Mulholland Drive explained: Delving into David Lynch's masterpiece (2024)

"A mystery is one of the most beautiful things in the world," David Lynch once said. If that's true, watching his 2001 masterwork, Mulholland Drive, must feel like falling in love.

A film noir that's really a love story that's really a nightmare, it's continued to confound and seduce audiences in equal measure, having torn the critical sphere apart when it first premiered at the Cannes Film Festival. Lynch won Cannes' Best Director Award (shared with Joel Coen for The Man Who Wasn't There), while The New York Observer's Rex Reed called it a "load of moronic and incoherent garbage" – the worst movie he'd seen that year.

Now, Mulholland Drive sits at the top of the BBC's poll of the greatest films of the century and was the second movie made after 1990 to feature in Sight and Sound's poll of the all-time greatest films (ranked 28, shortly below In the Mood for Love).

Watch Mulholland Drive on Prime Video

Like all great mysteries, Lynch's movie looks almost tame at a glance, only revealing the true sharpness of its teeth when it's arguably too late to back out.

At the start, we meet a dark-haired woman (Laura Elena Harring), every bit the femme fatale, who's the sole survivor of a terrible limo crash on the titular, winding Los Angeles road. She has no memory of who she is.

In shock, she wanders into an apartment, where a woman named Betty Elms (Naomi Watts) lives – a fresh-faced newcomer from Deep River, Ontario, looking for a piece of the Hollywood pie. Betty, her heart as golden as her locks, dedicates herself to helping this mysterious woman, who borrows the name Rita from Rita Hayworth, after spotting a poster for the 1946 classic Gilda.

Meanwhile, a film director, Adam Kesher (Justin Theroux), watches his life spiral out of control after a shadowy figure, Mr Roque (Michael J Anderson), demands he cast an unknown actress named Camilla Rhodes (Melissa George) as the lead in his new movie.

At the start of Mulholland Drive's final act, Betty and Rita find themselves inexplicably drawn to a nightclub by the name of Club Silencio, where haunted performers mime along to pre-recorded tracks. It's here that the narrative finally unspools.

In the following scenes, not all of them in order, we learn the truth about Betty: she's the fevered creation of a heartbroken Diane Selwyn (Watts), who was rejected by a woman named Camilla Rhodes (Harring), who in turn announced her engagement to a director named Adam Kesher.

Diane orders a hit on Camilla but is driven mad by the guilt. She takes a gun from her bedside table and turns it on herself. Of course, anyone who's seen Mulholland Drive will understand how rudimentary a synopsis that is.

Some consider the movie to be the ultimate culmination of all of Lynch's obsessions – blended identities, an attraction to and revulsion towards the filmmaking machine, the distortion of reality through dreams, the potential of alternate dimensions, and the deep paranoia that runs through the mundane.

Whatever the case, its true meaning has continued to elude even the most dedicated of cinephiles.

Mulholland Drive – like Lynch's Twin Peaks, Lost or Christopher Nolan's Memento – sits at the crest of a wave of puzzle-box narratives, whose popularity has steadily been fuelled by the rise of internet forums and YouTube analysis. Harring, in 2017, told The Independent that she's personally received "letters from psychologists, from psychiatrists, from doctors who write a thesis on the meaning of Mulholland Drive".

Something about the movie seems to entice everyone, and anyone, to take on the role of amateur detective. Most agree though that the split narrative represents two sides of a dream.

Lynch's work, in one way or another, seems perpetually indebted to The Wizard of Oz – here, Diane pulls elements of her real life into the dream world, just as Dorothy Gale did with Oz ("you and you and you and you were there!").

The hit man, in Betty's world, completely botches the job. And, in an incongruous comedic sequence, we see him bumbling around, accidentally shooting a civilian as he attempts to cover up for his incompetence.

The mysterious brunette, unlike Camilla, is utterly devoted to our heroine, and the only reason Betty doesn't get the lead in the Sylvia North Story is due to an elaborate conspiracy. Diane, in her world, admits that "the director, he didn't think so much of me".

Betty represents Diane's lost innocence, the creation of a fractured mind attempting to shield itself from the degradation of the Hollywood machine.

Perhaps it's a once-naive Diane, then, that we see in the opening seconds, lit up bright and surrounded by a surrealist collage of dancing couples. She mentions, like Betty, at the party, that she first arrived to LA after winning a jitterbug contest. It's hard to believe the Diane we know now would have had any interest in swing dancing.

The infamous Winkie's Diner scene – where a separate, seemingly unrelated character named Dan (Patrick Fischler) describes a horrifying nightmare about a person he knows, or at least suspects, is behind the diner – hints at the terror of the unseen.

This uncanny figure, known only as The Bum (Bonnie Aarons, also famous for The Nun), represents the truth that Diane is attempting to suppress, the very thing that threatens to destabilise her self-constructed fantasy. It's significant that The Bum is later seen in possession of the blue box, the same object that the camera dives into when the movie finally breaks out of Betty's dream world.

There are a few other intrusions of reality along the way. The waitress at Winkie's Diner (Missy Crider) is called Diane, and looks strikingly similar to Watts. A neighbour, Louise Bonner (Lee Grant), turns up to Betty's door insisting that Betty isn't her actual name and that, "that one is in my room and she won't leave".

And, in the audition scene, where Betty reads with the lecherous Jimmy Katz (Chad Everett), an entirely different woman seems to emerge – not sweet and maudlin like the Betty we saw rehearsing lines with Rita, but in full command of her own emotions.

Is this Diane? Watts herself, even? After all, this is the role that transformed her career. She was on the verge of quitting before Lynch called her in for a meeting, purely on the basis of her headshot. "I saw someone who had a beautiful soul," Lynch later told the Los Angeles Times.

"There is no band. It's all recorded. It is an illusion," Club Silencio's Magician (Richard Green) proclaims. Moments later, Betty has some sort of fit, as if her body were trying to physically reject the truth of how easily we are fooled by artifice.

"I think he's talking a lot about the ego,” Harring herself has mused. "How much we suffer when we compare ourselves to other people. I think that the dead body at the end is the death of the ego, and how we can really be free at the end."

But, as philosopher Robert Sinnerbrink has pointed out, subscribing to the idea that Betty's narrative is a dream doesn't necessarily mean that what we see of Diane is "objective reality".

The order is still jumbled. Certain moments seem hard to believe, like the way Camilla so openly toys with Diane by kissing a blonde woman (George) at the dinner party, in front of Adam and all her well-to-do guests.

Does Lynch himself know the truth contained in his own movie? Potentially not. Mulholland Drive seems to have come together almost by magic – originally intended to be a spin-off following Twin Peaks's Audrey Horne (Sherilyn Fenn), as she set off to seek Hollywood fame and fortune, it would run alongside the show's third season.

There was, of course, no third season of Twin Peaks until 2017, so Lynch retooled its story and shot a 90-minute pilot for ABC, which an executive reportedly watched standing up at 6am with a coffee in hand and cancelled on the spot.

StudioCanal instead offered to buy the rights to Mulholland Drive and gave Lynch $7 million to turn it into a feature film. "I had zero idea how I was going to do that, so it was a time of high anxiety," the director told Filmmaker Magazine.

"One night, I sat down, the ideas came in, and it was a most beautiful experience. Everything was seen from a different angle. They came out of a kind of darkness and made themselves known."

When Theroux later badgered him with questions on set, Lynch would answer only with, "I don't know, buddy. But let's find out".

As the actor later described: "He wasn't being cute or cheeky or evasive – he genuinely didn't know. It's like you're on an escalator into a cloud with him, you never know where the escalator lets off."

Mulholland Drive is available to watch on Prime Video, iTunes and other digital retailers.