Mulholland Drive explained: A guide to David Lynch’s movie

Set in motion by a car crash on Mulholland Drive, Los Angeles, Lynch’s 2001 film stars Naomi Watts and Laura Harring in dual roles, with a cast that also includes Justin Theroux. Initially, it plays out like a stylised mystery against the backdrop of the Hollywood Hills, as Betty (Watts) attempts to help amnesiac Rita (Harring) discover her real identity. As the movie goes on, though, there are sinister hints that all is not as it seems, and soon the narrative breaks down, eventually shifting into a harsher reality in which the two women take on very different roles.

Lynch is a filmmaker who prefers to let his audience come to their own conclusions about his stories, meaning that in the years since Mulholland Drive’s release, he has offered relatively little in terms of clues about the movie’s meaning, and even his cast were left pretty much in the dark. Speaking about the film in 2021, Theroux revealed that the filmmaker “doesn’t answer your questions” on set, and described working with him as like being “on an escalator into a cloud… you never know where the escalator lets off.”

That sense of ambiguity is arguably one of the film’s enduring charms, but if you’ve been left baffled by Mulholland Drive on your first viewing, this cheat sheet should shed some light on its mysteries.

Mulholland Drive explained - what is the dream theory?

According to one of the most common - and surprisingly coherent - interpretations of Lynch’s film, the first part of Mulholland Drive is best understood as a dream sequence, in which elements of the ‘real’ story are explored in heightened or distorted ways, until the protagonist Diane wakes up. It’s a clever play, too, on Hollywood as a dream factory, churning out illusions while often crushing the hopes of the people trapped in its machinery.

The film’s stars, Naomi Watts and Laura Harring, each play two different characters, one who exists in the dream world, another in reality. Watts is first introduced to us as aspiring performer Betty, who is naive to the ways of Hollywood; in reality, her name is Diane Selwyn, a struggling actress who is in love with Camilla Rhodes, a successful film star, played by Harring. Their relationship has come to an end, Diane’s work, most of which has been acquired for her with Camilla’s help, is drying up and her ex is now engaged to film director Adam Kesher (Justin Theroux).

In Mulholland Drive’s dream world, Camilla is Rita, the mysterious woman who turns up at Betty's aunt’s home with no memory of her past life after surviving the car crash which takes place right at the start of the film. In the fantasy, there’s another Adam, still a director, who Betty auditions for; Adam’s latest film, though, has been commandeered by mobsters who want to cast an unknown actress called Camilla Rhodes (played here by Melissa George, as if things weren’t confusing enough) in the lead role.

Betty and Rita attempt to piece together clues that might reveal the latter’s identity (her only belongings are a purse full of cash and a blue key) and head to a diner where the name of a waitress, Diane, jogs the latter’s memory, causing her to remember the name Diane Selwyn. They look her up in the phone book, and eventually track down her flat, discovering the corpse of a woman, presumably dream-Diane, in the apartment next door.

It’s around this point that things take a turn for the (yet more) surreal. The pair visit a nightclub, Club Silencio, where the sense of illusion is increasingly heightened: a singer comes on stage to perform the song Crying by Roy Orbison in Spanish, and although she collapses halfway through the track, her vocals continue. Soon after, Betty finds a blue box matching Rita’s key; when she opens it, it seems to contain nothing but darkness.

Then it’s back to reality, as Betty wakes up as Diane, in the apartment where the two women previously found the corpse. We learn about Diane and Camilla’s relationship, and the stark contrast in their career trajectories.

It soon becomes apparent that many of the characters and incidents in the dream have a parallel in real life: Betty herself is an idealised version of Diane at the start of her career, before she was burned by Hollywood, for example, while Coco, the landlady at Betty’s aunt’s apartment, is actually Adam’s mother, who appears at his and Camilla’s engagement party. We also learn that Diane and Camilla first met while auditioning for The Sylvia North Story, the same film that Betty tried out for - and was rejected from - in the dream.

Filled with jealousy after the engagement party, Diane meets a hitman at Winkie’s diner and arranges for him to kill Camilla; he promises that she will receive a blue key (another crossover from dream to reality) once the job is done. When she later sees the blue key in her apartment, she is overwhelmed by hallucinations and eventually shoots herself.

Which clues reveal it’s a dream?

Just before the film’s opening credits, we see a bed with red sheets, arguably our first hint that what is about to unfold is happening in the dream world; the same bed and sheets are later seen when Betty and Rita visit the apartment with the dead body, and then again when Betty / Diane wakes from the dream.

The character Louise, the next-door neighbour who has swapped apartments with dream-Diane’s, also acts as a link between dream and reality, warning Betty that “someone is in trouble, something bad is happening” and correcting her when she introduces herself with her dream identity. Perhaps the most obvious flag, though, is when the Cowboy appears to usher her back into reality, telling her “hey pretty girl, time to wake up.”

What do Betty and Rita represent?

One way of looking at Mulholland Drive’s first section is as a comment on Hollywood movie-making, and how the industry can flatten stories and characters into easily digestible tropes and characters as a way of making sense of the world. It follows then, that both Betty and Rita, the dream versions of the more fraught and complicated Diane and Camilla, each seem to slot into an old-fashioned Hollywood archetype: Betty is the naive blonde ingenue, while Rita is the mysterious femme fatale. And yet in the film’s final third, these tropes are turned upside down: it’s Diane, with her murderous intentions, who has acted out the part of the villainess.

What happens in the car crash?

We first meet Rita when she is sitting in the back of a limo, and is surprised when the driver pulls over at an unexpected stop along Mulholland Drive, up in the Hollywood Hills. A man in the front of the car pulls out a gun, and it seems that he is about to shoot her - perhaps foreshadowing Camilla’s actual death offscreen at the hands of the hitman - when two open-topped cars come careering into the limo.

As the only survivor of the collision, she makes her way down into a residential area of the city and sneaks into an apartment. Later, aspiring actress Betty (Naomi Watts) arrives at the house, which belongs to her Aunt Ruth. After seeing a film poster for Rita Hayworth’s Gilda, the other woman introduces herself using the actress’s name.

If you see the first two hours of the film as a dream sequence, these early events are later reflected in reality. The site of the car crash on Mulholland Drive is now a cut-through to director Adam’s house, where Diane will feel humiliated at his and Camilla’s engagement party, an incident that will eventually push her over the edge and prompt her to arrange the hit. In both stories, then, it’s the site of a traumatic event.

Who is the hitman?

In the film’s first section, Joe (Mark Pellegrino) is a clumsy hitman who messes up an attempt to steal a little black book, killing not only the target but a woman in the next room, and the janitor who witnesses the murder, before triggering the fire alarm. It’s a darkly comic sequence where the slapstick humour sits unsettlingly alongside the spate of killings.

In reality, Joe still is a hitman, but a competent one hired by Diane to kill her former lover; once he has done so, he presents her with the blue key. In Diane’s dream, then, it’s as if she has tried to neutralise the threat - and assuage her guilt - by transforming a ruthless killer into a bumbling mess who can barely do his job. Perhaps her subconscious is trying to persuade her that he might not be able to kill Camilla after all.

Who is the ‘monster’ behind the Winkie’s?

Towards the beginning of the film, a man named Dan, who is sitting in a Winkie’s diner, explains that he had a nightmare where he saw a terrifying figure behind the same restaurant. When he checks around the back, the strange man appears, causing him (and probably viewers of a nervous disposition) to collapse in fright.

The same man appears again towards the close of the film: the first time, he is holding the blue box, the second, his face is superimposed on top of those of Betty and Rita’s, which appear over a view of Los Angeles. Winkie’s diner is the place where Diane meets up with the hitman who will kill Camilla, so it’s possible that this monster is the manifestation of her worst impulses. Just as Dan is unable to bear the horrific sight, Diane is ultimately unable to come to terms with where her dark side has led her.

Who are the old couple - and what do they mean in the film?

We first meet Betty when she emerges from LAX airport, accompanied by an old lady, who we soon learn is named Irene, and an elderly man. The pair reiterate how nice it was to travel with Betty, and wish her well in her attempts to crack Hollywood, promising to watch out for her “on the big screen”. It seems like a sweet farewell, but this is a Lynch movie, and the tone quickly changes when the old couple climb into the back of a taxi. As they travel away from the airport, at first they appear to be smiling sweetly, but they hold their expressions far too long, and their grins become unsettlingly rictus.

It’s an early hint towards the terrifying role the pair will play at the end of the film. Once Diane wakes up from her dream, leaving her Betty persona behind, she sees the blue key from the hitman, telling her that the hit has successfully been carried out on Camilla. Horrified at her actions, Diane is beset by hallucinations and sees a miniature version of the old couple creeping under her door, as her apartment fills with the sound of hysterical laughter.

The old couple soon switch to their original size and pursue Diane, their grins becoming even more horrifying and strange. Though before they encouraged her naive aspirations of stardom, now they remind her of everything she hasn’t achieved, and are almost mocking with their empty smiles; her early dream has become sinister and curdled.

What happens at the end of Mulholland Drive?

Cornered by the vision of the old couple, Diane reaches into a drawer to pull out a gun, then shoots herself.

After Diane dies and everything fades to black, we see her and Camilla’s - or should that be Betty and Rita’s? - smiling faces superimposed over the bright lights of Los Angeles. It’s reminiscent of an old-fashioned movie poster, as if Diane has finally been given the star treatment, but soon the two women are joined by the face of the creature from behind Winkie’s — Diane’s final dream doesn’t last for long before something more nightmarish settles in as a reminder of what she has done.

Then we return to the club from earlier in the film, where a blue-haired woman, who had previously appeared in the audience, whispers “silencio”, as if she is finally putting Diane to rest. Just as the main dream sequence came to an end after the women visited Club Silencio, unravelling their illusions and bringing them back to reality, now the club acts as the final bookend for the second section of the story, with Diane’s self-delusions finally over.

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