Why tell the audience it is a recording before showing them?
- Does knowing something is constructed stop it working on you?
For teachers
The single best scene for teaching that film sound is built rather than captured. Seven and a half minutes and strange — senior classes, and worth setting up before playing.
