Mulholland Drive is a film that was never supposed to be a film. David Lynch shot it in 1999 as a pilot for ABC, an open-ended mystery about an aspiring actress and an amnesiac woman in Los Angeles. ABC executives watched the cut and cancelled the series. Lynch took the footage, got money from the French company StudioCanal, wrote an ending, and shot new material. What came out in 2001 is one of the strangest and most durable American movies of its decade.
Trailer, via StudiocanalUK.
Betty Elms Arrives From Deep River
Naomi Watts plays Betty Elms, newly arrived from Deep River, Ontario, staying in her aunt’s apartment and determined to take Hollywood by storm. She finds a brunette woman hiding there, a car crash victim with amnesia who takes the name Rita after a poster of Rita Hayworth. Laura Harring plays her. Rita remembers only that she is in danger. The two find a blue key and a large sum of cash in Rita’s purse.
Watts modeled Betty on Doris Day, Tippi Hedren and Kim Novak. She described the character as a thrill-seeker, someone “who finds herself in a world she doesn’t belong in and is ready to take on a new identity, even if it’s somebody else’s.” That reading is the whole film in one line, though Lynch never says so.
Adam Kesher and the Cowboy
Justin Theroux plays director Adam Kesher, pressured by mob-connected businessmen to cast an unknown blonde named Camilla Rhodes in his film The Sylvia North Story. He refuses. The mob shuts down production. He comes home to find his wife cheating on him, gets beaten and thrown out, and learns his bank account is frozen. A mysterious cowboy warns him to cast Camilla anyway.
None of this connects cleanly to Betty and Rita, and that is the point. Lynch edited the film with Mary Sweeney, his frequent collaborator and briefly his wife. The result leaves the story’s events open to interpretation. Lynch refused to explain any of it, which left audiences, critics and the cast to speculate on what the film means.
A Diner, a Dream, a Blue Key
The film’s most famous scene has nothing to do with its leads. A man named Dan eats at a diner and tells his friend about a nightmare in which he encounters a monstrous figure in the alley behind the building. They go outside to check. A filthy homeless person appears from around a corner exactly as Dan predicted, and he collapses in shock.
That sequence is a short film inside the film, and it works because Lynch treats it with total seriousness. The same goes for the botched hitman job that kills bystanders, and the audition where Betty, nervous but plucky, shows a depth that her rehearsed read with Rita never hinted at. The rehearsal scene is deliberately hollow. The audition is not.
Here is what actually holds Mulholland Drive together:
- Watts’s performance, which splits one actress into two women and makes both of them real.
- Harring’s Rita, passive and frightened, then something else entirely by the end.
- Sweeney’s edit, which never lets the audience settle into a genre.
- Lynch’s refusal to resolve the mystery, which turns a plot hole into the subject.
Watts said of the process: “I had to therefore come up with my own decisions about what this meant and what this character was going through, what was dream and what was reality. My interpretation could end up being completely different, from both David and the audience. But I did have to reconcile all of that, and people seem to think it works.”
It works. That is the thing worth saying plainly. A lesser film would have explained the blue key, the cowboy, the name Diane Selwyn. Mulholland Drive does not, and it has outlasted almost everything that came out alongside it.
What the Film Cost and What It Won
Mulholland Drive grossed $20.1 million on a budget of $15 million. That is a moderate commercial success, not a hit, and it is worth remembering how close the film came to not existing at all.
- Release year: 2001
- Runtime: 147 minutes
- Budget: $15 million
- Gross: $20.1 million
- Cannes: Best Director, David Lynch
- Academy Awards: nomination for Best Director
- Genres: thriller, drama, mystery
The film boosted Watts’s Hollywood profile considerably. It also marked the last feature film role of Ann Miller, the veteran Hollywood star who plays Coco, the building manager who warns Betty about letting Rita stay. Miller died in 2004. That detail gives the film an accidental weight it did not ask for.
Casting happened almost by accident. Lynch chose Watts and Harring from photographs, called them in separately for half-hour interviews, and told both he had not seen any of their previous work. Harring was in a minor car accident on the way to her first interview, then learned her character would also be in a car accident. Watts showed up in jeans straight off a plane from New York City. Lynch asked her to come back the next day “more glammed up” and offered her the part two weeks later.
An Ending That Isn’t One
Lynch’s explanation for casting Watts was simple enough: “I saw someone that I felt had a tremendous talent, and I saw someone who had a beautiful soul, an intelligence—possibilities for a lot of different roles, so it was a beautiful full package.”
The film’s tagline promises that both worlds will collide on Mulholland Drive. They do, and the collision is the entire architecture. Betty’s identity, or her loss of it, is the film’s real subject. One critic argued Betty performed the role of the film’s consciousness and unconscious at once. Another theorist concluded that because Betty entered the Hollywood system naïvely but eagerly, she became a “complicit actor” who embraced the very structure that destroyed her.
That is a lot of weight to put on a character who starts out as a small-town cliché. It holds because Watts plays the cliché straight and then lets it crack. Mulholland Drive is not a puzzle to be solved. It is a film about wanting something badly enough to lose yourself in it, and it is better for refusing to say so out loud.
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