It's full of half-developed plot-lines and characters who are seen once and then disappear. (A detective played by Robert Forster is only on screen for a matter of seconds and Dan Hedaya's psychopathic movie executive is barely on screen any longer.) Bizarrely, all the cameos and red herrings work to Lynch's advantage, heightening the sense of eeriness yet further.The film begins Cronenberg-fashion, with a very violent crash. A beautiful amnesiac in a low-cut ballgown (Laura Harring) stumbles out of the wreckage and into the life of Doris Day-lookalike Betty, an ingenuous young would-be movie star from Deep River, Ontario, who has just arrived in LA to seek her fortune. The amnesiac decided to call herself Rita, after Rita Hayworth in Gilda. (It's a corny conceit, but Lynch just about gets away with it.)As in Twin Peaks and Lost Highway, the film thrives on its own sense of incongruity.
It takes relentlessly dark material and gives it a perverse comic twist. Either that, or it makes comic situations seem hugely and perversely unsettling. Thus we have a Satanic figure dressed in a cowboy hat and looking like Gene Autry, an easygoing assassin with a loathing of Hoovers, a wizened media mogul who sits alone, seemingly paralysed from the waist downward, in a cavernous office, a homeless man who looks and behaves like a werewolf from an old Universal horror movie, and two smiling geriatrics who turn out to have a psychopathic side.Mullholland Drive has a warped, dream-like logic all its own which is another way of saying it doesn't make a huge amount of sense. On one level, this seems yet another cautionary tale about an innocent abroad in Hollywood. (It doesn't take at all long for Betty to be corrupted.) The lesbian sex scenes are on the gratuitous side a nod in the direction of Russ Meyer to please the foreign buyers perhaps. Many of the main motifs seem to have been borrowed wholesale from old avant-garde films.
The key which Betty hallucinates about could come straight from Maya Deren's Meshes Of The Afternoon, the box which can't, or shouldn't, be opened from Bunuel's Belle De Jour Lynch also cannibalises his own earlier work. There's even a damn fine coffee joke this time to do with what is reported to be the world's best espresso. Whatever else, Mullholland Drive is bound to achieve instant cult status.One character hanging about in Cannes, touting her autobiography, looked and sounded as if she had just stepped out of Lynch's movie. Danni Ashe, a stripper since the age of 17, boasts that she is "the world's most downloaded woman".
