It’s not an erotic movie, but there was something about the lesbian love scene in David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (and I do mean love!) that made me sit up straight, pay attention, leap to my feet, salute repeatedly, and scream “Wakka-wakka” into a throw pillow.
Not only is Mulholland Drive a masterpiece, the scene is earned. I’m old enough to remember when my brothers and I would sneak into the living room at night and watch scrambled soft-porn on Skinemax (the other HBO). Even then it was clear we were watching something cheesy and poorly considered. Bad erotica is just bad filmmaking, but good erotica is goooooood filmmaking.
Mulholland Drive is a dark movie, first of all. It’s about the existential pitfalls of Hollywood, fame, and ambition. Not to *spoiler alert* with a vengeance, but Naomi Watts plays a character who is GOOD, at least in her dream sequence about her love affair with Laura Harring (Harring was in, like, Willard, Little Nicky, and Silent Night, Deadly Night III).
Naomi is a heroine resisting (or immune to) the degrading spiritual corrosion many an ambitious starlet in Hollywood is subjected to, and Laura Harring (the embodiment of Hollywood decadence and betrayal) is a movie star with amnesia. The two go off on a quest to find out who she is.
And because this movie is heavy on the menace, you come to see these two women as naives pitted against the corrupting evil that is Hollywood, and the would-be celebrities and starlets who sacrifice their souls for a shot at stardom but, having failed (or even having succeeded) go on to be ignoble and obscure.
These two women are together against the world!
So when these two are laying bed, half naked, you feel the sexual tension in a way I’ve never seen in another film. When they start to make love, it’s as real as anything I’ve ever seen on camera. Not only is it hotter than cayenne pepper, it’s emotionally true, and we see their lovemaking as the ultimate protective bond (sweet love!) in a world out to erode their very souls.