Mulholland Drive

An in-depth study of David Lynch's surreal psychological thriller, Mulholland Drive (2001), in the BFI Film Classics series.

Mulholland Drive (2001), David Lynch’s hallucinatory noir, is one of cinema’s most original, despairing portraits of Hollywood’s dream factory. A backstudio film, Mulholland Drive follows bright-eyed actress Betty Elms (Naomi Watts), who arrives in Los Angeles and becomes caught in a mysterious conspiracy of power with Rita (Laura Harring), an alluring amnesiac.

Justus Nieland’s timely study approaches Mulholland Drive as a film haunted by the fragile infrastructure of its city. He revisits Mulholland Drive’s origins as a failed TV pilot for ABC, exploring Lynch’s relationship to various studios as material spaces of world-building and environmental control. He argues that LA’s unstable atmospheres and uncanny landscapes, with deep roots in the history of film noir, are the essential setting of Mulholland Drive’s tragic queer love story and its dark meditation on identity and fantasy.

Tracing the film’s enduring influence on contemporary film culture, Nieland shows how Mulholland Drive’s radical ambiguity continues to provoke obsession and interpretation. Born of an analogue world of paint, plastic and celluloid, Lynch’s surreal masterpiece now enjoys an eternal digital afterlife among fans.