Mulholland Drive

Betty Elms (Naomi Watts) has arrived in Hollywood dreaming of being a star. But when she goes to stay at her Aunt’s apartment she finds it occupied by the lovely Rita (Laura Elena Harring) who has lost her memory and is terrified for her life. From the most basic of plots and narrative cliche, David Lynch furnishes a deeply troubling and deeply erotic investigation of Hollywood, a vision which has the logic and texture of a hallucinatory dream. Both Betty and Rita, and their alter egos, Diane and Camilla, embody competing versions of celebrity and fame: movies as success and Hollywood as destruction. But attempting to explain “Mulholland Drive” in linear terms is self-defeating. A continuation of Lynch’s ground-breaking work in “Blue Velvet”, “Twin Peaks” and “Lost Highway”, the surreal sequences in the film are never excessively melodramatic or ridiculous; they are often moving and chilling. Lynch creates a singularly impressive mise-en-scene of the unconscious which places him in the forefront of contemporary cinema. “Mulholland Drive” began as a pilot for a TV series. When the producers were alarmed by Lynch’s work, they cancelled the series. Fortunately, Lynch was able to eventually secure funding from European production sources. But this difficult genesis and production history has been written into the final film itself, where the Machiavellian game which is filmmaking in Hollywood is re-cast in stark visual metaphors of good and of evil. In Lynch’s universe, the Devil is a cowboy.