Every Little Thing I Adore About 'Mulholland Drive'

Few contemporary films have accumulated the same warped shape of cult snowball that Mulholland Drive has managed to amass. From its opening frames, David Lynch’s magnum opus announces itself as something wholly singular- and spends the next two hours fucking with the fabric of the medium with delirious vision, delicious wit- and the impossible magnetism of a witching-hour séance that simply cannot be resisted.

While I loved the movie from the moment I first saw it as a teenager, it’s still grown on me massively over the years- and I want to stress that this is not because I ‘understand’ it better. If anything, this film’s fathomless depths have only further opened up into a mercurial sea of endless emotive readings- netting over all past ideas until each moment is rendered inexplicable by the sheer multitude of things it might express. This truly is an inexhaustible work, comparable to the modernist literature of the 20^th century at its most playfully wicked- and I expect that fresh generations will be falling in love with its dangerous dreams forevermore.

The delirious sworl of the opening scene- which so perfectly exemplifies Lynch’s dreamy process. Images and shapes collide in a manner that could have only been conceived deep in the subconscious- far beyond the reach of any real implied meaning. The power is in the images, not how they might be explained. I’ve always found this film isn’t a mystery to be solved but an enigma to be experienced- and the giddy headrush of its dancing prologue is a beautiful appetiser for the nightmare to follow…

I love how on-the-nose this pre-credits shot is: Emerging from one dream and descending into another. With an alluring shot of soft focus and striking POV, we know the film to follow is not quite of the waking world.

The title drop is such a raw, unforgettably simple image: A weathered road-sign charged with inimitable mystique by flashing lights and the ghoulish sound design crawling out of the void beyond. This is a textbook example of how to use the abstract to set an unshakable atmosphere for your movie.

I’ve always loved the rainbows of bloom beaming out of these car’s headlights. It’s a choice ‘realistic’ cinematography would have aimed to avoid, put to perfect use to give these vehicles a startling surreality as they scream through the inky streets. Little details can go a long way.

This has always been one of my favourite shots in the movie: The intensely artificial light just out of shot makes the whole world of the film seem staged and false, its characters’ fates rigged from the start. In the end, we’re all little figures in the devil’s dollhouse.

I mean really, who couldn’t love Robert Forster?

If your material is strong, then be daring with it. Lynch dreamt up this unforgettable diner scene and dropped it ten minutes into his movie, in spite of the fact it has no concrete relevance to the rest of the film. We cut to Rita sleeping afterwards and have to wonder: Was she dreaming this? Is that enough of a reason to include such a one-off in your movie? I think the resultant impact of this mortifying sequence is more than enough of an answer. The eerie floating camera throughout, never finding rest, is an ingeniously simple expansion of the done-to-death shot-reverse-shot formula.

Naomi Watts is brilliant in this film: Her unapologetically intentional acting is such a risky move, easily vulnerable to ridicule- but it compliments Lynch’s knowingly hokey dialogue wonderfully. From the moment she walks into the picture, something is off: And everyone involved commits to the act with irresistible conviction.

This delightful old couple suddenly twisting into a freaky-as-fuck entity in one cut through their wordless, gurning grins.

I’ve long been fascinated by the effect of not showing an actor’s face during a scene and this pivotal meeting between the two leads is a wonderful example: Rita’s whole body abstracted by a glass screen and Betty’s back turned to us. We feel right there in the room behind them- and yet excluded. Their blurred communication mirrors our own.

Context is everything: We’ve seen this kind of aerial angle a thousand times as a pillow shot in everything from action thrillers to rom-coms, but in the universe Mullholland Drive is building this genuinely feels like a quietly all-knowing eye in the sky, looking down at its fake little world.

There’s something silently sinister about this photograph looking directly into the camera. She knows we can see her.

Have always loved the way that the blocking and composition make this table feel a hell of a lot bigger than it actually is when we finally see them all in a wide.

Lynch’s delightfully absurd sense of humour is one of my absolute favourite things about his body of work and Mulholland Drive might be his funniest film to date. This dude’s barely audible, mumbled request for a napkin as he receives his highly recommended espresso kills me every time.

Seriously, this shit is hysterical. A little bit like how Kafka’s hellish bureaucratic nightmares were actually raucously funny to their author, sometimes Lynch’s skin-curling insanity lapses into total hilarity.

 This perfectly multi-layered composition. There’s a whole world in this shot- and every element of it is trapped within a glass screen.

Is it bad that it’s taken me this many years to realise that the dead dude’s hair sticks straight out along the path of the bullet because he’s put so much fucking gel in it? A fabulous detail.

It takes a real talent to capture a scene that’s both disturbing and funny at once. This woman’s defiant “no”s have always haunted me.

Really, who else would have thought of the hitman shooting the vacuum to cap off this scene? The absurdist escalation here reminds me a lot of the way Tarantino paced out Butch carefully choosing more and more ridiculous weapons during his escape in Pulp Fiction- but charged with a hell of a lot more playfully tragic humanity. This really is one of the best black comedy scenes ever shot- and much like the diner nightmare from earlier it barely has any real tether to the rest of the movie. But the material is strong, and we’re dreaming, so why not?

Theroux’s face in this moment always cracks me up. Like a kid caught by his parents- but too far gone to stop himself.

There’s something so distinctly Lynchian about the way this random blub flickers to life underneath that skull overlooking the corralle. Mulholland Drive feels like a career culmination, where the intuition he’d been cultivating with decades of experimentation with dream logic came together seamlessly. This image, an arcane concoction of the natural world and twisted human endeavour, has stayed with me since the first time I saw it.

I like the way that we’re shown a rehearsal of a soon-to-be pivotal audition scene with a totally different take on the performances, so that the eventual payoff becomes even more shocking.

The first time I ever saw Mulholland Drive, this was the scene that blew me away. After being puzzled for over an hour by the off-centre acting, this one sequence lifted up the curtain and revealed that it was all intentional. It’s a stunning moment of pure cinema and the way Lynch lets almost all of it breathe in this one achingly intimate close up is the perfect choice for this kind of lightning-in-a-bottle moment.

The way Betty drifts out of focus during this gorgeous push-in. Again, traditional cinematography dictates that shots should ideally stay in focus at all times- but the effect of briefly withholding clarity here is the cherry on top of a magnificent little moment.

As sinister as the context is, these 50s throwback pop tunes are always joyful.

“………..excellent choice Adam…”

The way a shrill string swell in the song so elegantly lines up with their twin ECU stares.

This bizarre pan Lynch throws in of the two guys staking out Rita’s old place. It’s such an odd, almost student-film feeling technique- but it works. At the end of the day, that’s the only thing that matters.

Again, this is technically a very primitive effect: But in the context of the scene, its use is unforgettable.

Here are these light blooms again, gifting an otherwise banal shot with so much more character.

This jarringly distant angle of their arrival at Club Silencio. Without a word, you instantly know shit is about to go down.

The way that in a scene where the mutation of sonic reality is so vital, we never hear the man’s stick hit the ground.

I’ve always adored Lynch’s penchant for using a simple editing trick to fade someone out of reality- and rarely has he used it more devilishly than here.

Even decades later, there really is something to be said for the audacity of Mulholland Drive essentially ripping its whole world apart for the final half hour. I feel again like this is something Lynch had been building confidence towards, getting closest with his previous Lost Highway and its similar narrative derail- but the effect of this film’s shocking reversal remains potent no matter how many times I see it. Seriously, who else does this? And who the hell else could pull it off?

How stagey the apartment now looks, almost exactly like a studio set. Is Betty a projection of this woman’s miserable life, attempting to escape through the medium of a ‘performance’ as an entirely different person- cruising the heady world of LA professional acting? Is the final act of the film a slow, agonising collapse of that fantasy, revealing the grim reality of so many people who trek to the city of angels with a head full of dreams and end up in the scrap-heap with a million other suckers who thought they could beat a system that was rigged from the start?

The way all the film’s listless little strands begin to flow together by the end, often in the most innocuous ways. It’s as if we’re tracing back a path of the everyday inspirations that made up what we’ve just seen: Both in Lynch and ‘Betty’s minds. Is the first ‘part’ of the film the illusion Club Silencio warned us about? Was it staring us in the face this whole time, as so often all things are?

By its extrasensory world-warping final moments, Mulholland Drive manages the rare feat of both clicking into the place and remaining tantalisingly unresolved. Lynch has spoken out against the idea that his films ‘make no sense’ by saying they all have their own internal logic- and this might be his most masterful stroke of dreamlike clarity. Packed with unforgettable moments strung along like shimmering pearls swimming in the silent abyss of tragic artifice, Mulholland Drive captures cinematic truth not as a dream, but an illusion. And as we shrink-wrap our souls in the digital skin of social media, trapped in an out-of-body freefall through the image we have curated of our own reality, it becomes a more and more vital vision of just how far our 21^st century nightmare has really gone.