A Brilliant Postmodern Tour-de-Force

Rating: 10/10 (7 February 2002)

A riveting and innovative meta-cinematic masterpiece! In true postmodern fashion, this film brilliantly explores the narcissistic and schizophrenic nature of Hollywood and the human individual. A complex and labyrinth of love, naivete, heartache, broken dreams (literal and metaphoric), unfixed identities and plot twists, Mulholland Drive encourages multiple viewings as it is itself comprised of multiple meanings.
Equally multiple are the paralleled layers of identity and reality in this film. Drive mirrors the film industry which reflects our own dream worlds, our reconstructions of ourselves and our realities. The film seduces the members of its audience, changing them into riddle-solvers like Oedipa Maas in Thomas Pynchon's novel The Crying of Lot 49, and like Betty (Watts) and Rita (Harring) themselves. The audience, once its identity has been shifted into that of detective, tries to piece together and make sense out of Drive's ostensibly inexplicable connections and ever-shifting identities and occurrences. As the film eludes resolution, it leaves its audience wondering: is there such a thing as an authentic or fixed identity? Do demons and nightmares emerge, as they do for Diane, when we lose ourselves in our dream worlds (be they in the movies or in our own imaginations)? Or are fluid and multiple identities and realities perhaps more authentic and "real" than what we perceive as real? Moreover, does not having a fixed self or fixed reality offer the human individual a wealth of potential and possibilities? The surreal may not be all that bad after all, which may be what Lynch is hinting at in Drive. The two moments in the film that best encapsulate the value and dignity of the complex human individual are the love scene between Betty and Rita, rendered with utmost tenderness, and Del Toro's beautiful rendition of Roy Orbison's "Crying," which compels the audience to cry along with Betty and Rita and to cry at the simultaneous beauty and ugliness of human existence that Drive mirrors so well. The film's end seduces the audience one last time with a reminder, "Silencio...," but Mulholland Drive seduces us to be anything but silent about its noir world. Once it becomes your parallel universe, you will find yourself continuously driving through its labyrinth of multiple meanings and possible interpretations, reconstructing your reality again and again.