a David Lynch masterpiece!

Rating: 10/10 (10 January 2002)

And I had thought Lynch was losing his fastball...
Mullholland Drive is the best 2001 movie I have seen.

Like a lot of Lynch movies, there are all sorts of loose ends lying around, characters who appear, and look like they may be important, and then vanish. There are a lot of characters like that in Mullholland Drive.

Mullholland Drive deals primarily with two female characters.
If you don't want any spoilers, you should stop reading.
OK, now I'll assume that you know the basic structure of the movie, that the movie starts with a brunette miraculously surviving a hit on Mullholland Drive and tumbling down the hills into LA, where she wanders with amnesia until she is taken under the wing of an absurdly perky young blonde aspiring actress named Betty. The two of them have some Nancy Drew-ish adventures aimed at determining the truth of the brunette's identity (she goes by Rita after she saw a movie poster of Rita Hayworth). These adventures include sneaking into the apartment of a "Diane Sellwyn", whom they discover dead, as well as a remarkable audition by the Betty character, in which she transforms herself instantly from a perky Canadian innocent blonde into a sultry, sin-ridden temptress. At the blink of an eye. And of course this part of the movie culminates with some fantasy lesbian sex, and a trip to a bizarre late night show "Silencio" where the actors appear to be saying things but everything is simply lip-synching.
Also, there is a running sub-plot with a director who looks like a possible David Lynch who loses control of his film, is forced by a sinister cowboy and the world's pickiest expresso drinker to film an actress named "Camilla" for the lead role in his movie. Also, his wife cheats on him with the pool guy.
Then...after Betty and Rita come back from the Silencio - poof Betty is gone. And then Rita opens a mysterious box with a mysterious key and disappears, too.
At which point the sinister cowboy knocks on the door and says "wake up", and suddenly "Betty" is Diane Sellwyn, a mousy actress wannabee with half the sex appeal of "Betty". She is having flashbacks to an affair with a woman named Camilla, who is "Rita". Camilla has dumped her for the same Lynchesque director we saw in the first half. He's practically the only constant from the two parts. There are a few scenes in which the bitterness of Diane is developed, and then she hires a hit man to take out Camilla. The hit man tells her that, when he's done, he'll leave the key at her apartment. The movie ends with Diane coming home and finding the key, and being plagued by demons who appear and drive her to suicide, where she dies in exactly the same position that the "Diane" corpse was found in the first half.
I subscribe somewhat to the "dream" interpretation of this movie. One structure which reviewers have tried to put on this film is that the entire movie is a dream sequence of Diane's, and that the first two-hour sequence is an extended fantasy of her denying her own identity and complicity in the murder of Camilla, including bring Camilla back as a woman in need, and Betty being a perky, yet sultry actress on her way to the top. The key appears repeatedly to try to bring Diane back to her reality, which finally occurs after the lesbian sex fantasy. Under this theory, the sequences after Diane wakes up include many flashbacks which Diane is experiencing as a "waking dream" as she drives herself to suicide.

I think there is a lot of truth to this: certainly the exagerrated characters in the first part have dreamlike qualities to them. Betty is essentially Nancy Drew: hopelessly perky, but ready to commit breaking and entering without a second thought. And throughout there are assorted quick stories which appear and disappear without a trace, the kind of narrative structure which is typical for a dream. The forces of evil are infinitely powerful and inscrutable, but bizarrely clad as Roy Rogers. And there is a sequence in which a guy tries to kill somebody, but make it look like a suicide, but runs into a sequence of absurd problems, the kind of thing which also happens a lot in a dream.
But there is some lack of fit to this theory. How is it that Betty and Rita break into Diane's apartment and discover her dead already, if it is Diane's dream? Is she dreaming her own suicide with pinpoint accuracy? And also the tail end of the movie includes many dreamlike elements, with Camilla magically appearing on Diane's couch, and tourist demons chasing Diane to her suicide.
If you need to fit a narrative structure to the events as an entire entity, probably the dream sequence theory is the best. But this is a Lynch movie after all. Think of an Escher drawing: there is no reason that there needs to be a "real" up and down to an Escher stairway, but our mind still needs to fit those dimensions to his looping monks. Similarly, there is so much inter-reference between the two parts of the movie that I am tempted to treat the whole thing as an extended sexual fantasy of the director character, who is himself merely Lynch in disguise.