The Weirdest Movie You’ve Never Seen: David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive

“Auteur” is a filmmaking term derived from the French translation of Author. In Pop-Culture, the term has become synonymous with the idea of filmmakers owning a film aesthetic so prominently that it becomes a reflection of themselves, and extension of who they are as an artist.

Nowhere is this term more applicable to the great David Lynch, an iconic and beloved director who passed away earlier this year to the shock and despair of millions, including myself. David Lynch is one of those figures I consider to be one of the few artists that have truly changed my life. We all get a few, the ones that feel like they were put on this earth solely to commune with your very soul, and create art that changes who you are as a person. As someone who has studied and admired his paintings, music, and films for years, I fell for this segment of What We’re Watching, I absolutely had to talk about Mulholland Drive, the weirdest movie you’ve probably never seen.

Similar to Quentin Tarantino or Wes Anderson, David Lynch is the pioneer of his own headspace, transmuting highly stylized and aesthetically unique films attributed to his strange auteur nature. His style has become so popular through its inherently eerie and dreamlike storytelling, that an adjective has been developed to attach films that obtain a similar state of consciousness. “Lynchian” is the word, and it describes a feeling of perpetual darkness filtered through the lens of macabre dreamlike imagery. Throughout his entire filmography Mulholland Drive inhibits this quality perhaps the most prominently, following a young actress (played by Naomi Watts) and her chance encounter with a striking brunette with amnesia (played by Laura Harring). Unlike most films, Mulholland Drive doesn’t seek to resolve its story concretely; it aims to tell itself as a dream. It aims to strike awe, fear, and anxiety in its audience while delivering strikingly uncanny, unnatural, and disturbing images to its visuals.

In a lot of ways, Mulholland Drive is the closest you will ever get to experiencing Alice’s jump down the rabbit hole in film. It’s less of a film, and more of an abstract painting, a series of images and sounds masquerading as a Hollywood parody. It’s a giant puzzle full of dissociated subtext and existentialist themes. It’s the kind of film to terrify you, not through shock value, but through surrealism. Mulholland Drive is a dream. Through its staging, acting, and incredibly powerful direction, it aims to make you inquire, reflect, and most importantly — feel. It’s a film I will never stop singing the praises of, as despite multiple rewatches over the years, it’s the surrealist dream that keeps on giving. More importantly now, it’s a testament to everything David Lynch stood for as an artist. An auteur that made it a point not to make a movie, but create an experience. A dream that made you draw your own conclusions and meaning from. A film that matters, and a film that is most certainly worth your time.