Ranked by BBC Culture as the no.1 film since the year 2000, Mulholland Drive has fascinated and confounded viewers since it was released in 2001. The distinction is based on a poll the publication conducted, surveying 177 critics from all over the world.
“Some are newspaper or magazine reviewers, others write primarily for websites; academics and cinema curators are well-represented too,” it says on bbc.com. So there is a fair chance that this may actually be the global consensus. And this writer agrees.
Directed by the mystifying David Lynch, the neo-noir mystery Mulholland Drive is the second of a trio of movies dubbed (unofficially) “the LA trilogy.” The first is Lost Highway (1997) and the third is Inland Empire (2006).
Structured in similar ways, the three pictures have narratives that cannot be taken at face value and requires some level of interpretation to be understood. Each is heavy with philosophical references and allusions, as well as symbolisms and explorations of universal themes discreetly woven into the story.
This type of narrative is later distinguished as Lynchian, author David Foster Wallace defines the Lynchian style as “a particular kind of irony where the very macabre and the very mundane combine in such a way as to reveal the former’s perpetual containment within the latter.”
It’s confusing, it’s frustrating and it’s incredibly arousing.
And what appears to be the perfect balance can be found in Mulholland Drive. Lost Highway was not particularly macabre and Inland Empire simply took disturbing to a whole new otherworldly level. Mulholland Drive straddles it all right in the middle, with just the right amount of craziness to make its viewers go, “WTF am I watching,” but driven with the desire to finish the film in what would turn out to be a futile effort to gain some understanding of all those WTF moments.
Even the soundtrack is a work of genius. Aside from the eerily dark score, the song choices, particularly the ones performed at key scenes – Rebekah del Rio’s a cappella Spanish version of “Crying” called “Llorando,” sung at the pivotal Club Silencio sequence, and Connie Stevens’s “Sixteen Reasons” lipsynched at the audition sequence – were places so strategically that they could very well be their own characters and not just songs that the characters were miming to.
Mulholland Drive was a feat that has never been, and perhaps will never be, duplicated by any director. Employing a host of avant-garde techniques, including transitions that are either abrupt of nonexistent, nonlinear narration and intertextuality, the film neither feels convoluted nor absurd. An entire semester in film school can be spent just dissecting every nuance in the film and figuring out what they mean and/or allude to.
Dozens upon dozens of analyses have been published online. But to this day, even after repeated viewing, theories remain theories. While there are agreements among commentators and some interpretations are more widely accepted than others, there is still no definitive explanation of what Mulholland Drive really means.
Is it a simple tale about an aspiring Hollywood actress whose dreams and aspirations consumed her to spiral out of control? Is it a commentary on the Hollywood system as a whole? Was half of it just a dream? A fantasy? An illusion? A hallucination? Or is a tale that takes place solely within a criminal mind? What part of the movie is true, and which parts are made up? Is it all made up?
After seeing Mulholland Drive a few times and reading every possible interpretation and theory brought up online, this writer still isn’t convinced that we’ve truly figured it out. What if the clues have been misleading us all along? I suspect that we’re still missing a vital piece of this great Lynchian puzzle. Perhaps that piece isn’t meant to be found in the first place.
It’s the kind of mystery that – 15 years since its release – still makes one want to watch it all over again to look for more clues and restart the discussion. And that, my friends, is how a truly great film operates.