David Lynch's Darkest Fable - A Cryptic, Sublime Masterpiece

Rating: 10/10 (16 February 2016)

Mulholland Drive isn't a movie - it's a psychic experience. In order to appreciate and understand David Lynch's cryptic, sublime masterpiece your mind must first shift into an alternative mode of consciousness. If you do that then you'll be attuned to this divine puzzle.
Mulholland Drive is a masterful and hypnotic portrait of both the horror and beauty of being human and contains Lynch's sharpest observations so far. For me Mulholland rises way above Inland Empire which I felt was a bit self-indulgent. Mulholland Drive and Lost Highway are his best films, Blue Velvet and Wild at Heart follow close behind but these two have a certain dark vibe that I've never felt while watching any other film. David Lynch does EVIL very, very well, and he does it best in Mulholland Drive and Lost Highway, but especially well in Mulholland Drive. 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 the supportive elderly couple who initially wished her luck on her starry-eyed adventure in film-land and we also see the demonic vagrant guy who lives out the back of the diner - all reminders of the emotional ups and downs of pursuing the film dream in Hollywood.
The cowboy, the fifties dancing at the beginning, the film director, the hit-man; these are all stereotypes of Hollywood Movies; artifice. At the midnight theatre, we are reminded, "It's a tape, it's a tape;" artifice. Her perceived love for Rita / Camilla; 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 - like Saṃsāra - 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. At the end - the miniature elderly couple, so admiring initially in the car, now so deranged and small, that elderly couple represents her ego. She is driven over the line. Where is happiness? In this City of Dreams? Mulholland drive is a modern day, very intelligent Dharma from David Lynch, a very wise man.