‘Mulholland Drive’ at 25 - The Dreamy Masterpiece That Redefined Cinema
25 years ago today, on October 12, 2001, David Lynch released what is perhaps the most outstanding achievement of his entire career: Mulholland Drive. By then, Lynch had already established himself as one of the great filmmakers. He had made the Best Picture nominated The Elephant Man in 1980, Blue Velvet in 1986, perhaps his greatest mainstream success in the early-90s landmark television series Twin Peaks, and Lost Highway in 1997. Most of these works used surrealism the way other directors use plot. But Mulholland Drive felt like the place he had been heading all along, a film about the allure of Hollywood, broken dreams, illusion, and obsession, made by a man who had worked in the industry for 25 years and had plenty to say about it. When Roger Ebert reviewed it in 2001, he wrote:
“David Lynch has been working toward Mulholland Drive all of his career … The movie is a surrealist dreamscape in the form of a Hollywood film noir, and the less sense it makes, the more we can’t stop watching it.”
That last observation is the one that has aged best. Try to summarize the story and you hit a wall almost at once. Betty, played by Naomi Watts, is a perky young woman who has come to Hollywood to audition for the movies. Rita, played by Laura Harring, takes her name from a Gilda poster, and she is hiding something she cannot remember. Around them, Lynch spins a director forced to cast an actress he doesn’t want, a shadowy figure giving orders by phone, a landlady played by Ann Miller, and a rotting corpse. And that is all before the characters begin to fracture and recombine.
There is little in the way of explanation, and I mean that as the highest praise. The film began life as a 1999 pilot for ABC, which didn’t air it, and a network wouldn’t have understood what it was looking at anyway. Lynch took what he had, found his financing elsewhere, and charged right through the same sort of material that had frustrated mainstream audiences in his earlier work.
So much of Mulholland Drive’s power comes from the performances. The closer Watts’ Betty gets to discovering Rita’s identity, the more we are forced to doubt her own. This performance marked Watts’ breakthrough, and it is hard to forget that she was on the verge of quitting acting and leaving Los Angeles before she was cast. Harring, slinky in her clinging gowns, takes the risk of embodying an archetype and gets away with it, because the film understands that archetypes are what Hollywood sells. Neither woman ever winks at the audience. They play it straight, and that is why the film’s tonal shifts, from innocence to menace to farce, work as they do in a real dream.
The film is also a love letter to the movies, and a bitter one. It is steeped in Hollywood history, from the studio gates that recall Sunset Boulevard, to the casting of Ann Miller, to the fashions, music, and makeup. Cinephiles adore movies about movies, and I suspect that explains some small part of the film’s remarkable standing, most notably being listed 8th on the 2022 Sight and Sound Poll of the Greatest Films of All Time. But the lists could never fully explain why people keep returning, because Mulholland Drive is also a gripping tragedy about the machinery of fame, a story of two women in Hollywood and of the way its system grinds up the bodies it has no further use for. The innocent hopes of Betty give way to something much more desperate, and the film’s cruelty lands harder now, in an era far more attuned to how that machinery treats the young and the vulnerable, especially women.
It is a great blunder of Academy Awards history that the film received only a nomination for Best Director, and no Best Picture nomination at all, losing both awards to Ron Howard’s otherwise excellent A Beautiful Mind. I would go even further to say that Mulholland Drive was not merely the greatest film of its year, but the most groundbreaking contribution to the art of cinema in the decade before it or the decade after. Awards are a poor measure of such things, but the omission says something about how far ahead of its audience the film was, and how willing the establishment of the time was to ignore a masterpiece sitting in plain sight.
David Lynch directed one more feature, Inland Empire in 2006, which made Los Angeles the setting of a third film after Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive. His last work came in 2017 with the widely-acclaimed third and final season of Twin Peaks, the series for which he is perhaps best known. He died in 2025 at the age of 78, leaving behind one of the most celebrated filmographies in cinema history. But 25 years to the day after its release, it has become abundantly clear that no single work of Lynch’s is more skillfully crafted, or more important to the medium, than this one.
Mulholland Drive is available for purchase on 4K Blu-ray as well as digital rental.