The American Dream Ends on Mulholland Drive
General Reviews
I know I’m not the first person to write about Mulholland Drive for this challenge. But I want you all to know that I had the idea first. Sure, there are some faster writers on here, and they've given us some good takes, smart, valid. But I also know this movie well enough to say politely, with love and light, that you don't get it the way I get it.
Like most David Lynch films, Mulholland Drive is often described as confusing, surreal, impossible to decode. I can't relate.
Just kidding—it's all of those things no matter who you are. But the difference is that this film isn't a puzzle to me, it's a feeling. A dread. A fantasy I've fantasized. Its essence is sunk so deep into my nervous system that trying to explain it without sounding annoying feels impossible. If you’ve felt it, you know. If you haven’t, stop trying to attach logic to it and let it work on you. Soon, you too will have that deeply unpleasant feeling that you have to just sit with, and it will be bliss.
Okay, I'm done posturing. My credentials as an insufferable person are firmly established. Now I just have to prove why a movie released barely a year into the 21st century still towers over everything that came after it.
Ah, the American Dream; the dangling carrot before every Yankee’s nose. It’s the ideal that one will achieve success through sheer will and determination. Hollywood—the grand illusionist—has peddled this fantasy since its inception by showing audiences that they will be happy and live a prosperous life if they work hard enough. Well, Mulholland Drive exists to dismantle those rose-coloured glasses and expose the façade of the Hollywood dream factory.
Betty (Naomi Watts), an unassuming idealist, arrives in Los Angeles bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. She has the energy that Hollywood loves to market: optimism and a smile so sincere it borders on naïve. We get to live inside that invention, that luminescent ether, for a lot of the film. The performances feel heightened, uncanny. Even danger feels theatrical and distant, like something that happens to others.
That's the trick.
It feels surreal at first because it's too coherent (if a Lynch film seems too normal, something terrible is coming.) Kind of like a painted backdrop on a movie set, the first half of the film is a fantasy constructed to shield the truth. An intentional deception that smuggles a darker reality past the audience's defences. Right before the smoke clears, we believe we’re finally getting a key—literally—to unlock the mystery set up in the first two acts. Instead we're disenchanted by a stark, brutal reality. Lynch weaponizes our storytelling expectations that have been conditioned by the history of movies; a cinematic sleight of hand, if you will.
By act three, Betty has unravelled into her true self, Diane; a broken soul crushed by the weight of Hollywood’s machinations. It's not that she wasn't talented, determined, or hardworking, the system just never cared. That institutional indifference is what takes Mulholland Drive beyond the story of one woman and into a harrowing exposé of Hollywood itself.
Let's zoom out for a second. Remember that the reason we're all here is to argue the best of the 21st century. To me, that means whoever owns that title has to say something definitive about the era, so I'm bringing out the red string.
Mulholland Drive comes out in 2001, at the exact moment one century of Hollywood fantasy gives way to another. It’s the end of the old millennium, the last gasp of a dream the industry had been selling for decades: talent + perseverance = success. It's a closing statement on 20th century Hollywood myths, and a warning about what's been bubbling below the surface. Lynch is telling us, right at the start of the 21st century, that the dream no longer works the way we've been pretending it does. Maybe it never did. He really said ‘this system will take your belief, your desire, your identity and it will not give you meaning in return,’ and put a pretty blonde woman at the forefront so we would all listen.
I could keep going. I could talk about the queer coding, the recurring motifs, the hobo scene, Billy Ray Cyrus. That’s kind of the point, I guess, you can never run out of things to say about this movie. But I'll save that for a different challenge, a different time. I think my work here is done, the case is closed, Bob's your uncle, point is proved.
Mulholland Drive is the absolute. Lynch inaugurated a new era, forged a path to a new cinematic frontier, shattered the illusion of false hope peddled by his peers. There is no band. It’s all artifice, just like the allure of Hollywood and just like the American Dream.
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