Enlightenment!

Rating: 10/10 (1 November 2006)

Mulholland Drive is a beautiful, masterful and hypnotic portrait of the human condition and contains Lynch's sharpest observations so far. David Lynch is a practitioner of transcendental meditation and clearly presents within this film a deep understanding of Eastern concepts regarding states of consciousness, desire, ego, greed, love and death.
This is what it's about: It is about IDENTITY. We follow the adventure of a woman submerged in Western ignorance, pursuing a dream that is in fact a nightmare. She wants to be an actress. "Mulholland Drive" itself refers to the winding road on the outskirts of L.A., like the life of the protagonist, winding, unpredictable, with steep cliffs, what's around the corner? The tagline, "A love story in the City of Dreams," presents the ultimate in human weakness; ego, desire, greed. For as long as she is pursuing ego, desire and greed, she is moving further away from her real identity. When she dies we see images of her parents, a reminder of her real identity.
The cowboy, the fifties dancing at the beginning, the film director, the hit-man; these are all stereotypes of Hollywood Movies; artifice. At the theatre, we are reminded, "It's a tape, it's a tape;" artifice. Her perceived love; artifice, dazzled by surface charm and fake smiles. For as long as she pursues the life of an actress she is living artificially, she is not her own IDENTITY. The amnesia: she forgets who she is! The film ends where it begins, yet she can't figure out how to escape this CYCLE - get it..? The hit-man shoots the cleaner, the vacuum cleaner sets off the fire alarm... a chain of events a bit like karmic cause and effect, no?
Surrounding her is the private nightmare she herself created, in the pursuit of desire and ego. Those miniature old people, so admiring before in the car, now so deranged and small, those old people are her ego. She is driven over the line. Where is happiness? In this City of Dreams? Or in reality? Mulholland drive is a modern day, very intelligent Dharma from David Lynch, a very wise man.