Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Mulholland Drive
2001 · David Lynch · Mulholland Drive on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Look at the warm golden light on Betty's face. (light)
Deming shoots Betty in diffuse late-afternoon glow on longer lenses that flatten space and idealize her. Watts is photographed like a 1950s star. Nobody else in this Los Angeles gets quite that light.
Payoff: The lighting is making a claim about her that the city has not.
Listen for a low hum under the Hollywood scenes. (sound)
Lynch supervised the sound himself. A near-subsonic drone runs through much of the film, and the mix weighs Badalamenti's score and the room noise about equally. You often cannot tell whether a sound is in the scene or over it.
Payoff: The hum keeps the ground unstable. If you cannot place a sound in the world, you cannot fully trust the world either.
Watch Betty rehearse a scene, then play it at the audition. (performance)
In the apartment Watts plays the lines as flat melodrama. At the casting call she delivers them completely transformed, charged and intimate. Same words, two different people.
Payoff: The scene shows an actor performing sincerity so well that sincerity stops being a category. In the reading: Crystalline description. The reading calls this a crystalline description, where a scene composes what it shows instead of pointing at something fixed and real.
Count the separate storylines the film starts and never connects. (cutting)
Sweeney cuts on feeling rather than eyeline. Betty and Rita, a director losing control of his picture, a man terrified of something behind a diner, a hitman whose job keeps going wrong. Nothing joins them in any ordinary way.
Payoff: The missing connective tissue is the design. Lynch withholds the glue because the film is organized by rhyme rather than by cause.
Watch the moment anyone crosses a doorway in this film. (staging)
The Havenhurst apartment, the bungalow at Sierra Bonita, a corral at night, the curtained interior of a small club. Lynch weights every boundary and holds his actors in position longer than naturalism would allow.
Payoff: Nothing here is allowed to be ordinary. Every room you enter is staged as a place where the rules might change.
The 3 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Do not try to solve it. Watch the light and listen to the hum.