Mulholland Drive (film)

Mulholland Drive (stylized as Mulholland Dr.) is a 2001 surrealist neo-noir mystery art film written and directed by David Lynch. Its plot follows an aspiring actress (Naomi Watts) who arrives in Los Angeles, where she befriends a woman (Laura Harring) who is suffering from amnesia after a car accident. The film follows several other vignettes and characters, including a Hollywood director (Justin Theroux) who encounters mob interference while casting for his latest film. Lynch's tagline for the film is "a love story in the city of dreams".

The film was originally conceived as a television pilot for ABC, with footage shot and edited in 1999 as an open-ended mystery. After viewing Lynch's cut, however, television executives cancelled the proposed TV series. Lynch then secured funding from French production company StudioCanal to make the material into a feature film, writing an ending to the project and filming new material. The resulting surrealist narrative has left the film's events open to interpretation. Lynch declined to offer an explanation, leaving audiences, critics, and even the film's own cast to speculate on its meaning.

Mulholland Drive earned Lynch the 2001 Cannes Film Festival Award for Best Director, as well as nomination for the Academy Award for Best Director for the film. The film boosted Watts' Hollywood profile considerably, and was the last feature film to star veteran Hollywood actress Ann Miller.

The film has received enduring critical acclaim and has been listed as one of the greatest films of all time. The 2022 Sight and Sound Greatest Films of All Time critics' poll ranked it at No. 8. The BBC and IndieWire ranked it the best film of the 21st century, and the LA Film Critics Association ranked it the best film of the 2000s.

A woman is about to be shot by her chauffeur, but is saved when a car crashes into them at night on Mulholland Drive. The woman is the sole survivor. Dazed, she hides in a vacant apartment. The next morning, Betty Elms, an aspiring actress from Deep River, Ontario, arrives at the apartment, which her aunt has lent her. She finds the woman, who has amnesia but remembers she is in danger. The woman adopts the name "Rita" from a Gilda poster featuring Rita Hayworth. Betty and Rita discover a large quantity of cash and a blue key in Rita's purse.

A man describes a recurring nightmare in which a horrific figure waits for him in the alley behind the Winkie's diner on Sunset Boulevard. His friend dismisses it, but the two investigate the alley anyway. The figure appears as predicted, and the man collapses in shock.

Film director Adam Kesher is threatened by mobsters who want him to cast unknown actress Camilla Rhodes as the lead in his new project, The Sylvia North Story. When he refuses, the mobsters shut down the production. Adam returns home and finds his wife in bed with another man. After a scuffle, his wife's lover throws him out of his own house. Adam's personal assistant offers sex, but he declines. He is pressured into meeting a cowboy, who urges him to cast Camilla for his own good. Elsewhere, incompetent hitman Joe Messing bungles a job, killing two people.

After meeting a waitress named "Diane" at Winkie's, Rita remembers the name "Diane Selwyn". Betty finds Diane's address in the phone book, but leaves for an audition, where she does marvelously. The casting agent brings her to meet Adam, who is auditioning actresses for The Sylvia North Story. The two lock eyes, but Betty flees after remembering she promised to meet Rita. Adam reluctantly casts Camilla to please the mob.

Betty and Rita visit Diane Selwyn's apartment and discover a woman's decomposing corpse in the bed. Horrified, Rita tries to cut her hair off, but Betty persuades her to instead wear a blonde wig similar to Betty's own hairstyle. They have sex and fall asleep, but Rita wakes them both up when she chants "silencio, no hay banda" (Spanish for "silence, there is no band") in her sleep.

Rita insists on visiting Club Silencio immediately. There, Betty and Rita watch a stage show in which a trumpeter and singer Rebekah Del Rio mime and lip-sync performances that are eventually revealed to have been pre-recorded. After Rebekah's performance, Betty discovers a blue box in her purse matching Rita's key, and they return home. Rita is about to unlock the box, but finds that Betty has vanished. After unlocking the box, Rita also vanishes.

Diane Selwyn, a depressed and struggling actress who looks exactly like Betty, awakens in the apartment Betty and Rita investigated. Her neighbor visits to pick up her things and warns that detectives are looking for Diane. Diane daydreams about Camilla Rhodes, a successful actress who looks exactly like Rita. She cries after recalling that Camilla broke up with her.

Camilla invites Diane to a party at Adam's house on Mulholland Drive. Diane tells Adam's mother that she moved to Los Angeles with money she inherited from her deceased aunt and that she met Camilla when they both auditioned for the lead in The Sylvia North Story. It is revealed that Adam cast Camilla as the lead in a film; that Adam and Camilla are now dating; and that Camilla ostensibly threw the party to announce their engagement. Camilla kisses a woman who looks exactly like the "Camilla Rhodes" sponsored by the mobsters. Diane shakes with rage.

Diane meets Joe Messing at Winkie's (where a waitress is named "Betty") and hires him to kill Camilla. He promises to leave Diane a blue key as a sign that the job is done. Later, a traumatized Diane stares at the blue key on her coffee table. Terrorized by hallucinations, she runs into her bedroom and shoots herself. At Club Silencio, a blue-haired woman whispers "silencio".

Giving the film only the tagline "A love story in the city of dreams", David Lynch refused to comment on Mulholland Drive's meaning or symbolism, leading to much discussion and multiple interpretations. The Christian Science Monitor film critic David Sterritt spoke with Lynch after the film screened at Cannes and wrote that the director "insisted that Mulholland Drive does tell a coherent, comprehensible story", unlike some of Lynch's earlier films like Lost Highway. On the other hand, Justin Theroux said of Lynch's feelings on the multiple meanings people perceive in the film, "I think he's genuinely happy for it to mean anything you want. He loves it when people come up with really bizarre interpretations. David works from his subconscious." The film was described as a neo-noir.

An early interpretation of the film uses dream analysis to argue that the first part is a dream of the real Diane Selwyn, who has cast her dream-self as the innocent and hopeful "Betty Elms", reconstructing her history and persona into something like an old Hollywood film. In the dream, Betty is successful, charming, and lives the fantasy life of a soon-to-be-famous actress. The remainder of the film presents Diane's real life, in which she has failed both personally and professionally. She arranges for Camilla, an ex-lover, to be killed, and unable to cope with the guilt, re-imagines her as the dependent, pliable amnesiac Rita. Clues to her inevitable demise, however, continue to appear throughout her dream.

This interpretation was similar to what Naomi Watts construed, when she said in an interview, "I thought Diane was the real character and that Betty was the person she wanted to be and had dreamed up. Rita is the damsel in distress and she's in absolute need of Betty, and Betty controls her as if she were a doll. Rita is Betty's fantasy of who she wants Camilla to be." Watts' own early experiences in Hollywood parallel those of Diane's. She endured some professional frustration before she became successful, auditioned for parts in which she did not believe, and encountered people who did not follow through with opportunities. She recalled, "There were a lot of promises, but nothing actually came off. I ran out of money and became quite lonely." Michael Wilmington of the Chicago Tribune found that "everything in Mulholland Drive is a nightmare. It's a portrayal of the Hollywood golden dream turning rancid, curdling into a poisonous stew of hatred, envy, sleazy compromise and soul-killing failure. This is the underbelly of our glamorous fantasies, and the area Lynch shows here is realistically portrayed."

The Guardian asked six well-known film critics for their own perceptions of the overall meaning in Mulholland Drive. Neil Roberts of The Sun and Tom Charity of Time Out subscribe to the theory that Betty is Diane's projection of a happier life. Roger Ebert and Jonathan Ross seem to accept this interpretation, but both hesitate to overanalyze the film. Ebert states, "There is no explanation. There may not even be a mystery." Ross observes that there are storylines that go nowhere: "Perhaps these were leftovers from the pilot it was originally intended to be, or perhaps these things are the non-sequiturs and subconscious of dreams." Philip French from The Observer sees it as an allusion to Hollywood tragedy, while Jane Douglas from the BBC rejects the theory of Betty's life as Diane's dream, but also warns against too much analysis.

Media theorist Siobhan Lyons similarly disagrees with the dream theory, arguing that it is a "superficial interpretation [which] undermines the strength of the absurdity of reality that often takes place in Lynch's universe." Instead, Lyons posits that Betty and Diane are in fact two different people who happen to look similar, a common motif among Hollywood starlets. In a similar interpretation, Betty and Rita and Diane and Camilla may exist in parallel universes that sometimes interconnect. Another theory offered is that the narrative is a Möbius strip. It was also suggested that the entire film takes place in a dream, yet the identity of the dreamer is unknown. Repeated references to beds, bedrooms and sleeping represent the influence of dreams. Rita falls asleep several times; in between these episodes, disconnected scenes such as the men having a conversation at Winkie's, Betty's arrival in Los Angeles and the bungled hit take place, suggesting that Rita may be dreaming them. The opening shot of the film zooms into a bed containing an unknown sleeper, instilling, according to film scholar Ruth Perlmutter, the necessity to question the reality of following events. Professor of dream studies Kelly Bulkeley argues that the early scene at the diner, being the only scene in which dreams or dreaming are explicitly mentioned, illustrates "revelatory truth and epistemological uncertainty in Lynch's film." The monstrous being from the dream, who is the subject of conversation of the men in Winkie's, reappears at the end of the film right before and after Diane commits suicide. Bulkeley asserts that the lone discussion of dreams in that scene presents an opening to "a new way of understanding everything that happens in the movie."