The film is nothing more than a study in gross self-indulgence and pretension.

Rating: 1/10 (11 October 2002)

A fine cast of journeyman actors is wasted in this dismal swamp of innuendo and surrealistic melodrama. Also wasted are an interesting beginning and an intriguing premise. At the film's opening, we see an attempted murder foiled by an automobile accident. The intended victim, Rita (Laura Elena Harring), a dark, mysterious beauty, escapes death but suffers from amnesia. When she is befriended by Betty (Naomi Watts), a perky blond who has just arrived from the Midwest (Deep River, Ontario) to seek fame and fortune in Hollywood, the film rapidly develops into a quest for personal identity and truth. United by the noble bonds of friendship, the two women intrepidly stalk the surreal streets and sun-drenched beautiful places of a Beverly Hills that is rife with danger and suspense. Lynch's ability to create an atmosphere thick with the fear of potential violence works well in the first quarter of the film, but toward the middle, bored by all of this innuendo, we eventually say "who cares?" Questions are raised, but none are answered. This is like taxation without representation.
The film's promising elements-mysterious lives in the haunts of the rich and famous-slowly, methodically, and ponderously dissolve like so much grease down the tubes with the Draino. Mulholland Drive becomes merely fodder for Lynch, the Great Trickster, who, in failing to invest his film with a heart, soul, and (worst of all) a brain, perpetrates the greatest outrage against his audience. By its robust ineptitude, the film mocks not only itself, in a self-referential chic, but also the people who have actually paid good money to see it.
One scene, in particular, is instructive. At one point, giving way to insomnia, the two friends, Betty (the blond) and the Rita (the brunette), who are by now also lovers, hail a cab that deposits them in the seedy side of town. Here a thin, cold winds blow discarded candy wrappers and the yellowed pages from ancient dailies to and fro. The scene is Lynch's Little Magic Theatre (aka the Club Silencio). The theatre is a cheesy old movie house unimaginatively converted into a kind of night club. Most of its tiered seats are unoccupied, as the Blond and the Brunette sit down together and look anxiously at the stage. Almost immediately, a sad sack of a woman is physically helped on to the stage. Perhaps she has stage fright or has read the script. A sonorous, plaintive ballad, sung in Spanish, begins to emerge from within this dowdy woman with misapplied makeup.
Though she looks like a fugitive from a Tijuana Red Light District, or from someone's (the director's?) nightmare, the soulful ballad works its melodious way into every nook and crevice of the theatre. Betty and Rita, apparently transfigured by the lyrics and melody, begin to cry so fluidly that makeup and mascara run, and Betty soon looks like Tammy Baker at a funeral.
But are the women crying because the song is so soulful, so beautiful, or because they are stuck contractually in this dismal bog of cinematic bi-polarism? At one point, Betty's chair contracts a severe case of Saint Vitas Dance, and threatens to hop, skip, and shudder its way to the back ward of the local hospital. (Shades of the Exorcist?) But Rita is ready with moral support and is able to subdue the chair, which, ashamed of its histrionics, settles back into its former existence as an uncomfortable seat in a cheap theatre. Once the obsessed chair is exorcised, we remind ourselves that more horrors await us, just around the shadowy corner. Perhaps the Bag-Man-Who-Looks-Like-A-Buddhist-Demon will pounce, showing a cavernous jaw filled with bad teeth and halitosis. Caution: Spoiler
This cheerful scene in Lynch's Magic Little Theatre ends when the zombie-like ballad singer finally collapses on the stage and two men, ticket taker and diabolical Master of Ceremonies, haul her unceremoniously off the stage. Well, at least she doesn't get the bum's rush. Strange thing is, though, the song continues. Behold, the deft stroke of the Mountebank! The song was not sung by the plump, odd woman with the bad hair and makeup. Apparently, the song is coming from a loudspeaker-appearance versus reality, perhaps? Well, gee, but hasn't this been done before, and so much better, in, say, Michelangelo Antonioni's Blowup (1966)-or scores of other more artful and accomplished films?