For our annual summer countdown, we are looking at our favorite 25 movies that were not huge hits during their initial release, but mean a lot to us. Check out last year’s Summer of Stars countdown or the year before when we did blockbusters! Find the rest of the Flop and Fizzle series here!

by Ian Hrabe, Staff Writer

Mulholland Dr exists as a Kubrickian monolith in my life. One day I just had to see that movie, and 20 years later it is the inciting incident to both my love of film and, I’m not even kidding, my chosen career path as a librarian. When I couldn’t find Mulholland Dr at Blockbuster I found out that I could check out DVDs at the public library, and I frequently cite this as the moment I realized that libraries are “really really really cool.” But why did I want to see this movie so bad? Was it a schoolboy crush on Naomi Watts? Probably not, since this is the movie where she got her big break. A desperate ploy to become a cool art kid instead of an unkempt punk rocker? I tried mining the archive of my high school Xanga blog to no avail, though to my horror I was able to download the archive of that blog where my very first post mentioned the film (See footnote).  But you know what, it doesn’t really matter why I saw it, but that I saw it at all. And that this movie from David Lynch twisted psyche was such an insane mindfuck that reading about what it was really about on the IMDB forums made me a true believer in the power of cinema.

Needless to say, the normies couldn’t hang with this one when it was released and it predictably bellyflopped at the box office. Which is nothing new for Lynch, who dabbles in Hollywood occasionally only to deliver dismaying results to any producer hoping to turn a profit. In the wide angle shot of David Lynch’s career though, television is a medium where he has had his most mainstream success. Twin Peaks is one of the pillars that all of today’s great TV shows have to stand on. It showed you can tell a long-form story in the medium, and despite being hugely popular when it aired in 1990-1991, the show allowed David Lynch more room to mine his incredibly weird brain. He returned to Twin Peaks in 2017 with a critically heralded third season of the show on Showtime, and was working on a new show for Netflix before it got shut down by Covid. 

I only bring this up because before rewatching Mulholland Dr for the first time in maybe a decade, I learned that it began its life as a TV pilot. The pilot was rejected, Lynch shot more footage to tie the whole thing together, and we got one of this century’s first landmark films. Watching it with a TV eye, I couldn’t help wondering what a 10-episode Mulholland Dr would have looked like. Though the worlds Lynch crafts are all grotesque (except for like, The Straight Story), this is the one I wanted to spend the most time in. That is largely due to the film’s neo-noir mystery structure, in which an aspiring actress helps an amnesiac figure out who she is. 

Don’t let the conventional plot fool you, Lynch takes frequent detours into the seedy underbelly of Hollywood and features such sequences as “hotshot film director has a midnight rendezvous with a cryptic cowboy” and “man witnesses horrific goblin living behind diner and died of fright.” At no point does this film have any fingerprints from studio and network bigwigs. This is Lynch operating at the height of his powers, doing whatever the hell he wants, and leaving it to you, the viewer, to decipher. Is there a real meaning to everything inside this movie? Debatable. Is it a fascinating mystery box to try to puzzle open? You bet. 

Where Blue Velvet mines the rot at the heart of small town America, Lynch levels up to explore the rot in Hollywood. Not just Hollywood the place, but the idea of Hollywood itself. Jitterbug contest winner Betty Elms (Naomi Watts) makes her way to Tinseltown with hopes of making it big on the big screen. That Watts became a huge star after this film was released is no surprise, as she plays the wide-eyed ingenue to perfection. She’s so perfect in fact, that when Lynch drops the grim 90s Hitchcock routine and goes into full on Lynch Mode, it makes the film’s third-act narrative shift feel absolutely traumatic. We learn that Betty is actually Diane, the jilted lover of Rita (Laura Harring), the woman whose identity she was helping uncover in her…dream? Parallel reality? Lynch will never tell you and I doubt if he has even settled on an explanation, but the beautiful thing is it doesn’t matter. The film’s final 30 minutes is an exercise in pure horror that leaves you feeling absolutely haunted.

Which is what mainstream audiences want, right? To look into the eyes of the dumpster goblin and wallow in the rot wrought by our constant need to be entertained? Oh, what’s that? It only made a little over $7 million domestically and despite being critically lauded–Lynch won Best Director at Cannes and was nominated for the Academy Award in the same category–the movie still feels like a cult classic. And really, that’s how it should be with David Lynch. He’s one of the first filmmakers budding cinephiles turn to when they have an itch that isn’t being scratched, and Lynch is more than happy to scratch it and keep scratching until his surreal images are burned into your brain.

Footnote: Have been watching a lot of DVD's from the library lately, in the past three days I watched Magnolia, Vanilla Sky, and Mulholland Dr.
Mulholland Dr. being the only one that I really really liked. In fact, it's one of my new favorite movies and if you haven't seen it I suggest checking it out, now. -August 24th, 2003.