Mulholland Dr. (on-screen title)

Director / Screenwriter: David Lynch

By Roderick Heath

In memoriam: David Lynch 1946-2025

Mulholland Drive famously began life as a pilot for a TV show commissioned from David Lynch. As unlikely in its time as it would have seemed a few years earlier and indeed still does from today’s vantage, Lynch’s first foray into creating for television, Twin Peaks had proven a genuine cause celebre that described a rollercoaster arc in the popular culture of the early 1990s, a large audience arrested, mesmerised, bewildered, and finally frustrated. Initial huge success faded into neglect as the show’s blend of the folksy and infernal supplanted the hook of intrigue and the show passed out of Lynch’s creative control, even if it remained entirely defined by his artistic imprimatur. Still the show remained an object of pure cult fervour that finally gained satisfaction when Lynch revived the series for a single season in 2017, and in the meantime it set the scene for some of the odder permutations of 1990s mainstream culture. Lynch’s next attempt to get such a project off the ground proved ill-fated, as the network that commissioned it passed, at a time when Lynch’s stature as a hero of artistically ambitious American cinema had waned a little in terms of attention if not achievement. Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992), an attempt to build upon the series and draw out its ugliest facets involving murder and incest, had been largely rejected, even derided, and Lost Highway (1997) proved too jaggedly strange and onerous to find a receptive audience, although both films have since been reclaimed by aficionados. The Straight Story (1999) proved a swerve towards the relatively mainstream, even the superficially anodyne, but actually offered a sneaky roadmap through real-world underpinnings of Lynch’s imaginative landscape.

Lynch in the meantime spent a couple of years nursing his rejected pilot titled Mulholland Dr., in a nod to Sunset Blvd (1950), which set in motion an array of mysteries and characters: Lynch knew he had something worthwhile in this rump of creativity, but, intended as it was to set a serial drama in motion, it had no ending. Lynch reported some time later that he was sitting around on his couch when suddenly a tiny avalanche of ideas hit, handing him a way of transforming the pilot into a complete entity, and he was able to reassemble the key actors, including stars Naomi Watts, Laura Elena Harring, and Justin Theroux, to shoot new scenes. Mulholland Drive’s reception, at least amongst receptive fans and cinephiles, was just as electric and fervent as the arrival of his Blue Velvet in 1986, and even if it didn’t prove his last feature (that would be the long, labyrinthine Inland Empire, 2006), it proved very much the culmination of his movie career in terms of acclaim and profile, the end of a road filled somehow with both random twists but also a sustained purpose since the great WTF clarion call of Eraserhead (1976), a film that took Lynch five years to shoot. Lynch, born in Montana, had moved around the United States with his family, as his father, a research scientist employed by the government, moved from post to post, spending the bulk of his teen years in Virginia. Lynch later recalled having, despite the repeated moves, a rather idyllic childhood, and his art, of course, became preoccupied with depicting and conceiving the discovery of the existence of the teeming strangeness and threat in the world.

Mulholland Drive proved an entirely logical thematic and physical terminus for Lynch’s explorations of the churned state of the American continent. Apart from his two early discursions into other worlds – the Victorian England of The Elephant Man (1980) and the only slightly more alien far future of Dune (1984) – the perverse disparities of American life remained Lynch’s preoccupying theme. Most particularly the constant, simmering tension between its affected surfaces of settled tranquillity and the storms of it deep, dank appetites, and his perception of people, often artists but also the naturally inquisitive, the seers of suburbia, caught between the two realms. Lynch drifted from the conjured landscape of an industrial city, nightmarishly transformed but all the more vivid as such, in Eraserhead, back to the longed-for but unstable Americana of Blue Velvet and the avatars of retro cool at loose in Wild At Heart (1990), the small town infested by Mephistophelean evil in Twin Peaks and the wanderers trundling along the Kerouac road at varying speeds of Lost Highway and The Straight Story. Hollywood, end of the line, edge of the continent, the place all lost fantasists and visionaries finish up, not escaping the things the dog and torment and displace them but coming to a stage where they can argue those forces to some kind of compromise, understanding, even tenuous partnership – or be destroyed by them even quicker.

Mulholland Drive emerged in 2001 as the last of a trio of films linked together, if only in my head, following Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut (1999) and Wong Kar-Wai’s In The Mood For Love (2000). As well as all being subjects of contention and ardour for cineastes of a certain stripe, all of them dealt in depicting frustrated and displaced sexuality that pervades the texture of the films themselves – only one of them was technically a period piece, but all seemed to blur eras and deal in punch-drunk nostalgia – and essayed in dreamlike spaces. In any event, Mulholland Drive was the subject upon release of fierce and ebullient discussion by cineastes. What did it mean?  Did it tell, as Lynch insisted, a coherent story? Was it part dream, part cold reality? Was there really an underlying mystery to be deduced and pieced together? Lynch happily stirred the pot by putting out a list of supposed clues, mentioning throwaway lines and odd details that could surely only lead to greater bafflement. Of course, there is no final, neat explanation for what we see and hear and feel in Mulholland Drive, although it certainly presents closely related stories that one can take, depending on predilections, as perhaps only one story, or as variations on a common theme. I might even go further and posit Mulholland Drive as a saucy shared joke on the whole idea of solving mysteries, the very notion of locking the teeming strangeness and perversity of life into friezes of convenience and coherence. Twin Peaks had hooked an audience with its murder mystery, before revealing its disinterest in offering a solution in any square, familiar way. Mulholland Drive solves its mysteries, in a way, but solutions are only ever new gateways.

Otherwise Mulholland Drive might best be taken as an associative collage improvising on certain recurring, essential motifs – acting, movies, love, sex, crime, personality, power, and Hollywood itself, microcosm of and psychic playground for America at large. An industrial locale wrapped in a glamour that is at once, sure, superficial and phony, but is also couched in something very real. An act of fantasy conjuring in itself, as the place where so many dream lives find their psychic bed and more immediately so many dreamers flock to become more than they are. The place where every variety of human, those trying to escape an identity and those trying to find one, all flock, to find fortunes – the money kind, yes, but other kinds too, from sexual plenty to community and grand labour. In broadest terms, Mulholland Drive recounts two disparate narratives that in its last quarter, merge, blur, and carefully revise themselves. In the first, the perky, folksy young wannabe actress Betty Elms (Naomi Watts), who’s recently won a dance contest (jitterbugging, for maximum retro zest) back in her home town of Deep River, Ontario, arrives in LA to looks for acting work, taking over the apartment of her aunt Ruth (Maya Bond), a working character actor who has just recently left to shoot a role.

Betty finds a strange woman (Laura Elena Harring) in the apartment’s shower: this stranger, as the audience has already seen in the movie’s opening moments, was an apparently well-to-do woman riding in the back of a limousine that stopped on a deserted stretch of Mulholland Drive in the hills above the city, and the drivers turned out to be paid assassins about to kill her – only for some joyriders to come tearing up the road and crash into the limo, killing the assassins and leaving the woman with a head injury causing amnesia. The woman stumbled about nocturnal LA until she found refuge in Aunt Ruth’s apartment after glimpsing Ruth leaving. The woman, still without memory, sees a poster for the Rita Hayworth noir vehicle Gilda (1946) on Ruth’s wall and gives her name to Betty as Rita. Later, when Betty speaks on the phone to Ruth and realises she is harbouring a total stranger, ‘Rita’ admits to her loss of memory and abject confusion. Checking out her purse, Betty finds a large sum of cash, and an oddly-made blue key. The two begin following the few clues they have to Rita’s real identity, including a telephone number that yields only an answer from a seemingly random woman, and, eventually, Rita’s memory of the name of someone called Diane Selwyn, jogged when she glimpses a diner waitress with the nametag reading ‘Diane.’

The other portion of this is a hyperbolic comedy of humiliation involving Adam Kesher (Justin Theroux), the quintessential slick-kid Hollywood director (in very 1990s hip uniform with all-black wardrobe and rectangular-frame glasses) who spends a long day crashing headlong into the limitations of his auteurist power over reality. The 1950s period piece he’s working on is shut down when he resists pressure imposed by a pair of mysterious emissaries, the Castigliane brothers (Angelo Badalamenti and Dan Hedaya), who glower with fearsome charisma and whose presence reduces Hollywood players to quivering yes-men. They insist the oblivious Adam cast an unknown starlet named Camilla Rhodes as his lead, giving him a photo of the woman. Their bidding is met with Adam’s outraged refusal, and he expresses his resentment by taking a golf club to the Castiglianes’ parked limousine. Adam returns to his house to discover his wife Lorraine (Lori Heuring) in bed with a hick pool cleaner (Billy Ray Cyrus). Adam this time avenges himself by pouring paint on Lorraine’s jewellery, sparking a tussle that results in Adam getting thumped by the lover and thrown out of the house. Taking refuge in a hotel, he’s informed that his bank accounts have been frozen, and his loyal, smitten assistant Cynthia (Katharine Towne) relays a message seemingly relayed by the mysterious people of clout behind these machinations to go and meet another emissary known only as The Cowboy (Lafayette ‘Monty’ Montgomery). The Cowboy proves indeed to be a man dressed and speaking like a silent movie-era idea of a cowboy, and strictly informs Adam that, if he wants to be restored to life, he must go through the motions of seeking the right star for his movie but finally accept the one given to him.

The old, semi-ironic nickname for Hollywood, the Dream Factory, is taken literally in Mulholland Drive – but dreams, the actual phenomena we experience at night whilst sleeping, are unruly things that bend in ways we can’t control, show things that linger often with the glow of hyper-reality and from which we sometimes awake screaming. Whilst Lynch felt waking dreams, little twists of the conscious mind, were artistically valuable, Lynch’s career so often seemed devoted to capturing the essence of what it is like to be inside the proper kind of dream, the way those can seem to have a logical flow of events and then suddenly make great leaps, take breakneck tangents, those sudden transformations, the uncanny way characters, associations, scenes and ideas from the waking life are reconstructed in the dreamscape. Lynch had cinematic precursors in this – Luis Buñuel in general, and the specific cinematic methods for achieving oblique, dreamlike effects of Federico Fellini’s 8½ (1963), like oddly blocked and disjunctively moving camerawork, and careful use of sound. Lynch’s sense of humour was a lot more lignite-hued than Bunuel’s or Fellini’s, his version of the dream-life not the fizzing kind of a Mediterranean in half-rebellion against Catholic angst but a raw nerve of anxiety underlying superficial stolidity closer to Ingmar Bergman, fitting given Lynch’s Scandinavian roots.

Despite all his more high-falutin’ allegiances and associations, Lynch was every bit as much a member of the Movie Brat generation in terms of his preoccupations and imaginative spurs as, say, Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, or John Carpenter, and crucially similar to them in fundamental ways, even as his expressive modes and appeal jumped the guard rails into different artistic methods and motifs: somehow Lynch managed to be as American as apple pie whilst also channelling artistic modes utterly at odds with convention. Like Spielberg he was compelled by the theme of the suburban quotidian in American life being upended by squalls of chaos and threat and the roar of the semi-suppressed id. Like Carpenter his suburbs are riddled with emanations from a reality-fracturing supernatural beyond. Like Lucas he contended with the tension between rebellion and conformity, and often couched it in terms of a battle between the monstrous father figure and the ardent but tempted youth. Lucas was perhaps being a little more canny and attentive than it seemed when he offered the chance to direct Star Wars – Episode VI: Return of the Jedi (1983) to Lynch, who chose to do Dune instead. I could even go so far to say that Mulholland Drive is to Blue Velvet what Lucas’s Star Wars prequel trilogy (1999-2005) was to his original triptych – playing with the same essential ideas, story, and archetypes, but delving more deeply into a sense of social and political context as the backdrop to a revision of the original myth, full of evil empires and puppet-masters, golems and dark mages of backroom machinations, and also where the now the hero is also the villain.

A vignette early in Mulholland Drive, one that seems unconnected to anything else in it until the final scenes, illustrates the idea of dreams swooping out the psyche and into the world with all their terrible power. A worried young man, Dan (Patrick Fischler) meets with his friend Herb (Michael Cooke) in a Winkie’s diner on Sunset Boulevard, and narrates to Herb how he had a dream of them both meeting in the same diner but with awareness of some terrifying and numinous being lurking behind the diner, able to see through walls and be seen in turn, glowering with a visage of monstrous power. Herb, listening to his friend’s tale, recognising Dan’s anxiety is potent and must be confronted, takes charge and leads him out behind the diner – but there a grotesque figure does suddenly loom from behind a wall, demonic in appearance but seemingly just a terribly dirty and bedraggled vagrant (Bonnie Aaron). Dan promptly collapses, perhaps even dying from shock. One could take this scene as less mysterious than it seems – perhaps Dan saw the tramp there one day, the impression slipping out of his conscious mind but lodging in his subconscious. Or, we take the apparent manifestation literally – that Dan’s dream was prophetic, that the thing lurking in the back of his mind has come to life, everything that is terrifying and baleful in the subconscious self suddenly actualised and lurking within the banal environs of an LA diner parking lot.

The homeless man, the street person, is at once the most pathetic and vulnerable person in modern urban society, and also the most reviled, the most emblematic of things that infuriate and perturb and disgust, precisely because they represent this anxiety underlying all surface stability, all illusions of being on the rise or even of just treading water. Lynch’s use of the figure is redolent of the line from Bob Dylan’s “Like A Rolling Stone” about “the mystery tramp” who stands as a figure on a frontier of experience, something that can’t be bargained with or fooled or skirted, because such a figure exists at the rock bottom of both society and the average person’s psychic landscape: finally there is a place where there is no further to fall. And Mulholland Drive is, like Eraserhead and Blue Velvet, preoccupied by the fall, the feeling of plummeting out the bottom of the world and beyond all personal moral standards. But as Mulholland Drive plays out to its bitter yet still dreamy, yearning end, the emblems of evil in the film are figures more usually presented as homey and beneficent – a nice old couple who befriend Betty, glimpsed in the opening abstracted depiction of Betty winning the dance contest and arriving in town with her. They are briefly depicted riding in a limousine together, grinning to each other with that special, fixed, unnerving grin so constant in Lynch’s work, as if they’ve just played the first move in a long game of malignantly motivated chess.

The old-timey cowboy seems to have welled out of the collective dreamscape of Americana fantasy past, and comes as the messenger of ambiguous power and embodiment of lurking, miasmic menace, his passive-aggressive, homespun directness (“No, you’re not thinkin’. You were too busy being a smart-aleck to be thinkin’.”) presented not as the language of the innately good but the code of the brutish and baleful – but also, in his way, like a final barometer of truthfulness, forcing Adam to understand the gravity of his situation, if not the dimensions of it. The underworld of Hollywood as purveyor of fantasies that will have its appointed dream-goddess come what may – but the holder of the role is arbitrarily decided. Whilst the tramp, when returned to right at the end, becomes something else, other than fiend and monster, instead a mythical keeper of secrets and possibilities, holding the blue box that opens up portals to other identities and fates, across the gamut of good and evil.

Another, also nearly independent vignette in the film nudges Quentin Tarantino-esque territory as Lynch offers another pair of men, the blonde, scruffy Joe (Mark Pellegrino) and the long-haired Ed (Vincent Castellanos) chatting in Ed’s seamy-looking downtown office – they seem to know each other well, and Ed’s been telling a funny story about a car accident that seems like it might, possibly be the one Rita was involved in. Joe suddenly pulls out a silencer-studded pistol and shoots Ed dead, aiming to obtain a thick black book filled with Ed’s business contacts, a volume Ed describes as “the history of the word – in telephone numbers.” In a flourish reminiscent of the still-standing dead man in Blue Velvet, Lynch moves in for a close-up of the dead man’s hair, stretched out and sculpted in shape with blood from where the bullet erupted from his head and left him with a perversely totemic kind of perm. The assassin’s efforts to get away clean and make the death look like suicide are immediately complicated, with metastasising absurdity, by the nature of the building he’s in with thin walls and teeming denizens, and in short succession he forced to kill a neighbouring woman and a cleaner, and still can’t quite get away clean as a siren starts blaring and drives him to finally flee by the window, neat job devolved into messy massacre. A beautifully orchestrated episode of black comedy, this scene connects with a motif throughout the film of things spinning far out of the control of people trying to get a job done. Joe returns in two later scenes, the first suggesting he’s on the hunt for the missing Rita as he talks a prostitute and pimp into keeping an eye out for strangers on the Strip, evidently employed to keep an eye out for the missing Rita.

In keeping episodes like the encounter with the Winkie’s tramp and Joe’s misadventure, Lynch flaunts the ragged edges of his magnum opus, its unstable form as something made initially for one end and then repurposed for another – and indeed makes this unstable undercurrent, this sensation of a work self-revising on the fly, part of the thing itself. When I first watched Mulholland Drive, I felt it was hampered by the presence of this stuff, the consciousness of something repurposed: the brief appearance by Robert Forster, not an actor one simply tosses into any old part, as the cop who investigates the instigating crash, is another example of this raggedness. But on whatever level he was conscious of it, Lynch was able to make Mulholland Drive a study in the flux of storytelling, casting about for its engine, its focal point, its obsessive lodestone, and finally zeroing in on its two heroines. It’s stating the obvious to say Lynch improvises freely throughout Mulholland Drive on essential ideas and images harvest from a cultural inheritance derived from and regarding movies. Most conspicuously, classical film noir imagery and character types, with the story at first mimicking a perfectly straightforward genre tale, kicking off with Rita’s near-killing, like a movie Otto Preminger or John M. Stahl would have made. The stroke of fate that simultaneously saves her also erases her, making her a blank slate for the city’s projected fantasy life, a use the people in her life ultimately have for her too. The woman we come to know as Rita is fashioned into a simulacrum of an ideal noir heroine, claimed and taken over in part by that cultural inheritance. Again, solid underpinnings – of course someone in love with the idea of Hollywood tradition and genre might have a poster of Rita on their apartment wall, and of course someone looking frantically for an identity might take a name from it, even as this history-stripped woman seems born to the name. Her appearance instantly invokes fantasies of various kinds with her mane of raven-black hair, sleek beauty, and lips perpetually daubed with lipstick of blood red hue. Lynch dips back into the same kind of quasi-lampoon of detective tales he offered in Blue Velvet, with Betty a suitably goggle-eyed Nancy Drew who, flung into Rita’s company and, once the initial unease and surprise pass, finds herself in close contact with the emanation of all things tantalising, glamorous, and charged with potential – the personification of Hollywood itself.

Another realm in the mix is the tradition of stories about Hollywood itself, its particular place, eternally appealing, taunting, foreboding, a kingdom of sirens constantly sending out its alluring song to wreck bodies and souls. The genre of acerbic portraits of behind-the-scenes Hollywood is nearly as old and familiar in stock characters and themes as any kind of movie Tinseltown has put out. Common types in such stories include the eager wannabes, the ruthless climbers, the broken and disillusioned rejects and failures, the imperious and fixated directors, the timid, outmatched writers, the maniacally priapic and boozy matinee idols, the vulgar and philistine producers and libidinous financiers of Old Hollywood, and their inheritors, the amoral and ignorant yuppie executives. Plus the manifold sleazy hangers-on getting off and getting rich off their proximity to it all. As well as the obvious appeal of the concept of stardom, of riches and fame, the subtler but perhaps even more powerful appeal of Hollywood for many was as a place where it was possible, in terms of a moralistic and parochial culture, to realise one’s nature – a place to be bohemian, queer, polyamorous, orgiastic, and indeed where even the sadistic and monstrous can be unleashed. In the Faustian version of Hollywood, the prospect of complete enslavement or debasement is the inevitable and necessary chance taken when one rolls the dice in the town’s great game, where the ultimate reward is to achieve the complete sovereignty associated with moviemaking success the supreme goal and only found at the pinnacle of earlier aristocratic cultures – complete social and sexual liberty and detachment from all standard mores and behavioural curbs. It’s the capitalist-democratic version of that aristocratic pinnacle, one that can supposedly be obtained with the right blend of natural blessings and hard work – one reason people have of late been so preoccupied with anger about “nepo-babies” hogging the slots of reward.

But Hollywood nonetheless needs creative minds, intelligent minds, the odd and original and malformed and overactive minds, to actually produce what it produces. This is a truth Lynch wryly communicates he knows well throughout Mulholland Drive: where else could someone like him persist as at once an utterly incongruous figure, alien in so many respects to the objectives, ideals, and expectations that drive the place, but also someone with a product that all industries covet, and Hollywood in particular – something unique in value, unfalsifiable, something than can be sold to a rabid and receptive cadre of customers so often sniffy about other products. Adam is Lynch’s nominal avatar in the film as a director straining against the forces behind the Hollywood scenes. But he’s a detached study, a fool of fortune whose shows of resistance are small, petty, silly, and generally backfire. Still, we get flashes of appeal in Adam, like his careful turning down of his assistant’s offer of sexual comfort as well as a bed for the night, wielding ironic humour (“Get along little doggie.”) that let us know that even if he is ridiculous, Adam’s capable of being circumspect and charming. More immediately, it’s easy to look at Adam’s travails, his blind wrestle with forces moving far beyond his immediate purview as overlord of an invented reality, and see a particularly rueful and extreme projection of Lynch’s own experiences – from the impact trying to make Eraserhead had on his first marriage, through to making Dune and Twin Peaks, contending with the capricious, pulverising force of money, in the one art form where money is a near-universal prerequisite for it happening at all. The screaming mutant baby of Eraserhead was as much a personification for the constantly half-finished work of the artist, exhausting, crippling, stripping, forcing constant contention with an inner landscape and all its old goads, as it was a channelled portrait of industrial breakdown or parental angst.

Lynch touches ground with authentic Hollywood legend, casting 1950s musical star Ann Miller as Coco, the owner of the apartment complex Aunt Ruth lives in, evoking a bygone type of star and the feeling that in every corner of Hollywood persists some aging but still vital person of its past. This recurs in the witty casting of former TV heartthrob Chad Everett, and Lee Grant turns up for a random cameo as a batty psychic who also lives in the complex and knocks on Betty’s door to rant warnings about evil influences – a scene that feels a little like a swerve into the realm of supernatural soap operas like Dark Shadows and Passions, which had their similarities to Twin Peaks. Lynch exhibits a more personal sense of humour in casting his longtime collaborator, the composer Badalamenti, whose, lush, pining strains sound throughout the film, as one of the Castiglianes. The way Lynch posits the appearance of the Castiglianes, and the even more perturbing overlord we glimpse orchestrating things, suggests a conspiracy we might readily understand – is the Camilla whose picture Adam sees perhaps the wife, girlfriend, or daughter of some mobster or plutocrat, having her career pushed along with some judiciously applied pressure?

More immediately, however these men signify the complete and utter arbitrariness of the powers that run Hollywood – rather than representing some special interest, they might well be seen as envoys of the world at large, the mass audience, who will have their elect and particular movie star, their chosen vessel for all their fantasies. The vignette, both intensely funny and deeply discomforting, of one of the Castiglianes being served an espresso with assurances it will meet his demanding tastes, only for him to spit it up on a carefully proffered napkin in dribbling disgust, has the quality of something somehow both witnessed and dreamt, nudging the same sense of Olympian grotesquery glimpsed in Dune. Again, Lynch seems to be rooting this in hints of mafia involvement in producing Adam’s film, the Castaglianes a couple of wiseguys sent to terrify everyone into submission – and far from improbable given the long, sordid history of getting movies financed, and the reasons people have for buying into the film industry. Adam’s refusal to play along brings down a malign curse on him. A very Hollywood curse. Thine credit cards will bounce and thine wife will boff a dude with muscles and a mullet. Adam tries the same thing in pouring paint over Lorraine’s jewels, the artist’s revenge, paltry spasms of bratty resistance punishing by attacking wealth. Artists are always prostrate before money and power, before the intentions of tycoons. Their power is sneakier, burns longer, ignites its bombs in odd and spasmodic intervals. It lasts. But in the meantime, you’re stuck in the world of the Castiliagnes.

Lynch’s pivots of identification, sympathy, and perspective littered throughout Mulholland Drive reach for and gain schizoid intensity, obliging us to see through different lenses, preparing ground for more overt and particular disruptions. The names that drop throughout – Betty Elms, Camilla Rhodes, Diane, Rita, Adam Kesher – become floating titles rather than specific things attached to people. Hollywood types; communal archetypes. Diane is the name of a waitress; then it’s Betty; Diane is also a corpse. Camilla is the name of a random starlet; then it’s attached to the face of the woman we’ve called Rita. Adam is an outmatched antihero, then a smug winner. Hollywood’s also always been a place full of people not using their real names, because their real identities were inconvenient – too ethnic, usually, or too much associated with things to be fled from or forgotten or best left unprovoked, or just plain too unromantic, too lumpen, too evident of roots in the ordinary. The business of the actor, too, is obviously to play parts, to put on many names, many guises. To transform and transport. So why shouldn’t the daily guise the actor be a role too? Hell, actors get accused of that all the time, and of falling for their mates in the roles of other people. Mulholland Drive’s names are a reference book of genre functions, or perhaps rather a rolodex – or, yes, like Ed’s black address book. The history of the world in telephone numbers. No wonder it’s worth killing for. Obtain such a book and you can hack the nature of movie reality itself.

On a more prosaic level, the episode of the husband coming from home a rough day to find his wife in bed with another man is a common one in Hollywood-adjacent storytelling – prefigured, for instance, in Brian De Palma’s Body Double (1984) and John Landis’ Into The Night (1985), a motif that suggests this as a particular needling anxiety about the price for failure in the town for men (and the price for failure for women, well, we get to that). Adam’s relentless humiliation and reduction, and his flailing reactions to them, are matched later by him becoming the avatar of attainment and centrifugal attraction – status he achieves nominally by kowtowing finally to the dynamo of power under the city surface, a kowtowing that does however allow him to succeed at what he wants to succeed at. Adam’s encounter with the Cowboy is presented as a vignette of pure-sprung American gothic, beginning with Adam making a totemic journey to the very fringes of the city where the road becomes rough, arriving as an old, seedy corral, replete with old cattle skull nailed to the gate, wind blowing through, and a light that sparks to flickering life as the phantom ranger appears to deal out Delphic promises. Lynch here synthesises an uncanny connection between plush-tacky splendour of the precincts of power inhabited by the usual Lynchian grotesques representing plutocracy and something darker, more primal, something shouting out of the vast American interior with all its phantom heroes and villains, vanished peoples and stranded citizens.

Those grotesques in their offices and domiciles are perhaps the closest Mulholland Drive swerves towards established and familiar Lynchian shtick, the wide-angle lensing of sparsely-furnished, hideously coloured, creepy spaces with dangling drapery with recessed lighting inhabited by malformed weirdoes imposing their will on others, Lynch’s vision of Tartarus as the back office of a small-town social club left unredecorated since 1955. And Mephistopheles in this case is some wheelchair-bound tycoon with a vocaliser to his throat but not needing to say anything to get his underlings to not just shut down a movie but Adam’s whole life. This is the deep secret of power, ruined bodies transmitting cold will. A vital aspect of Lynch’s creative palette was the Manichaeism lurking beneath it, the assurance that evil is a real, palpable, infesting thing as well as good. Lynch’s moral schemes were never particularly complicated or radical. But his insistence that everyone and everything has its dual natures, its duelling versions, gave him a theme to explore in his most cunningly slippery textures and degrees of intensity, from the most genuinely fulsome and beneficent to the most hellishly grim. Amongst its many themes, Mulholland Drive essays a karmic certainty that “what goes around, comes around,” but, in an inversion of the famous Karl Marx quote, offers it first as comedy – a thug (Tony Longo), dispatched by the Castiglianes to give Adam a beating, instead encounters Lorraine and her lover, and he finishes up swiftly and easily knocking them both out when they try to interfere with his task – and then, much later, as tragedy. This in turn connects with the constant spectacle found throughout the film of characters whose jobs, missions, plans and settlements go utterly haywire, and resist all their most frantic expressions of frustration and control, metastasising into Sisyphean things.

Lynch’s takes on extreme evil usually encompassed a degree of caricature that invites the cartoonish, the theatrical, an almost childlike vista from pantomime on good and evil, but tried to push through that to another layer, a sense of primal unease left in us from childhood. I expect we all have our different portals into this. I recall, once, as a child, my grandfather has a rubber gorilla mask in his house which, when someone put it on, would absolutely scare the bejesus out of me, and one of my most vivid early childhood memories was of someone stalking me through the house with the mask on. Despite my knowing it was a mask, the transformation still triggered deep anxiety, the spectacle of the human erased and replaced by the monstrous. And indeed the perhaps justified wariness of just how an adult would get a kick out of scaring a kid so comprehensively. The feeling that the putting on of the mask is actually the revelation of the true face, the deeper nature. That’s the feeling Lynch tried to chase throughout his career – that space in the back of the brain that still recalls such moments of profound childhood disquiet, and how closely akin the snorts of disdain we give at poor simulations of reality found in, say, old sci-fi and horror movies with their cheap special effects, are to things that transport and mesmerise when we reshuffle our attention a few degrees to one side. Rita’s repeated drifts into sleep in the first part of the film nod pointedly back to the dreamer manifestos of Dune – the sleeper will awaken, but into what dream? The Cowboy makes appearances at defined narrative pivots, stage-managing twists of fate – steering Adam back to the straight path, overseeing Betty’s transformation into Diane and, later, Diane’s push towards consuming rage and planned murder – as if representing Lynch’s sense of authorial power, the dark side of creative ability, to conjure these people and then destroy them.

The audition that Betty attends offers what at first seems like merely a mischievous skewering of Hollywood types in broadly satiric fashion. The pompous, distracted director Bob Booker (Wayne Grace) makes vaguely meaningful pronouncements (including “Don’t play it for real, until it gets real,” and, “Strained, perhaps, but still … humanistic.”) about the efforts of the actors to breathe life into the shitty script, much to the eye-rolling confusion of everyone else. Jimmy ‘Woody’ Katz (Chad Everett), the deep-tanned, deep-creased silver fox lead actor Betty has to act with has charm to the fore but quietly disdains his too-often predictable young ingénue love interests and how little they need from him: “They all say it the same way, so I just react,” Katz notes, echoing a comment by John Wayne about his own approach to acting. The producer Wally (James Karen) and a rubbernecking casting agent (Rita Taggart) who used to be married exhibit mutual appreciation: the show Betty’s auditioning for can’t afford the agent but she’s there to swoop on any new discoveries. All of this falls away, however in light of the sheer, transfixing spectacle of the talent Betty suddenly reveals. We’ve already seen Betty reading her lines with Rita, laughing at the dialogue and playing it in the same vehement, showy way Katz expects and has seen a million times, but this time we see her take those words and Katz along with her into a new zone of electric intimacy, transforming tired melodrama into an aria filled with intimations of sexual gamesmanship and awareness of the close dance of passion and disgust, love and hate.

Betty here manages more than one kind of alchemy. She turns her stock-standard character, the princess seduced and affronted by Katz’s character’s roguish incursions, into a dark sorceress at once stoking erotic feeling, challenging it, and spurning it, delivering a threat of murder like the ultimate come-on. Subtler inversions too – when Betty is first shown rehearsing her lines, they seem at first to be angrily aimed at Rita, foreshadowing the later variations on their relationship, the butter knife she wields in comic anger recalling and anticipating weapons drawn in anger. Bad acting is the key to good acting. Katz’s choice of playing the scene “close” comes with evident sexual interest, forcing himself into Betty’s physical domain, but with her expertly turning this to her own advantage, just like her character, and giving a master class in how to win power in multiple frames of Hollywood reference. Betty’s audition is a marvellous sucker-punch joke on the viewer as Betty shifts from naïve ingénue who might not thrive in Hollywood, at least not until she takes a few hard knocks, to expert in the finest worldly arts, sinuous, teasing, deceiving: it’s her job, after all. But one of the odder aspects of Hollywood mystique is the well-propagated idea that, with the star, that person has a slightly thinner veil between the version they show the audience and the person themselves than with the mere actor. The idea that stars once got discovered in strange places and ways – the way they sat at a drug store counter, like Lana Turner, or the way they walked on set, like John Wayne – is part of that mystique, they idea they had some special trait, something entirely real, that could then become the linchpin of a simulated reality rather than stars being the product of that simulation. Betty contradicts this mystique whilst seeming to exemplify it as the girl who comes to Hollywood and immediately realises her dreams. Betty wows the assembled so perfectly that the casting agent snares her and drags her across the street to the set of Adam’s movie, where auditions are being held on set for his lead.

The scene seems set for a fateful meeting, Betty and Adam, a meeting that could, if it occurs, will click in familiar narrative function and hold the potential to upend the systems we’ve seen arrayed. Adam, however, follows the script he’s been given, as the Camilla Rhodes the Castiglianes offered (played, in another touch of meta humour, by Watts’ fellow blonde Australian former soap star, Melissa George) steps up to do her audition – which proves to be lip-synching to a piece of dreamy 1950s pop. Adam’s been obliged to smile and lie to a successful actress who’s just auditioned and wants the part bad. Betty is intrigued, fascinated, a little awed; Adam’s eye is caught; but the meeting of their attention is charged with a mysterious meaning, one that sets Betty making her excuses and leaving, returning to Rita. The aspect of suggested fatefulness here connects most overtly with Betty’s choice of Rita over Adam – not just in a romantic sense but also in choosing connective reality over the artifice of the set, but with perturbing inferences later as Betty tries in turn to become the starlet-fashioning auteur, and pays the price of being turned into the by-product of her hubris. More blatantly, Lynch subverts his own apparent narrative arc – why, otherwise, have the stories of Betty and Adam been told concurrently? More immediately, Adam knows he has to choose this Camilla Rhodes. But there’s always one than one Camilla Rhodes.

Betty and Rita venture out to chase down the only lead they have from Rita’s memory, the woman named Diane Selwyn, and go to visit her home, only encounter a suspicious woman (Johanna Stein), who looks a little like she could be Rita’s far plainer sister, seems impatient at the mention of Diane, and explains they swapped bungalows. Diane’s new bungalow proves locked, so Betty sneaks in the window, and she and Rita come across a corpse, apparently that of Diane, lying on the bed – a sight that shocks Rita profoundly, signifying that far from claiming her old identity she needs to flee it completely, and seeks to change her appearance. Lynch pointedly conflates two of his constant influences, Edward Hopper and Alfred Hitchcock. Betty’s costuming starts to evoke the kind of tight grey suit Hitchcock’s 1950s heroines often wore. Then, in the sight of her slipping through the window of Diane’s apartment with buttocks straining meaningfully against her skirt, also recalling Hopper’s “Office at Night”, provoking the eye with knowledge of the barely suppressed erotic arc between Betty and Rita, and between them and the audience. These reference points soon segue into a more overt and pointed nod to Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) as Betty insists on being the one to help Rita change her appearance, and with her identity and generic function. She uses a wig to render Rita into a lookalike of herself, a transformation laced with touches of both erotic claiming and narcissistic imposition.

Lynch also opens a gate into Bergman’s Persona (1966), a nod that becomes substantial as Lynch reproduces Bergman’s common framing motif of the two women’s faces as they lie in bed, framed to suggest skewed pieces of the same visage. This metamorphic overture proves an overture to epiphany as Betty offers to let Rita share her bed, and Rita strips down to climb in – the old-fashioned, nominally chaste ease of women in each other’s space quickly pivots into a sudden bloom of initially furtive, soon declarative Sapphic passion. “I’ve never done this before,” Betty confesses with a tender simplicity that completely transforms the situation into something exposed, ardent, real, in a place that is otherwise hostile to such qualities – the lyrical ardour extends as Lynch fades from Betty and Rita’s kisses to the sight of their fingers entwined as they sleep together, Rita’s painted nails and betty’s bare bespeaking the polarities they embody but have momentarily gained equilibrium for. But it’s not a moment of discovery and acceptance, both of self and another, that saves souls. Far from it.

The queer love aspect of Mulholland Drive is a fundamental aspect of its mystique, its aesthetic and emotional vividness, and indeed gave it a lustre of cool it’s hard not to be a little sardonic about: surrealism, Hollywood-bashing, and smoking hot lipstick lesbians? The mother-lode of cool. Not that Lynch utilises this aspect facetiously, even as he does certainly utilise it to tantalise and titillate – sexy things are, surprisingly enough, sexy, but they’re other things too. No-one would expect Lynch to offer up some kind of simplistic liberation message, and he doesn’t, even as Betty and Rita’s first sexual encounter is played in a manner utterly matter-of-fact and quietly, marvellously transformative: it’s the only moment in the film where they seem like actual, genuine, entirely present people, negotiating the quicksilver nature of desire. It’s only later that Betty’s faintly ritualistic repetition of the “I’m in love with you” takes on a quality of stake-claiming and fetishisation rather than personal appeal. Lynch’s evocations and explorations of sexuality in Blue Velvet, with its increasingly dark and sour view of the temptations inherent in heterosexual climes – skewing towards the eternal twin poles of Madonna and whore, exalted corn-fed virginal gal and knowing, abused tormented and tormenting sex object – here are matched by a depiction of Betty and Rita and their alter egos, their other archetypal manifestations. They the same binary figures as found in the diptych of Jeffrey’s amours in Blue Velvet – the Blonde, embodying all the positive, simple, naïve American virtues, and the Brunette who personifies all that is boding, sensual, adult, and dangerous. Born perhaps of Lynch whacking off to the Tippi Hedren-Suzanne Pleshette scenes in The Birds (1963) with all their sublime pseudo-Sapphic sizzle.

Crucially, here they come with the mediating male hero removed – cutting out the middle-manager of psychological-erotic archetypes. At least, for the time being, before ultimately Adam is cast into the role, slightly against type. Animas find brief, tantalisingly perfect meeting of poles of Lynch’s artistic and psychological avatars, locked in ruby-lip-to-ruby-lip, nipple-to-nipple symmetry of passion. This, in a film where everything feels touched with aspects of both the surprisingly intimate and off-hand and also the fetishistic, in a film where everything, from the constant, perfervid red of Rita’s lipstick, which is restored improbably present and perfect long after Rita’s accident, to the warmly uterine walls of Ruth’s apartment. As in Greek myth, Oedipus and the Sphinx or Theseus in the labyrinth, the solving of a riddle, the journey to the centre of things, is associated with battle with a monster, but also transmutes the nature of the monster – in those myths that slaying of a beast only presages a pivot into sexual mystery laced with threat and danger, as well as possibility, which only requires the good sense to let enigmas lie – but nobody can ever let them lie. Betty and Rita’s flurry of passion opens a crack in Rita’s amnesiac deliverance from identity, or perhaps rather makes her a vessel for communion with the underworld in this city of the dead, as the name of a place called the Club Silencio and a Spanish catchphrase emerge from her as she sleeps with Betty. She and Betty venture out into the night, out into the blasted, neon-lit, rubbish-strewn alleys and secret parlours of art.

Lynch’s sleights of hand in his camerawork throughout Mulholland Drive are things of startling beauty, sometimes subtle in how they achieve disorientation, like the way in the film’s last phase Lynch depicts Diane engaged in making a cup of coffee before the camera suddenly lunges forward and over her sofa to reveal Camilla lying on it naked. More overt is the sudden, rushing move of the camera across the desolate street outside the Club Silencio being one of the most overt, delivering a feeling of a quickening plunge whilst intensifying the strangeness: Betty and Rita have left behind the relatively settled and familiar world they’ve been exploring and travelled into the underworld in a manner reminiscent of the nocturnal odyssey chasing weird harbours of nightlife in Blue Velvet. The effect of such flourishes depends otherwise on the simple mastery of Lynch’s simpler sequences of shot-for-shot exposition, as in how cannily he reproduces Hitchcockian camera motifs in seeking and gazing during Betty and Rita’s exploration of the apartment complex they invade seeking Diane. The Club proves to have an odd floor show where the emcee – played by Geno Silva, who earlier had also played the solicitous manager of the hotel where Adam took refuge, suggesting commonality between the figures – announces that their acts are “all recorded,” people appearing on stage by only miming to tape tracks, and watched by a sparse, glazed audience, including a blue-haired woman seated alone in a stall. The miming acts climax with a long, mesmerically powerful vignette of a singer, Rebekah Del Rio (playing herself), performing a Spanish-language version of Roy Orbison’s “Crying,” delivered with such galvanising force that it doesn’t kjust reduce Rita and Betty to tears and palsied fits, but manifests into Betty’s handbag a small blue box, the goal of the search, the thing that the blue key fits. Pandora’s Box, perhaps.

This scene is linked with both betty’s audition and the depiction of Camilla Rhodes lipsynching her audition for Adam. Lynch’s camera gazes on unblinking at the spectacle of acts where we’re made self-conscious of the artifice involved – although Del Rio is miming to her own singing, she is nonetheless faking her performance of it, but also not faking, rather enacting the deed of dragging out soul-stirring art from the inner depths with emotional intensity. We are repeatedly treated to awareness of falsity in performance. We’re deep in Lynch’s private universe of meaning here, including his faith in Orbison as the quintessence of a certain kind of odd yet ardent American art and emotional expression. The Club Silencio scene hints at the influence of Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt, 1963; Godard was another Lynch hero, and that film of course was another portrait in sexual jealousy, moviemaking, and the danse macabre enacted by artist, star, and tycoon, and also sported an episode of pointed Godardian sarcasm when the characters sit down to watch what’s supposed to be a movie but which Godard presents instead as a live stage performance with a singer performing along to a pre-recorded track – Godard’s send-up of the prospect of encountering artifice within artifice. Lynch evokes this, but goes for quite a different inference. Godard always retained an intellectual’s distrust for the power of art even as he couldn’t escape it; Lynch’s desire lay in the opposite extreme, to restore to art some of the sacred mystery and power stripped from it by narrative conventions and over-intellectualisation.

The lip-synch vignettes seem to be doing the opposite to Betty’s audition, where we see straw spun into gold, but really they involve the same motif of gazing at the performer, compelled by beautiful faces mimicking emotions of transfiguring, even transcendent power: simulacra of grief, joy, erotic power, sundering reality, breaking down barriers between art and artist, life and performance. These are moments where the consciousness of falsity, the states of fakery and artifice, are challenged and defeated – Rebekah’s lip-synching to a song of thunderous, ritualistic power and catharsis accords with Betty’s intuitive sense on how to shock the lousy script she’s playing out into something intense, dynamic, transcendent, shocking us with awareness at how something that should be stone dead can suddenly become realer than the real. Through Watts-as-Betty/Diane we follow a journey from laughing rehearsal to expert performance to finally suffering through the real, terrible thing. The director at Betty’s audition wasn’t actually full of it after all. Rebekah’s performance hands Rita and Betty the capacity to rewrite reality, to rediscover themselves or indeed not too. The song continues after the “singer” collapses and is dragged off stage: in art, particularly in the cinema, the vitality of the artwork persists long after the artist has departed the scene. Here, I feel, is the deeper thesis of Mulholland Drive, and indeed perhaps of Lynch’s art in general. Art is a precious thing, eternally won from the muck of existence, the triumph of the human over the failure of the human. And art is not real; it might reflect, channel, remix, rewrite, amplify, and chart reality, but finally is something that happens only when humans contend with reality. And finally this emerges as the deeper point Lynch gropes his way towards: all the false images, the genre canards, the surfaces, connect with things that are real, deep, dark, fundamental, vitally tied up with human identity and how we see and read the world. Art is a series of sign-play that connect with varying speeds and degrees of intensity with real feelings, real thoughts, the fragments of life and experience and the demi-world of dream and imagination we carry.

The Club Silencio scene proves the end of one movie called Mulholland Drive, and the start of another – an early shot that announces the film’s title via a hazily headlight-lit glimpse of the street sign bearing the name is repeated in the second, shorter film, and Watts and Harring are given separate, extra billing in the end credits as Diane and Camilla. The most common and easy interpretation of this pivot is that where the first part of the film represents Diane’s dreamy fantasia about how her early days in Hollywood went, the last portion depicts a rude waking reality. In this reality, the person who we’ve called Betty is actually Diane, a middlingly successful supporting actor who had an affair with Camilla Rhodes, who helped get her jobs because of their illicit relationship, but Camilla has now become a big star working with Adam. Meanwhile Diane’s obsessive distraction has destroyed her relationship with another woman, the one Betty and Rita met at Diane’s bungalow complex, who’s glimpsed sniffily inspecting Diane’s home for any uncollected personal items. Touches like the blue key and the fateful stop on Mulholland Drive itself, rendered with surreal vividness in the earlier portion, now return in a more prosaic, “true” form, but also now charged with the unease of deja vu. After a night of total humiliation attending a party Camilla and Adam throw to announce their engagement, Diane hires Joe the assassin to kill Camilla, but, suffering a fit of hallucinatory madness in which she encounters the old couple she met coming to Hollywood now presenting as leering, tormenting demons, and kills herself, her self-destruction leaving her splayed in the same position as the corpse Betty and Rita found.

Lynch, however, disrupts this reading, and keeps sifting and shifting meaning through style. Diane is as hyperbolic and monomaniacal in her fiercely betrayed, sadomasochistic heartbreak and vengeance as Betty was in hayseed blessed with natural virtues. When Lynch’s pivoting perspective revisits a sexual encounter between two women, now between Diane and Camille, the visual and thematic palette changes to one of fetishized, skin-flick lustre – Camilla sprawled on Diane’s sofa, bare chested and gleaming with Paul Verhoeven-esque gloss and palpability. The earlier scene was the realistic, touching one; this one grazes softcore fantasy, two women locked together in lust and ardour and also degrees of hate, Camilla seeming to get off on tantalising and tormenting Diane just as this seems to spark some masochistic streak in Diane; they fuck, but they are not together. The dialogue between the two women suggests they’re meeting in clandestine fashion with implied dishonesty towards someone else; Camilla, this edition of the archetype with Rita’s face, is a slyly smiling, amoral sylph. Later Diane refuses Camilla’s entreaties and keeps her out of her bungalow, but far from wanting to throw Camilla out her life as Lorraine did to Adam, Diane’s intense jealousy manifests, finally reaching its maniacal Gethsemane when Diane attends a part at Adam’s house Camilla has invited her to, seemingly purely to make Diane watch as she flirts with other female friends even when the night culminates with Camilla kissing the “other” Camilla, now placed as one of Camilla’s harem, and Adam and Camilla seemingly right on the verge of announcing an engagement – and, at least from Diane’s perspective, actively enjoying making Diane squirm. Camilla is, then, the winner in the great Hollywood game, the floodgates of all forms of plenty open to her, gifted the power to decide reality.

Of course, all of this performance, sham, something Lynch and his cast and crew are manufacturing. Betty and Diane are two sides of the same impersonation of an idea, linked by Watts’s playing – Watts herself, the actual person and actor, is the focal point of these personas, these beings. When Betty is smiling, it’s Watts’s smile; when Diane is showing flesh, it’s her flesh. Everyone in Hollywood has their doppelganger – or, really, their legion of doppelgangers, people often just about as good-looking, as talented, just as filled with ambition, just as aware they have no other place to go for any chance to unleash their dream-selves, all defeated for various reasons including simple, awful luck. Diane, the dark antiverse Betty, is an angry, red-eyed beast increasingly stoked to rage and destruction, now a personification of blazing resentment, heartbreak, and furore that will be expressed by slaying the appointed goddess. Diane’s meeting with Joe in Winkie’s is another turnpike of fortune, where the waitress has the name Betty on her tag, and Dan looks on, stricken with recognition in seeing Diane’s  raw and vehement visage, and we wonder if this was the reality of the terrible face we saw. Lynch segues from this scene to a scene that nods again to Vertigo, but with the eerie flashing green light supplanted by an infernal red, as he seeks out and finds the tramp now in possession of the blue box, and the possibility the tramp is another iteration of Betty/Diane arises – which might be the reason for the sly casting of a female actor in the role. The blue box, which vanishes after Betty opens it and is transmuted into Diane, is as charged with baleful and reality-hacking power, as the puzzle box from Hellraiser (1987).

That association might not even be accidental. Lynch was so very often close to horror cinema in his career and indeed many of his movies sit squarely within the genre even with familiar generic markers erased. The horror movie urge here with the scenes of the tramp are palpable, and again in the climax. Are the old couple mere hallucinations, emblems of all the lost promise Betty had which Diane has squandered, the image of her self-destruction assembled in a fraying mind? Or are they actual, genuine demonic entities, the same ones who sent out the Castiglianes and the Cowboy, orchestrating victories and debasements, triumphs and ruinations, according to whim and secret fiats, now coming to claim one of their prizes? Given the throwaway earlier reveal about the producer and casting agent being once married, and their role in ushering Betty through into Hollywood sanctums, can we see the old couple as Diane’s twisted version of those two false prophets of stardom. Either way Lynch depicts the couple, shrunken to tiny imps escaping the blue box and accessing Betty’s rooms under her door, emblems of things that slip slyly under all psychic barriers and liminal will to break us down. This climax had the potential to be risible: I’m struck by its similarity to the tyrannising dream cabals of Edward D. Wood Jnr’s Glen or Glenda? (1953) similarly rooted in a specific evocation of childhood anxieties. Of course Lynch had all the craft Wood lacked, but nonetheless they were definitely artists of the same species. But as with so much of Lynch’s cinema the sheer conviction he delivers it with, and the force of the filmmaking – Lynch’s juddering camera and flickering light and Watts’s unnerving shriek of utter horror – make it instead a scene that stays lodged in the mind like a fishhook. Diane’s suicide sees her room flood with smoke: she is the body in the bed Betty and Rita found, but the scene dissolves back into a Jungian void. Lynch’s last few shots return to the sight of beaming Betty and loving Rita. One version of reality, identity, character, dramatis personae, is released from solid form, and rolled back to the beginning, perhaps to seek yet another, different ending, and on and on – that’s entertainment. A close-up of the gnarled visage of the tramp, refers all versions back to the start, or, rather, the bottom. No further to fall. All stories, whether they end in tragedy or triumph and all the points in between, or even sheer chaos, share points in common – beginnings, when all things are possible.