“I just wanted to come here,” says the man in the “Diner Scene” of Mulholland Drive, if you look it up on YouTube. “Winkie’s?” says another man incredulously. So begins a great film sequence in one of David Lynch’s most storied films.
This summer, I liked a playlist of the movie’s soundtrack on Spotify and played the track by Angelo Badalamenti on loop as I made my daily suburban walk, along a main street, through a small meadow with a tennis court I looked at each day, and through a trail beside a neighbourhood called Creditpointe, with an ‘e’ at the end feminizing it aptly and uncannily. The soundtrack’s slinky irony made for satisfying listening, even if somewhat unsettling. But that was the goal, anyway.
The Diner Scene, with its abrupt and lonesome scare, is one of several well-known scenes laden with hints, signs, symbols and references to be sifted through and analyzed by moviewatchers and Lynch fanatics. Mulholland Dr., stylized as such, is one of the greatest films to be made — the greatest, according to a BBC poll of film critics in 2016, followed by Wong Kar Wai’s In the Mood for Love in second place, and trailed by Richard Linklater’s Boyhood in fifth.
“Every element in cinema is important, and music is one element, and I always say that the music has to marry to the picture,” says Lynch in conversation with David Stratton, in Australia in 2015. Indeed, the soundtrack to Mulholland Dr. is as varied and piecemeal as the film itself, at times jingly and sombre, by turns ironic and operatic. The film reads as many dreams stitched together, forming a linear-like progression of merry and miserable scenes that lock out the real in favour of the plausible, not altogether impossible.
“It’s a mysterious road,” Lynch says of Mullholland Drive, particularly at night. It has views of the Hollywood Hills just as it has ahead of it a long, winding path. Naomi Watts, who stars as Betty, has said of it, “Mulholland Drive was a particular road that I remember when I was down, down, down on my luck, and remember thinking, this day is going too bad and this has been a succession of really bad days. I could just do a quick turn and just drive off this cliff. But there are times you could drive around and it’s a smooth ride, and it’s the opposite of that.”
The many interpretations of the film seem to converge on one likelihood, which is that Betty Elms is the dream version of Diane Selwyn, and encounters in her dream Rita — who in “real life” is Camilla Rhodes — a lover and alter ego who suffers from amnesia after a car accident. The two encounter other characters in the course of auditioning for a part (Betty), searching for her identity (Rita), and attending a performance at a late night club and a dinner party late in the movie (both). The film is said to explore stardom and putrefication, a “love story in the city of dreams,” as Lynch himself has characterized it.
The film doesn’t lack for comedic moments, alongside the bizarre, like the infamous “cowboy scene,” in which a director for a big name studio, Adam Kesher, is interrogated by a dreamlike character who instructs him to cast the woman in the photograph he was shown earlier in the day. “You will see me one more time if you do good. You will see me two more times if you do bad.” In another scene, Kesher pours pink paint over his lover’s jewellery box after catching her in bed with another man.
When I watch Mulholland Dr, a sense of uncanny washes over me, and whatever delights the movie brings also washes a sense of dread and abject terror. Why are we drawn to such imagery, and what can be the comfort in sharing such a dream? The film is not moralistic, or does not seem to impart a lesson, but the fate of Diane Selwyn leaves the viewer confused as to why reality is as harsh as it is, and why sheer ambition should give way to such strife. The film seems as if it shouldn’t be as elegaic as it is, nor as funny or crude, but it is. It is a film with a long, winding arch and many characters who are cast and recast in strange acts and are not, ultimately, understood.