A beautiful woman (Laura Elena Harring) escapes assassination on nighttime Mulholland Drive when her car is hit joyriders, but due to concussion she can't remember
anything about herself. Luckily she runs into aspiring actress Betty (Naomi Watts), and the two team up to solve the mystery of her
identity and why her purse is stuffed with hundred dollar bills and a strange blue key. Meanwhile film director Adam
Kesher (Justin Theroux) is being coerced into casting a particular actress in his new movie, and when he refuses his life is satobtaged. And
there is this very scary vagrant living at the back of Winkies diner… or is that part of a dream? And who, exactly, is the enigmatic
figure known only as "the Cowboy"?
Don't expect straightforward resolutions to any of these issues, for we are in the territory of David Lynch High Weirdness, a place where normal film narrative rules
don't apply, and everything is symbolic, self-referential and part of some cryptic meta-plot. That aside, Mulholland Dr. is a
superbly crafted work, keeping up a suspenseful noir atmosphere and a compelling oddball logic running through its bizarre twists. Like
the similarly named Sunset Boulevard, it explores the metaphysics of Hollywood and the interplay and interchangeability of reality and illusion.
Naomi Watts is excellent as the naïve Betty, a fresh Hitchcockian blonde in a surreal post-Hitchcock world. She and the
amnesiac woman, who calls herself Rita after Rita Hayworth, become lovers, and their affair leads them into stranger and stranger realms. The
blue key seems to unlock some quantum mechanism in the story, for it turns back on itself like a Mobius Strip, characters swap identities, and past, present and future flow together.
This is intriguing in the manner of bold experimental art, and only a master like Lynch could pull it off without it seeming pretentious or a plain mistake.
He is still using noir thriller conventions, but in an entirely postmodern way, so that revelations and significances bounce around the film as though glimpsed in a hall
of mirrors, and the viewer must decode the "mystery" of the whole thing according to his or her personal perspective.
There are some great set pieces in Mulholland Dr. The dream recollection sequence in Winkies Diner is exquisitely spooky, and the confrontation between Adam and the Cowboy in the deserted corral at midnight has some
classic deadpan dialogue that is real vintage Lynch. Theroux plays Adam with just the right amount of simmering edginess, trying to act
normal with his clothes covered in pink paint, and finally accepting that the odds against him are stacked too high. Weirdest of 
all is the Café Silencio where, as the impresario tells us, "everything is pre-recorded", and performers lip-synch to plaintive ballads which continue even as
they fall over.
All in all Lynch is terrifically on form here, and Mulholland Dr. recalls the best of his other work, such as Blue Velvet and Twin
Peaks. Judged in its own terms it is completely successful, a masterpiece of weird cinema, and a much-needed reminder that cinema can truly be art.
© Roger Keen 2001 (originally published in Prism)
