Mulholland Drive is a 2001 mystery film written and directed by David Lynch. Its narrative is characterized by surrealist and neo-noir elements, and follows an aspiring actress (Naomi Watts) newly arrived in Los Angeles, where she befriends a car crash victim (Laura Harring) who is suffering from amnesia. Meanwhile, a Hollywood director (Justin Theroux) must deal with interference from the criminal underworld while casting his latest film.
The film was originally conceived as a television pilot for ABC, with footage shot and edited in 1999 as an open-ended mystery. After viewing Lynch's cut, however, ABC executives cancelled the proposed series. Lynch then secured funding from French production company StudioCanal to repurpose the footage into a film, for which he wrote an ending and filmed new material. The resulting film, edited and produced by Lynch's frequent collaborator (and briefly wife) Mary Sweeney, has left the story's events open to interpretation. Lynch's refusal to offer an explanation left audiences, critics, and even the film's own cast to speculate on its meaning. The film considerably boosted Watts's Hollywood profile and marked the last feature film role of veteran Hollywood star Ann Miller.
Mulholland Drive received widespread critical acclaim, earning Lynch the Cannes Film Festival Award for Best Director and a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Director. It was also a moderate commercial success, grossing $20.1 million on a budget of $15 million. It is frequently cited as one of the greatest films of the 2000s, the 21st century and among the best films of all time.
The 2022 Sight and Sound Greatest Films of All Time critics' poll ranked it at No. 8, while the director's poll ranked it at No. 22. The BBC and IndieWire named it the best film of the 21st century, and the LA Film Critics Association listed it as the best film of the 2000s. In 2025, The New York Times ranked it at No. 2 on their list of the 100 Best Movies of the 21st Century, while The Ringer named Watts's performance as the greatest of the 21st century.
Plot
The film opens with brightly lit images of couples dancing the jitterbug, over which a young blonde woman appears smiling and being applauded, followed by a point-of-view shot descending toward a pillow as someone lies down.
At night on Mulholland Drive, a brunette woman in an elegant evening gown narrowly escapes being shot by her chauffeur when another car crashes into them. Left with amnesia, she wanders into Los Angeles and hides in a vacant apartment. The next morning, she is discovered by Betty Elms, an aspiring actress newly arrived from Deep River, Ontario, who is staying at her aunt's place. The brunette adopts the name "Rita" after seeing a poster of Rita Hayworth and recalls only that she is in danger. The two become friends and discover a blue key and a large sum of cash in Rita's purse.
A man named Dan eats at a diner and recounts a nightmare to his friend in which he encounters a monstrous figure in the alley behind the diner. When they go outside to investigate, a filthy homeless person appears from around a corner and Dan collapses in shock.
Film director Adam Kesher is pressured by mob-connected businessmen to cast an unknown blonde, Camilla Rhodes, in his new film The Sylvia North Story. When he refuses, the mob shuts down production. He returns home to find his wife cheating on him, is beaten and thrown out, and discovers his bank account has been frozen. A mysterious cowboy warns him to cast Camilla. Meanwhile, incompetent hitman Joe Messing botches a job, killing bystanders.
Rita remembers the name "Diane Selwyn", and Betty locates her address in a phone book. A seemingly psychic neighbor warns that "someone is in trouble," and building manager Coco cautions Betty about letting Rita stay. Betty leaves for an audition, where she performs brilliantly; a casting agent brings her to Adam's audition for The Sylvia North Story. While Camilla auditions with a performance of "I've Told Ev'ry Little Star", Betty and Adam share a brief but intense glance before she slips away to meet Rita. Adam agrees to cast Camilla to appease the mob.
Betty and Rita visit Diane's apartment complex, where a neighbor who recently exchanged units with Diane says she has not been seen in some time and directs them to her apartment. Inside, they discover a woman's decomposing corpse on the bed. Rita panics and tries to cut her own hair, but Betty instead disguises her with a blonde wig. That night, they have sex and Betty twice confesses she is in love. Rita later wakes them both by chanting ('silence, there is no band') in her sleep, and insists on visiting Club Silencio, where the host explains all performances are pre-recorded. Betty and Rita weep as Rebekah Del Rio performs a Spanish rendition of "Crying", and Betty discovers a blue box in her purse that matches Rita's key. Back at the apartment, Rita unlocks the box and realizes Betty has vanished, before disappearing herself.
The narrative shifts to Diane Selwyn, a depressed and struggling actress who looks exactly like Betty. She awakens in the bedroom where the corpse was found. Moving through her morning in a daze, she recalls memories of her former lover Camilla Rhodes, a femme fatale actress who resembles Rita: a volatile sexual encounter and breakup; being forced to watch Adam and Camilla kiss during a film rehearsal; and a dinner party at Adam's house, where Diane describes losing the lead in The Sylvia North Story to Camilla, to whom Adam announces his engagement. The memories culminate in Diane hiring Joe at the diner to kill Camilla, with a blue key promised as confirmation.
The homeless person behind the diner opens the blue box, releasing a tiny elderly couple – the same pair who accompanied Betty upon her arrival in Los Angeles. Back in the present, a traumatized Diane stares at the blue key on her coffee table. Terrorized by hallucinations of the elderly couple, she flees to her bedroom and shoots herself, dying in the same position as the earlier corpse. As the room fills with gunsmoke, Betty and Rita are shown smiling at each other. At Club Silencio, a blue-haired woman whispers "silencio".
Cast
Themes and interpretations
Giving the film only the tagline, "A love story in the city of dreams," David Lynch refused to comment on Mulholland Drives meaning or symbolism, leading to much discussion and multiple interpretations. The Christian Science Monitor film critic David Sterritt spoke with Lynch after the film screened at Cannes and wrote that the director "insisted that Mulholland Drive does tell a coherent, comprehensible story," unlike some of Lynch's earlier films like Lost Highway. On the other hand, Justin Theroux said of Lynch's feelings on the multiple meanings people perceive in the film, "I think he's genuinely happy for it to mean anything you want. He loves it when people come up with really bizarre interpretations. David works from his subconscious." The film was described as a neo-noir.
Dreams and alternative realities An early interpretation of the film uses dream analysis to argue that the first part is a dream of the real Diane Selwyn, who has cast her dream-self as the innocent and hopeful, "Betty Elms," reconstructing her history and persona into something like an old Hollywood film. In the dream, Betty is successful, charming, and lives the fantasy life of a soon-to-be-famous actress. The remainder of the film presents Diane's real life, in which she has failed both personally and professionally. She arranges for Camilla, an ex-lover, to be killed; unable to cope with the guilt, she re-imagines her as the dependent, pliable amnesiac Rita. Clues to her inevitable demise, however, appear throughout her dream.
This interpretation is similar to what Naomi Watts construed; in a 2001 interview, she stated that "I thought Diane was the real character and that Betty was the person she wanted to be and had dreamed up. Rita is the damsel in distress and she's in absolute need of Betty, and Betty controls her as if she were a doll. Rita is Betty's fantasy of who she wants Camilla to be."
Watts' own early experiences in Hollywood paralleled those of Diane's. She endured some professional frustration before she became successful, auditioned for parts in which she did not believe, and encountered people who did not follow through with opportunities. She recalled, "There were a lot of promises, but nothing actually came off. I ran out of money and became quite lonely."
Michael Wilmington of the Chicago Tribune found that "everything in Mulholland Drive is a nightmare. It's a portrayal of the Hollywood golden dream turning rancid, curdling into a poisonous stew of hatred, envy, sleazy compromise and soul-killing failure. This is the underbelly of our glamorous fantasies, and the area Lynch shows here is realistically portrayed."
The Guardian asked six well-known film critics for their own perceptions of the overall meaning in Mulholland Drive. Neil Roberts of The Sun and Tom Charity of Time Out subscribe to the theory that Betty is Diane's projection of a happier life. Roger Ebert and Jonathan Ross seem to accept this interpretation, but both hesitate to overanalyze the film.
Ebert states, "There is no explanation. There may not even be a mystery." Ross observes that there are storylines that go nowhere: "Perhaps these were leftovers from the pilot it was originally intended to be, or perhaps these things are the non-sequiturs and subconscious of dreams." Philip French from The Observer sees it as an allusion to Hollywood tragedy, while Jane Douglas from the BBC rejects the theory of Betty's life as Diane's dream, but also warns against too much analysis.
Media theorist Siobhan Lyons similarly disagrees with the dream theory, arguing that it is a "superficial interpretation [which] undermines the strength of the absurdity of reality that often takes place in Lynch's universe." Instead, Lyons posits that Betty and Diane are in fact two different people who happen to look similar, a common motif among Hollywood starlets.
In a similar interpretation, Betty and Rita and Diane and Camilla may exist in parallel universes that sometimes interconnect. Another theory offered is that the narrative is a Möbius strip. It was also suggested that the entire film takes place in a dream, yet the identity of the dreamer is unknown. Repeated references to beds, bedrooms and sleeping represent the influence of dreams. Rita falls asleep several times; in between these episodes, disconnected scenes such as the men having a conversation at Winkie's, Betty's arrival in Los Angeles and the bungled hit take place, suggesting that Rita may be dreaming them.
The opening shot of the film zooms into a bed containing an unknown sleeper, instilling, according to film scholar Ruth Perlmutter, the necessity to question the reality of following events. Professor of dream studies Kelly Bulkeley argues that the early scene at the diner, being the only scene in which dreams or dreaming are explicitly mentioned, illustrates "revelatory truth and epistemological uncertainty in Lynch's film."
The monstrous being from the dream, who is the subject of conversation of the men in Winkie's, reappears at the end of the film right before and after Diane commits suicide. Bulkeley asserts that the lone discussion of dreams in that scene presents an opening to "a new way of understanding everything that happens in the movie."