Mulholland Drive

David Lynch's Mulholland Drive began life as a pilot for an ABC television series. The network passed on it in 1999, and Lynch did something unusual: he shot additional footage, restructured the existing material, and turned a dead pilot into a self-contained feature. The result premiered at Cannes on May 16, 2001, and took home Best Director. It arrived in US theaters that October through Universal Focus.

The film opens on a limousine gliding down Mulholland Drive at night, a car crash, and a woman stumbling away from the wreckage with no memory of who she is. She hides in an apartment belonging to a working actress and is found the next morning by the actress's niece, Betty Elms, fresh off a plane from Deep River, Ontario, with a head full of Hollywood dreams. Naomi Watts plays Betty. Laura Harring plays the amnesiac, who takes the name Rita from a Gilda poster on the wall.

From there the movie spirals through a hitman botching a job, a film director named Adam Kesher being strong-armed by mob money, a diner scene at Winkie's that has become one of the most analyzed sequences in modern cinema, and a blue key and a blue box that sit at the center of everything. Lynch shot it for about $15 million, and it grossed just over $20 million worldwide. The Criterion Collection released a 4K restoration in 2015. Twenty-five years on, it still gets argued about at film schools, in podcasts, and on message boards the way few films of its era do. [edit]

A black limousine turns off Mulholland Drive in the middle of the night. Inside, a woman in a dark dress sits with two men when the driver stops, pulls a gun, and orders her out. A pair of drag racers slam into the car before she can comply. She staggers from the wreckage, dazed and bleeding, and makes her way down the hill into Los Angeles. She has no name she can recall. She slips into an apartment, hides behind a piece of furniture, and falls asleep.

Betty Elms lands at LAX the next morning. She is bright, polite, and almost aggressively optimistic, a small-town girl from Deep River, Ontario, with a suitcase full of audition outfits and a plan. Her aunt Ruth has lent her the apartment at the complex run by a woman named Coco. Betty walks in, finds a stranger in the shower, and instead of calling the police decides to help. The woman has no ID except a purse full of cash and a blue key. On the wall hangs a poster for Gilda, and the woman picks the name Rita from it.

Betty and Rita spend the next stretch of the film trying to recover Rita's memory. They visit a diner called Winkie's, where a man named Dan tells a friend about a recurring nightmare involving a figure behind the restaurant. They go to a rundown apartment on Sierra Bonita and find a woman's body decomposing in the bedroom. Rita's memory starts to surface in flashes, and the two women grow close in a way that moves past friendship. A blue box appears in Rita's bag, and the key fits it. Rita opens it at the end of the first act, and the film drops out from under the audience.

Running alongside this is the story of Adam Kesher, a director whose new picture is being hijacked. Two men from a production company called Castigliane Brothers show up at his office with a headshot of a blonde actress and a demand that she be cast. Adam refuses. That night he comes home to find his wife in bed with another man, gets beaten by a cowboy in a corral, and loses his house, his bank accounts, and his access to his own movie. He ends up broke and humiliated, sitting in a diner with a hitman he barely knows.

Other threads drift through the film. A bungling hitman shoots a man, a woman, and a janitor in a high-rise office and keeps messing up the job. A detective named McKnight questions witnesses about the crash. A singer named Rebekah Del Rio performs a Spanish-language version of Roy Orbison's "Crying" at Club Silencio, collapses mid-song, and the voice keeps going, exposing the whole thing as a recording. Betty and Rita watch, sobbing, and then the blue box appears again. This time Betty opens it. The camera pushes into the box, and the dream ends.[edit]