http://www.thenational.ae/opinion/comment/how-a-movie-with-many-meanings-stakes-its-claim-among-the-greats

David Lynch’s 2001 American surrealist masterpiece, Mulholland Drive, was recently named best film of the 21st century in a BBC survey of 177 film critics from 36 countries. But despite its increasing acclaim, Mulholland Drive remains widely misunderstood.

It is still often regarded as muddled, even by many who acknowledge the painterly composition of each frame, technical mastery and deft use of sound. Far from being an incoherent “mood piece” reliant on atmospherics, it is in fact structured with clockwork-like precision.

Mulholland Drive’s narrative can be confusing not because its deliberately disjointed storylines resist reassembly into a clear plot. Instead — like a toy which can turn into a robot, a car, or an aircraft — Mulholland Drive’s component parts can be successfully reassembled as telling a number of different stories depending on how they are linked together and which aspects are privileged.

The film is a mystery/thriller that toys with our need for meaning. It invites, or rather forces, viewers to become detectives, uncovering these meanings in a maze of clues, and thereby interrogates the essence of cinematic desire.

At its core an aspiring actress apparently hires a hitman to murder her estranged girlfriend after she has been humiliated at a party at which this ex announces that she will marry a famous director. Like its main influences, the Wizard of Oz and Vertigo, Mulholland Drive is told through two storylines that refract and inform each other with actors playing various characters that may or may not be the same.

The first narrative is often misunderstood as a “dream,” but probably better understood as utopian (at least for the character “Betty” played by Naomi Watts), while the second arc (ironically more non-linear), is usually misconstrued as “reality” but probably better conceptualized as dystopian.

However, from the perspective of the film director character, played by Justin Theroux, this utopian-dystopian dichotomy is precisely reversed. For him the first storyline is a nightmare and the second a wish-fulfillment fantasy. He is uniquely the same character in both storylines, providing a crucial reference point for interpretation.

Lynch further confuses viewers with a particularly tricky red herring. In the two main storylines, Watts and Laura Harring both play characters who, although very different in personality, look similar. Viewers are invited to assume these characters are therefore essentially the same people.

However Watts’ character Diane is probably better compared to Harring’s mysterious and beautiful brunette Rita. The temptation to see Betty and Diane as essentially versions of the same personality because both are played by Watts is another ruse.

Here’s an example of how the two parts of Mulholland Drive can inform each other.

In the first storyline, two mafiosi order the director to cast a lead actress of their choice, introducing the film’s haunting catchphrase, “this is the girl.” One gangster then disgustedly spits out coffee, while the other screams “help me!”

This initially appears inexplicable. But the second storyline offers an unexpected context and interpretation. Diane experiences the engagement party as theatrically staged to maximize her humiliation. As her heartbreak, rage and existential nausea reach a fever pitch, she looks down at some coffee she is trying to choke back.

The mug’s design features a circle flanked by two squiggles, spelling out “SOS” (the universal cry for help at sea). As her tears flow, Diane looks up, only to see the actor who played the gangster who spat out coffee.

The mobsters’ extraordinary behavior – including their extreme aggression against Diane’s hated rival, Adam — can thus be read backwards as a codified enactment of her psychological affect at the moment she decided to murder her former lover (she later tells the hitman, “this is the girl.”)

The nature of all these scenes is determined by which character’s perspective is privileged. Confronting the mobsters is a disaster for Adam, but he is triumphant at the party scene that provokes murderous outrage in Diane – and vice versa.

Lynch’s architectural achievement is even more extraordinary since most of the first storyline was filmed as a pilot for a television series that was rejected, while the rest of the scenes, including the entire second storyline, were shot more than a year later, after the whole project was reconceptualized as a totally different standalone film.

Such a production history could excuse the kind of narrative incoherence many falsely associate with Mulholland Drive, and which actually does belong to Lynch’s next film, Inland Empire (which he shot without a script). Yet, somehow, in Mulholland Drive Lynch crafted a uniquely complex, flexible cinematic structure whose component parts can be read with or against each other to produce some strikingly different, yet fully-functional, narratives.

Lynch famously never comments on the substance in his films. With Mulholland Drive, that silence is particularly effective since the viewer can play with its different parts like a child working with a pile of Legos.

No other film of the 21st, and arguably even the 20th, centuries requires or rewards this level of audience engagement.

http://www.thenational.ae/opinion/comment/why-donald-trump-wont-win-the-us-election

The American presidential election is over. Republican candidate Donald Trump has virtually no hope of winning. Barring the most extreme and implausible of unforeseen circumstances, Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton will be the next president of the United States.

Conventional wisdom holds that it is ridiculous, and perhaps even dangerous, to say any such thing. The primary objection is that with 11 weeks to go, too many things can suddenly transform the political landscape for any categorical statements at this stage. Moreover, it’s added, debates and other strategic opportunities will provide Mr Trump with several chances to correct his image and potentially overtake Mrs Clinton.

If one were focusing strictly on the popular vote this is plausible, although there would still be a strong basis for concluding the election is all but over. By this stage, polls are prescriptive and rarely so wildly incorrect as to produce a Trump victory. Virtually every poll shows Mrs Clinton with commanding leads nationally, in all the key battleground states, and even in several traditionally solid Republican ones.

A combination of factors might, just possibly, swing the aggregate national popular vote in Mr Trump’s direction. But that’s not how American presidential elections are decided. They are based on an electoral college system largely structured by a winner-take-all arrangement. If a given state gets 12 electoral college votes based on its population, then whichever candidate wins that state, no matter how narrowly, gets all 12 of those votes.

This means that national popular vote majorities are not decisive. The question is who can get to 270 electoral college votes winning state-by-state. The electoral college map has been shifting in recent years in favour of the Democrats. Moreover, Mr Trump’s bizarre campaign has hurt him where he needs to win most: key battleground states.

The arithmetic is clear and devastating for him. Both campaigns quietly agree Mr Trump will need to win a clean sweep of all four crucial battleground states: Pennsylvania, Ohio, Florida and North Carolina. Both agree that if he drops even one, he will certainly lose.

Mrs Clinton has clear or commanding leads in all four of these states, and, astonishingly, is running even with Mr Trump in several traditionally solid Republican states, including Georgia and South Carolina. He is not receiving the same support from white males that Mitt Romney did four years ago (indeed it seems to be slipping), and is faring disastrously with minorities and women.

It is scarcely possible to imagine that he can win all four of these states without exception, given the apparent state of the election a mere 11 weeks away (and some potentially significant absentee voting begins in late September). If Mrs Clinton had to win all four of these states, her campaign would, quite properly, be extremely nervous. Still, she could pull it off, and certainly has a much better chance to do so than he does.

But it is a very heavy lift for any candidate to sweep all four key battleground states. For Mr Trump, he will have to do it charging wildly from behind, with what everyone agrees is an insufficient ground game at the local level, campaign staff at every level, public messaging strategy, and with the profound distrust of a large majority of the public.

The reality for Mr Trump gets even more grim the closer one looks at the map. Even if he did somehow manage to sweep all four key battleground states, Mrs Clinton would still have a few paths to victory, however difficult. There are many ways for her to cobble together 270 electoral college votes. It is Mr Trump who has only one viable route: this virtually unimaginable clean sweep of battleground states.

With his campaign now being run by the de facto leader of the fringe “alt-right” cult, Stephen Bannon of the notorious Breitbart.com website – and with America’s leading racists exulting that their movement has “taken over the Republican Party” through the Trump candidacy – it’s almost impossible to imagine how the unprecedented turnaround and come-from-behind victory that he will need might unfold without a dramatic and extremely implausible “October surprise”.

Meanwhile, Mrs Clinton’s campaign seems to be growing stronger. Yet given the radical political polarisation between and homogenisation within the two American parties, it’s unlikely that she can achieve an old-fashioned, two-thirds majority landslide in the manner of Franklin D Roosevelt, Lyndon B Johnson or Richard M Nixon. Those days are gone.

Pundits hedge to avoid possible embarrassment. The media needs the illusion of a competitive race to maintain interest. Therefore, few are willing to state the virtually incontrovertible truth this clearly: Mr Trump now requires not a minor political miracle to win, but an unprecedented and virtually unimaginable one. It’s over.

No wonder there’s so much speculation that he is really preparing to join with Mr Bannon and another close ally, disgraced former Fox News chief Roger Ailes (recently ousted for sexual harassment), to found a new right-wing extremist media empire. Since Mr Trump is now almost certain to lose, the self-styled “king of debt” might as well try to monetise the debacle.

http://www.thenational.ae/opinion/comment/republicans-wonder-what-they-can-do-about-trump

Over the past week the presidential campaign of Donald Trump imploded, seriously calling into question the future of the Republican Party. As he sinks ever further behind Hillary Clinton both nationally and in key battleground states, Mr Trump is becoming increasingly shameless, aggressive and, apparently, unhinged.

For all the talk of a campaign “reset,” he has demonstrated in both word and deed that he isn’t interested in any moderation. At times he insisted that he is on the path to victory. At other moments, though, he seemed to acknowledge he may well lose, and appeared remarkably comfortable with the prospect of a “nice long vacation” instead.

Last week Mr Trump intensified his already outrageous rhetoric, apparently calling on gun owners to assassinate either Mrs Clinton or any judges she might appoint. (He later absurdly claimed he was just urging political mobilisation).

He ridiculously claimed that president Barack Obama and Mrs Clinton founded ISIL. He rebuked a radio host who tried to assist him by saying he must mean they created the political environment in which the terrorist group emerged. No, Mr Trump insisted, Mr Obama literally founded ISIL. He later claimed he was just kidding, but no one can explain what the joke is supposed to be and no one is laughing.

And, with staggering irresponsibility, he keeps insisting the election will be rigged against him.

Although the election isn’t until November and the political landscape can change overnight, Mr Trump’s candidacy really does seem doomed. One noted Republican said only a video of Mrs Clinton drowning puppies while surrounded by terrorists chanting “death to America” could give him a fighting chance. Another wrote that he would have been much better off if he had done nothing since his convention, and, although he won’t, if he just did and said nothing for a week he might take the lead.

The American political conversation is now focused on why Mr Trump is behaving in such a patently self-destructive manner. It not only defies conventional wisdom, it defies rationality.

Theories abound. The notion, which I have publicly embraced since last autumn, that Mr Trump has serious emotional or mental issues has recently gained currency among both Republicans and Democrats. But while he appears to have a textbook case of narcissistic personality disorder, this explanation is insufficient and dangerous.

Most victims of mental illness or personality disorders don’t promote violence or spread misogyny, bigotry and racism. So, this doesn’t explain Mr Trump’s most alarming behaviour and might stigmatise decent people with mental illnesses. Yet emotional instability does help explain his apparent lack of self-control, so it can’t be completely ignored either.

Some, including people who know him well, speculate that Mr Trump never expected to get this far, and, consciously or not, understands he is unsuited and ill-prepared for the presidency, and doesn’t actually want to win.

Others suggest he is indeed trying to win, and is genuinely convinced that the aggressive and outlandish outbursts that won him the nomination can also secure him the White House.

Another explanation is that he really doesn’t care whether he wins but is simply revelling in the publicity, fun and endless attention. In this view, the Trump campaign is just a giant ego trip without any actual political agenda.

Finally, some argue that Mr Trump lacks the political skill and imagination to do anything differently. Understanding that he is therefore likely to lose, he’s deliberately whipping his followers into a frenzy of righteous rage in preparation for an angry, and perhaps violent, response to a defeat in November. The charitable version of this analysis is that he’s building a “movement” far beyond the election or even the Republican Party. The uncharitable one holds that he’s consciously and cynically laying the groundwork for civil unrest.

Facing potential Trump-induced congressional defeats, on top of probably losing the presidency, Republican leaders are sinking into a morass for which they are largely responsible. While the New York Daily News and others have demanded the party dump him as their candidate, there’s no mechanism to do that. Over 70 senior Republicans signed a letter urging Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus to “suspend” funding for the Trump campaign and focus on congressional races instead. But the hapless Mr Priebus whined that this would be premature.

Despite a steady drip of high-level Republican defectors denouncing Mr Trump, with many also endorsing Mrs Clinton, most elected Republicans still officially back him. They typically cite concerns over Supreme Court appointments, although even conservative commentators such as George Will have noted it’s ridiculous to claim to be defending the constitution by supporting someone who obviously neither knows nor cares anything about it.

Although it’s only August, it really does seem that the Trump campaign will require an extraordinary and imponderable intervention – for example an “October surprise” release of particularly damning hacked Clinton emails – to regain any serious prospect of victory. The remaining questions, then, are how much damage will the Republican Party and its congressional candidates suffer, and how can it rebuild itself after this unprecedented, but entirely self-inflicted, calamity.

http://www.thenational.ae/opinion/comment/the-unknown-muslim-who-has-kept-america-safe

A Muslim American is the person “most responsible for keeping America safe since the Sept. 11 attacks,” wrote former CIA acting director Michael J Morell in the New York Times last week. Mr Morell was referring to “Roger”, an American convert to Islam (he cannot be identified because he still works for the agency) who headed the CIA’s counterterrorism centre for almost 10 years.

The extraordinary fact that American counterterrorism efforts were led by a Muslim for most of the past decade is unknown to most Americans, including Muslims. Yet it upends almost all stereotypes, even most positive perceptions, about the relationship between Muslim Americans and the dangers of, and responses to, terrorism.

The past two weeks has demonstrated the urgent need to shatter these assumptions with such underappreciated and, for some, counterintuitive facts. Mr Morell was explaining his opposition to the presidential candidacy of Donald Trump, who has built his campaign of hate around fear of minorities, particularly Mexicans and Muslims.

It is ironically appropriate that one of the greatest crises of his fraught campaign has been Mr Trump’s confrontation with Khizr and Ghazala Khan, the parents of a heroic American soldier killed in Iraq.

Mr Khan spoke in support of Hillary Clinton at the Democratic National Convention, and criticised Mr Trump’s bigoted policies and pronouncements.

Rather than allowing Mr Khan’s comments to quickly fade from attention, Mr Trump went on a bizarre rampage of ethnic and religious scapegoating against the couple.

He began by suggesting Mrs Khan was not allowed to speak at the convention because she is a supposedly oppressed Muslim woman (she later explained she was too grief-stricken to publicly discuss her son’s death).

Mr Trump ultimately couldn’t restrain himself and, seemingly inevitably, accused Mr Khan of sympathy for terrorism. Citing his supposed future effectiveness in combating terrorists, Mr Trump said: “I think that’s what bothered Mr Khan more than anything else.”

One of Mr Trump’s key supporters, the veteran political dirty trickster Roger Stone, accused Mr Khan of being an anti-American extremist and “Muslim Brotherhood agent”. Trump campaign officials promoted an article, written by two well-documented frauds and crackpots, that suggested their heroic son, Capt Humayun Khan, was actually planning a terrorist attack against the very American troops he gave his life protecting.

In fact, the Khans’ hideous experience at the hands of Mr Trump and his supporters is not only familiar, it’s quite universal. Virtually everyone from the Muslim American community, myself included, who has come to the least public attention since September 11, 2001 – regardless of their actual religious or political beliefs or activities (including sacrificing their life for the country) – has been subjected to precisely the same accusations levelled at the Khan family.

Each and every noted Muslim American, as far as I can tell without any exception at all, has been publicly accused of being a religious extremist, supporter of terrorism and practitioner of “taqqiya” (which is supposed to signify religiously permitted, or even mandatory, lying).

The “taqqiya” myth is the crucial Islamophobic trope, because it allows anyone and everyone – no matter what they really believe, or have said and done, without exception – to be smeared as a crypto-radical. This gem of paranoia allows for no exemptions or escape, and twists all contrary evidence into reinforcement (“See how clever they are?” etc. )

Were his existence more widely known and discussed, as it certainly should be, “Roger” himself would definitely be subjected to all of these accusations. Indeed, every national counterterrorism setback or policy failure would be reinscribed as evidence of his ineluctable treachery.

For all its ugliness the Khan controversy has definite positive aspects. It revealed not only how tenacious and vicious American Islamophobia is, but also the extent to which it remains a fringe phenomenon.

In some ways Mr Trump has undeniably brought Islamophobia closer to the mainstream. But, less obviously, he may have simultaneously tainted it with his own prodigious unpopularity, as recent polling data indicating a sudden and significant recent improvement in American perceptions of Islam and Muslims suggests.

The controversy reminded their fellow citizens that Muslim Americans serve, and die, in the military, and demonstrated the ugliness of religious bigotry. It’s an argument Mr Trump and his fellow hate-mongers simply could not win, and has therefore been a net plus for Muslim Americans.

It has helped normalise Muslims in American society. Their compatriots, including Republicans, clearly not only sided with the Khans, many identified with them as well.

There is a danger of creating an unfair and unworkable “good Muslim” standard that stigmatises ordinary, unremarkable citizens or establishes an implicit test of loyalty. Nonetheless, the Khan affair demonstrates why it’s imperative to celebrate Muslim American contributions, including to security.

Unknown, unnamed and unappreciated, “Roger” should be exhibit A in the rebuttal to Islamophobia. Almost no one’s heard of him, but every single American, Mr Trump included, needs to discover and digest the fact that for most of the past 10 years, the CIA’s counterterrorism efforts were ably and effectively led by a Muslim.