The Movie Cult Classic Mullholland Drive
Alone and afraid, she finds shelter at a large house and falls asleep. She wakes up to take a shower when Betty (Naomi Watts), finds her. Betty is a fresh, young hopeful who has just arrived to Hollywood to make her dreams of stardom come true.
The film opens to teenagers dancing swing behind a large white movie screen. They’re shadows keeping pace with the fast, beat music. Camera pulls out and fades to black. It opens again to a film noir type scene with a mysterious woman in a limo. She is coming from a big Hollywood party.
The limo parks at the bottom of the hill of Mulholland drive, behind another limo. She asks the chauffeur why he stopped when a sudden white light from the headlights from another car blinds her and crashes into her limo.
The mysterious woman awakens, blood pouring from her head and suffering from amnesia. She staggers out of the limo and climbs up the hills to the houses. She stumbles into a house where she falls asleep on the floor. She wakes up to take a shower and meets Betty, a young girl who is house sitting for her aunt while she is on set of her new film.
The mysterious woman reveals to Betty she doesn’t remember anything before arriving at her house. Betty adopts the name of Rita from a Rita Hayward poster hanging in her aunt’s bathroom. Together they retrace Rita’s steps to try to fit the pieces only to unveil a dark truth.
David Lynch, the director of such classics as Wild at heart, Blue velvet, Twin peaks: Fire walk with me, and Twin peaks. His screenwriting is his most inventive and daring. The story is a patchwork quilt with intricate, scenes erratically woven, resulting in the beginning’s the end and the end’s the beginning.
Lynch later juxtaposes the beautiful, glamorous side of Hollywood with its pastel candy colored world and its seedier underside where young starlets are used and broken with no reminisce of what they once were.
The film is extraordinarily surreal with dreamlike stylized film noir scenes, which are the essence of David Lynch. It is as if you’re looking into David’s Lynch’s dreams. His use of fairytales such as goldilocks and the three bears and Nancy Drew books inspire and enhance the script. Both actors brilliantly convey the complex characters very well.
I didn’t understand the film the first time I saw it, until I was drawn into a deep discussion with my friends about the intricacies of the film. I highly recommend this film to anyone with an open mind and a warning attached to watch it many times as possible. You will want to buy the movie because you will never forget it. NC-17 rated.
