From cancelled pilot to finished feature
Mulholland Drive began life in 1999 as a ninety-minute pilot David Lynch shot for ABC, built around an amnesiac woman climbing out of a car wreck on the title road with a purse full of cash and a blue key, and a bright-eyed aspiring actress who takes her in. ABC found the pace too slow, objected to the casting of Naomi Watts and Laura Harring as too old for the parts, and cancelled it after a single viewing. The French company StudioCanal spent roughly a year negotiating with Lynch to fund eighteen new pages and further shooting, turning an unsold pilot into a finished feature with an ending it had never had, released in 2001.
Two women, a dropped identity, and a hard pivot
Betty Elms (Watts), newly arrived in Los Angeles, moves into her aunt’s apartment and finds Rita (Harring), a woman with no memory of her own name, hiding there after surviving a car crash meant to kill her. The two investigate Rita’s identity while, in a separate thread, director Adam Kesher (Justin Theroux) is pressured by unseen backers to cast an actress he does not want in his film. Roughly two-thirds of the way through, the film pivots hard on itself, swapping identities, relationships and even actors’ apparent roles without explanation. Lynch wrote and directed it without offering interpretation to critics, cast or audience; editor and long-time collaborator Mary Sweeney cut the extra footage into the original pilot material, and Peter Deming shot both the 1999 and 2000 sessions so the two eras of footage sit together almost seamlessly.
What holds across the seam
What holds the film together across its seam is Angelo Badalamenti’s score, doom-laden and constant, and Naomi Watts’s performance, which runs from bright, almost parodic optimism in the film’s first half to something far more exposed once the story turns, a range few actresses were given the chance to demonstrate in a single role that year. The film’s most quoted sequence, a stage performance at Club Silencio insisting that everything the audience is hearing is a recording, works as pure unease regardless of whether you can map it onto the plot. Individual scenes, an audition, a diner conversation about a recurring nightmare, a hitman’s botched job, hold up as freestanding set pieces even for viewers who never settle the larger puzzle.
The threads the pilot never resolved
The seam between the abandoned pilot and the added feature material is visible if you look for it: several plot threads set up in the first two-thirds, a hitman subplot, a mob-connected coffee critique, a cowboy who threatens Adam, are dropped rather than resolved, leftovers of a television structure built for episodes that never got made. Lynch’s refusal to explain the ending, admirable as a matter of principle, also means the film offers no way to check whether a given reading is right or simply plausible, which will frustrate anyone who wants the pieces to click into one confirmed shape rather than several competing ones sitting unresolved side by side.
Hollywood, memory, and assigned identity
The film treats Hollywood itself as the source of the dread: auditions, casting rooms and studio backlots recur as places where identity is assigned by other people rather than chosen, and Betty’s arc from hopeful newcomer to something much darker reads as what the industry does to the women who arrive in Los Angeles believing in it. Memory itself is the other subject; Rita has none, and Betty’s version of events later seems to have been reconstructed rather than lived, and the blue box and blue key function as a way of asking what a person does with a life once the official explanation for it stops holding together. Los Angeles here is a city built from borrowed names and interchangeable rooms.
Who should sit with the unresolved version
This suits viewers who enjoy puzzle films that refuse to hand over the solution, and anyone curious to see Naomi Watts’s breakthrough performance, which the film built her American career on. It rewards a second viewing more than most films are able to, since the pivot around the two-thirds mark recontextualises nearly everything that came before it. It is not for anyone who needs a plot to resolve cleanly by the credits, or who finds Lynch’s slower, dread-laden pacing simply tedious rather than unsettling; the abandoned pilot’s loose threads will read as sloppiness rather than intentional mystery to viewers unwilling to accept the film on its own terms.
Whether the two and a half hours pay off
Assembled from a cancelled pilot and a French backer’s patience, on a budget of fifteen million dollars, Mulholland Drive became one of the most influential American films of its decade, taking Lynch the directing prize at Cannes and continuing to place at or near the top of critics’ polls of the twenty-first century two decades on. It does not resolve, and it is not trying to; the value is in the two performances at its centre and in individual sequences that remain unnerving on their own terms regardless of the larger puzzle. At close to two and a half hours it is a real commitment for one evening, but it is one of the rare puzzle films that gets more rewarding, not less, on a second watch.