what it's about

Rating: 10/10 (4 April 2003)

SPOILER: That is, if there can be a spoiler for a film that has so many interpretations. However, if everyone can agree that the central character (indeed, the ONLY character) has committed suicide, the film can only be interpreted as this soul's struggle in the bardo/afterlife to escape from that particular life, to let go of it after examining it and the karma it has accumulated. Regardless of one's view of the "afterlife" one must assume that the soul must go through some kind of hell to shed the personality and the human life's "sins" to be able to let go and enter "heaven". This is thought of in many religious traditions as a dream, the Big Sleep as it were, from which there is no awakening beyond liberation or rebirth. I believe that David Lynch has read, even studied, the Book of the Dead, and in this intensely spiritual film, has left the realm of human sleeping dreams of his other films, and entered the realm of the between-life state, in a most brilliant way that cannot be apprehended intellectually but, because it has been shown to be such a popular movie, is communicated directly and understood through the unconscious, the collective unconscious that knows the truth of this teaching.
There are some elements of the film that can only be understood through Mr. Lynch's unconscious, which is appropriate in that it is a personal meditation on death, first and foremost. Some elements are cinematic, some are probably riffs that Lynch and his collaborators came up with, coyote-like, cosmic jokes with no punch-lines, or a million punch-lines. The bardo is inhabited by demons and guides, sometimes cloaked in the same guise, like the old couple, who in life were probably someone the lost soul had flown into LA with, memories of the past life no longer filtered through the conscious memory of the living, but seen as just a dream, one that must be worked out for the soul to go onward.
The physical location of Mulholland Drive is very much a bardo for probably many souls, including this poor woman who came to Hollywood with hopes and ideals, fell into a lesbian affair with a woman whose career is taking off as hers is failing, and kills herself. How she deals with it afterwards is what Lynch's supremely important work is all about.