Thoughts On Mulholland Drive (2001)

I still have the poster for the 'Mulholland Drive' preview that came to Madison, Wi. in 2001 up in my bathroom. At this point, I was already head-over-heels for David Lynch. I had been through 'Twin Peaks' at least three times and knew his films shot for shot. Watching 'Mulholland Drive' at that point was like hearing 'OK Computer' after spending two years immersed in 'The Bends'. It was terrific. Afterwards, as my friends and I convened in the lobby of the campus theater, the conversation was awkward and somewhere on the order of, "I don't know what the fuck that was all about, but it was amazing". I would see 'Mulholland Drive' four more times in theaters around Madison and many more on video. Needless to say, I've done a lot of explaining and dealt with random theories ("It's all about the cowboy", "It's all about the look Diane's neighbor gives Rita", "What about the two very different auditions Betty gives"?). The cut-and-paste timeline and surreal sequences have thrown us all for a loop, but subsequent viewings help make wonderful sense of it all.
Here's the plot as simply as it can be laid out: Diane Selwin is a small town girl who moves to LA with dreams of stardom. She meets another ambitious beauty, Camilla, on the audition circuit and there fast friendship turns to romance. Unfortunately, Diane's passionate love is no match for Camilla's ambition. Camilla quickly gets the career Diane and her dreamed of and cements it by dumping her for a hot, young director; Adam Kesher. With little left, Diane becomes sick with sadness and hires a man to kill Camilla. She then goes to sleep and has a vivid dream: Camilla survives a horrible car accident and becomes helpless with amnesia. Diane, now a ray-of-sunshine version of herself named Betty, takes her into her aunt's dream apartment and they hide out from the evil forces of Hollywood who are frantically trying to find Camilla. With one audition, Betty becomes a highly sought after talent in Hollywood, but gives it all up to help Camilla who now desperately needs her. When she awakes, Diane realizes that Camilla is dead. That night she becomes insane with remorse and takes her own life.
'Mulholland Drive' is classic Lynch. We again have a beautiful woman in trouble, dark humor, and intense nightmares. But the film also succeeds as a great statement on the nature of dreams. The film's final act gives us all the characters first laid out in the dream so that we can see what Diane did with them. In real life, she sits and listens to Adam Kesher laugh off his profitable divorce. In the dream, he's broken-hearted and humiliated by his wife's affair with the pool man (a hilarious Billy Ray Cyrus). In real life, he's a high-powered director who halted her career and stole her girlfriend. In the dream, he has control of his film and his life taken from him. Adam and Camilla's dinner party, which would prove Diane's undoing, becomes the most significant factor in her dream. The man staring at her over espresso would become the espresso-obsessed film broker during Kesher's unfortunate meeting in her dream. Kesher's mother, Coco, who treats Diane with pitying condescension, becomes a motherly landlord who looks out for her. And, of course, a brief glimpse of a cowboy would become a hilariously terrifying figure in Betty's Hollywood. Diane's dream would also transform the long, fateful limo ride to the party into a violent revenge on Camilla for breaking her heart. Her meeting with the hitman at Winkie's would later turn out to be both a hilarious sequence of a killing/robbery gone endlessly wrong and a brilliant scene about terrible nightmares coming true.
Maybe Lynch was railing against ABC for turning down the initial pilot that Lynch would have to re-shoot for a feature length film, but 'Mulholland Drive' is also an oddly genius satire on the absurdity of Holllywood politics. The Cowboy, the manipulative casting agent, the man with tiny head, and the mysterious phone calls are all objects of ridicule as it seems there's no logic or humanity in the way things work in tinseltown. We'll never know what kind of TV show Mulholland Drive would have made, but I thank god it didn't happen for it would have cost us arguably his best film. Look for the scene at Club Silencio, the look between Adam and Betty, and the botched hit for examples of cinematic gold.