Mulholland Drive: A Labyrinth Of Light And Shadow

Mulholland Drive (2011) is one of the best-known films by director David Lynch, also author of The Secrets of Twin Peaks . As with almost all of his works, this creation also leaves no one indifferent and, once seen, divides the public between those who are exalted and those who are disgusted by it. Over the years this film has been awarded as one of the most iconic of the current century, although not unanimously.

Presenting a plot of this film is by no means easy given the complex structure. The plot? A young girl survives death twice when, just at the moment when it seemed she was about to be killed in a car, paradoxically she is saved thanks to a car accident.

Mulholland Drive plot

In her purse, the girl has only money and a small blue key. Nothing that can help to understand her identity, a key aspect of the film since after the accident the girl loses her memory and hides in a house that is not hers. Betty is instead an aspiring actress who lives in Los Angeles in the house loaned to her by an aunt. Upon arriving home for the first time, she runs into the bumpy young woman, who decides to be called Rita.

From this moment on, the film investigates Rita’s real identity, taking the viewer on a journey through the most secret passions of the two protagonists until reaching a series of apparently disconnected situations. From the initial thriller, we move on to absolute darkness and a descent into hell, in a game of appearances and symbols that in this article we try to decipher.

Mulholland Drive was originally supposed to be a TV series, but the producers were so shocked by the pilot that they preferred to turn it into a feature film.

Perhaps, the underlying problem is the viewer’s attempt to grasp a certain linearity, to find the final explanation and to understand every facet, instead of letting himself be carried away by the emotions and sensations that this film awakens.

Why do we try at all costs to grasp the explanation of everything that happens? That’s why we at La Mente Meravigliosa , rather than giving an explanation of the film, have chosen to analyze some key moments.

Why look for an explanation?

Mulholland Drive is an authentic labyrinth, a dream movie that we could associate with the complex structure of our dreams. Still today we try to find a key to reading Lynch’s work, even if the latter has repeatedly stated that the film has no real explanation.

In an age where we are used to information excess, watching Mulholland Drive can be a revelatory experience. A film that allows the viewer to give their own personal interpretation of what they see on the screen. Art doesn’t always have to be able to be explained in words. Sometimes, its explanation occurs on other levels or is limited to arousing certain emotions in us.

Let us think for a moment of some pictorial, musical or poetic works. These do not always convey a clear message and, often, this does not even weigh on us since we prefer to let ourselves be carried away by emotions. Even cinema can arouse this kind of emotion without being just a means of entertainment.

The mere fact that Mulholland Drive raises questions and questions in us pushes it beyond the label of mere entertainment. Lynch’s filmography usually trespasses into the dream, which is why it is paradoxically easier to try to understand the message of Mulholland Drive starting from the world of dreams. When we dream, the images and stories that crowd our mind and that seem totally logical to us during the dream, turn out to be completely disconnected once we wake up.

Mulholland Drive : an illusion

When we dream, in our dreams people appear that we have already seen at least once in our life, but that we do not remember or to whom the dream attributes different roles from those interpreted in reality.

In the dream, even the spaces can differ enormously from reality, as well as our potential, which sometimes lead us to carry out actions that in life we ​​would not be able to do. Wanting therefore to make a parallel between Mulholland Drive and the dream world, we can find in the film a whole series of elements that fit perfectly into the dynamics of the world of dreams. The film is also loaded with symbolism, particularly in a revealing place: the Club Silencio.

The Silence Club scene is undoubtedly one of the most hypnotic of the film and, at the same time, the one that determines a before and after in the plot. If up to this point it was possible to identify a structure that was at least partly linear, starting from this scene we find ourselves in front of a completely different film.

This Club acts a bit like the Magic Theater in Hermann Hesse’s hermetic novel The Steppe Wolf . A meeting place from which no character will return to who he was and which, perhaps, holds the real key to understanding the protagonists.

The blue color

Club Silencio is a place dominated by the blue color and which seems to evoke a profound duality of the protagonist. Blue, which alludes to mind and introspection, is the same color that we find in the key that Rita had in her bag at the time of the accident and in the safe that Betty keeps.

During the film it will be the blue key to open the safe giving life to a new reality, to a succession of events that, finally, seem to acquire a meaning. Everything that has been seen up to that moment seems to take on a new meaning, making us witness an evident split in personality. Thanks to Club Silencio, we discover that we have been deceived. All we saw was just an illusion, a lie. Just like art, dreams and, precisely, this film. The club wizard seems to be talking to the girls and us at the same time, awakening us from the sleep that Lynch had forced us into.

We thus pass from the first part of the film, with its detective tones, to a more obscure one, which revolves around a point of inflection as disconcerting as it is revealing. From the optimism of the American dream that the young Betty seems to live, we move on to the decadence and instability of Rita, deepening the duality that harbors in the latter.

Conclusions

Despite the many merits and strengths of this film, there are still some critics who cannot digest it and who consider it an overrated work. Even if this were the case, we still find ourselves in front of a film full of valuable interpretations, capable of launching the career of Naomi Watts who in this film we see acting in a masterly way.

It certainly cannot be denied that Mulholland Drive is a real puzzle with a deeply subjective solution. An exercise for the spectator to treasure. Ultimately, Mulholland Drive is an invitation to the mind, an illusory puzzle loaded with passions and lies.