How 'Mulholland Drive' Made Me A Film Scholar
A personal essay about David Lynch’s surreal masterpiece
I like to think that if you are a cinephile, film critic, or scholar, then there must be one key motion picture in your life that made you take film seriously as an art form. It made you excited about movies, about what they could mean, or the effect they could have, kicking off a series of events that led you to become the person you are today.
For me, that movie was David Lynch’s 2001 masterpiece Mulholland Drive.
It is, without a doubt, my favorite movie of all time. As pretentious as this may sound, Mulholland Drive was the first film that made me think about what it meant, fostering active engagement on my part as a viewer instead of over-explaining itself via artificial exposition. Watching it over and over completely changed my perception of what films are and what they were capable of.
It inspired me to diversify the types of films I watched, as well as to analyze them critically. It made me an avid fan of Lynch and a collector of his works. And I believe it to be the work most directly responsible for my becoming a film scholar.
So, here I want to share how Mulholland Drive changed my life.
First Impressions
In late 2003, I was an avid movie-watcher but I’m not sure I would really call myself a cinephile. I loved watching movies, but I didn’t really think much about them. Or rather, I had not seen a movie that inspired me to think while or after watching it. I regularly watched films at that point on cable and DVD. The former wasn’t very good in Russia at the time, but occasionally you could find an interesting title on it.
I also wasn’t really sure of what I wanted to do with my future. I knew I wanted to have something to do with movies professionally, maybe acting, directing, or producing. But I wasn’t certain precisely what that would be, even as the specter of graduating from high school loomed ever closer.
Then, one day, I caught the tail end of a little film called Mulholland Drive on cable. I had never seen anything like it before. Prior to this, the most obscure or independent films I had seen were by Quentin Tarantino, which is to say that I was mostly into escapist entertainment of the mainstream, blockbuster variety.
Mulholland Drive was my entry point to experimental cinema, surrealism, and the works of David Lynch, who remains to this day my favorite film director. Its ending was so bizarre, yet so captivating.
When I asked my parents if they had seen the film, they replied that they had and neither one liked it. My mother stated that it had a lot of plot points, which led absolutely nowhere. My father regarded it as a bunch of nonsense.
But despite their reactions, I couldn’t get it out of my head. Something about it just lingered with me. I bought it on DVD and watched it in its entirety.
I really enjoyed the film even though the final 30–40 minutes really threw me off. Left without a clear understanding of what it was about, I went on the Internet and started reading about it. I found out it had been originally a pilot for television, remade into a feature when the series wasn’t given a green light.
I also bought into the claim by film critic Roger Ebert that Mulholland Drive is “is all dream. There is nothing that is intended to be a waking moment.” For a while, this was how I approached the film — as a collection of dream sequences, without an actual story. I thought it wasn’t meant to be rationalized, simply enjoyed as a bunch of beautiful, yet ultimately disconnected scenes randomly strung together.
Rewatch and Analysis
I soon showed it again to my parents and their opinion of the picture started to improve. They enjoyed individual episodes, such as the comical murder sequence by an incompetent assassin, despite finding it to still be incoherent as a whole.
And then, I showed it to my older brother when I visited him in the summer of 2004.
This was the fourth time I saw it and I believe at this point I had memorized almost every line of dialogue. It was during this rewatch that something just clicked. Suddenly, I could sense the logic behind the movie’s structure and the disparate pieces of its narrative started to fall into place in my head.
The next time I watched it with my parents, I was ready.
First, we saw the film in its entirety, and while I occasionally told mom and dad what to look out for, I didn’t explain anything.
Then, after the movie was over and I had confirmation that they still didn’t get it, I made the case that, in the end, Mulholland Drive was the story of Diane (Naomi Watts), a young woman that came to Hollywood and didn’t really make it big, ending up jealous and possessive of her lover Camilla (Laura Elena Harring), who was more successful and talented. Once her lover decided to leave her, Diane had her killed, only to be driven insane by her guilt, which led her to commit suicide.
I argued that only the last 30 or so minutes of the film took place in reality, while everything before that were the dreams of Diane Selwyn, a reflection of her desires to become a true star, to be the woman that Rita/Camilla loves, to be the one that the director favors. I then rewound the DVD and showed them all the evidence.
I pointed out how the opening POV sequence showing someone going to sleep on a bed with red sheets corresponded to “Diane” waking up much later in the movie, framing everything that had taken place before that as a ‘dream.’
I illustrated how the weird and unsettling “Winkie’s” diner scene seemed to intentionally linger on a discontinuity between two sequential shots, indicating to the viewer that this was a false reality, or more specifically, part of a dream.
I showed them how the emphasis on the ashtray in Diane’s apartment meant that the scene was taking place chronologically earlier than Diane waking up and talking to her neighbor, that we were now seeing flashbacks intercut with the ‘present.’
I replayed the scene between Diane and the assassin Joe, explaining that it heavily implied that Diane had her lover Camilla murdered and apparently the blue key served as proof of her death (and/or would unlock a locker containing it).
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Film Studies
I swear, I reached these conclusions about the film’s actual narrative all by myself, and this led me to realize that films were capable of being more than just entertainment, that they could tell stories through indirect and elliptical means, that they could be ambiguous and open to interpretation.
My parents were very impressed with my analysis.
That I was able to explain the plot refuted any doubt in their minds that a film-related profession could be in my future. In turn, I now had a clear idea of what I wanted to learn in college and what I wanted to do professionally.
Previously, I was interested in filmmaking and acting, but now I wanted to participate in film criticism and analysis. I wanted to write about movies, to study movies, analyze them, engage with them on a deeper level. I knew I wanted to see more films like Mulholland Drive that encouraged or necessitated audience interpretation.
I dreamed of becoming a great film critic.
And so, rather than searching for acting or directing majors, I started looking into film studies. I applied to six or seven universities with such programs, using my analysis of Lynch’s masterpiece in my application essays and writing samples.
I got accepted into three of them, ultimately becoming an undergrad in the Cinema Studies program at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. My time there led me to consider becoming a full-on researcher and professor of film and television, ultimately leading to a PHD at Brown University’s department of Modern Culture and Media.
Every time I see Mulholland Drive now, I recall some events from my life that are connected to it. I remember writing my first film essay and making it through the application hell that was my final year in high school. I remember watching hundreds of movies from different genres from across the world, in the process learning global film history, theory and culture.
I remember living in NYC and visiting an amazing, yet now sadly defunct video store, where the butchered TV pilot version of the movie was openly available for rental. I remember meeting screenwriting professor and frequent Lynch collaborator Mary Sweeney at USC to discuss the use of dream visions in Twin Peaks.
In turn, I wonder sometimes about what would’ve happened if I had never caught Mulholland Drive on TV. Would I have still gone into film studies? Would I have still worked as a film critic for publications like Washington Square News and The Daily Trojan? Would I still have written a dissertation about the history of the American film industry? I don’t know for sure, but I doubt it.
My takeaway from all this is that one movie really can change your life. And in so doing, it can become an indelible part of your personal history.
But what about you?Do you like Mulholland Drive?
Or do you think it’s ‘suckfest,’ as a colleague once described to me? Is there a film that similarly inspired you to think differently about movies, to become more actively engaged when watching? Is there a film that helped make you who you are today? If so, please
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Thelma and Louise. Intriguingly, a polemic artfully disguised as realism disguised deftly as sometimes caricature, and multi-genre dramedy - and vice-vice-vice-versa. It can make you think, at multiple layers, technical and normative. And Spike Lee's films for the breath of fresh air they deliver. Dog Day Afternoon. Missing. Romero. A lot of great movies inspire you to think differently about movies - and life - which in part defines their greatness. TV series similarly. Novels...
I've always struggled with movies as a medium compared to television. I'm a trilogy-of-books kind of guy, so it never surprised me that movies felt more like short stories while television gave me the time I wanted to spend with my favourite characters (who, of course, can overstay their welcome).
So while movies didn't get me here, LOST was the show that made me a media scholar - something about the way people engaged with the show, week-to-week, in the emerging online discourse is what held my attention (including various interactive paratexts and the constant public engagement of the showrunners), along with how the show seemed to be engaging with Big Questions. It led me to read thoughtful criticism from folks who were both critics AND scholars - I'm sure that exists in movie critic land, but it was TV critic land that got me to notice. And it's what got me to think about storytelling in a visual medium. It was (embarrassingly recently) only in the last 6-7 years that I realized that TV was a writer's medium (with the Showrunner holding a place of honour) compared to movies being a director's medium (it still shocks me that Hitchcock didn't write the scripts for his films, even if he was involved)! I think that says a lot about what features of visual storytelling appealed to me, at least initially. Today though, we have all of these TV auteurs who act, direct, and write all at once (from Fleabag to Atlanta to The OA) - so I can finally lean into film studies lit (instead of just media studies broadly and the emerging field of TV studies). But I still rant and rave about LOST all the time lol.