David Lynch's most-discussed feature. Originally pitched as a TV pilot, repurposed as a film whose central mystery the film deliberately refuses to resolve.
Hollywood, contemporary. A young aspiring actress, Betty Elms, arrives in Los Angeles to stay at her aunt's apartment while pursuing her career. She discovers a beautiful brunette woman in the apartment — a woman with no memory of her identity, who has survived a car accident on Mulholland Drive. The two women become close as they investigate the brunette's history. Betty's audition for a film role goes brilliantly. The investigation produces strange encounters with various Hollywood figures.
Roughly two-thirds into the film, the structure breaks. Betty and the brunette (who has been calling herself Rita) visit a midnight performance at the Club Silencio. A blue box appears in Rita's bag. Rita opens it. The film transitions into a different register entirely: Betty becomes Diane Selwyn, a failed actress who has hired a hitman to kill her former lover Camilla (the brunette). The remaining footage may be Diane's pre-suicide hallucination of the life she wanted. The film's structure is, deliberately, irreducible to single interpretation.
Mulholland Drive's structural strangeness has a specific production cause. David Lynch originally developed the material as an ABC television pilot. The pilot was rejected by the network in 2000 — Lynch's specific approach to the material (the slow pacing, the surrealist dream sequences, the refusal of conventional dramatic resolution) was not considered suitable for network broadcast. Lynch then secured additional financing from the French production company StudioCanal to reshape the existing footage and shoot additional material into a theatrical feature.
The film's structure reflects this production history. The first roughly 100 minutes are the TV pilot Lynch had originally produced — a Hollywood-noir investigation with the two women's relationship as the central dramatic engine. The final 47 minutes are the material Lynch shot specifically for the feature version. The transition between the two registers is the famous Club Silencio sequence; the structural break that has divided audiences and critics since the film's release is, in some sense, the literal production break.
The Club Silencio sequence — Betty and Rita visiting a strange midnight performance at a Spanish-language theatre on Sunset Boulevard — is the film's structural pivot. The sequence runs roughly twelve minutes. A magician on stage announces that everything is recorded, nothing is real, the orchestra is a recording, the singer is lip-synching to a pre-recorded vocal. A woman performs Roy Orbison's 'Crying' in Spanish ('Llorando'); she collapses halfway through; the vocal continues. Betty and Rita weep in the audience. Then Rita's purse produces a blue box. Rita opens it. The film changes.
The sequence is one of the most-discussed in modern American cinema. The lip-sync moment is, in some sense, the film's argument made literal — that the surface (the singer's performance) and the underlying truth (the pre-recorded vocal) are decoupled, that the audience has been responding to something that is not what it appears to be, and that the recognition of the decoupling is the structural turn the film requires. The sequence has been quoted, homaged, and referenced across decades of subsequent cinema.
Mulholland Drive's central mystery — what is the relationship between the first 100 minutes and the final 47 minutes — has been argued about for almost twenty-five years. The most-common interpretation is that the first section is Diane's pre-suicide fantasy of the life she wished she had lived (where she would be a successful actress, Camilla would be her devoted partner, the failed audition that ended their relationship would never have happened); the final section is the reality the fantasy was constructed against. Other interpretations propose more-elaborate structures: the entire film as Diane's dream, the entire film as competing realities, the film as a representation of Hollywood as a structural producer of broken identities.
Lynch has, across multiple interviews and appearances, refused to clarify the film's structure. He has stated that he wants the audience to do the interpretive work themselves. The deliberate ambiguity is, in some sense, the film's substance. Audiences who require resolution find Mulholland Drive frustrating; audiences who can sit with the ambiguity find it one of the most-rewarding films in late-20th-century cinema.