David Lynch died on January 15, 2025, five days before his 79th birthday, and as obituaries and remembrances poured forth, certain descriptors of his films abounded: “surreal,” “menacing,” “dreamlike,” and so on, adjectives that grasp at but do not reach the logically cryptic yet intuitively clear power of the self-sustaining dreamworlds Lynch crafted.

Mulholland Drive may be both his most analyzed and his most lauded film, which in its elliptical narrative of troubled lives circling Los Angeles’s film industry encapsulates both the narrative abstraction and aesthetic enthrallment that became major tenets of his artistic legacy. Conceived as a pilot for ABC, producer Pierre Edelman purchased the rights to Mulholland Drive for the French production company StudioCanal+ after the network rejected it, and Lynch reconvened his cast and crew to finish the project as a feature film. It became an instant critical success upon its release in 2001, winning Lynch Best Director at the Cannes Film Festival and garnering the filmmaker an Academy Award nomination, and its reputation has only improved over time — in the 2022 Sight and Sound critics’ survey of the Greatest Films of All Time, Mulholland Drive landed at #8.

Its origins — split between the corporate demands of American network television and the comparative freedom of international film financing — are evident in the final product, where plot lines and characters are introduced in a manner echoing his aesthetically bold yet narratively straightforward pilot of Twin Peaks, only for its very narrative threads to merge and splinter in unexpected, near-inexplicable ways.

In Mulholland Drive, protagonist Betty calls Los Angeles a “dream space,” and this designation is made manifest in the film’s form: dream and reality converge and do not neatly separate. Before the title and opening credits emerge onscreen, a point-of-view shot jerks around the blurry contours of a room, as heaving breaths emanate from the soundtrack, and the camera descends onto a pillow. We enter the dream, and it’s debatable as to whether Mulholland Drive ever completely pulls us into any waking consciousness.

One of several iconic American films — and a personal touchstone for David Lynch — that reverberates in Mulholland Drive is The Wizard of Oz, where the viewer is led to believe a teenage girl from Kansas is swept up by a tornado into a different realm. When Dorothy is told Oz, so much more vibrant than her sepia-toned home, was only a dream, she is adamant that the place to which she traveled was real. The narrative logic of The Wizard of Oz tells us that her journey was a dream; the experience of watching the film tells us that Oz was and remains real.

Betty (Naomi Watts) descends on an escalator into the Los Angeles International Airport with the undisguised glee and awe of a girl traveling over the rainbow. She has come to stay in her Aunt Ruth’s apartment while Ruth shoots a film on location, and Betty intends to become a movie star and a “great actress” during her time in Los Angeles. Her fate changes when she finds an unknown woman (Laura Elena Harring) in the apartment who survived a car crash and is struck with total memory loss. Calling herself “Rita” (after spotting a poster of the film Gilda starring Rita Hayworth), she possesses a purse filled with stacks of cash and a large key. Betty, excited by the mystery, enthusiastically devises a plan to discover her new identity — all while preparing for a big audition.

Meanwhile, in a storyline that may or may not be connected to Betty and Rita’s, a director named Adam Kesher (Justin Theroux) is hamstrung by shadowy forces, possibly linked to organized crime, who pressure him into casting an unknown actress named Camilla Rhodes as the star of his new film — when she comes to audition, he is forced to declare that “this is the girl.”

Rita remembers the name “Diane Selwyn,” and so they find Diane in the phone book and travel to her apartment, only for her and Rita to discover a rotting corpse in bed, curled in the fetal position. The horror draws them closer together: to disguise her identity, Rita begins to wear a blonde wig, of a similar style to Betty’s; they have sex later that night, and Betty whispers to Rita that she loves her. Rita has a late-night, unexplained revelation, and she takes Betty to the Club Silencio. Here, a virtuosic lip-synced performance by Rebekah del Rio holds such sway over them that they weep and shake, and a blue box materializes next to them that only Rita’s key can unlock.

What the box contains is a void; what the key opens is the door to another reality. Watts now plays Diane Selwyn, an embittered actress; Harring is Camilla Rhodes, a movie star who was Diane’s lover but left her for Adam Kesher. This world, seedier and more desperate than the mysterious movie-dream that preceded it, rhymes with that of Betty and Rita’s; resonances abound that suggest they are projections, mirror images of one another.

Lynch and director of photography Peter Deming tell the story of Betty and Rita with a camera that slowly floats up and down, seeming to possess a consciousness emanating from beyond the frame, but Lynch also guides the film with a linearity and a disciplined navigation of plot and subplot that suggests the film’s televisual roots. The opening of the box creates a new reality: the new story is fragmented; the order of events is no longer clear. The mystery of Rita’s identity is left unsolved, but new mysteries unfold — were Betty and Rita the dream of Diane Selwyn? Are Betty and Diane living in separate, parallel realities? Do they dream of each other? (And what to make of the soot-covered man living behind a diner, initially revealed early in the film in a harrowing scene seemingly disconnected from the main plot, then re-appearing at its close with the blue box in his possession?)

Logical meaning remains blurry, but one can follow a thread of cinematic resonances. Betty is Dorothy entering Oz; Rita makes herself the mysterious Gilda — and, like the actual Rita Hayworth, fashions a new identity out of whole cloth. When Betty enters the Paramount lot, beaming, she is Norma Desmond making her grand return; when she walks around Los Angeles in a trim gray suit, she is Kim Novak in Vertigo. The echoes of Hollywood’s Golden Age reverberate in the sprawling landscape of Los Angeles that Lynch captures, and they give the film a palimpsestic quality. Images of the past bubble up and are absorbed into the present, suggesting how the externalized dream of cinema seeps into our unconscious minds.

While the film launched years of speculation about its true meaning, Lynch, for his part, refused to explain. In an interview with Chris Rodley for his book Lynch on Lynch, reprinted in the Criterion Collection’s release of Mulholland Drive, Lynch said that the film’s viewers “really know for themselves what it’s about. I think that intuition — the detective in us — puts things together in a way that makes sense for us… I think people know what Mulholland Drive is to them, but they don’t trust it. They want to have someone else tell them.” The intricacies of meaning — the overlapping dream-states, the clues that seem to go nowhere but recur in unexpected ways, the doubling of characters and actors — converge in a way that does not result in a closed loop of narrative logic as in a film with a traditional three-act structure, but resonates on stranger, deeper levels. The film’s emotional truth, in any case, is captured obliquely in Lynch’s “synopsis” of the film in the same interview: “Part one: she found herself inside the perfect mystery. Part two: a sad illusion. Part three: love.”

Intellectual interpretation is available, and perhaps inevitable, but Lynch’s respect for the viewer’s “intuition” creates a filmic world with meanings that may not be rationally understood, but that are emotionally and sensorially apprehended. In Mulholland Drive, and across his unparalleled body of work, David Lynch opened a portal into the “dream space,” and asked whether we may already be living in the dream.


Part of Kicking the Canon — The Film Canon

Comments are closed.