All Rise...

Judge Erich Asperschlager had a dream about this place.

The Charge

"Silencio"

The Case

Audiences tend to approach art with certain assumptions. We have medium-specific expectations about things like structure, subject, and authenticity. Books and movies are assumed to be works of fiction unless clearly labeled otherwise. Songs, on the other hand, are treated as autobiographical. God help a songwriter who sings from a perspective other than their own. Filmmakers have more latitude, but even so, audiences balk when the visual medium becomes too visual. Movies are expected to mirror books in structure—telling stories through dialogue and exposition. Visual flourish is appreciated, but often treated as window dressing for spoken words. The best directors know how to balance visual and verbal storytelling, but there's a short list of filmmakers who take full advantage of the power of moving images and sound. David Lynch is at the top of that list.

Most directors treat movies like books. Lynch treats movies like paintings—fluid, visual, and experimental. His films can be "difficult." We are trained to expect that what we see in movies is real. Not in the way early audiences screamed at the sight of Edison's oncoming train, but it's not that far off. We expect movies to make logical sense. We expect people in movies to operate under the same general laws of physics we do. But film has the power to twist reality, to use actors, sets, music, and editing as brush strokes on a celluloid canvas.

2001's Mulholland Drive is rightly recognized as a classic by critics, fans, and the cultural curators at Criterion Collection who have put it out in a gorgeous Blu-ray set. Pull up any random selection of reviews or blog posts, however, and you'll see just how ill-equipped we are to talk about a film that abandons traditional structure.

There are plenty of theories about what Mulholland Drive "means." Some of these are thematic. Some are more literal. A surprising number try to tease a logical story out of Lynch's dream narrative. It's easy to summarize the basic story: a woman loses her memory after a car crash in the Hollywood hills and teams up with a fresh-faced actress to figure out who she is and what happened. That story is intercut with a secondary plot about a director under pressure from mystery men to cast a specific actress in his new movie. Add in a few seemingly random scenes featuring an unlucky hitman and a burned man living behind a diner, and that's pretty much the movie. Except it isn't at all, because the last half hour turns everything upside down, weaving story threads together at the same time others are pulled apart. I think it's a mistake to try to reassemble the pieces of the film into a story that makes sense. Mulholland Drive isn't Memento. It's not The Usual Suspects. The end of the film doesn't inform the beginning beyond the movie's themes of love and loss, Los Angeles, filmmaking, and crushed dreams.

The fact that the same actresses have different names in the final act, or the same name as a different character, doesn't have to mean we've been in an extended dream sequence, or that characters are involved in a conspiracy. Maybe it means that women in Hollywood are interchangeable and that the story of a naive actress ground down by the realities of the industry is one that will continue to play out as long as starlet hopefuls board planes and buses destined for the Dream Factory. Then again, maybe it doesn't. Maybe the film is about the darkness that's waiting to be uncovered in locked apartments, blue boxes, and in narrow back alleys by those who poke around in places they don't belong. Over and over, characters in the film are given warnings and instructions. When they heed those warnings and follow directions, things go well. When they don'tÉ well, I'll let the Cowboy explain it to you.

Mulholland Drive isn't supposed to make logical sense. It's supposed to be messy and evocative, conjuring emotional responses to what we see and hear. Lynch challenges the expectations of cinematic storytelling and in doing so creates something that approximates the filmmaking process itself. Movies don't happen by following a careful plan that flows from one logical step to the next. The best movies are the end result of thousands of battles, compromises, and happy accidents. Mulholland Drive is a great example. It started as a TV series meant to capitalize on Lynch's success with Twin Peaks. Thanks to a harried ABC exec who decided he didn't like the pilot after half-watching it in the background over breakfast while talking on the phone, Lynch eventually was given the chance to expand the rejected pilot into a feature. When it came time to make the film, they discovered that the sets and costumes from the pilot were long gone. Fortunately, the actors cast for the TV series that never happened were willing and available to come back and finish the job. Lynch's deep fingerprints are all over the film, but it's impossible to overstate the impact of the performances. It's an amazing cast from top to bottom. Even the smallest roles make a huge impact. Non-actor Monty Montgomery's creepy Cowboy, the haunted diner patron played by Patrick Fischler, and Ann Miller's otherworldly landlady Coco are all shadows on the backdrop of Lynch's waking nightmare LA.

Justin Theroux has a leading role, and plays it well, though he is mostly an extension of the studio patriarchy we see throughout the film. He's down the ladder from the tailored suits pulling the strings, but all he has to do to get by is follow orders. The film's women don't have it so easy. Laura Elena Harring's Rita goes from the victim of a botched assassination to the victim of a car crash to amnesiac fugitive trying to piece her life back together. She plays the character like a femme fatale who finds herself in the wrong movie, unsure of her lines and waiting for the director to yell "cut." It's a marvelous performance, though the star of the film is then-newcomer Naomi Watts as Betty. She gives a fearless, raw performance that runs the gamut from naive to soul-crushed, with a hell of a lot of sexy in between. The men in the film are mostly detached, leaving the heavy emotional lifting to the women, who scrap, dream, love, and grieve. It's the only way for them to survive in a world that demands they trade their souls for success.

I don't know if Mulholland Drive is about making movies, but by abandoning traditional narrative logic, Lynch challenges us to approach film in a new way. The most honest scene in the film is in Club Silencio, where the emcee tells the audience up front that everything they see is pre-recorded. And yet we forget as soon as Rebekah Del Rio starts singing her Spanish language cover of Roy Orbison's "Crying" (another happy accident resulting from a meeting between the singer and director). The song is so gorgeous, so heartbreaking, that it envelops us. When the singer collapses on stage while the song continues, we remember the emcee's fair warning. Lynch makes us keenly aware that none of what we are seeing is real. But that doesn't mean it's not true.

Criterion Collection has done their part to deliver Mulholland Drive (Blu-ray) as directly as possible from Lynch's brain to TV screens. The 1.85:1 1080p Blu-ray is sourced from a new, director-approved 4K transfer. The image shimmers with bold, saturated color (the infamous blue box has never looked better) and sharp detail with a fine layer of film grain. The joy of seeing a painting in a gallery instead of a photo reproduction is the texture—the ability to see in the brush strokes the hand of the artist. Criterion is committed to doing the same for the films they curate, and it shows. The only audio option on the disc is a 5.1 DTS-HD Master Audio mix. While not a showy mix, it is immersive. Dialogue and sound effects are clear and well-placed, sandwiched between layers of Angelo Badalamenti's undulating ocean of a score. It's a full-throated delivery of the atmospheric soundtrack.

Mulholland Drive comes with a lean collection of bonus features. They're informative, provided you aren't hoping for answers to the film's mysteries. There is a single deleted scene between the two detectives investigating the car accident (shades, perhaps, of what we might have seen in the aborted TV series); the 2-minute original trailer; an archival "On-Set Footage" (24:44) featurette; and a 48-page book ("booklet" doesn't feel substantial enough) with archival photos and an excerpt from Chris Rodley's book Lynch on Lynch.

The bulk of the extras are new interviews conducted by Criterion, looking back on the production. Conversations with "David Lynch and Naomi Watts" (26:45) and "Laura Elena Harring, Johanna Ray, Justin Theroux, and Naomi Watts" (35:39) provide a more general overview of Mulholland Drive's history and filmmaking process. Composer "Angelo Badalamenti" (19:30) talks about his career, work with Lynch, and the story behind his cappuccino-snob mobster bit part in the film. Finally, production designer and director of photography "Peter Deming and Jack Fisk" (22:10) describe the process and challenges of finding the locations and capturing footage that matched Lynch's vision.

Mulholland Drive is a worthy addition to any film fan's library, especially in this handsome new set from Criterion. Physical media may be on the way out, but it still has value when it comes to movies as rich and rewatchable as this. Lynch draws from his past as a painter to create special films that evoke the vivid immersion of a dream within the permanence of cinema. Mulholland Drive has one of the scariest scenes, two of the sexiest, and the most exquisitely heartbreaking a capella performance ever captured on film. Few people have worked in the cutthroat Hollywood shown here, but nearly everyone has stumbled along the spectrum of infatuation, love, and pain we see in Betty and Rita's story. Let it wash over you again in this sparkling new transfer. Who needs Blu-ray chapter stops when a movie is this good?

The Verdict

This is the film.

Give us your feedback!

Did we give Mulholland Drive (Blu-ray) Criterion Collection a fair trial? yes / no

What's "fair"? Whether positive or negative, our reviews should be unbiased, informative, and critique the material on its own merits.

Share This Review

Follow DVD Verdict

Other Reviews You Might Enjoy

• The Accidental Tourist
• Jakob The Liar
• Nickelodeon / The Last Picture Show
• The Europeans