The two are a study in contrasts, but they connect nonetheless.įrom there, Lynch uses an entire different set of characters to stage an ingenious piece of misdirection. Betty knows nothing about Rita or the danger she might be in, but she agrees to help the stranger find her identity. The woman, who calls herself Rita, after a poster of Rita Hayworth in Gilda, takes refuge in a spacious apartment that Betty (Naomi Watts), an aspiring blond actor from Canada, is occupying while her aunt is out of town. The irresistible hook of the pilot, and the finished film is the mystery surrounding a glamorous brunette (Laura Elena Harring) who gets in a car accident in the Hollywood Hills and stumbles away with a purse filled with cash and a blue key, but no idea who she is. She deserves better than the town gives her. ![]() But the soul of Mulholland Drive is still the same: it’s about a sunny, optimistic dreamer from Deep River, Ontario, who lands in Hollywood hoping to make a career, but gets waylaid by circumstances beyond her control, losing her innocence – and a great deal more – in the process. It isn’t that difficult to figure out where the pilot ends and where Lynch’s new material starts – some scenes could air on network TV, others absolutely could not – and there’s a startling, almost calamitous quality to the way he deconstructs his own movie, making every single part of the first two-thirds or so up for renegotiation. And it won’t matter if the girl is more talented or not. Though Lynch himself admitted to feeling unhappy about the cut, his extraordinary reclamation project seems informed by the common disappointment of not making it in Hollywood – whether through accidents of luck or timing, lack of better connections, or the unaccountable forces behind the scenes. He’s seduced by the Hollywood dream factory, but knows how ugly it looks on the inside.Ĭase in point: Mulholland Drive itself, which began as a rejected 90-minute pilot for ABC, the network that once turned Lynch’s Twin Peaks into a sensation, but refused to roll the dice a second time. Lynch’s affection for classic Hollywood has been apparent since his 1986 film Blue Velvet turned noir on its head, but his own career on its fringes informs Mulholland Drive just as strongly. ![]() (At No 28, it’s only a few slots behind Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love, another bewitching masterpiece.) It’s surely no coincidence that Vertigo, along with Sunset Boulevard, is the film Lynch most directly references as the identities of two very different women merge and then fracture into so many pieces that it takes multiple viewings just to start putting them back together. ![]() David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, now 20 years old, is on the same journey, one of only two 21st-century movies to place on the most recent Sight & Sound Top 100.
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