In the middle of David Lynch’s 2001 film “Mulholland Drive,” the hopeful young actress Betty (Naomi Watts) and her amnesiac lover Rita (Laura Elena Harring) slink out into the cool Hollywood night and find themselves in Downtown Los Angeles, entering a back-alley theater. There is some kind of strange, late-night stage performance in progress. An emcee announces, quite clearly, that all the music the audience is about to hear is tape recorded. To illustrate the point, a trumpeter comes out onto the stage, playing plaintively. He drops his trumpet, and it flies away on strings. The music continues. It’s all tape recorded.
A beleaguered, clearly exhausted singer then takes to the stage. It’s Rebekah Del Rio. She begins to sing “Llorando,” a Spanish-language version of Roy Orbison’s “Crying.” She sings a cappella, her voice penetrating the darkness, stabbing the audience in their hearts, rending their souls asunder. It’s one of the saddest, most beautiful performances the world has ever known. A woman who can barely stand up can still reach into herself and, with a Herculean effort, belt out raw beauty.
Del Rio then collapses on the stage, having spent the last drop of her energy. The singing continues. Stagehands run onto stage to pull Del Rio off while her singing still wafts through the air. It’s all tape recorded.
This, I think, is what David Lynch thinks of Los Angeles. Everything is beautiful. The art is heartbreaking. We sneak into dark theaters to seek experiences that make our hearts beat fast. And it’s all, openly, 100% fake. Lynch released “Mulholland Drive” 25 years ago, and its eerie, mysterious powers have not abated. It’s still often considered one of the best films of the 21st century.
Mulholland Drive was originally a TV pilot
The making of “Mulholland Drive” is well-known. Lynch, wanting to get back into television, shot a pilot episode for a mysterious, Hollywood-set neo-noir about an amnesiac and an aspiring actress who team up, Nancy Drew style, to find out more about the amnesiac’s identity. The show was to feature a wide variety of characters, and Lynch, true to his style, didn’t know where everything was going to end up. As detailed in Paul A. Woods’ David Lynch book “Weirdsville USA,” Lynch notoriously said to ABC that they would have to buy the pilot to find out what happened next.
When the pilot wasn’t picked up, StudioCanal stepped in to fund an expansion, allowing Lynch to turn the pilot into a movie with a solid conclusion. His film features a shift about 90 minutes in wherein the Watts and Harring characters seemingly wake up from a dream, outfitted with all-new identities. Reality now has a different flavor, and everything is darker. Fans of David Lynch weren’t shaken by the midway tonal mutation, however, taking the dreamlike mysteries in stride. Indeed, one might see “Mulholland Drive” as a feminine flipside to Lynch’s more masculine 1997 film “Lost Highway.” Both films are about overwhelmed characters changing identities. “Lost Highway,” however, is bleak and aggressive and deals with blood, porn, and crime bosses. I noted that it’s about the utter failure of masculinity. “Mulholland Drive” is about showbiz, backroom dealings, and unexpected lesbian romance.
“Mulholland Drive” became a massive critical darling, just accessible enough to delight both critics and mainstream audiences (“Lost Highway” was less successful). Lynch was nominated for Best Director at the Academy Awards. The film made best-of-the-year lists, and its estimation has only grown in the last 25 years.
Mulholland Drive is often considered one of the best films of the 21st century
In 2025, the New York Times released a poll of the 100 best movies of the 21st century, and “Mulholland Drive” came in at #2, behind Bong Joon-Ho’s class drama “Parasite,” and ahead of a Paul Thomas Anderson’s American origin story, “There Will Be Blood.” Rolling Stone released their own top-100 list that year, and “Mulholland Drive” was only slightly lower at #9, more popular than Richard Linklater’s 12-years-in-the-making “Boyhood,” but not quite as highly ranked as Edward Yang’s gorgeous family drama “Yi-Yi: A One and a Two.” /Film reported on this back in 2016, but “Mulholland Drive” topped the BBC’s list of the 100 greatest films of the 21st century. /Film’s Nick Bartlett ranked David Lynch’s feature films in 2025, and placed “Mulholland Drive” at #3.
In terms of feature films, “Mulholland Drive” would prove to be Lynch’s penultimate movie. He returned to theaters in 2006 with the digitally-shot, immensely long “Inland Empire,” another Hollywood poem, this time devoted to actors and their craft (and Laura Dern in particular). He continued to churn out low-profile shorts for many years thereafter, and continued to act and give his daily weather reports. Lynch, in that span, grew from a nightmarish auteur into a gentle, loving grandfather. In 2017, he co-wrote and directed all 18 episodes of “Twin Peaks: The Return,” which might be seen as the director’s final epic project.
Lynch’s many fans may debate his best movie, but “Mulholland Drive” was one of the times when Lynch, as unlikely as it sounds, broke through to mainstream success. The film is still gorgeous, mysterious, and may perhaps never be fully unlocked. Lynch would have wanted it that way.
