Mulholland Drive

David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (2001) follows bright eyed actress Betty Elms (Naomi Watts) as she arrives in Hollywood and becomes entangled with Rita (Laura Harring), an amnesiac woman hiding in her aunt’s apartment. A hallucinatory noir of dreams, doubles, and broken identities, the film won Lynch the Cannes Film Festival Award for Best Director and has since been canonised as one of the greatest films ever made, ranking no. 8 in Sight and Sound’s latest Greatest Films of All Time poll. Written soon after Lynch’s death and the devastating Los Angeles wildfires, Justus Nieland revisits Mulholland Drive as a film haunted by its city. He explores its uncanny atmospheres and strange landscapes, reading Los Angeles not merely as a setting but as the film’s central subject. Nieland also examines the film’s noir sensibility, its modernist treatment of memory and identity, and its tragic queer love story. Tracing the film’s enduring influence on modern filmmakers such as Ari Aster, Jordan Peele, Céline Sciamma, and Julia Ducournau, Nieland shows how Mulholland Drive’s radical ambiguity continues to provoke obsession and interpretation. Born of an analogue world of paint, plastic, and celluloid, Lynch’s masterpiece now enjoys an eternal digital afterlife amongst fans.