Mulholland drive movie#
Mulholland drive series#

Mulholland Drive follows Betty (Naomi Watts), a fresh-faced aspiring actress who arrives in Hollywood one sunny morning to take a stab at becoming an actress. And if we were to apply this ideology to Mulholland Drive, it would suggest that we can only really understand the film by first understanding that we can’t derive any logical meaning from its plot.

Mulholland drive series#

In his essay series Course in General Linguistics, early structuralist philosopher Ferdinand de Saussure explains that “in language there are only differences,” by which he means that it we can only understand what a symbol is by understanding what it is not. In a film where symbols and plot points are never really defined, and therefore become a string of Rorschach tests, the only thing we can successfully amass meaning from is the method with which the story is told.

It’s simply the case that the contents of the plot are largely inconsequential. Indeed, don’t interpret this confession to mean that there is nothing at all to be gleaned from Mulholland Drive. That is, until I discovered the 20th century post-structuralist philosophers. And sadly, because of this, Mulholland Drive remained more or less meaningless to me for years.

Mulholland drive movie#

The truth of the matter is, if you’re anything like I once was and you want nothing more than to figure out what this audacious two-and-a-half-hour descent into madness and absurdity really means, you’ll inevitably run into a number of people who will essentially tell you the same thing: It’s not a movie that’s meant to be understood. Sometimes I would get frustratingly close to what I perceived to be its true “meaning”-the person behind the dumpster represents the crisis of homelessness in Hollywood, or, wait, no, they represent the obscured lines between nightmare and reality, or wait-only to realize I was right back where I started. Over the years, I have desperately sought to make sense of the madness that is David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive.