Everything you were afraid to ask about "Mulholland Drive"

Revised and updated: The scary cowboy! The mysterious box! All that sex! We answer all your questions about David Lynch's latest outrage -- the weirdest movie of the year.

By Bill Wyman, Max Garrone and Andy Klein

Oct. 23, 2001 | "Mulholland Drive," the latest feature from director David Lynch, is exhilarating -- two hours and 25 minutes of macabre thrills, highly charged erotica and indelible images. But it's also confusing. Bits and pieces of plot dribble out; characters appear and disappear; the film takes an incomprehensible turn two-thirds of the way through; and there seem to be three or four disparate story lines that have virtually nothing to do with one another.

In this way, the film is similar to Lynch's "Lost Highway," his cinematic scud missile of 1997. In that film, the 40-something Bill Pullman languishes in a locked prison cell. He then, without explanation, turns into the 20-something Balthazar Getty and is released from prison, and the movie goes off on a new story tangent. That was just one puzzling development in a film whose plot was regularly described as a Möbius strip by reviewers.

"Mulholland Drive" is a movie along those lines, though its filmic palette is broader, its setting (Hollywood and the film industry) more portentous, and its themes plainer. Beyond that, the narrative is intricate and playfully surreal rather than opaque and frustrating.

Indeed, it may be the most conventional and coherent of Lynch's "hard" movies ("Eraserhead," "Blue Velvet," "Twin Peaks," "Fire Walk With Me," "Wild at Heart," "Lost Highway"). All the themes that cycle through his work -- strange figures pulling the strings behind the scenes, random acts of extreme violence, bizarre character fixations and the feeling that the surreal is an active part of our everyday life -- are present here, but he's tied them to a narrative structure that, in the end, resolves itself. For aficionados, there are red herrings that will maintain many a debate, but others will suspect that Lynch is finally coming out and telling us what he's all about.

Still, of recent American movies, only "Memento" is remotely as challenging, and it's still almost impenetrable on first viewing. What follows includes a synopsis of the plot and then questions and answers about what in the world is going on in "Mulholland Drive's" strange universe. So stop reading now if you haven't yet seen the film.

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Here's the basic plot: The film opens with garish, distorted footage of people jitterbugging; it's a hellish version of a Gap ad. Then we see washed-out superimposed footage of a young woman with a sort of beatific homecoming queen smile on her face.

Then there's a few seconds of a red blanket; breathing sounds pulse on the soundtrack.

Then the movie proper starts, with a few parallel stories: In one, a gorgeous woman is in the back of a limo, climbing the winding curves of Mulholland Drive above Los Angeles. The driver stops unexpectedly and points a pistol at her. But before he can fire the limo is rammed by one of a pair of drag-racing cars. The voluptuous woman gets out in a daze and stumbles down the hills into Hollywood and ends up sleeping in an apartment whose owner is away on vacation.

Then we see a diner, with an odd, nervous, nerdy-looking young guy talking to a more composed middle-aged man. The younger one says he's had a dream about the diner and a monster outside. They go outside and see the monster! The young guy collapses.

Someone is after the woman who wandered off from the car wreck. We see a strange man pick up a phone and hear that they haven't found her yet. He calls a number and passes along the message; we see a dirty yellow wall phone picked up and accept the message. Then we see that phone hung up, picked up and dialed. A phone rings on a coffee table next to an ashtray, but no one answers.

We are introduced to another character, Betty, as she gets off a plane, chatting gaily with an elderly couple she met on the flight. Betty is a bushy-tailed, almost painfully chipper young woman just arrived in Los Angeles to make her fortune as an actress. The older couple effusively wish her luck.

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