Mulholland Dr. (2001)

May 16, 2001 (Cannes), October 12, 2001, release date

Directed by David Lynch

Screenplay by David Lynch

Music by Angelo Badalamenti

Edited by Mary Sweeney

Cinematography by Peter Deming

Naomi Watts as Betty Elms, Diane Selwyn

Jeanne Bates as Irene

Dan Birnbaum as Irene’s companion

Robert Forster as Detective McKnight

Brent Briscoe as Detective Domgaard

Maya Bond as Aunt Ruth

Bonnie Aarons as the bum behind Winkie’s

Laura Elena Harring as Rita, Camilla Rhodes

Melissa George as Camilla Rhodes

Justin Theroux as Adam Kesher

Billy Ray Cyrus as the pool cleaner

Monty Montgomery/Lafayette Montgomery as the cowboy

Dan Hedaya and Angelo Badalementi as the Castigliani brothers

Michael J. Anderson as Mr. Roque

Joseph Kearney as Roque’s manservant

Ann Miller as Coco (the landlady and Adam’s mother)

Chad Everett as Jimmy Katz

Produced by Les Films Alain Sarde, Asymmetrical Productions, Babbo Inc. Canal+, The Picture Factory

Distributed by Universal Pictures

 Mulholland Dr. was released fourteen years ago this month. It still has the power to confound viewers. The director, David Lynch, has never offered any explanations about the film, which makes it more intriguing. I’ve seen it twice, and maybe two viewings are necessary for a film like this one that seems to offer viewers a look into a person’s mind at the moment of death. The mood of the film means everything, as was true of Winter’s Bone. David Lynch and Debra Granik created a noir mood for their respective films and stayed true to it and the story in each one.

(This blog post about Mulholland Dr. includes spoilers.)

Most of the film that takes place between the time that Betty’s head hits the pillow in the bedroom of her shoddy apartment and the time that she pulls out the gun from the bedside table takes place in the past. The film opens with a jitterbug sequence, with several dancers cut out to show more dancers and then more dancers again. Betty Elms, standing with an older man and a woman, is beaming. The next shot is a switch to a first-person point of view, with the camera moving into a bedroom with a bed, pink sheets, and a yellow or greenish-yellow blanket. Labored breathing is heard on the soundtrack as the camera moves into an extreme close-up on the pink pillowcase and then fades to black. That would be the moment when Betty’s head lands on the pillow.

Then everything is told from Betty’s point of view, but the way that she imagines recent past events in her life. The slow-tracking camera moves are first-person point-of-view shots from Betty’s point of view, but they seem to stop and linger before switching to the next shot. She seems to approach each set of events, then stop to re-imagine them with her revisionist memory. And as the movie progresses, it turns out that Betty has embellished some events with her own wishful thinking.

For instance, when she first meets Rita, her love interest, she is solicitous about her head wound and her loss of memory, which Rita sustained during a car accident. She wants to take care of Rita and help her regain her memory. The two of them eventually fall in love, and their relationship seems perfect, but slowly the truth intrudes. Betty may be trying to put a much more positive tone on her time in Hollywood, but the plot slowly reveals her self-deceptions.

In the final sequence, Betty is sitting in her shabby living room in a chenille bathrobe. She looks like she hasn’t slept in days. Incessant knocking on her front door distracts her, but she starts to hallucinate. Tiny versions of the older man and woman, who stood with Betty in the opening sequence of the film, are trying to crawl under her front door and they succeed. They become life-size and chase her, and she runs screaming to the bedroom, where she falls on the bed.

At this point, Mulholland Dr. is back in the present, back at the moment at the beginning of the film where Betty’s head hits the pillow. Everything between the first camera shot moving into Betty’s bedroom at the beginning of the film and this moment near the end of the film when she runs screaming into her bedroom is what makes up the plot: Betty’s musings on the most recent events in her life while she was in Hollywood. The very last scene brings the plot back to the club Silencio that Betty and Rita visited one night and where all the acts were prerecorded, where everything gave the illusion of happening in the present. The shot then switches to the lone spectator (an illusion of a woman because it’s a man dressed as a woman?) in the box at the club, who whispers the word silencio.

The word silencio means “silence” in Spanish, but it seemed to mean the moment of death in Mulholland Dr. The entire film seems to be the ultimate illusion: that everything that the audience sees and tries to put into a coherent narrative form is simply a representation of Betty’s musings at the moment of death. In this interpretation, the film succeeds beautifully. It does have a loose narrative structure because the character’s final musings involve the recent past and nothing more. But it has some fantastic moments that don’t seem quite so fantastic if the basic premise of the film is that almost everything the viewer sees exists solely in Betty’s mind.