David Lynch may be one of the most complicated filmmakers of all time. Even at his most accessible and “straight-forward,” Lynch crafts deeply strange and intellectually challenging cinematic experiences that combine numerous genres (namely mystery, thriller, and horror) into a wholly ineffable sub-category all their own. At his least accessible, Lynch creates hauntingly surreal films so esoteric, one could view them a thousand times and still never quite fully understand their internal logic (though we know there’s method buried somewhere below the hideous madness).
If we’re judging Lynch’s oeuvre based on the level of his trademark inscrutability, then his 2002 film Mulholland Drive is certainly his masterpiece. Audiences continue to debate what this film is really all about and what actually happens to its characters. The narrative follows an aspiring actress, Betty (Naomi Watts), who arrives in Hollywood from the Midwest following (possibly) a big win at a local jitterbug contest. Betty is a stereotypical, starry-eyed woman, her dreams so big they mask any ability she might have to recognize her own naivety. Upon her entry into the City of Angels, Betty gets embroiled in a labyrinthine conspiracy involving amnesiac Rita (Laura Harring), pompous director Adam Kersh (Justin Theroux), hitmen, mafia-types, drug addicts, and other nefarious figures.
Or does she? Everything we see transpire over the film’s first two acts fly out the window when Betty becomes Diane, Rita becomes Camilla, and the relationship between the women, which turns romantic during their investigation into Rita/Camilla’s past, suddenly becomes mostly dead and thoroughly embittered. Furthermore, bitterness and the clear ravages of addiction stand in place of Betty’s previous naive exuberance. She is out of work, jealous of Camilla’s ill-gotten fame and viciously heartbroken over Camilla’s new romance with Adam (the fame and the romance go hand in hand, you see). As soon as you’ve adjusted yourself to this shift in narrative, Lynch ends the film with an explosion of terrifying surrealism that rivals the most disturbing of straight horror films.
Lynch remains characteristically mum on the secrets of his film, though he did provide a series of clues that, when analyzed, seem to suggest that the first two thirds of the film were either a dream or a drug-fueled hallucination, in which the damaged Diane recast herself as the innocent Betty, and the object of her unrequited desire, the mean and manipulative Camilla, changes into Rita, who, due to her amnesia, can literally become whomever Diane wishes her to be—she is like a blank slate, at the mercy of “Betty’s” good nature and guidance. However, in the final act of the film, we see that Diane cannot escape the horror of her reality, even if, at this point in her sad life, she can no longer entirely discern reality from fantasy.
The above proceedings work to deliver a message common among numerous Hollywood films: that Hollywood itself is a glitzy, glamorously-dressed nightmare landscape that chews people up and spits them out (Lynch puts it succinctly within the film itself, with a sign on a lamppost that reads, “Hollywood is Hell”).
For all intents and purposes, this is a solid reading of the film, albeit one that is self-contained and ignores Lynch’s broader cinematic universe (as well as the simple fact that nothing in a Lynch film is what it seems on the surface). There are several clues linking Mulholland Drive to the bizarre small town of Twin Peaks, Washington, and acknowledging these tidbits as far more than Easter eggs helps the viewer better understand the film’s more surreal elements (as much as one can understand Lynch’s vision, anyway).
Evidence Mulholland Drive And Twin Peaks Share The Same Universe
(A quick note before we dive right in: one may be tempted to examine the repetition of the name Diane in Mulholland Drive and Twin Peaks: The Return, especially as it relates to the casting of Naomi Watts as Janey-E in the latter series, a character who, it turns out, is the sister of Diane Evans, Agent Dale Cooper’s previously unseen assistant, played in The Return by Laura Dern. It is entirely arguable that Janey-E and Betty/Diane are, in fact, the same person (even within the context of the argument I’m about to make), but for the sake of brevity, that is a facet of this conversation we shall save for another time. For our immediate purposes, we’ll assume that Betty/Diane and Janey-E are separate characters.)
First and foremost, to understand how Mulholland Drive connects to Twin Peaks, we need a quick history lesson about the film’s production. It actually began life as an intended spinoff of Twin Peaks, involving that series’s Audrey Horne (Sherilyn Fenn) moving to Los Angeles and once again finding herself embroiled in a bizarre mystery. This iteration of Mulholland Drive never came to fruition, however, and so Lynch reworked Audrey into Betty, filmed a pilot (which more or less comprised the first two-thirds of the film), and submitted it to the network, who ultimately passed. A few years later, France-based production company Studio Canal offered Lynch the chance to wrap up the original TV movie by turning it into a stand-alone feature film. He accepted their offer, shot new scenes with his principal cast (the final act of the film), and released the it theatrically.
Lynch must have still had Twin Peaks on the mind when he envisioned these new scenes, namely during the “Club Silencio” sequence near the end of Act II. As Betty and Rita (they have not yet transformed into Diane and Camilla, respectively) enter a strange, secret nightclub called Club Silencio, we see a stage that should look immediately familiar to Twin Peaks fans: it is adorned with red velvet drapes, a set decoration made infamous in the television series’s Black Lodge, where a backwards-speaking little person danced to reverb-heavy jazz music. But while this connection is obvious (and ostensibly insignificant—Lynch may simply like red velvet drapes, and a cigar might just be a cigar), eagle-eyed viewers will no doubt spot two familiar faces among the audience at Club Silencio.
That is, from left to right, Phoebe Augustine and Sheryl Lee, who, in Twin Peaks, play Ronette Pulaski and perhaps the most important character in the series, Laura Palmer, respectively.
One may be inclined to suggest the presence of these women is nothing more than an Easter egg, but Lynch is a notoriously meticulous filmmaker who makes no decisions idly. Of course, we cannot say for sure if Augustine and Lee are meant to be Ronette and Laura, but this writer feels safe in assuming they are the same characters, especially given the further clues Lynch provides in Twin Peaks: The Return, the follow-up Showtime series from 2017. Most obvious, we see the same theater space used for Club Silencio in The Return.
Again, one may argue the significance of this space appearing in both Mulholland Drive and Twin Peaks is negligible, but it seems doubtful Lynch would go to the trouble of shooting in this location (the Tower Theater in Los Angeles) if he didn’t want to draw a parallel between his series and Mulholland Drive.
And what is this parallel? What conclusion are we meant to draw? Considering that we see the same space in both Twin Peaks and Mulholland Drive, and that the space as seen in the latter features red velvet drapes on the stage and two prominent characters (Ronette Pulaski and Laura Palmer) seated in the audience, it follows that Club Silencio is a “room” within the Black Lodge. And this further means that Betty’s “transition” into Diane in Mulholland Drive might not simply be a broken woman waking from an idyllic dream.
So how does that work?
Well, as we see in The Return, Laura Palmer, whose death is the catalyst of the entire original series, continues to exist in an alternate form inside the Black Lodge. (Ronette’s fate is less clear; Phoebe Augustine does appear in the follow-up series, though she is only credited as “American Girl,” possibly an indication of Ronette’s fragmented mind—the last we officially see of her, in season two, her run-in with Killer BOB left her quite insane.) Lynch and co-creator Mark Frost ultimately reveal that Agent Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) uses the Black Lodge to travel back in time in an attempt to prevent Laura Palmer’s murder from ever happening. He succeeds in doing so, creating an alternate timeline in which he becomes a man named Richard. Still remembering the previous timeline, Cooper/Richard sets about locating Laura to ensure her safety. He finds her living as Carrie Page in Odessa, Texas, with no memory of her previous existence as Laura Palmer. Cooper/Richard proceeds to escort Carrie/Laura back to Twin Peaks, hoping to unravel this new mystery generated from his time manipulation. When they arrive at the old Palmer house, Carrie/Laura hears her mother’s voice and suddenly remembers her previous existence. She lets out a scream so forceful it knocks the power out.
This moment brings The Return, and Twin Peaks as a whole, to a close. It’s a rather somber ending informing the audience that, no matter how hard one tries to do and spread good in the world, horror will not only always remain, it will repeat itself time and again. (This summation barely scratches the surface of The Return, which features a sprawling and dense narrative, but for the purposes of this essay, it will suffice.)
The changing of characters’ names and identities should of course sound familiar: it echoes the very same scenario seen in Mulholland Drive (and Lost Highway, for that matter, but that’s another essay altogether). Given this, if we accept that Club Silencio is a room within the Black Lodge, then it stands to reason that Betty’s transition into Diane was not, in fact, a dream, but rather the character slipping through time into an alternate reality. This occurs via the blue box and key, both of which mysteriously appear in Rita’s possession, and which seem to originate from the bum behind Winkie’s, a “monster” whose countenance causes a man to die from fright near the beginning of the film. This bum is no doubt connected to the Woodsmen, a group of ragged, dirty agents from the Black Lodge first seen in Fire Walk With Me and expanded inThe Return (most notably in that series’s unforgettable episode eight).
As to why this happens to Betty, we cannot be sure—there is no Agent Cooper or similar figure manipulating time and space for a particular agenda; we do see the aforementioned mafia types seemingly pulling the strings of Hollywood behind the scenes, deciding which actresses succeed and which fail for frustratingly clandestine reasons (they force an unknown starlet also named Camilla on Adam by simply saying, “This is the girl,” and leaving it at that, ending Betty’s chances of auditioning for the part). Is this mafia in league with the Woodsman and the Black Lodge (including The Cowboy, who warns Adam to comply with the mafia’s demands)? Is it not enough to squash Betty’s career in Hollywood? Must she also suffer emotionally and physically as well?
It seems so, considering that Betty is happy in the first two thirds of the film, while Diane is miserable. In the same way that Laura cannot escape her personal horrors, Betty is not allowed to make it in the City of Angels. There are clandestine, supernatural forces at play, ensuring that Betty and all those like her eventually become Dianes, broken, destitute, and sad. Betty finds all her hopes chewed up and spit out, because this is the way the system works. For every successful Camilla, there must be an unsuccessful Diane, and the “powers that be” will go so far as too manipulate time and space to maintain this status quo, this balancing of extreme successes and failures.
Overall, however, this interoperation of Lynch’s film is only one of many. The director himself encourages as many theories about Twin Peaks as the fans can come up with, and ostensibly, this standpoint extends to his broader work as well—especially if you believe the film exists within the Twin Peaks universe (or, if you will, it is a Blue Rose case). But whether you buy into this theory, or you see Mulholland Drive as a standalone film about a woman’s mental breakdown, thematically speaking, we arrive at the same, simple conclusion: Hollywood is Hell.
