Mulholland Drive (2001 film + 1999 Pilot)

 2001/1999, d. David Lynch - Hollywood Suite/youtube

At the end of 2021, when I did my New Year's Countdown...of Excellence, I really, really, really got a hankerin' to watch Mulholland Drive again, having not watched it since the early 2000s.  As i was researching films to watch for the New Year's Countdown  (within the weird confines I gave myself), I came across BBC's list of "Best Films of the 21st Century"upon which Mulholland Drive sat at the top.  I mean, I recall really liking Mulholland Drive, but the best of the past 20 years?  It's so subjective and arbitrary, these lists, the ranking doesn't mean anything, really, except that the film consistently made it high in rankings across other lists as well.  So yeah, I needed to give it another watch, but it didn't fit my requirements for the Countdown.

Over the next six weeks I would start the film twice, making it minutes into the film before some distraction or another would pull me away.  I rarely have 2 1/2 hours to myself, and these kind of head trip movies (and Lynch films in general) aren't the wife's cuppa. 

Finally getting to the film, it's ... a rough start.  The swing dance competition that opens the film is just, completely, what-the-fuck inducing.  It looks cheap and corny, with it's puce backdrop and the multiple layers of swing-dancing couples and their shadows, accompanied by a subpar jazzy big band sound.  The sound fades into Angelo Badalamenti's ominous tones as a superimposed image tries to take focus, of a spotlit Naomi Watts, sometimes alone, crowned, sometimes accompanied by a largely smiling elderly couple.  Soft transition to fuscia bedsheets. Hard cut to a streetpost sign "Mulholland Dr." and a limo taking a trip at night along the drive. Credits and more haunting tones.

From here it's an array of strangeness as the attractive raven-haired passenger (Laura Elaine Herring) of the limo has a gun pulled on her, but is saved when a car full of drag racing teenagers crashes into the limo. She escapes, strolls down to Sunset Boulevard and eventually sneaks her way into the house of a departing traveller.  That traveller's neice, Betty (Watts) arrives from a flight to L.A., bright-eyed and bushy tailed, having travelled with the same elderly couple we saw briefly in the pre-credits opening.  Betty is staying at her aunt's place to make a go of becoming an actress, but finds the concussed woman there, who starts calling herself Rita, after seeing a Gloria poster in the apartment.  Polite Ontario native Betty doesn't see any issue with this stranger and seeks to help her out, especially upon learning she has amnesia.

The acting, at this stage, is very broad and soapy.  Twin Peaks also had very soap operatic sensibility to it, but I think Lynch was trying to pull more of a 50's cinema quality to the performances here.  Either way, it's varies from palatable to cringey. 

Betty and Rita have a few adventures in discovery in attempting to learn Rita's identity but Rita is clearly scared about what she might find, having a sense she is in danger.  Her only posession is a purse full of bundled cash and a chunky blue key.  At one point Rita remembers an name and upon investigating they find a dead woman in a house.  Rita is shocked and they return home where a freaked Rita tries cutting off all her hair (shortly thereafter adopting a blonde wig that looks not unlike Betty's hair). Bonded by the trauma they find a sense of trust and safety in each other and make love, Betty confessing to be in love with Rita.  Then, in the middle of the night, Rita convinces Betty to venture out to a theatre, where a very odd half-Spanish, half-English performance is occurring, where everything is recorded, nothing is what it seems.  A blue box appears, which seems to be the partner to the key Rita had.  Betty disappears before she can unlock the box.  And when the box is unlocked, it appears empty and Rita disappears.  Betty's aunt looks in, confused, as if she heard something, but nothing's there.

This is a drastic oversimplification of the plot of the film and really only takes us 3/4 through the film.

I've skipped over so much.  So, so much.  There's an early moment with two detectives at the scene of the crash.  There's a moment at a diner where a man explains to another man a troubling dream he had about that very same diner and that very same man, only to have his dream recreate itself. There's the introduction of the seemingly inept assassin (a strange bit of dark comedy), who later, after a series of phone calls, is hunting for Rita.  There's a whole subplot about a filmmaker, Adam (Justin Theroux), who is being manipulated by Hollywood mobsters into casting a particular woman in his film, and when he refuses, his life falls completely apart.  There's Betty's audition.  There's Adam's encounter with the cowboy.  There's the strange man in the hermetically sealed room who seems to control Hollywood by telephone.  There's... a lot of just seemingly unrelated bits in the first 2 hours of the film.

And then the blue box is opened with the blue key and everything shifts.  Suddenly Betty is Diane, the woman they found dead in her house earlier, and she's going through a breakup with Camilla, who we knew as Rita.  Camilla has fallen in love with Adam, her director, and Betty/Diane is not taking it well.   The narrative in this last half hour jumps back and forth in time, but if we're to follow, Betty/Diane finds out that Camilla/Rita is getting married to Adam at his dinner party on Mulholland Drive. She hires a hitman to kill Camilla, and he will leave her a blue key when the job is done.  Later we see Diane has the blue key and that detectives are looking for her.  There's a quick flash to a vagrant person who has the blue box from earlier, from which escapes the elderly couple from earlier but tiny little cackling monstrous versions of the elderly couple, who creep under the door of Diane's house and start driving her mad.  Diane kills herself.

The common interpretation of this is that the first 2 hours or so, is Diane's dream, that she, like Betty, came from Ontario to pursue acting, but where in her dream she seemed poised for stardom, in reality she's a struggling actor, landing only bit roles, maybe even turning to prostitution to get by.  Her romance with Camilla was very consuming, but Camilla was everything she wanted to be, and everything she wanted.  And then there's Adam, who came along and stole her love, so in her dream Adam is just subjected to humiliation after humiliation.  The elderly couple represent her demons, the ones who pushed her into seeking success but haunting her in failure.  In her dream, she saw the inevitable, that if she really killed Camilla, then should would die herself.

This "dream" narrative does make some sense.  Lynch said the conclusion to this film did come to him in a dream, there's the sequence of the man talking about his nightmare only to have it come to life, and there's lots of sleep imagery, starting with the fuschia bedsheets at the beginning which turns out to be Diane's bed later in the film.

But none of this really explains everything about the film, like what's the point of the hitman sequence and the black book?  The detectives only ever appear at the scene of the car crash, and aware of a missing female from the scene.  Diane's neighbour also appears in Diane's "dream", pretty much as she is, unchanged.  The cowboy appears to be attempting to wake Diane after Rita opens the blue box.  Who is the vagrant (let's say) person who frightens a man into unconsciousness in Diane's "dream" but then appears in Diane's reality but with the blue box from which escapes the menace of Diane's parents?  And after Diane dies, we see a similar overexposed image of Betty and Rita, superimposed, intercut with an image of the vagrant person, ending with the singer from Club Silencio whispering "Silencio".

Part of the wonder of the film is how it's hard to find a narrative that will actually satisfy everything we witness and hear in the film.  It has a dreamlike quality but is it really a story that partially takes place in a dream?  

What we know is Mulholland Drive started life as a pilot for ABC, but was not picked up.  Somehow this made it's way onto bootlegs, and the pilot can be found, in very poor condition, on youtube.  The pilot broaches 90 minutes in length, carries mostly the same plot, ending roughly after the discovery of the dead body.  The man's nightmare story in the diner is excised, and some other scenes are a tad longer or shorter (such as Betty leaving the airport, we only see the elderly woman briefly, and there's no communication between Betty and her).  There's another scene with the detectives which doesn't contribute a lot but at least makes use of Robert Forrester a little more.

Nothing about the pilot illuminates any of the secrets the film carries.  It's an intriguing archive piece, for sure, a complete alternative view of the Mulholland Drive story that emphasizes that all these disparate, weird pieces that the film just leaves hanging with a question mark would have been explored more (although, knowing Lynch, likely not in anything more satisfactory).  

Lynch repurposed the pilot into a feature, and it's amazing that it comes together as such, and doesn't feel like just a pilot with a tacked on resolution, which, ultimately, is exactly what it is.  But in examining the film for it's true story, its true meaning, the reality is, it's a film borne as a TV series with a whole slew of scenes that were setting up something more that will never bare fruit.  If they're puzzling, that's why.  Armed with meta knowledge, we're left to wonder what these things could have been.  

They're definitely intriguing, these now-vignettes of strange people, but they don't fit into the narrative of the film so uniformly.  That's part of the charm of the film, the uneasy marriage of all these elements into a whole.  Lynch compares his films to music, which are much more emotional than logical, he wants them to be about how they make you feel, less concerned about what sense they make if you think about them.  

If it were a TV show and we spent a year, or years, into the story only to learn that it was all a dream/metaphor for the trauma Diane had upon knowing she had her lover murdered, well, I wouldn't be too happy with that.  I'd be pissed.  So out of hand I want to reject this "dream interpretation".

I've been trying to push Mulholland Drive into a framework of multiple dimensions, that the vagrant person is a dimensional traveler, and that they know the soft points between the dimensions.  That Club Silencio is one gateway and that the blue box is a dimension hopping device.  It's a theory I have trouble hanging my hat on though, particularly because Diane's neighbour doesn't recognise Betty as looking exactly like Diane. Lynch started messing with dimensions with Twin Peaks: The Return and in the many ways Mulholland Drive feels like an extension of Lynch films prior, Twin Peaks: The Return often feels like an extension of Mulholland Falls as much as Twin Peaks.

Many look at the film as told from Betty/Diane's perspective, and the way it is presented as a film it can be seen from that standpoint, since Diane/Betty is the first character we see beyond the swing dancers.  But it the pilot, the first person we see is Rita/Camille, and it's perhaps then Rita/Camille's story as she suffers a concussion and falls asleep.  Perhaps it's all a dreamscape from start to finish, or a nightmare controlled by the vagrant woman.   

I don't think there's any logical answer to Mulholland Drive's story.  Lynch certainly doesn't want it to have a definitive answer.  He wants it to live as art does, to let the observer make their own choices and let their intuition and emotions guide them.   It's what makes it so fascinating to watch.  You can pick it apart, see all the clues, but you'll still come out unsure of any answer you might have wound up with.  

I think ultimately the message is, for all the vibrancy of Hollywood, there's a darker side to it, a place where dreams can become nightmares.  It's all recorded.  It's all just a metaphor.

Best film of the 2000s? No...but...maybe?