Films I Love #2: Mulholland Dr. (David Lynch, 2001)

Mulholland Dr. is one of those films whose impact is so overwhelming for me that I hardly know where to begin when writing about it. When I walked outside after the first time I saw it, stepping out into a bright spring day, I felt disoriented, my entire way of looking at the world around me thoroughly, if temporarily, destabilized by the experience of this haunting, unsettling, deeply moving film. Referencing classic "double" films like Persona and Vertigo, David Lynch weaves an enigmatic tale of the cheery would-be actress Betty (Naomi Watts) and the amnesiac femme fatale Rita (Laura Elena Harding) — who later transform into Diane and Camilla, respectively. Before this happens though, Lynch blends together elements of film noir, shoot-em-up action, melodramatic romance, Westerns, mystery, slapstick comedy, exploitation pictures, and horror into a dense patchwork that's half Hollywood pastiche and half disorienting dream/nightmare. The Hollywood genre film, in all its myriad forms, is reborn with a twisted logic that allows scenes from very different genres to melt into one another — Hollywood's collective history reimagined as a feverish dream. It all spirals towards the awe-inspiring Club Silencio sequence, Lynch's masterpiece in miniature, a brilliant deconstruction of movie soundtracks and the "magic" of cinematic artifice. With this gesture, Lynch meditates on the profoundest mystery of the movies: how something we know to be "fake" and manufactured can nevertheless move us to our souls.