#8 Mulholland Drive (Lynch) at 4-Star Theater

Since its release, this film has left audiences perplexed. Myself included. It’s often cited as the best film of the twenty-first century, a reputation that somehow coexists with the fact that most viewers don’t fully understand what the hell they just watched. Mulholland Drive (2001) is meant to be felt not understood.

I saw this as part of 4-Star Theater's celebration of David Lynch's birthday with a friend who had never seen the film. I failed to warn her that this was a two-and-a-half hour fever dream. In hindsight, that omission was very Lynchian.

Lynch was notoriously cagey about explaining his work, leaving viewers to interpret what the film was about. But the generally accepted reading of the plot is Diane Selwyn is an aspiring actress who comes to Los Angeles after winning a jitterbug contest and receiving an inheritance from her aunt. She falls in love with another actress, Camilla, who ultimately betrays her by sleeping with the director of the film they are working on together to advance her career. Diane spirals. She hires a hitman to kill Camilla. Overcome by guilt and despair, she eventually commits suicide in her apartment.

Everything else --- Betty and Rita, the cowboy, Winkie’s, Club Silencio, the blue box, the car crash --- are all fragments of Diane’s fugue state constructed to shield her from her unbearable reality. None of this is remotely clear until the final twenty minutes of the film. Or until a friend explains it to you. Or the denizens of Reddit do.

I’ve seen Mulholland Drive several times, but never in a theater. What surprised me most this time was watching it with an audience. Specifically, noticing when people laughed. I don’t think I’d ever found this film laugh out loud funny, but the crowd did. Often. The hitman scene got big laughs. So did Naomi Watts’s overacted performance as Betty. Even the sex scene drew laughter, especially after Betty asks, “Have you ever done this before?” and Rita replies, “I don’t know.”

This is one of the most analyzed films of the last twenty-five years. There are essays, diagrams, and dissertations devoted to it. I don’t have anything new to add to the dream interpretation. But seeing it in a theater, surrounded by other people, reminded me that the film’s power isn’t just in how it makes you feel but in how differently people experience it.

Mulholland Drive on Letterboxd