Everything you were afraid to ask about "Mulholland Drive"

What is the point of that scene with Chad Everett, Diane's audition?

This strikes us as possibly the heart of the movie. It's the linchpin of Diane's idealized image of herself. Yet beyond that, the care with which the sequence is set up and the scene's immense punch seems to suggest that Lynch believes, perhaps passionately, that there is such a thing as acting, even great acting. It may be his tribute specifically to the miracle of character imaginings like Diane's and, by extension, to the creation of self in our subconscious and the many selves we don't know. Actors make it up out of nothing more than sheer imagination and persuade the audience to believe it. Lynch has been doing the same thing explicitly over his entire career.

Again, Naomi Watts, the actress, should be given credit for balancing the many levels of control needed to convincingly act the part of a ground-down starlet imagining herself as a chipper and idealistic young thing who then can convincingly deliver a unexpectedly searing audition performance -- and then have the levels of the conceptions make emotional sense to viewers at the end of the film. Brava!

The hit man thing is confusing. Who is the long-haired guy he murders? And what about the prostitute he ushers into the van? Is that Diane, too?

The guy he shot so perfunctorily made some remark about a car accident. The implication seems to be that he was in one of the joyriding cars that hit the limo, and that he ended up with some sort of black book that the guys who were about to kill Rita possessed. In the logic of Diane's dream, the hit man needed that as a lead to where she was. We know that it's not going to help him find Rita, but he doesn't know that.

The scene is also another movie nod, this time to the absurdist modern black noir; here it allows Lynch, at his bleakest, to film a senseless carnage that out-Tarantinos Tarantino. It's also part of the confusing background noise Lynch likes to put into his movies. It is a deeply felt contention of his that not everything makes sense. Less charitably, you can say it's a loose end from the TV series that never got made.

What TV series?

"Mulholland Drive" was supposed to be the pilot for an ABC TV series that was going to both make ABC the network of the moment and put Lynch back into a "Twin Peaks"-like limelight. Fat chance. The network approved the script, but balked when execs saw the two-hour-plus result. Lynch apparently tried to slice off the last 40 minutes, but the network didn't like that either. He eventually found a French film company, Studio Canal, to put up some money. He reassembled the cast, filmed some more and created the feature version out now.

So what is Lynch trying to say about Hollywood?

You can't help noticing that no one comes off very well in this fetid world. In interviews Lynch has been putting the screws to ABC. While he points out that the network had approved the script before he filmed it, it's hard to believe any sane person would expect broadcast television to air a movie anything remotely like this. And we're somewhat suspicious when a director like Lynch -- who's been given tens of millions of dollars to make extraordinarily dark, sometimes positively inhuman ("Wild at Heart," for example) movies for more than 20 years -- whines about Hollywood. He's been nominated for a best director Oscar twice. What does he have to complain about?

All that said, the movie is certainly no polemic. Lynch seems pretty detached from this. The character of Adam the director seems a mocking version of himself. Lynch's nuances and implicit respect for the magic of the art make the film a complex portrait of the industry.

And the artistic rationale for the extended sequences of lesbian sex would be ...

He's playing explicitly with how Hollywood uses women predominantly as sex objects -- except he's turning the formula on its head, making the women's world a closed one, at least in Diane's fantasy of it. But of course, in the end she's doing the same thing a Hollywood movie normally does to a Camilla -- imagining that she's an empty object that she can possess.

In the end, "Mulholland Drive" is Lynch's most sympathetic film, particularly to women. Even if Betty's dream is an extended apologia for a terrible crime, the density of her character, the expansiveness of her dreams and desires, and the catch-all giddiness of her imagination all make her something close the one the thing she always wanted to be: the ultimate movie heroine.

And she's just part of the film's dense milieu. The network of aging actresses and incoming starlets ineffably captures the implacable Hollywood mill. Lynch seems to accept the manifold processes by which women come in to self-invent themselves: by sheer talent, the way Betty does; desperately, as Diane does; by hook or by crook, as Rita does, plucking a new identity off a movie poster; or sexually, the way Camilla does. All, he seems at pains to point out, are ultimately in the business of dream fulfillment, which is why we as consumers go to the films as well. Right?

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