David Lynch’s masterful, perplexing Mulholland Drive is an unsolvable puzzlebox movie, which is probably why we are continuously drawn back to its inscrutable mysteries and logic-defying narrative. It is a fully engrossing experience, one that intrigues and frustrates, amuses and disturbs by an entirely different set of rules—those of a fascinating artist confident enough to bring the conventions of avant-garde and experimental filmmaking to a broader audience.

Interestingly, Mulholland Drive began life as television pilot that was rejected by ABC and rescued from potential oblivion by producer Michael Polaire, who was able to raise the capital that allowed Lynch to reassemble his cast and reshoot some scenes and shoot 18 new pages of script to turn it into a feature. The resulting film has many thematic and visual similarities with both Lynch’s masterpiece Blue Velvet (1986) and his groundbreaking television show Twin Peaks (1990–1991), yet it feels like something wholly original. One of Lynch’s greatest gifts as an artist is not only his emotional immediacy (despite the surreal, fractured nature of his films), but his ability to constantly work over the same ground again and again, exploring the same traumas, anxieties, and perversions while still making it feel new.

As you might guess from the title, Mulholland Drive is about the strange wonderland that is Hollywood. It begins in mysterious fashion, with a glamorous woman (Laura Elena Harring) about to be killed by her limo driver when a group of drag-racing kids smashes into their car head-on. The woman survives the wreck and stumbles down a hill into a wealthy neighborhood, where she holes up inside someone’s apartment, unaware of who she is or what happened to her.

The house she finds herself in is owned by the aunt of a bright-eyed, innocent ingénue named Betty Elms (Naomi Watts), who is fresh off the plane from a small town in Canada. Blonde, perky, and dreaming of stardom, Betty has an audition set up and is hoping to catch her big break. When she first runs across the amnesiac woman, she thinks she is one of her aunt’s friends. The woman, who eventually calls herself Rita after seeing a poster on the wall for the great romantic film noir Gilda (1946), begs Betty to help her. And, much like the naïve Jeffrey in Blue Velvet, Betty finds herself quickly sucked into a menacing world hiding just below the everyday surface that she finds not only mysterious, but strangely compelling. (Lynch loves to generate humor out of these go-getter young hopefuls who wade too deep into the darkness of the underworld.)

Of course, this is merely the beginning, and to try to explain what happens from there would not only spoil the film for those who have not yet seen it, but would take much more room than is allowed here. Suffice it to say that, much like Lynch’s Lost Highway (1997), the narrative surface is not what it seems to be, and about two-thirds of the way into the film everything suddenly collapses in on itself. Characters switch identities and previous events are forgotten as if the two parts of the film take place in alternate universes. An argument could be made that the first part of the film is a dream and that the second part represents reality, but one could make the exact same argument in reverse, which inherently draws us to the exasperating question, “What is real?”

In some ways, this is maddening; but, at the same time, Lynch’s freedom from traditional narrative logic and his willingness to twist convention to get at deeper themes is exhilarating. Mulholland Drive may not make sense in the way we normally expect from a Hollywood narrative, but that is a fundamental part of its power. The surreal, dream-like logic is a thematized narrative strategy that works in tandem with the film’s scathing critique of the institution of Hollywood, the “dream factory” that has turned out more than its share of nightmares. In Mulholland Drive, Hollywood is a place that draws in innocent dreamers, chews them up, and spits them out. Betty’s identity may change completely in the course of the film, but her two selves form a path from idealism to despair.

Mulholland Drive plays not only with narrative, but also with generic classical Hollywood conventions, particularly film noir and the backstage melodrama. Lynch is an expert at establishing moody atmospheres and dark, foreboding mysteries (aided and abetted by a wonderfully sinister, yet beautiful score by his frequent collaborator Angelo Badalamenti), and he dishes out some truly memorable sequences here, especially a scene in which Betty and Rita sneak into the apartment of the woman who may hold the key to Rita’s identity only to find a decomposing body in the bedroom.

It is from the same well of dark impulses that Lynch also gets some of his funniest moments, including a sequence in which Betty auditions for a role with a lecherous older actor—perfect, windproof gray hair and skin bronzed to orange perfection—and turns it into a highly charged sexual performance of which we had no clue she was capable. Lynch maintains the sexual intensity throughout, especially once Rita and Betty become romantically involved. While sex in Lynch’s films is often a path to the deepest human perversions, here it is played straight, and Naomi Watts and Laura Elena Harring generate true heat together.

On another level, it is fascinating to watch Mulholland Drive as a television pilot turned into a feature film. After it was rejected by the networks, Lynch gathered all the actors together and shot new footage in order to rework the material as a feature. Such a move almost demands Lynch’s fractured approach because a television pilot by its nature is extraordinarily open-ended. Introducing more than a dozen characters, including a narcissistic movie director (Justin Theroux), a police detective (Robert Forster), and a host of shady movie financiers (including one played by Dan Hedaya), Mulholland Drive was obviously designed to establish the beginnings of multiple narratives that would play out over dozens of episodes that never happened. Instead, Lynch had to find a way to tie them all together in less than an hour—an exercise in futility. Thus, he rejected any notion of truly resolving any of it, and instead used it to his advantage in constructing a dream-like exploration of the great unresolvable conundrum that is life.

Copyright © 2021 James Kendrick

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