The Millennium in Frames: David Lynch and Mulholland Drive

It feels impossible to separate a Mulholland Drive discussion from a discussion about its writer and director, David Lynch. Over a 40-year career, Lynch has chosen his spots carefully and sparingly, helming only 8 features since 1977:  Eraserhead, The Elephant Man, Dune, Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive, and Inland Empire. Of course, he’s also done the Twin Peaks TV series, but for a film figure as important and influential as Lynch to average just one movie every five years, and release only two movies in the last 20 years, it feels a bit strange. On the other hand, it always gives his releases a momentous and significant backdrop, a sense of a longtime great coming out of recluse for one. last. ride.

Mulholland Drive carried that sort of pomp in 2001. At that point in his career, Lynch was heralded primarily for his 1986 movie Blue Velvet and his 1990 show Twin Peaks (the latter of which he revived on Showtime earlier this year, to much acclaim). His style—which we’ll detail in a moment—was secure, and his reputation—likewise—was established as sporadic, maybe brilliant, maybe downright nuts. Mulholland stars then-newcomer Naomi Watts (she was 31) as a young woman hoping to make it big as an actor in Los Angeles. Justin Theroux, most known now for his role as Kevin Garvey on HBO’s The Leftovers, shows up too (a pair of quick fun Justin Theroux facts: 1) he’s 45 years old, and 2) he co-wrote Tropic Thunder). Beyond that, it’s hard to say what Mulholland Drive is about, really. There’s a monster in it. There’s a mysterious blue key. There’s some pretty squirmy sex scenes. As far as Lynch goes, it’s pretty par-for-the-course.

To this day, people haven’t really grasped what Mulholland Drive is about. That’s pretty standard for a Lynch movie. It’s hard to categorize any David Lynch product into a specific drama, so for a while now, commentators have leaned on the invented term ‘Lynchian’ to describe his movies and TV shows. Here’s what Lynchian might mean in a few bullet points:

• Lynchian describes a scenario where the everyday meets the grotesque. Example (courtesy David Foster Wallace): A man killing his wife is not Lynchian, but a man killing his wife because she bought the wrong brand of peanut butter is Lynchian.
• Lynchian is dreamlike or nightmarish. This means time doesn’t always move linearly, things appear and vanish without explanation, and the supernatural is in play. Mulholland Drive can be watched with the assumption that every single character is dreaming, and that’s not necessarily to its detriment. It’s just part of the Lynchian genre.
• Lynchian movies aren’t here to entertain or enlighten, just experienced. It sounds cliché, but it fits because while we usually watch movies a) to have an escape from the world and enjoy ourselves, or b) to learn something, Lynchian movies don’t satisfy either desire. Even if you don’t understand what’s happening, it’s not expected that you ask questions.

In that way, it can be tricky watching Mulholland Drive for the first time (or, if we’re being honest, the tenth time—many critics watch it regularly and remain perplexed by it), just because you have to watch it differently than you watch other movies. A good way to describe a productive Mulholland Drive viewing experience is akin to thinking about your own dreams. You can ask what it means, but not really the point. The point is more about how the dream made you feel or where the dream came from or what visions or ideas the dream inspired. Meaning is secondary, and while that can be frustrating, it’s an approach you can sort of teach yourself to adopt.

Nevertheless, there’s been a massive effort to figure out what Mulholland Drive means. If you do some research on the movie, you’ll find a lot of commentary by people with the title “film theorist” or “film scholar.” First off, you have to wonder if those are viable job titles. Second off, it’s a regrettable corner of the Internet because it makes the David Lynch camp feel exclusive and snooty, and it might not have to be that way. Lynch has compared his own movies to abstract art—anyone can step in front of his “paintings” and have a different experience—but that dynamic has been sort of buried by critics who claim there’s one correct interpretation. Anyone can walk into a museum and look at a portrait and appreciate it. It seems silly to think that Lynch movies should work differently.  

For his own part, Lynch has remained distant from the Mulholland Drive conversation, offering scant “clues” to what the movie means but posing no real interpretation. This might be annoying if Lynch seemed to care at all about discussing his own work; he really doesn’t engage in that way. What’s more, Lynch doesn’t really engage with other movies at all, once telling the American Film Institute that he doesn’t watch a lot of other pictures. Next to big-time movie geeks like Quentin Tarantino and Edgar Wright (both of whom it can be argued our quite influenced by David Lynch), this might seem highly unusual. On the other hand, Mulholland Drive and other Lynchian movies are so in and of themselves that they seem to exist apart from the wider world of “the cinema.” Lynch has isolated himself, and that makes his place within the millennium—and moviemaking as a whole, too—wholly unique.

The last 20ish years of movies have been quite responsive to the times. After 9/11, we saw movies ask more questions, peer around corners more, and dip their toes into nostalgia. Today, we see movies engage often with progressive concepts of identity, with Get Out and The Big Sick being just two examples of flicks that confront audiences with challenging, distinctly modern modes of thinking. Mulholland Drive doesn’t play into that dynamic at all. The only thing it engages with is the individual, and the only relationships it’s concerned with are between its creator and its viewer, and its viewer and themselves.

And on that front, Mulholland Drive succeeds. It’s a resonant movie, even if it isn’t a particularly transparent one. Amid a climate of competing voices, Lynch made something that forces you to dwell on it without resorting to shouty displays or exploitative showmanship. That’s rare today, and it’s an approach that few, if any at all, have been able to replicate in the world of onscreen entertainment. Perhaps that’s to our detriment, but perhaps that was the point, too.