Mulholland Drive

There is no shortage of theories regarding the fever dreams of David Lynch. We have our own: He’s a walking clinical study of high-functioning autism, a man who lives—quite literally, by all appearances—in a private world that turns the everyday back on us in grotesquely refracted ways. All of Lynch’s most emblematic works (this movie, Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks) say the same thing: There is a world inside the world, more corrupt and more Byzantine than you can imagine. An ironic streak of puritanism colors Lynch’s notion of evil; you see it in the way he represents good (Laura Dern and Kyle McLachlan in Blue Velvet) and the glee he takes in brutality toward the unrighteous. But none of this even begins to explain the peculiar emotional force of these little dream-quests. As for Mulholland Drive, consider this Rakish Viewers’ Tip®: The plot isn’t tough to fathom if you take for granted that the first two hours are a dream dreamt by a character who doesn’t have a line until the last 20 minutes.