Some teenage boys have pictures of attractive women on the back of their closet doors, I had a full-page newspaper ad for Mulholland Drive.
In many ways, it was my Driver’s Ed teacher’s fault. During a driving practical, he and I started talking movies and we got around to my love of cult films. He asked me if I had ever seen David Lynch’s Eraserhead. I had not and he ended up loaning me his copy. Which was a bootleg VHS off of a Japanese laserdisc. I know this because it had Japanese subtitles and halfway through it, the screen randomly flashed “SIDE 2.” The quality was fuzzy, but I was into it. I decided to check out Lynch’s other work. I had some previous knowledge of Lynch it turned out. I had seen his Dune on television, and caught the “Owls are not what they seem” scene from Twin Peaks on Bravo. My next step ended up being Blue Velvet, and from there I was hooked. I've podcasted some about this before. This was all around mid-2000 to early 2001. Early IMDB showed me that Lynch had a new project coming out soon, a reworked pilot for a TV series. His “film version” of the Twin Peaks pilot was a particular favorite of mine, so I knew Lynch was going to make something remarkable.
When Mulholland Drive came out, I had to wait until video. My small town did not have a movie theater at the time, and my parents weren’t going to let me drive into the big city to see a movie by myself. I lived in walking distance to a video store, where I got Blue Velvet, so it would happen in time. It ended up that the first time I saw Mulholland Drive was on VHS with the words “PROPERTY OF UNIVERSAL STUDIOS. UNAUTHORIZED DUPLICATION PROHIBITED” scrolling across the bottom every fifteen minutes or so. I had friends who worked at that video store and they loaned me the screener VHS, something that technically wasn’t supposed to happen. Only the owner or manager was supposed to watch the screeners. This meant I saw it a number of weeks before it officially hit video shelves. That might beat the Japanese laserdisc bootleg experience.
I had to chase this film and I had finally caught it. This is something that I both miss and am quite glad I don’t have to do anymore. Before the internet and peer-to-peer sharing, if something was a little off the beaten path, one would have to hope a video rental place, often NOT a Blockbuster, would carry it. Or you’d look in the tv listings and hope to catch it. It was a stupid time. However, I do think it may have made some movies better. You finally got to see something you’d spent months turning over various rocks to find, and that would add something. Not quite hype, but maybe it enhanced the positives. This could lead to disappointment too, of course, but that rarely happened in my experience. Mulholland Drive may have had something extra added, but it still exceeded my expectations.
A woman gets into a car accident on the titular road, loses her memory, and wanders into an apartment, where she meets a young Hollywood hopeful. Together they try to solve the mystery of who she really is. That is until they open a blue box with a blue key after going to the Club Silencio. Also a film director is trying to make a movie, but these mobster types are telling him who to cast, his wife is having an affair with Billy Ray Cyrus, and some cryptic cowboy is giving him instructions. Then there is something going on behind Winkies. The film had so much. It was weird, hard to figure out, but it made me feel things most films could not. Pixar can get you in the feels, a real good horror movie can get you filled with dread. But David Lynch can make you see something beautiful, terrifying, mysterious, and wonderous all at the same time.
Needless to say in 2002 and 2003 Mulholland Drive became the THIS MOVIE IS VERY IMPORTANT TO ME film that many teenage film buffs have. I imagine my friends kind of hated it. I would attempt to explain the film when folks said, “that movie doesn’t make sense,” but I never really conveyed it well. I probably spent 10 years trying to discern the enigma. In the DVD insert, David Lynch gave 10 “clues for unlocking this thriller.” I spent many of my subsequent viewings trying to answer those questions. I was quite excited whenever I figured out one of them. “That explains EVERYTHING!” I would (incorrectly) say to myself, and try to use this new knowledge to help others “understand” the film better. I was young and dumb.
Over the years I would rewatch it periodically, and each time I had a different appreciation. Thanks to the internet, I have been able to see the pilot version, in slightly better bootleg quality. It too is pretty good, but 2000 era television was never gonna go for it. Ten years after I saw it for the first time, I would get to see the film in the cinema, as a Midnight Movie. I was living in Colorado at the time and drove myself to one of the arthouses in Denver. It wasn’t a large crowd. The film has a fierce following, but Rocky Horror it is not. Seeing the Club Silencio scene was something else in the cinema, as opposed to my home. With about 30 minutes left in the film, some guy yelled something profane and stormed out of the theater. The Aurora shootings had happened a week before, not too far from this screening, so suddenly there was this tension added to an already tense film. I let myself just experience the film that time, and that was one of the best cinema experiences of my life, angry guy notwithstanding.
I don’t think making sense of it all is the right thing to do with this film. I will say that I think most of the film is a dream, but “figuring that out” isn’t the point. Lynch himself often states he is more interested in whatever the viewer gets out of his films than “explaining” them. I don’t blame teenage me for trying though.
Mulholland Drive often makes the top 3, if not the number 1 spot of many Best of the 21st Century lists. I’m hard pressed to think of something better. Sight & Sound’s Greatest Films of All Time list from 2012, a list re-evaluated every ten years, it ranks at number 28. It is the youngest film on that list. I wouldn’t be surprised if it moved up the ranks next year. Somehow, something that started as a TV pilot, became one of the greatest films of all time. For this cinema lover, it was seminal to how I understood and analyzed film as both art and entertainment.
~Andrew