Mysteries Of The Suburban Deep.
I walked to the cinema in Leederville that is showing Mulholland Drive, setting off from the centre of Perth and crossing a number of inner city localities I haven’t been in for a long time.
I lived in the suburb well over twenty years ago. Many of the same landmarks are still there, mostly unchanged, but what has changed is the way the area is crisscrossed by high-speed multi-lane roadways.
After the movie I walked across a number of other suburbs back home to Inglewood. I’d planned to do that anyway, and the absence of buses and taxis confirmed that it was the right decision.
As soon as I left the cinema/restaurant precinct I noticed that all the houses were locked up, windows closed, and where shutters were installed they were firmly shut. The lights in each house were out. The porch lights people are accustomed to leaving on if they are out or expecting visitors were also switched off.
While making my way along a major road and then a series of side streets the same scene repeated itself. Occasionally I would hear the distant sounds of music and lowered voices coming from dimly amber-lit houses well off the main road, where I could see drinkers lolling about on the verandahs alone or in pairs. All the surrounding houses were dark, and quiet.
Every so often, though, there’d be a roaring in the distance and a posse of cars would come hurtling along, scream to a halt at a traffic light, then loudly zoom off again. Each motor car was a mobile display of light and sound, and each cluster of them reminded me of a travelling circus, or a school of light-emitting deep sea fish that was flitting its way through a sulphur vent reef.
After an hour of darkness and silence frequently punctuated by noise and light, I found myself in Mount Lawley, at the corner where the video store, the cinema and the cafés meet. The same faces were there that gather night after night at the same outdoor tables, and the same people were exchanging tapes and disks in the video store.
Things just weren’t adding up. If the shut-up houses meant their inhabitants were out, yet the gatherings at the oases of cinema, food and drink were the same as always, and the cars in close formation on the roads were so many, where were they all going? And was my impression that the same automotive posses were driving up and down, up and down, up and down in fact correct?
Where had all the people who lived in all the houses gone? Had they transformed themselves into the motorists roaming the streets surrounding their own homes? What were they searching for? Or for whom? Had David Lynch’s world leaked over into our own?
11:46:55 AM 
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