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A Second Look at Mulholland Drive
Confused? Disturbed? Vaguely turned on? You’re not alone.
by Spencer Lewerenz

David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive was the best film of 2001. It is the greatest film about Hollywood since Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard, and seals Lynch’s reputation as one of our greatest directors. You wouldn’t know that, of course, from the reviews. Part of Lynch’s problem, critically, is that his films don’t look like other “serious” films. They are considered too wild, too willfully obscure, and, perhaps more than anything else, too stylish to be accepted in polite company (i.e., the Academy). The name “Lynch” itself conjures a host of perversities: backwards-talking dwarves, amyl nitrate-inhaling thugs, Kyle Maclachlan. Though critics were generous with their praise for Mulholland Drive, there seemed to be an underlying assumption that it was a cinematic novelty, amusing but meaningless. Roger Ebert typified this reaction, writing, “Mulholland Drive isn’t like Memento, where if you watch it closely enough, you can hope to explain the mystery. There is no explanation. . . . This is a movie to surrender yourself to. If you require logic, see something else.” This points to the other part of Lynch’s problem with critics: They can’t make a heap of sense of him.

Ironically, Lynch devotees have only reinforced this misconception. They, too, mistake the director’s trickiness for unintelligibility—and applaud him for it. But then, these are the cinematic nonconformists who describe Lynch’s works as “Mobius strips,” films that can be enjoyed for their dizzying incongruity, the implication being that there is no real method to his structural madness.

While critics and fans were both confused and mesmerized by Mulholland Drive, most moviegoers were just plain confused. Though Lynch was nominated for best director, the film became known mainly for the glossy, cable-after-dark sex scene between its two female leads. Misunderstanding Mulholland Drive is particularly easy. The film blends seemingly incompatible genres: noir mystery, comedy, drama, and horror. (The scariest parts of the film are also often the funniest). The acting and directing, though mostly deft, occasionally veer into B-movie territory. Plot threads go unresolved. Strange occurrences go unexplained: a monster scares a man to death behind a diner, a sinister cowboy appears and disappears into thin air, a bungling hitman kills his friend for a black book. Then, some two hours in, the protagonists inexplicably disappear and then reappear as different characters.

Nonetheless, Lynch does make sense, and Mulholland Drive, in particular, makes more sense than any American movie in years.

GETTING PAST THE PUZZLE

David Lynch’s Hollywood is a town in which people are broken and embittered by the pursuit of an illusion. Even those who can’t sort out its house-of-mirrors storyline will recognize this as the theme of Mulholland Drive. But, unlike other recent cinematic brain-teasers (Memento, Donnie Darko), solving this film’s puzzle is not just its own reward. Get past Lynch’s coy cryptogram and it’s easier to see that this is an accomplished, mature film of genuine warmth and profound human insight So what’s really happening in Mulholland Drive? Diane Selwyn (Naomi Watts), a nice girl from Deep River, Ontario, wins a jitterbug contest and decides to move to Hollywood to be in the movies. After Diane loses a starring role to the cruel and manipulative Camilla Rhodes (Laura Elena Harring), the two become friends, then lovers. Camilla’s star rises; Diane’s does not. Camilla procures small parts for Diane in her films. She falls in love with dashing young director Adam Kesher, as Diane watches jealously, and ends their affair. Jilted and depressed, Diane accepts Camilla’s invitation to a dinner party at Adam’s house on Mulholland Drive. Her hopes are raised when Camilla takes her on a private, romantic stroll, then crushed when Adam and Camilla announce their engagement. Diane hires a hitman to kill Camilla. After the deed, the police show up at her door and she commits suicide.

Instead of telling the story like this, all nice and tidy, Lynch does something, well, Lynchian. There have been other movies about how the Hollywood Dream is crushed by Hollywood reality, but only David Lynch would film the Hollywood Dream as a dream. After Diane learns of Camilla’s death, she falls asleep and recasts her life as she would like it to be. And so the meek, bitter Diane Selwyn becomes the bold and eager Betty Elms. Instead of “girl follows Hollywood Dream, girl’s dream is crushed,” we actually see Diane living the Hollywood Dream as Betty. From the beginning, however, the dream is haunted by the ugliness of Diane’s reality, and when Diane does finally awake, it’s like an addict coming down from drug euphoria.

But why be so cryptic? The most difficult thing about the film is that, aside from a few small clues, the movie plunges into the dream without warning. A director should let the audience in on such crucial details, shouldn’t he? But Lynch understands dreams too well. When we realize we are dreaming, our dreams cease to have power, and we wake up. Likewise, audiences lose interest in dream sequences if they know they are dreams, because, if what is taking place on screen isn’t real, there is nothing at stake. As it is, Mulholland Drive is underscored by a constant, eerie tension, a sense of premonition and déjà vu, because we, too, are stuck in the dream and don’t know it.

WHAT DOES THE DRAMA MEAN?

In all of Lynch’s films, the distinction between dreams and movies is hazy. Contained in Mulholland Drive is a sort of chicken-or-egg question: If dreams are the stuff movies are made of, what are movies if not dreams committed to celluloid? In watching the movie, the audience mistakes the director’s vision for Diane’s; the movie we believe we’re watching is actually Diane’s dream. But—and here’s that paradox—Diane’s dream also resembles a movie, often a bad one.

Diane has populated her dream with clichés from the movies, primarily noir mysteries. Early in her dream, Betty exhorts her companion, “Come on, it’ll be just like in the movies! We’ll pretend to be someone else.” This is a major clue. Mulholland Drive is a movie about a dream that resembles a movie about being in the movies. This may sound a bit cute, but the point is that actors come to Hollywood to be in the movies because they really want their lives to be like the movies. They want to live the dream. Diane Selwyn discovers, through bitter betrayal and revenge, that reality is neither dream nor movie, so she escapes into a dream that plays like a movie.

In the dream’s opening scene, a limousine crawls up Mulholland Drive, the winding road that separates Hollywood from the San Fernando Valley. (According to Hollywood lore, many a star and starlet have come to a tragic end on this road.) In the limo’s back seat is the raven-haired Harring, a dame to kill for by any noir standard. The car stops. One of the drivers pulls a gun. But just as it looks like the end of the line for our dark beauty, a car of drag-racing teens (which looks to have driven straight off the set of Rebel Without a Cause) plunges into the limo. As the smoke clears, the dazed girl stumbles from the wreckage, down the hill into Hollywood.

On the most obvious level, Diane is distraught after learning of Camilla’s death and so dreams that she escaped the hit. But Diane associates Camilla, the object of her desire, with the other object of her desire, Hollywood. In beating out Diane for roles, seducing and then rejecting her, Camilla has been as cruel a lover as Hollywood has been. In killing Camilla, Diane put an end to her Hollywood dream. In the dream, however, Camilla lives. This Camilla is her dream.

GETTING RID OF GUILT

Consider this: Towards the end of the movie, Diane takes the same limo trip up Mulholland. The car stops again, and Camilla opens the door and leads Diane up a secluded path to Adam’s house. For a moment, Diane believes that Camilla wants her back. But when they get to the top, Adam is waiting; he and Camilla are still very much a couple. Later in the evening, they announce their engagement. Diane imagines a parallel between the events that lead up to Camilla breaking off their relationship and her revenge on Camilla. She equates the two events in her mind: Camilla took her dream away from her, and her revenge shattered it for good. But in her dream, the hit fails, and Diane avoids both events. The dream lives—because Diane is dreaming it. Meanwhile, at Winkies, a Denny’s-like diner, a nerdy man discusses his recurring dream with another man who seems to be his therapist. He says that, in the dream, they’re both at the diner, and a man with an awful face behind the building is making them “scared like you wouldn’t believe.” The friend/therapist asks if he came to see if the man is really out there. The nerdy man says he’s there “to get rid of this God-awful feeling.” They walk behind Winkies, and a monster appears from behind the dumpster, scaring the nerdy man to death. The nerdy man is Diane, and the “God-awful feeling” is her guilt. The monster is the unseemly truth of her crime that haunts the fair-seeming falsehood of her dream. Appropriately, the scene takes place in the booth where Diane met with the hitman; she saw the nerdy man at the register while taking out the hit.

After the crash, the dream-Camilla sneaks into the apartment of Betty’s Aunt Ruth, who is on her way to Canada. (In reality, Aunt Ruth is dead.) Betty, just off the plane from Deep River, Ontario, has come to stay in her aunt’s apartment in Hollywood while she auditions for roles. While excitedly exploring the apartment, Betty discovers the actress in the shower and, assuming she is a friend of her aunt, asks her what her name is. The girl can’t remember. She spys a poster of Rita Hayworth from the movie Gilda and tells Betty her name is “Rita.” Seeing that Rita is injured, Betty encourages her to see a doctor. Rita responds, “It’ll be okay . . . if I sleep,” and stretches out on the bed. Everything is as Diane would like it to be. Her Aunt Ruth is alive, her apartment is lavish, and her future as an actress still looks bright. And, to boot, her lover shows up alive and naked in her shower. Why does Rita have amnesia? To begin with, it’s another noir cliché. Also, as the embodiment of Diane’s dream, Rita is more Diane than she is Camilla. Diane wants to forget her bitter reality—a jilted lover and failed actress—thus the amnesia and the desire to sleep.

Yet, there’s still more. The real Camilla was not only cruel and manipulative, she also had the upper hand in their relationship. (She got Diane small roles. She called the affair off.) Rita, on the other hand, is Camilla as Diane would like her to be: sweet, vulnerable, and needy. On another level, Camilla is Hollywood as it really is. Rita is Hollywood as Diane would like it to be. In essence, she is purely Diane’s fantasy; she only looks like Camilla. The tagline on the Gilda poster in Aunt Ruth’s bedroom reads: “There never was a girl like Gilda.” There never really was a girl like Rita, either. Rita admits to Betty that she can remember nothing but a car accident. They open Rita’s bag and find stacks of cash and a blue key. From the moment Rita awakes, hints of Diane’s deed begin to invade the dream. Diane used the bag of money to pay off the hitman. He was to give her the blue key as a sign that he had accomplished the hit. Ironically, the mystery Betty is so eager to investigate is the reality that Diane went to sleep to forget. Rita remembers more and more details from the waking world, including the name Diane Selwyn. One night, Betty finds Louise Bonner at her door, a woman in a witch-like, blue-trimmed cape. The exchange is the film’s creepiest:

Louise: Something is wrong here. Someone is in trouble. Who are you? What are you doing in Ruth’s apartment?
Betty: I’m her niece. She’s letting me stay here.
My name is Betty.
Louise: No, it’s not.

Nothing is more frightening to Diane than the truth. Whenever her dream turns ominous, as it does here, it is because the truth is haunting the pleasant fiction she has created for herself. Indeed, her name is not Betty. It is Diane.

CHANGING YOUR ATTITUDE

In contrast with Betty’s mystery/horror plot, Adam Kesher, Camilla’s real-life fiancé, stars in a subplot that is part satire, part slapstick comedy, and part unintentionally funny B-movie. Again, in this subplot, Diane plays out her dream-wish that her failure is the fault of a Hollywood mafia who call the shots from behind the scenes. In a casting meeting for The Sylvia North Story, the Castigliane brothers offer Adam a deal he can’t refuse: to cast the blonde dream-Camilla as the lead. Adam balks at losing control of his movie, and is told that he will no longer be the director of the film. In retaliation, Adam takes a golf club to the Castiglianes’ limo and flees. Mafia godfather Mr. Roque, a man with an unusually small head, orders the film’s production shut down. (In the mind of the struggling actor, all executives are untouchable, small-headed men who make completely arbitrary decisions.) Adam returns home to find his wife Lorraine in bed with Gene the pool man (Billy Ray Cyrus). As an unapologetic Lorraine screams bloody murder, Adam pours a can of paint into her jewelry box. Gene promptly tosses Adam out of his own house. The director checks into a dumpy downtown hotel and discovers that his bank account is empty and his credit cancelled. Back at his house, a Castigliane thug comes looking for him, finding only the combative Lorraine and Gene, whom he handily punches out.

Adam’s subplot echoes Diane’s professional rejection (again the fault of secret Hollywood forces), her lover’s betrayal, her revenge, and her coming punishment (the police detectives she knows are on her trail). Adam, like Rita, is a dream doppelganger for Diane. Gene tells Adam, “Just forget you ever saw it. It’s better that way.” Diane tries to forget the way Hollywood really is, but it emerges in her dream as a satire nonetheless.

At the hotel, Adam receives a message that he is to meet a man known only as the Cowboy at his corral. Adam finds the corral and the Cowboy, a distinctly Lynchian character who, despite his absurd plaid trenchcoat and oversized white cowboy hat, carries himself with an air of supernatural menace. He comes off as something of a sinister Hop-along Cassidy, offering plain-spoken wisdom that somehow doubles as ominous threat.

Diane saw the Cowboy briefly at Adam’s party, and here she has merged him with another cliché from her memory: the simple, moral truth-telling man from the silver-screen Westerns of yesteryear. Apparently, movies did have something of a positive affect on Diane, because the Cowboy is her moral sense, now frightening to her because it is something she would rather forget. The Cowboy’s message to Adam is that he can continue to direct his movie as long as he accepts Camilla as the lead. But it’s also a larger warning against allowing misfortunes that can’t be controlled to affect one’s attitude.

The Cowboy: A man’s attitude . . . a man’s attitude goes some ways, the way his life will be. Is that somethin’ you might agree with?
Adam: Sure.
The Cowboy: So since you agree, I guess you would be a person who does not care about the good life.

Because Diane refuses to learn this lesson, her future is in peril.

THE TWO BECOME ONE

Meanwhile, Diane’s other self, Betty, auditions for the lead in a movie. Sweet, innocent Betty suddenly drips with sexual charisma, pressing sleazeball costar Jimmy Katz’s hand against her thigh. She wows the room, something Diane was never able to do. But there is something truthful in the scene: Betty resorts to trading on her sexuality. Diane has, no doubt, had to do the same. Betty is brought in to audition for Adam, who has resumed the helm of The Sylvia North Story. Adam can’t keep his eyes off her. But, alas, Betty remembers that she had promised Rita she would go with her to Diane Selwyn’s apartment. She runs off, much to Adam’s disappointment. The other Camilla Rhodes auditions, and Adam casts her as instructed. In reality, Adam fell in love with Camilla, not Diane, and the director of The Sylvia North Story, Bob Brooker, didn’t like Diane and cast Camilla in the lead. In Diane’s fantasy, Adam is immediately infatuated with her, but is forced to cast Camilla, and Betty doesn’t even audition because of her commitment to her friend.

Betty and Rita sneak into Diane Selwyn’s apartment and find her decomposing body in bed. Rita believes that the two men they see driving by Betty’s apartment killed Diane and now are after her. Back at the apartment, Rita dons a disguise: a short blonde wig that literally makes her Betty’s doppelganger. The two men are a dream echo of the two detectives that Diane knows are after her. The wig signifies two things. First, it reflects Diane’s attempt to remake Camilla and Hollywood as she would like them to be—in her image. Also, as Betty and Rita get closer to solving the mystery, they uncover more of Diane’s life, and the dream nears its end. Appropriately, the distinction between Betty and Rita begins to blur. In the next scene, the two will become one, at least in one sense.

The notorious lesbian coupling scene is exactly what critics have accused it of being: a shameless piece of titillation. But this is Diane’s sexual fantasy, an empty, solipsistic fantasy in which she makes love to a girl that is her own creation and her own twin. And like the rest of her dream, she relies on old movie clichés—this time from blue movies.

Rita enters the bedroom wearing only a towel and the wig.
Betty: You don’t have to wear that in the house.
Rita looks down at the towel.
Rita: What?
Betty: The wig!

It is telling that, in the throes of passion, Betty whispers“I’m in love with you.” Rita doesn’t respond. She doesn’t have to: Betty whispers it again.

THE TURN COMES

Now, Lynch plunges us into one of the bizarre sequences for which he is famous. But, understood as a dream that is anchored in and inspired by real events—Diane’s affair and betrayal by Camilla, and her revenge—the scene becomes comprehensible. But its weirdness is a sign that Diane’s pleasant fantasy, under the weight of her guilt, is becoming more and more unsustainable.

Rita awakes from a nightmare and insists that Betty come with her to a bizarre movie theater-turned-nightclub called Silencio. “No hay banda. There is no band!” the emcee announces as they take their seats. We hear the sound of various instruments. “It is all recorded!” he booms. A man comes from behind the curtain, playing trumpet. As the sound of the trumpet continues, he drops the instrument to his side to show that he is not really playing. The emcee disappears in a cloud of blue smoke. Then, Latin singer Rebekah Del Rio performs a wrenching, a capella version of Roy Orbison’s “Crying” in Spanish. A fake tear is painted in the corner of her eye. Betty and Rita weep violently. Rebekah Del Rio collapses to the floor, but we continue to hear her voice. It, too, is a recording. Betty and Rita realize they have been fooled. Betty reaches into her purse and finds a blue box. They return to the apartment to retrieve the blue key. Betty disappears. Rita opens the box and disappears. Aunt Ruth appears in the same clothes as when she left for Canada. She looks around the room: It is empty. Not even the blue box remains. Suddenly, we are back with Diane Selwyn’s corpse in her bedroom. The Cowboy opens her door: “Wake up, pretty girl.” With the swooning romanticism of the bedroom scene, Diane’s dream is at its most detached from reality. Afterwards, it can no longer sustain itself. At Club Silencio, Betty and Rita recognize that the singer’s emotion, like the tear on her eye, is fake. She is merely acting; the song is not being sung. To make it worse, the emcee already told them and showed them that it was fake, yet they fell for it anyway. They have been manipulated. Confronted with the truth that her dream—and the movies that are the “stuff” of her dreams—are not real, she finds the blue box. What does it contain? Reality. Rita opens it and the dream ends. The Cowboy appears with Diane’s corpse as a reminder to her of what will happen if she does not “change her attitude.” Diane wakes to the knocking of her neighbor, who mentions that the police detectives are looking for her. After the neighbor leaves, Diane thinks back about her affair with Camilla in a series of stream-of-consciousness flashbacks. Afterward, we see the monster behind Winkies holding the blue box. Only now, outside of Diane’s dream, it is evident that the monster is nothing but a bum.

The bum was only scary to Diane because of what he represents to her: not only the ugly truth of what she did, but the ugly truth of what was done to her—the truth about Hollywood itself. Diane’s story is not unique. In Hollywood, Lynch seems to assert, people are ritually used and discarded, as she was. And that truth is discarded, like a vagrant, and hidden beneath the fair-seeming falsehood that is the Hollywood Dream. The vagrant drops the blue box into a sack, another image of truth discarded. Tiny versions of an old couple seen earlier in the film—representations of the romanticism and naivete Diane possessed upon coming to the city—crawl out of the sack. Back at Diane’s apartment, the detectives knock at the door. At the same time, the mini-oldsters crawl under the door, laughing maniacally. As reality had haunted her dream, now the lost dream haunts her reality. They chase her into her bedroom, where she shoots herself. We see the room fill with blue smoke—just like the smoke at Club Silencio. But this is supposed to be reality, isn’t it?

No, it’s not real at all—it’s a movie. Lynch has fooled us, like the emcee at Club Silence fooled Betty and Rita. The following, final images remind us that the movie has contained both dream and reality, falsehood and truth. We can remember the film for the romantic image of Betty and Rita’s “love” or the image of the bum. It is a final warning to the viewer: we must discern, as Diane did not, between the lies and the truths that movies tell.

Considering all the chatter about steamy sapphic sex, one must ponder how effective an advocate of truth the movie is. Furthermore, it seems more than a tad elitist that only those who understand the film are immune to its illusions. In light of what the film achieves, however, these must be considered minor flaws. The narrative unraveled, Lynch’s every artistic choice is exposed as staggeringly meticulous and deliberate, right down to the colors in his palette. (He associates pink with concealing, or falsehood, blue with reality, or truth.) Mulholland Drive may be weird, tricky, even a bit perverted, but it’s also one of our finest films, and DavidLynch one of our best directors.