Not just images, landscape and logic buggery here

Rating: 10/10 (21 October 2003)

It begins with a jitterbug, ends with a suicide, and seems to spike through everything both hopeful and hopeless about L.A.'s film industry in between. David Lynch's Mulholland Dr. may very well be his single best achievement in noiresque narrative mixed with his trademark skips and jumps in logic. Brilliantly acted, shot, edited, mixed and scored, Mulholland Dr. may or may not make sense to what no doubt will be a bewildered viewer, but the images conveyed in the interim prove unforgettable.
Read about the plot in the "Plot Outline" link or in the external reviews by Roger Ebert, David Edelstein or Kenneth Turan. I want to present something else here: the notion that what you're seeing does, in fact, exhibit a logic and brilliantly plays on so many emotional levels that, taken as a whole, Mulholland Dr. can unsettle not just those who don't get it but, worse still, those who do.
So many reviewers use the term "dream" to describe this film, and Lynch himself cleverly quips the tagline "A love story in the city of dreams." I won't go into every detail in order to completely spoil someone else's first-time enjoyment of the film, but let me go far enough to ask that you consider that what's shown is a dream through most of the movie and that the rest is a mix of imagination, delusion, memory, guilt, and sheer disgust, all made to counter the illusions just shown to you.
Consider that much of what you're seeing isn't just coming from the mind of Lynch as filmmaker but from the dreamer as the one sometimes incorrectly interpreting L.A.'s lifestyle. Even Betty, the movie's heroine, refers to where she is as a "dream place."
Consider that the Club Silencio is where the dreamer reaches the closest point to realizing the truth without being told it, where the environment of the dream is revealed, where the song elucidates more than just a point about the dimensions of sight and sound when they're not real: it uncovers a true feeling underscoring the entire dream. The song is sung in Spanish, one more way to show that it's not completely real or understandable while, at the same time, it teems with a very real, underlying feeling that brought the dreamer to her dream and, later, to her unflinching, gruesome reality. It's as if the Spanish singer is speaking the emotion but in a way that keeps the dreamer from fully realizing it.
Consider that Betty and Rita, as the critics put it, are archetypes of the dream but that Laura Elena Harring's and Naomi Watts' characters in the end, after a jarring switch in identities, are also archetypes but, unfortunately, pale-faced reflections of what we know and what is true not just about Hollywood but about life in general. The movie isn't just about image or illusion. It embodies the always contradictory but yet congregational experiences of lust, greed, hatred, ambition, luck, vengeance, guilt, manipulation, storytelling, love, and silence. It shows us how one person's fortune can become another person's aching, how one person's jealousy can be another's nourishment. It also forces us to consider how you can be jealous of the one you love.
And, just as important, Mulholland Dr. should not merely be looked at as a puzzle whose pieces one can connect if one reads David Lynch's primer on the rear of the insert in the DVD package. Voluptuous images should be taken in and felt without deconstruction. The emotions being played out are very real whether or not the viewer truly understands the plot.
In all, David Lynch has created not just a memorable motion picture but a truly emotional experience.