A promisory note for an explanation scarcely worth the effort of looking up

Rating: 7/10 (10 August 2002)

I was among those whose first reaction was "What the HELL was that all about?" But I didn't stop there. I cheated. I looked up the answers. Believe me, you don't want to know what I found out; the solution to all the riddles is remarkably dull. The only reason I couldn't have worked them out by myself, I think, is that I would have found it difficult to stoop so low as to come up with such a banal, catch-all explanation.
But for form's sake: beware, spoilers ahead.
The key is this: it's more or less all a dream. Yes, I know: people say that about "Lost Highway", too, yet anyone who has seen that movie and seriously thought about it knows they're wrong. The "alternate version" of the protagonist in "Lost Highway" is best thought of not as part of a randomly meandering dream, but as something real: a psychic projection of the hero's evil nature, or a doppleganger, or some such. (My money's on the first option, but whatever.) The horror in "Lost Highway" is that when the hero "turns into someone else" he really DOES turn into someone else; but here, the heroine merely "turns into someone else", i.e., fantasises about it. Big deal.
Nor is there any interesting explanation as to why these particular events form part of her dream, rather than other events. This second failing is just as serious as the first. Even if the vast central section of "Lost Highway" WAS all a mere dream, which it wasn't, there's still a cogent reason why any particular part of the dream is the way it is, determined by the parts of the story that AREN'T dreamt. Not so here. Why is the cowboy, someone Diane glimpses briefly at a party, such a sinister and powerful figure in the dream? No reason; he might just as easily not have appeared in the dream at all, and the role he played in the dream might just as easily have been played by some other randomly chosen person, or not played at all by anyone. Why is the blue box so important? No reason; it might just as well have been a blue elephant, or a toenail clipper. What's the significance of the face behind Winkie's who's "controlling everything"? None; he's just some homeless guy; even in the dream, he's a red herring.
Even leaving all this aside it's clear that this is a thin and flat film, a surprisingly bad and badly made work from someone whose previous two efforts ("Lost Highway" and "The Straight Story") had both been superb. Nothing stands out. It's as if Lynch is chewing used gum - and the reason for this, I think, is that the movie is all about Hollywood. "Lost Highway" awakened real fears. "Mulholland Drive" is something remote from any interesting human experience or human fantasy, full of actors and directors and agents, whom Lynch (being too close too) can't bring himself to be honest about, and people outside Hollywood can't recognise. Lynch is a strong enough director to make such material okay, marginally above average, sort of worth watching if you're in a charitable mood, but that's all he can do.