Mulholland Drive

Those words are spoken twice in Mulholland Drive, once at the beginning and once at the end. More than two hours pass between the two utterances, during which time we experience a kind of cinematic fugue state alongside the dual protagonists. It begins with a car crash on the eponymous road in the Hollywood Hills, leaving a woman who will soon call herself Rita (Laura Elena Harring) with amnesia; she takes her name after seeing a poster for Gilda’s Rita Hayworth on the wall of the nearby apartment she wanders into. That apartment is also where Betty (Naomi Watts) is staying while trying to make it big in Hollywood, putting the two women on a collision course that echoes predecessors like Sunset Boulevard and Persona while also being utterly nonpareil.

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Mulholland Drive isn’t a horror movie, but it is disturbing in a way that only a David Lynch project can be. Part of that is due to its origin as a television pilot. Lynch reassembled the original script into a feature after it wasn’t picked up; the result is one of the most mesmerizing films ever made, a neither/nor assemblage that’s somehow made more powerful by the fact that not all of its pieces fit together perfectly. Those jagged edges do fit together compellingly, though, which is more important.

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Lynch, whose passing would have been untimely had he lived to be 100, died last week at 78. His life and career divide the history of cinema into a before and after; his passing is to film what Picasso’s was to painting or Kafka’s was to literature. Countless imitators have followed in his wake, none of whom have crafted a dreamscape as convincingly surreal or as authentic to the actual experience of dreaming. That he only made one movie after this — 2006’s Inland Empire, which is monumental in its own right — is an even more damning indictment of Hollywood than Mulholland Drive itself.

Lynch had an uneasy relationship with the studio system dating back to his misbegotten Dune adaptation, which failed both critically and commercially. What bothered him most was that he didn’t have final cut on the project and wasn’t even allowed to fail on his own terms. Many of his subsequent projects were financed independently and/or internationally, with French financiers being especially simpatico; he was beloved at Cannes, where he won the Palme d’Or for Wild at Heart and Best Director for Mulholland Drive. None of his three Oscar nominations — for directing The Elephant Man, Blue Velvet, and Mulholland Drive — resulted in wins, though he did receive an Honorary Academy Award in 2019.

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No other filmmaker has ever had the same capacity to confuse and intrigue all at once. You’ll rarely be able to give a straightforward answer to a question as simple as “what’s going on?” the first time you watch Mulholland Drive, but that unknowing inspires you to keep following the breadcrumbs rather than retreat to safety. It’s strange in a way that invites you into its world rather than pushing you away, like a dream that feels incomprehensible when you first wake but slowly becomes vivid as you recall it throughout the day.

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Lynch’s most memorable protagonists embody wide-eyed optimism in the face of horror, a trait so intrinsic to his sensibility that one might reasonably assume it was shared by the man himself. Special Agent Dale Cooper of Twin Peaks has it, and so does Betty. Newly arrived in Los Angeles from Deep River, Ontario, she dreams of being thought of as a great actress but will settle for being a movie star — some people are lucky enough to be both, after all. Bright eyed and bushy tailed, she’s also wholly unprepared for what the Hollywood dream factory has in store for her.

So, for that matter, is her potential director. We’re introduced to Adam Kesher (Justin Theroux) at a meeting concerning the recasting of his leading lady, who’s exited The Sylvia North Story for reasons that are never stated. Unbeknownst to Adam is the fact that the final decision doesn’t rest with him but rather with a shadowy figure represented by two gangsters who are also in attendance at the sit-down, one of whom produces a headshot from a manilla envelope and ominously proclaims, “This is the girl.” When the filmmaker, unaware of what he’s gotten himself into, protests, he’s told simply, “It’s no longer your film.” One wonders if a studio executive ever spoke those words to Lynch.

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The film’s vibe is as wholesome as it is surreal, often within the same scene, a tension that typifies the adjective that has come to describe its director and his imitators: Lynchian. Mulholland Drive frequently has an aw-shucks sincerity to it one moment and a terrifying nonsequitur the next, with Betty’s naiveté serving as a kind of candy coating for some of the most unsettling imagery you’ll ever see.

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I first watched the movie on a laptop in my dorm room as a college freshman, which is both the ideal time and place to see it and something Lynch might not have been thrilled about. “If you’re playing the movie on a telephone,” he famously said of the small-screen experience, “you will never in a trillion years experience the film. You’ll think you have experienced it, but you’ll be cheated.” The movie utterly expanded my understanding of what the medium is capable of nevertheless, not least because I initially had no idea what happened in it. The website full of theories I visited that same night is still online, and though age and repeat viewings have made it fairly obvious that the classical interpretation is the correct one, the fact that disagreement remains is a testament to the movie’s phantasmagorical power.

That unknowing inspires you to keep following the breadcrumbs rather than retreat to safety.

One of Lynch’s most deeply held beliefs was the idea that understanding art on an emotional level is more important than analyzing it on an intellectual one. He refused to “explain” Mulholland Drive not to be willfully obscure but because he didn’t want to impose his views on the audience or deem any single interpretation “correct.” Mulholland Drive, like all his movies, isn’t an equation to be solved but a dream to be shared. He invoked this sentiment even more explicitly in Twin Peaks: The Return, with Monica Bellucci quoting the Upanishads to Gordon Cole (played, not coincidentally, by Lynch himself):

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“We are like the dreamer who dreams and then lives inside the dream. But who is the dreamer?”

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Try saying that five times fast. Then try applying its logic to Mulholland Drive, which is nothing if not a dream within a dream. Its most moving scene occurs near the end, just before a dramatic transition from one layer of reality to another. Betty and Rita visit Club Silencio and watch Rebekah Del Rio perform an a cappella rendition of “Llorando,” itself a Spanish-language cover of Roy Orbison’s “Crying.” The two women begin weeping, but not because Del Rio’s performance is so ominously heartbreaking. It’s because they’ve realized something about themselves, about the reality they may or may not inhabit, and about what happens next. That this revelation comes to them earlier than it does to us is significant: They are the dreamers who live inside the dream, a truth too sad and beautiful to be met with anything but tears.

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So no, we don’t stop here — we keep going, even and especially if we’re unsure of where the dream will take us.