Originally published November 2018

David Lynch is one of those unique filmmakers whose work can be so bizarre and mind-bending, you immediately know if you're watching one of his movies or shows. He's gotten a lot of flak for his 1980s rendition of the science-fiction classic, Dune. He's gotten a lot of praise for his influential 1990s TV show, Twin Peaks. He's even gotten an Oscar-nod for his bizarre crime mystery, Blue Velvet, with its iconic performances by Kyle McLaughlin and Dennis Hopper. Whether you like his work or not, you cannot deny how noteworthy it is, or the layers of depth that it manages to explore. Lynch's work often operates on so many different layers that you tend to notice something new every time you see it. The same can be said for my favorite film of his: Mulholland Drive.

It's difficult to write a review about a David Lynch movie. So difficult, in fact, it took me almost a year to get around to writing this, because I didn't know how I wanted to approach a movie like Mulholland Drive. A simple review format wouldn't do it justice. I needed a format of being able to just call out different moments and reasons why I like the movie, similar to how Fair or Foul works, but where I consider the movie mostly fair. Thus, to keep the What Did I Just Watch? feature from becoming the "bad movie" feature, let's break down what makes Mulholland Drive unique in the WDIJW format.

What Is It?

Mulholland Drive is a mystery thriller, sprinkled with moments of Lynchian comedy and metaphor. A young woman, who eventually goes by the name "Rita" (Laura Harring), who seems to be involved in some rotten business is on her way to an event when her limo is struck by a speeding car on Mulholland Drive, in Los Angeles. She manages to survive the crash but stumbles off in search of shelter having likely suffered a concussion and having forgotten who she is. She finds refuge in the vacant home of an actress but is not alone for long as the homeowner's niece, Betty (Naomi Watts), appears. Betty is trying to follow in the family’s footsteps by coming to Los Angeles to become an actress herself. Friendly and Canadian, rather than kicking out the confused stranger she finds in her aunt's house, she decides to help her find out what happened to her and discover her identity.

As they go along trying to solve the mystery, many other character side-stories take place, in true Lynchian fashion. There's a brief story with two guys at a diner discussing nightmares. There's a bumbling hitman who's very bad at his job and may be involved in the mystery of the young amnesic's identity. There's the film director who, after losing his job and walking in on his wife cheating on him, is being forced to make a movie a certain way by unknown forces and a mysterious cowboy.

As the story progresses, the two main women cross paths with some of these characters while fulfilling their own sub-plots. It's all relatively optimistic and lighthearted in its tone, until the sudden shift into ominous melancholy. A fair amount of the movie takes place in a bright and sunny setting. Even the scene where the hitman is killing someone is goofy and somewhat funny. However, in closed spaces, or dark areas, Lynch turns up the mystery and the tension with a big shift in the tone. By the end, the happier nature of the film slowly starts to slip away and is replaced by a dark, depressing atmosphere, as the mystery is revealed.

What Makes it Stand Out?

Direction and Tone

David Lynch has an innate ability to craft bizarre moments that are still somehow relatable to an audience that has no idea what's going on in his head. A lot of his side characters speak in circles or are very vague in their pieces of dialogue, but somehow their message is still able to come across relatively clearly. Part of this is accomplished through the screenplay and part of this is done through the direction.

Where Lynch's directing ability really shines is in how he's able to control the tone of the scene. In an early scene with two guys talking at a diner, one guy is telling his friend about a nightmare he had, yet he continues to smile between sentences in an uncanny way. The friend who is listening is interested, but also a little confused about the dialogue taking place. The conversation is dark and ominous, but also well-lit with the smiley friend coming across as relatively docile, happy, and maybe a little fearful. When they leave the diner, it's still bright out, but the fear is much more present on the man's face as they walk towards something he remembers from his dream.

Likewise, there's a scene where the film director heads out to this empty ranch and meets a mysterious cowboy late at night for reasons he doesn't yet know. He's snarky and a little perturbed about the whole fact that he has to come out to this random location and talk to this soft-spoken, mysterious cowboy about the movie he's trying to make. The conversation starts off in the director's favor with him just being sarcastic about everything, with still a layer of ominous tension floating underneath the conversation. Then the cowboy makes a veiled threat and the conversation shifts in his favor, with that layer of tension rising up to the surface.

There are many scenes like these with the main characters as well, where the tone of the scene jumps in a drastic but natural way. The ending is the culmination of all of these moments with the tone going back and forth between happy and sad in a sudden, seamless fashion, as a romantic relationship quickly falls to pieces and the spurned lover tumbles through different emotions all at once. What's more is that, while most of the movie is brightly lit as a sunny day in Los Angeles, as the movie progresses towards the end, more and more of it becomes darker. The lighting, the setting, and the colors of the scenes are all directly affected by the underlying tones of the movie. There are a few daytime scenes towards the end, but the colors are a darker shade and with less of a glow than in earlier sections of the movie.

Great Acting

This was the movie that propelled Naomi Watts' career, and for good reason. Before Mulholland Drive, she had experienced a small amount of film success with supporting roles and a few moments as a lead. However, it wasn't enough to keep her working in Hollywood and she was about to return to Australia before she landed the part in Mulholland Drive. We see a great deal of range from Watts in this movie as she practically plays two different characters. Her performance only briefly reaches the levels of intense screams she does in the horror movies she's been in, but the intensity is still there, bubbling beneath the surface in particular moments. She portrays a happy, optimistic, almost naive individual who just wants to go and live the dream in Hollywood. When she gets an audition for the part, she takes a completely different approach than what we expect and it becomes far more sensual than any of her practice sessions suggested. Later on, when things get more and more serious, she's able to convey the intense emotions her character is having without letting them explode out in an overly dramatic fashion. In fact, it's the way that you can see her forcing her emotions back down that make them even more intense.

And it's not just Watts who does a commendable job. The supporting cast of characters all fit really well into this bizarre Lynchian experience in their own ways. Justin Theroux, who plays the film director, manages to go through his own range of emotions in the film with different levels and methods of displaying his anger and frustration in the moment, while still going about with an air of superiority and sass. The smaller side characters who appear for only a scene or two are all played by actors who probably didn't have a ton of exposure or experience by this point in their careers but still managed to convey a weirdness or creepiness that Lynch often seems to strive for. A standout that always comes to mind when thinking of this movie is the creepy cowboy. His cadence and presence on-screen manage to convey a quiet intimidation that is perfect for this character. A mostly unknown actor who has had only 2 acting roles, according to IMDB.com, Monty Mongomery is brilliant at adding some mystery and tension to the whole experience in his performance as a character who is mostly just in one scene.

The Ending

If you still haven't seen Mulholland Drive by this point and you don't want anything spoiled, skip the rest of the review, because I want to talk about how Lynch manages to take an ending that would normally be seen as a cop-out or cliché and manages to make it all work. When I first watched Mulholland Drive, I didn't know what was really happening and was just chuckling to myself about how "David Lynch" the whole experience was. I was unprepared for the ending to work as well as it did and made me truly consider every event in the movie leading up to that moment. When a movie, or book, or game does something like this, even if I didn't necessarily like the experience, I still have to give credit for being able to pull me in enough to make me think about it so much. Luckily, I still like Mulholland Drive, so going back over everything when I watched it again made it that much more fascinating. What's so special about the ending?

There are multiple theories as to what really happens in the movie and each can be argued in their own way, but I'm going to stick with the most common one. To sum it up in an unflattering way, it's one of those endings where the entire movie up to a certain point was something of a dream sequence. This doesn't sound like anything special, right? Well, Lynch's execution of it, the fact that little details have been sprinkled throughout the movie as foreshadowing clues, and the surreal moments in a somewhat abstract mystery help tie it all together in a mind-bending, satisfying way.

As I mentioned in my Before I Wake review, when a film is using dreams as its hook for storytelling, I'm immediately intrigued because of how surreal and weird it all can get. One of my criticisms of Before I Wake was the fact that the dreams themselves were too concrete and not abstract enough to take advantage of the premise. This is something I never have to worry about with Lynch. David Lynch's stories have a tendency to get so weird and abstract every time, each one might as well be one long dream sequence. Mulholland Drive, to my knowledge, is the only one where the fact that it was "all a dream" is so apparent.

The reason it works for Mulholland Drive so well is that Lynch's abstract style practically asks the viewer to fill in the gaps around the symbolism of everything. The weirdness that occurs is an invitation for the viewer to make sense of what's going on, so making it a dream allows us to suspend our disbelief and connect the dots a bit. I could sit here and write a 5000-word essay about every little detail in the ending that is manifested in the "dream" part of the movie and why it works. The blue key, the little blue box it unlocks, the darkness within the box, the dead body they find, the director's conversation with the cowboy, the trip to the late-night club, the conversations in the diner, the hitman and why he sucks at his job, and the fact that Betty was able to nail her audition without any help from Rita are all examples of details in the story that gain some new significance through the ending and through the understanding that the dreams are from the mind of a deranged and guilty person.

If the movie did not end with the old cliché of being a dream, it would have just been a bizarre adventure through Los Angeles and someone would have had to write a proper ending to the various mysteries that were taking place. Since this was originally going to be a pilot for a Twin Peaks-type show, perhaps those mysteries were going to be solved at a later time and the dream conclusion was slapped on at the last minute. Whether it was a last-minute decision, or it was the plan all along, I think it works pretty well, regardless.

TL;DR (Conclusion)

Part of me wants to just rant and rave about the ending and how every little detail scattered throughout Mulholland Drive has some sort of significance, but that's better left for a podcast or for someone's own viewing. Mulholland Drive was something I had always intended to watch and I was unprepared for how much I would end up enjoying it when I finally did see it. It may still be a bit too weird for the average viewer, but I think it manages to hit all the right of a mystery thriller in a surreal setting.

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