Mulholland Drive (film)
Mulholland Drive is a 2001 neo-noir mystery film written and directed by David Lynch. It follows an aspiring actress who arrives in Los Angeles, where she befriends a woman who is suffering from amnesia after a car accident. Several other vignettes and characters are shown, including a Hollywood director who must deal with mafia interference while casting his latest film.
The surrealist 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, ABC executives cancelled the proposed series. Lynch then secured funding from French production company StudioCanal to repurpose the footage into a film, for which he wrote an ending and filmed new material. The resulting film, edited and produced by Lynch's frequent collaborator Mary Sweeney, has left the film's events open to interpretation. Lynch's refusal to offer an explanation left audiences, critics, and even the film's own cast to speculate on its meaning. The film considerably boosted Watts' Hollywood profile and marked the last feature film role of veteran Hollywood star Ann Miller.
Mulholland Drive received critical acclaim, earning Lynch the Cannes Film Festival Award for Best Director and a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Director. It was also a moderate commercial success, grossing $20.1 million on a budget of $15 million.
It is frequently cited as one of the greatest films of the 21st century and among the best films of all time. The 2022 Sight and Sound Greatest Films of All Time critics' poll ranked it at No. 8, while the director's poll ranked it at No. 22. The BBC and IndieWire named it the best film of the 21st century, and the LA Film Critics Association listed it as the best film of the 2000s. In 2025, The New York Times ranked it at No. 2 on their list of the 100 Best Movies of the 21st Century, while The Ringer named Watts' performance as the greatest of the 21st century.
Plot
The film opens with brightly lit images of couples dancing the jitterbug, over which a young blonde woman appears smiling and being applauded. This is followed by a point-of-view shot descending toward a pillow as someone lies down.At night on Mulholland Drive, a brunette woman in an elegant evening dress narrowly escapes being shot by her chauffeur when another car crashes into them. Left with amnesia, she wanders into Los Angeles and hides in a vacant apartment. The next morning, she is discovered by Betty Elms, an aspiring actress newly arrived from Deep River, Ontario, to stay at her aunt's place. The brunette adopts the name "Rita" after seeing a poster of Rita Hayworth and recalls only that she is in danger. The two become friends and discover a blue key and a large sum of cash in Rita's purse.
A man eating at a diner with a friend recounts a nightmare in which he encounters a monstrous figure in the alley behind the diner. When he and his friend go outside to investigate, a homeless person covered in filth suddenly appears from around a corner and stares at him as predicted by his nightmare, and he collapses in shock.
Film director Adam Kesher is pressured by mob-connected businessmen to cast an unknown blonde, Camilla Rhodes, in his new project The Sylvia North Story. When he refuses, the mob shuts down production and freezes his accounts. He returns home to find his wife cheating on him, is beaten and thrown out of his house, and rejects a sexual advance from his assistant. A mysterious cowboy warns him to cast Camilla. Elsewhere, incompetent hitman Joe Messing botches a job, killing bystanders.
Rita remembers the name "Diane Selwyn" and Betty locates her address in a phone book. A seemingly psychic neighbor knocks on the apartment door, warning that "someone is in trouble", and the building manager Coco later cautions Betty about letting Rita stay. Betty leaves for an audition, where she performs marvelously; a casting agent is impressed and immediately brings her to Adam's audition for The Sylvia North Story. While Camilla auditions with a dull performance of "I've Told Ev'ry Little Star", Betty and Adam share a brief but intense glance before she slips away to keep her promise to meet Rita. Adam agrees to cast Camilla to please the mob.
Betty and Rita visit Diane's apartment complex. A neighbor who recently exchanged units with Diane says that she has not been seen in some time and directs them to her apartment. Inside, the two discover a woman's decomposing corpse on the bed. Shaken, they leave. Rita panics and tries to cut off her hair, but Betty disguises her with a blonde wig. That night, they have sex and Betty twice confesses she is in love, though Rita does not respond. They fall asleep, but Rita wakes them both up by chanting "silencio, no hay banda" in her sleep. Rita insists on visiting Club Silencio, where the host explains that there is no backing band and the performances are all pre-recorded. Betty and Rita cry as Rebekah Del Rio performs a Spanish rendition of "Crying", and Betty discovers a blue box in her purse that matches Rita's key. They return to the apartment, where Rita goes to unlock the box before she realizes that Betty has vanished. After unlocking the box, Rita also vanishes.
The narrative shifts to Diane, a depressed and struggling actress who looks exactly like Betty. She awakens in the bedroom where the corpse was found, and the neighbor who switched apartments with her comes to pick up her belongings, warning Diane that two detectives have been looking for her. As Diane moves through her morning in a daze, she recalls memories of her former lover Camilla, a femme fatale actress who resembles Rita. These memories include a volatile sexual encounter and breakup, being forced to witness Adam and Camilla kiss in front of her during a film rehearsal, a dinner party at Adam's house where Diane explains that she moved to Los Angeles with money inherited from her late aunt and that she lost the leading role in The Sylvia North Story to Camilla, and hiring Joe at the diner to kill Camilla. During the latter, Joe indicates that Diane will receive a blue key as confirmation that the hit was successful.
The homeless person behind the diner opens the blue box, releasing a tiny elderly couple who are laughing hystericallythe same couple who had accompanied Betty upon her arrival in Los Angeles. In the present, a traumatized Diane stares at the blue key on her coffee table. As she tries to ignore the repeated knocks at her door, she is terrorized by the elderly couple, who had entered from underneath the door and grew back to their full size. She runs into her bedroom and shoots herself, dying in the same position as the corpse discovered earlier. As the room fills with gunsmoke, Betty and Rita are shown smiling at each other. At Club Silencio, a blue-haired woman whispers "silencio".
Cast
Themes and interpretations
Giving the film only the tagline "A love story in the city of dreams", David Lynch refused to comment on Mulholland Drives 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.Dreams and alternative realities
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; unable to cope with the guilt, re-imagines her as the dependent, pliable amnesiac Rita. Clues to her inevitable demise, however, appear throughout her dream.This interpretation is similar to what Naomi Watts construed; in a 2001 interview, she stated that "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 paralleled 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 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."
Philosopher and film theorist Robert Sinnerbrink similarly notes that the images following Diane's apparent suicide undermine the "dream and reality" interpretation. After Diane shoots herself, the bed is consumed with smoke, and Betty and Rita are shown beaming at each other, after which a woman at Club Silencio whispers "silencio" as the screen fades to black. Sinnerbrink writes that the "concluding images float in an indeterminate zone between fantasy and reality, which is perhaps the genuinely metaphysical dimension of the cinematic image," also noting that it might be that the "last sequence comprises the fantasy images of Diane's dying consciousness, concluding with the real moment of her death: the final Silencio." Referring to the same sequence, film theorist Andrew Hageman notes that "the ninety-second coda that follows Betty/Diane's suicide is a cinematic space that persists after the curtain has dropped on her living consciousness, and this persistent space is the very theatre where the illusion of illusion is continually unmasked."
Film theorist David Roche writes that Lynch films do not simply tell detective stories, but rather force the audience into the role of becoming detectives themselves to make sense of the narratives, and that Mulholland Drive, like other Lynch films, frustrates "the spectator's need for a rational diegesis by playing on the spectator's mistake that narration is synonymous with diegesis." In Lynch's films, the spectator is always "one step behind narration" and thus "narration prevails over diegesis." Roche also notes that there are multiple mysteries in the film that ultimately go unanswered by the characters who meet dead ends, like Betty and Rita, or give in to pressures as Adam does. Although the audience still struggles to make sense of the stories, the characters are no longer trying to solve their mysteries. Roche concludes that Mulholland Drive is a mystery film not because it allows the audience to view the solution to a question, but the film itself is a mystery that is held together "by the spectator-detective's desire to make sense" of it.