Mulholland Drive (2001). Written and directed by David Lynch. Starring Naomi Watts, Laura Harring, and Justin Theroux.
All artists are more than the sum of their inspirations, but it can be interesting to take a look at those inspirations when discussing an artist’s work. It’s particularly interesting when we’re talking about a film like Mulholland Drive (2001), a movie about Hollywood that is very much in conversation with the Hollywood tradition of both mythologizing and exposing the art and business of making movies.
So we’ll start with a brief tour of some of David Lynch’s favorite movies.
Back in the mid-1970s, when film student David Lynch was making Eraserhead (1977), he had the crew sit down to watch Billy Wilder’s 1950 movie Sunset Boulevard. Ever since its release, Sunset Boulevard has been regarded as one of the most quintessential Hollywood movies about Hollywood. It tells the story of a struggling screenwriter who takes up residence with a reclusive, delusional former silent film star. It’s bleak, it’s funny, it’s clever, it’s narrated by a dead man, and it’s all about how people in Hollywood manipulate and exploit each other to grasp at fame. Lynch considered Wilder one of his favorite filmmakers, and stated, “Sunset Boulevard just has the greatest mood; you’re immersed in it like a dream.”
Another film that Lynch cited as a favorite is Federico Fellini’s 8½ (1963), which tells the story of a film director struggling with creative block. It’s an experimental, dreamlike, avant-garde film, with a self-referential, metafictional blurring of the lines between the main character and Fellini’s own life as a filmmaker, and between the film the character is trying to make and the film Fellini is actually making.
Lynch was also a fan of the works of Jacques Tati, the French director, actor, and mime known for his comedic slice-of-life films in which his friendly, bumbling everyman character Monsieur Hulot encounters various slapstick and satirical situations in modern life. It may not seem like there’s much overlap between Lynch’s fucked-up films and Tati’s warm-hearted comedy, but Lynch explained his love for Tati’s work pretty clearly: “When you watch his films, you realize how much he knew about—and loved—human nature, and it can only be an inspiration to do the same.”
Finally, let’s not overlook Lynch’s fondness for The Wizard of Oz (1939). There is an entire documentary devoted to exploring the film’s relationship with his work—Leah Schnelbach has already written about Lynch/Oz (2022), so I won’t get into it in any depth. Whether or not one agrees with the analysis in Lynch/Oz, Lynch did cite The Wizard of Oz as a favorite film many times. And all I really have to say about it is this: Is anybody really surprised that he had an enduring love for the world’s most influential film about the blurred lines between dreaming and waking, as well as the disappointing mundanity that exists beneath a surface of magic and beauty? I don’t know about you, but I don’t find that terribly surprising.
Mulholland Drive is widely considered to be Lynch’s greatest film, the movie he was always meant to make. Roger Ebert said exactly that in his 2001 review: “David Lynch has been working toward Mulholland Drive all of his career, and now that he’s arrived there I forgive him for Wild at Heart and even Lost Highway. At last his experiment doesn’t shatter the test tubes.” That’s just one example, but many film critics across the board shared that opinion, both upon the film’s release and in the years since. Of course, not everybody loves it; there have been plenty of critics over the years who find it self-indulgent and needlessly incoherent.
Critical consensus, or lack thereof, doesn’t mean anything in cinema, and it certainly is not an indicator of quality. My purpose in bringing up the reviews is to point out the somewhat obvious but still interesting fact that the elements that some people hate about Mulholland Drive—the nonlinear structure, the lack of narrative clarity, the shift between apparent realities without explanation—are the very same things other people love about it.
I count myself in the latter group. I love Mulholland Drive, I think it’s a truly great film, and part of that love comes from the film’s refusal to explain itself.
Mulholland Drive was first conceived as a television pilot for ABC in 1999, which would seem outrageous if Lynch hadn’t already made Twin Peaks and redefined just how much weirdness network television could handle. Lynch wasn’t looking to do television again, but Tony Krantz, the agent who had facilitated the production of Twin Peaks, talked him into giving it a try. So Lynch made a pilot with a lot of the same crew from Twin Peaks, including cinematographer Peter Deming, editor Mary Sweeney, and composer Angelo Badalamenti (who also has a small role in Mulholland Drive as the mobster Castigliane brother who is very picky about his espresso).
ABC hated the pilot, so the series never went forward. Lynch was ready to abandon the project until a friend of his brought in the French film company StudioCanal to provide funding for a feature-length movie. That was the point at which Lynch—in his own telling of the story—realized he had absolutely no idea how to make that story into a film, and he had to figure it out.
There are bad VHS copies of the original pilot floating are the internet (here, for example), but you don’t need to watch it. For the most part it matches the first 90 minutes of the movie fairly closely, ending shortly after Betty (Naomi Watts) and Rita (Laura Harring) discover a decomposing corpse in Diane Selwyn’s apartment. In the film, that happens just before the hard left turn into true Lynchian weirdness.
Ask five viewers how to interpret that shift partway through Mulholland Drive and you’ll get five different answers. I’m of the opinion that’s a feature, not a flaw, but not everybody agrees with that assessment. I love the moment when everything starts to change, when the film we’ve been watching tips slowly but surely into a distorted kaleidoscope version of itself, where familiar names and faces and places are remixed and shaken up and revisited in entirely new contexts.
For about the first two-thirds of its running time, Mulholland Drive is masquerading as an odd and quirky but fairly straightforward L.A. noir. We have perky, naïve Betty living out both her Hollywood dreams and her Nancy Drew cosplay as she tries to help beautiful, mysterious Rita discover her true identity, and all the while they’re rather sweetly falling in love. We have douchey director Adam Kesher (Justin Theroux) encountering escalating problems as mobsters interfere with his latest movie for no apparent reason. All around them there are compelling vignettes: A man in a diner (Patrick Fischler) tells another man about a frightening premonition, then sees a vision of a dead woman in an alley. The legendary Ann Miller is a friendly, fabulous landlord. Michael J. Anderson pulls strings as a mysterious man in a red room (of course). Monty Montgomery shows up as a menacing cowboy enforcer (why not), Mark Pellegrino as an incompetent hitman (again, why not), and none of it quite fits together yet, but it’s enough to suggest a story that might make sense as we learn more.
Sure, this story might not follow real-world logic, what with its stereotypical mobsters and dream visions and Betty gliding easily through her auditions and introductions in show business, but at least seems to operate in accordance with Hollywood logic.
This is where we can insert an ominous Galadriel voiceover: But they were, all of them, deceived…
All of us, that is. The audience. Up until a certain point, Mulholland Drive feels like a movie that will more or less make sense when we have all the pieces—at least so far as complex noir mystery films are expected to make sense. In his 1946 review of Howard Hawks’ wonderful but fairly incomprehensible The Big Sleep, James Agee wrote, “…the plot’s crazily mystifying, nightmare blur is an asset…” The same movie rationale applies here: Betty might be playing at being Nancy Drew on screen, but the film is reminding us all along that in this world of shadowy power brokers and menacing mobsters and bright-eyed ingenues, clues and logic will only take us so far.
When the movie pulls the rug out from underneath us, it doesn’t pull its punches. It happens very deliberately, leading us right up to the edge of a precipice before giving us a solid shove, and that’s thanks to my favorite scene in the film: the visit to Club Silencio.
When Betty and Rita make their visit to Club Silencio, it is presented at first as a step in discovering Rita’s identity. They have a clue and they follow it. But as soon as they arrive, we realize it is nothing of the sort.
Even though it’s the middle of the night, and apparently the middle of a show, everything is frozen until Betty and Rita arrive. On stage the Magician (Richard Green) gives a very strange, very Lynchian monologue about the illusion of theater, about the trickery at the heart of performance. “No hay banda,” he says, “and yet, we hear a band.” And we do—we hear music, we see a trumpeter, and that trumpeter is revealed to be only pretending to play music.
It all has the feel of very experimental postmodern performance art—but that’s not how Betty and Rita react to it, which makes all the difference. They react with fear, with dread, with sadness. They cling to each other. There are tears. They are profoundly unsettled by what’s happening on the stage, which signals to us that we should be unsettled as well, even if we don’t yet know why.
A quick note before we move on: I know that it has been said one million bajillion times before, in every single piece of writing that has ever been written about this movie, but I’m going to say it again anyway. Naomi Watts and Laura Harring are so fucking good. They are astonishingly good! They are good separately, they are good together, they are good as every single version of these shifting, gleaming, prism-like characters who look entirely different from every new angle. It’s a genuine pleasure to watch two actors be so very, very good at what they do.
The crescendo of the Club Silencio scene arrives when singer Rebekah Del Rio comes on stage to perform a stunning, heart-wrenching Spanish a capella version of Roy Orbison’s “Crying.” It’s achingly beautiful—then Del Rio collapses on stage, but the singing continues. Because there is no band, and there is no singer. The people who drag the unconscious Del Rio off stage have faces familiar to us but not to Betty: one man (Geno Silva) was the landlord at the seedy hotel were Adam Kesher holed up, the other (Billy Ray Cyrus) was the pool guy who was sleeping with Kesher’s wife.
(Completely random aside: It is in fact true that Cyrus has kinda credited Lynch with the eventual creation of Hannah Montana, but it was in a vague, this-led-to-Hollywood-connections kind of way, and not in the weird devil-made-me-do-it way that some articles try to present it as by taking that quote out of context. That was a very strange Hollywood clickbait-and-gossip rabbit hole to go down. I regret the time I spent on that, but it is a good lesson in how you should always check sources.)
Betty finds the blue box on the seat next to her, and we know by now that the rules of the story have shifted. It’s not long before we’re no longer watching Betty and Rita solve a mystery and fall in love. We’re instead watching Diane and Camilla go through an ugly break-up, the kind that involves infidelity and inappropriate workplace behavior and hired hitmen. (You know, the kind of stuff we’ve all seen in our typical queer friend groups.) (That is a joke. I don’t think any toxic lesbians in my social circle have ever hired a hitman.) (But if they had, they probably wouldn’t tell me, because I would make a joke about it in a public article.)
There are several interpretations about what the narrative shift in Mulholland Drive represents. The most prevalent is that the first part of the film is Diane’s idealized dream of what her life could have been like, but there are also theories that the parts represent parallel universe, or that it all takes place in the same universe that just happens to be a world where both Betty and Diana exist as doppelgangers with very different lives, or that it’s all an elaborate hallucination. Some theories argue that there is no explanation at all, because the entire thing is meant as a metaphor for Hollywood, which often doesn’t make much sense.
The different interpretations are such a large part of the reaction to the movie that film scholarship and critique have long since moved beyond analyzing the movie and into the realm of analyzing the analyses. Lynch famously never confirmed nor denied any of the theories, even while sometimes insisting there is a coherent story—but by that point in his career, nobody really expected him to, as that was never his style. Members of the cast, particular Watts and Harring, have offered up their own evolving ideas over the years. But in a 2001 interview shortly after the film’s release, Harring summed it up succinctly when she said, “It intrigues you. You want to get it, but I don’t think it’s a movie to be gotten.”
I think I agree with that: I don’t think it’s a movie to be gotten, regardless of whether we find any of the theories fully satisfying.
A lot of contemporary reviews of Mulholland Drive also mention Christopher Nolan’s Memento (2000) as a point of contrast, as Memento is a nonlinear puzzle-box film where the seemingly disjointed clues do form a single narrative. To be clear, I like Memento and often find that kind of movie delightful! I love a puzzle as much as anybody. But the two movies have very different goals and are doing very different things. If a viewer goes into Mulholland Drive expecting a Memento-like experience, expecting and anticipating the “ah ha!” moment when everything fits together in a way that everybody can agree on, they are likely going to come away frustrated.
That’s not because Mulholland Drive fails as a movie. It’s because it succeeds. It succeeds marvelously. As much as we want to look for the real story beneath the story, the film is right there telling us the truth on the surface. We’re not detectives investigating these mysteries; we’re not even students taking a test that might be passed or failed. We’re the audience, but that’s not a passive role. We’re willing participants in the illusion. No hay banda. This is Hollywood. This is the dream factory. Sure, there is a wizard behind the curtain, but he’s just a guy who’s good with smoke and mirrors, and we’ve known he was there all along.
I love that Mulholland Drive never gives us an answer that everybody can agree on, even while offering many threads for us to tug. The movie plays constantly with the blending of reality and fantasy, with the masks people wear and the lies they tell themselves, with the shadowy borderlands between the lives we imagine and the lives we have. And I do mean plays, because the playfulness is inherent in the film, in its odd vignettes, its disconnected scenes, its self-aware humor.
In a broader sense, I also appreciate Mulholland Drive and all of Lynch’s work for being art that does not explain itself, made by artists who do not explain themselves. I don’t want to live in a world where popular art is expected or required to have a singular meaning and clear message that everybody can agree on. I am far from the first person to point this out, but current trends toward minimizing unfamiliarity, discomfort, and uncertainty in popular art are at best troubling, and at worst chillingly dystopian in their implications.
Over the past month I’ve been thinking a lot about how the world doesn’t have David Lynch anymore, but we still have his work—nearly fifty years of unapologetically surreal weirdness. He never explained his work, but his refusal wasn’t mean-spirited. Quite often he spoke about how he didn’t have an explanation himself. His films embrace the language of dreams, of dark imagery and strange ideas, of flights of fancy without known destinations. The movies are often very dark and upsetting, but there is still such joy in watching them, even when I’ve seen them before. There is joy in experiencing the increasingly bizarre scenes without knowing how they will make me feel, without knowing what thoughts they will spark, without knowing what strange imaginings will follow hours after the movie is finished.
We’ve lost David Lynch, but I desperately hope we never lose what he brought to us. I hope we never lose our appetite for art that unsettles, art that discomfits, art that challenges our very experience of the world. We would be so much poorer without it.
What are your thoughts on Mulholland Drive? Do you have theories, or theories about theories, or theories about how having theories about theories is theoretically challenging? It’s all out there somewhere. Or do you have any lingering thoughts on Lynch’s body of work overall? Feel free to share!
Just Another Day on the Blue-Collar Sci Fi Job
In March we are going to spend some time with a few regular workers just trying to earn a paycheck in a science fictional world. Is this a flimsy excuse for me to write about four fun movies I’ve wanted to write about all along but haven’t fit in anywhere else yet? Maybe.
March 5 — The Abyss (1989), directed by James Cameron
An oil rig crew has a strange day at work.
(Note: There are two editions available. The special edition/director’s cut is in fact quite a bit different from the theatrical release, mostly toward the end, but it’s also nearly three hours long.)
Watch: Amazon, Apple, Fandango, Microsoft.
View the trailer.
March 12 — The Fifth Element (1997), directed by Luc Besson
A taxi driver has a strange day at work.
Watch: Amazon, Apple, Fandango, and more.
View the trailer.
March 19 — Repo Man (1984), directed by Alex Cox
A recently fired grocery stockboy has a strange day at his new job.
Watch: Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Fandango.
View the trailer.
March 26 — Alien (1979), directed by Ridley Scott
A space tugboat crew has a strange day at work.
Watch: Amazon, Apple, Fandango, Microsoft.
View the (truly iconic) trailer.
