Mulholland Drive – (2001) Writer/director David Lynch’s suspenseful mystery is like an expressionistic painting/sculpture that cannot be understood in ordinary linear terms. It’s an illusion, a hallucination, a nightmare, a suicidal escape from unbearable reality.

A woman (Laura Elena Harring) is riding in the backseat of a limousine at night with two men upfront who stop the car and tell her – the driver pointing a pistol at her – to get out just as two cars full of wild kids coming from the opposite direction encounter the limousine, one of the cars hitting head on. Dazed with a head injury, the woman is the only survivor and leaves the scene of the accident with her purse. After walking down the hillside from Mulholland Dr into Hollywood, she stealthily enters the apartment of an older woman who is getting her bags to leave in a taxi. Betty Elms (Naomi Watts), a Canadian, arrives from the airport to spend time in her aunt’s apartment while her aunt is in Canada on a movie set; Coco (Ann Miller) knows of the arrangement and lets her in. Betty discovers the woman who calls herself Rita in the apartment; Rita admits that she actually doesn’t know her real name, having appropriated the name from a poster of Rita Hayworth. In her purse the two women find bundles of hundred-dollar bills and a blue triangular key. Two men meet at Winkie’s for breakfast, one telling the other of a repeated nightmare that takes place in the restaurant with both of them fearful of something, and then the dreamer experiences the nightmare for real.

Adam (Justin Theroux) is a film director who has a strange meeting in which he’s told he must accept Camilla Rhodes, a blonde actress, to play the lead in his current production; but he refuses. Outside he uses his golf club to bash in the windshield of the car belonging to two of the men with whom he’s just had a meeting. When he arrives at his home he finds his wife in bed with Gene Clean the pool cleaner. People are after him, shutting down his studio and his bank account; he’s told to meet The Cowboy who informs him that if Adam sees him only once more that will be good but twice will be bad. The only humorous incident involves two men who’ve previously known each other sharing a laugh before one murders the other but then has to kill two unexpected witnesses.

The patterns eventually fit neatly together like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that form an M.C. Escher drawing. As Betty and Rita sit in a booth at Winkie’s, the waitress’s name tag “Diane” triggers a memory of a name Rita recalls. After an eventful day in which Betty has made a unexpectedly startling impression during an audition for a part (note the earlier rehearsal for the movie role with Rita) and then gets introduced briefly to Adam while he’s directing his movie, she and Rita go in search of Diane but find a corpse. Betty accompanies Rita, at her insistence after waking from a dream in which she spoke Spanish, to a sparsely populated Spanish theater at 2 a.m. They watch the host demonstrate the illusion of musicians performing when the music is actually from a tape recorder. A woman singing Roy Orbison’s “Crying” in Spanish collapses on the stage with the voice continuing to sing. Inside Betty’s purse a blue cube appears. Back at Betty’s aunt’s apartment, Rita retrieves the blue key to try it on the blue cube, but Betty has disappeared; she then opens the cube. Betty becomes Diane, jealously in love with Camilla … Rita becomes Camilla, an actress and Adam’s fiancée … Coco becomes Adam’s mother. The Cowboy briefly appears in two additional scenes. Maybe it’s a movie about how actors can metamorphose from one character in one movie into another in another movie, their own lives becoming unreal in the process. Thus far, this is my favorite of David Lynch’s films.

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Copyright © 2007 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
Reproduced with the permission of the copyright holder.

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