David Lynch's 'Mulholland Drive' explained (2024)

After a few decades of baffling audiences with the likes of Eraserhead, Twin Peaks and Lost Highway, David Lynch ramped things up a notch with 2001’s Mulholland Drive, which has confused and enthralled audiences for over 20 years.

Beginning with Twin Peaks, Lynch has frequently returned to the theme of troubled female characters throughout his work, with Mulholland Drive featuring two – or four, depending on how you look at it. Naomi Watts gives a career-defining performance as Betty/Diane, as does Laura Harring as Rita/Camilla. The film is noted for its nonlinear plot line, with the characters shifting identities by its end. A plethora of bizarre characters and subplots, surrealist imagery and ambiguous dialogue define Mulholland Drive, making it one of Lynch’s most challenging films for viewers to wrap their heads around.

So, what does Mulholland Drive mean? Of course, the film is open to interpretation, and there are no set answers to the many questions that Lynch’s masterpiece poses. Even the director has been notoriously secretive about revealing his intentions behind creating the movie, leaving audiences to attempt to decipher his absurdist puzzle. Mulholland Drive is stylish and sophisticated, set against the backdrop of glamorous Hollywood. Yet, this setting slowly unravels as the film progresses, revealing the cracks in the movie industry’s cruel and unforgiving surface. At its core, Mulholland Drive is a film about the American Dream, one of Lynch’s favourite topics to explore within his work.

Mulholland Drive is divided into two realms: reality and Diane’s dream world. The dream world comes first, although clues that we’re witnessing an idealised fantasy are dropped throughout, with these motifs, such as a blue key or the homeless character, appearing in both worlds. We are introduced to Diane as ‘Betty’ at the airport, arriving in Hollywood as a hopeful yet naive, wannabe actor. She takes residence in her aunt’s vacant house, where Camilla appears as ‘Rita’ following a car accident on Mulholland Drive that has left her with amnesia. This sets up the perfect meeting between the two in Diane’s dream world. In reality, the pair had a sexual fling, although it meant much more to Diane than to Camilla, who flaunts her relationship with Adam, a director, in her face.

Thus, Diane exacts her revenge on Camilla by hiring a hitman to kill her, and her dream world allows her to play out a romantic life with her lover. Yet, the guilt that consumes Diane is frequently alluded to in the dream, with her anxieties manifested in the homeless character behind the diner or in Betty finding a dead body (later revealed to be Diane). Another excellent example of Diane’s dream highlighting her guilt is reflected in the scene where the hitman clumsily attempts to steal a phonebook, resulting in a darkly comic accidental killing sequence. For Diane, this fantasy provides a false hope that the hitman she hired will fail his task, quelling her guilt.

Back to the American Dream – a symbol of freedom and prosperity. When we meet Betty, she is ambitious and eager to immerse herself in Hollywood acting. She attends an audition where she impresses the casting agents, transforming into a seductress that starkly contrasts her childlike nature. In Betty’s world, she is talented and ready to take on Hollywood. In Diane’s real life, she has been chewed up and spat out by the star-making machine. Lynch comments on the artifice of the movie industry – the epitome of the American Dream. Diane’s hopes and dreams die in Hollywood shortly before she does, too. The American Dream’s offers are futile, and Diane learns this the hard way.

Lynch continues the thematic explorations of artificiality and deception in the Club Silencio scene, where a woman performs a Spanish version of Roy Orbison’s ‘Crying’ before collapsing. Yet the performance continues, causing Betty to convulse in her seat. Rita also sports a blonde wig to look like Betty, further blurring the lines between reality and fantasy.

The director comments on Hollywood’s reliance on stereotypes by making Betty the blonde ingenue and Rita the dark-haired neo-noir femme fatale. However, these tropes are continuously played with and flipped upside down, emphasising the contrived nature of Hollywood that attempts to spoonfed audiences familiar tropes as a form of comfort and escapism from the reality of society. Just as Diane uses fantasy to escape the crushing disappointment of her life – a failed case of the American Dream – Mulholland Drive suggests that audiences use movies to do the same.

The film ends with reality and fantasy merging and falling in on themselves. Rita’s mysterious blue key acts as a union between both worlds, transporting us into Diane’s bleakly tragic world. Once she kills herself in a moment of hallucination involving miniature versions of the elderly couple from the beginning of the film, the image of the homeless woman reappears, a final manifestation of Diane’s guilt. Then, a dreamy sequence depicting the two women’s faces overlayed on the Hollywood skyline appears. Perhaps the two can be together in death, but certainly not in life – that would be too good to be true.

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