The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
David Lynch · a film · 2001 · 147 minutes
Mode
Hollywood mystery that becomes a dream of self-exculpation; noir, ingenue comedy and love story folded into a sleeper’s defence
Mythos
The doppelgänger (the dreamer splits herself into the innocent and the rescued, and her rival into the helpless and the cruel); the girl who comes to the city; Orpheus looking back at the dead lover; the box that must not be opened
Phase
Two unequal parts hinged on a blue box: a two-hour dream in which every fact of the waking life is repaired, then a half-hour waking that walks the same places as they were; the car stops at the same place on the road twice
Presentation
Feature film in colour, about 147 minutes, grown from a rejected television pilot; Peter Deming’s photography, Angelo Badalamenti’s score, Lynch’s own sound design; sustained passages of dread without event
Register
From an espresso spat into a napkin and a hitman’s botched job to a woman screaming at two old people under her door; gold for Betty, brown murk for Diane
Scale
Two women, one industry, one city at night
Governing Proposition
A woman who has failed in Hollywood and paid to have her lover killed dreams, in the hours before her own death, a film in which she arrives fresh from Ontario, astonishes the room at her first audition, and rescues an amnesiac who needs her. The dream runs two hours and the waking a half-hour, and the waking is given second, so that the long first part is understood only after it has been loved. The wager is that an audience will accept a story it cannot assemble on first viewing, and will take the cost of its coherence from the dreamer’s guilt rather than from the plot.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The film begins with a jitterbug contest. Young couples dance against a violet ground, laid over one another in superimposition, and a blonde girl in the middle of them takes applause with an old couple at her shoulders, lit as though by a flash. Then a camera lowers itself onto a pillow, breathing audibly, and the image goes dark. Nothing else in the film is so plainly a sleeper’s point of view, and it is given before a word is spoken. A limousine climbs the ridge road at night, the street sign caught in its headlights, and a woman in the back seat, played by Laura Harring, is told to get out. A gun is pointed at her. A car full of racing teenagers hits the limousine head-on. She walks away from the wreck, down through the brush into the lights of Hollywood, and by morning has hidden herself in a courtyard apartment on Havenhurst whose tenant is leaving with her bags.
Betty Elms, played by Naomi Watts, arrives at the airport from Deep River, Ontario, with the old couple from the dance, who wish her well and drive away in their own limousine smiling at nothing, a shade too long. She has come to act; her aunt has lent her the apartment. The landlady Coco, played by Ann Miller, shows her in. In the shower she finds the woman from the car, who has no memory and takes the name Rita from a poster for Gilda. Watts plays Betty bright and eager and a little too much so, as though the performance were being given by someone who needed it very badly to go well, and the film will show, two hours on, who that someone is.
Lynch wrote and directed. The material was shot in 1999 as a pilot for a series at ABC, which turned it down, and the film was finished as a feature with French money the following year, with new scenes and an ending written over footage that had been made to stay open. The seams were kept, and they are part of the structure. Peter Deming photographed it and Angelo Badalamenti wrote the music, and the sound, which carries much of the dread, is Lynch’s own.
Movement II
At Winkie’s on Sunset, in daylight, a man named Dan, played by Patrick Fischler, tells another man a dream he has had twice, of this diner, of this man across from him, and of a face behind the building that he hopes never to see. They walk out to the back to put the dream to rest. The face is there. Dan falls. The scene connects to nothing around it and is the hinge of the film: the diner is where the waking woman will sit with a hired killer and where the thing behind it will hold a blue box in a paper bag.
Then the pilot’s machinery, kept and made strange. A tiny man behind glass, Mr Roque, is told that the girl is still missing, and a chain of telephone calls runs down through dim rooms to a phone under a red lamp. A hitman, played by Mark Pellegrino, kills a man for a black book, then has to kill a woman who heard the shot, then a janitor, then shoot a vacuum cleaner, and leaves by a fire alarm. The comedy is broad and would have been a series’ weekly business. In the film it plays as the dreamer’s wish that the man she paid were a fool.
A director, Adam Kesher, played by Justin Theroux, is told at a meeting by two brothers, played by Dan Hedaya and by Badalamenti himself, that an actress he has never heard of is the girl for his picture. One brother spits his espresso into a napkin. Kesher smashes their car with a golf club, goes home to find his wife in bed with the pool man, pours pink paint into her jewellery box, is beaten and thrown out, and learns that his accounts are frozen. He is sent at night to a corral above the canyon, where a lamp comes on by itself and a man in a hat, the Cowboy, tells him courteously to pick the girl, and that he will see him once more if he does well and twice if he does badly. Meanwhile Betty and Rita open Rita’s purse and find it full of money and a blue key with no lock.
Movement III
Betty rehearses her scene with Rita in the kitchen, a melodrama about a girl and her father’s friend, and reads it flat. At the audition, opposite an ageing leading man played by Chad Everett who puts his hands on her, she plays it hot and close and furious, and the room goes silent. It is the finest acting in the film and it is Diane’s wish for how the audition should have gone. A casting agent takes her across the lot to the set of a picture about a singer, where Kesher is auditioning girls to the songs of 1960. A blonde girl sings, and Kesher says the sentence he has been told to say. He turns, and his eyes meet Betty’s across the stage, and she runs.
She runs to Rita, and the two women go looking for a name Rita has remembered, Diane Selwyn, at an apartment court called Sierra Bonita. A neighbour has swapped flats with her. They climb in through a window and find in the bedroom a woman’s body on the bed, days dead. Rita, in panic, cuts off her own hair, and Betty puts a blonde wig on her, and the two women stand in the mirror as near twins. That night Rita comes to Betty’s bed, and they make love, and the film gives it tenderly. At two in the morning Rita speaks in Spanish in her sleep, the same word several times, and insists they go out.
Everything in this movement is a repair. The body is Diane’s own, seen from outside; the wig makes the lover into the self; the love is given freely by a woman who, awake, had ended it on a couch. The film has not yet said any of this, and a first viewer takes the scenes as the deepening of a mystery, which is what the dreamer would want.
Movement IV
A taxi takes them to a theatre at the end of an empty street. Inside, a magician in evening dress, played by Richard Green, tells the house that there is no band, that what they hear is a recording, while a trumpet plays and a man with a trumpet lowers it and the sound goes on. Thunder, blue light; Betty shakes in her seat as though a current ran through her. A woman announced as Rebekah Del Rio walks out and sings, without accompaniment, Roy Orbison’s song of weeping in Spanish, and in the middle of it she falls to the floor, and the voice continues. The scene says what the film is: a performance that goes on after the performer has gone.
In her purse Betty finds a blue box. At home, Rita fetches the key, and when she turns Betty is not there. Rita opens the box, and the camera goes into it and falls, and the box drops to the carpet, and the aunt who lent the apartment looks in on a room with no one in it. Then the Cowboy stands in a bedroom doorway and tells a sleeping woman that it is time to wake up. Diane Selwyn, played by Watts, wakes on the bed where the body lay. The light is brown. A neighbour collects her things and mentions that two detectives have been looking for her.
What follows is memory, cut without warning. Camilla Rhodes, played by Harring, stands in Diane’s kitchen as if the dead woman from the car had never been; Camilla on the couch ends the affair; on a set, Kesher clears the stage and kisses Camilla while Diane watches. A limousine climbs the ridge road and stops at the same place, and this time Camilla is waiting to lead Diane up a path through the brush to Kesher’s house. At the dinner party, Coco is Kesher’s mother. Diane tells the table her own story, Deep River, the dead aunt, the jitterbug contest, the audition for the singer’s picture where she met Camilla and the director who chose Camilla over her. Camilla kisses the blonde girl in front of her. Kesher and Camilla begin an announcement and laugh too much to finish it.
Movement V
At the diner Diane sits opposite the hitman, played again by Pellegrino, and pushes a photograph of Camilla and a bag of money across the table. He shows her a blue key and tells her what finding it will mean. At the counter behind him sits Dan, who dreamed this room, and the waitress who serves them wears a name tag that says Betty. Every piece of the dream has now been laid out in the daylight it was made from: the key, the name, the man who had to be a fool, the face behind the building. The face is there now, in the alley, holding the blue box in a paper bag; it sets the box down, and out of it come the old couple, tiny and laughing.
Diane sits in her apartment with the blue key on the table and nothing left to dream. The old couple slide in under the door, full size, and come at her shrieking, and she runs to the bedroom and shoots herself on the bed. Smoke fills the room, and in blue light the faces of Betty and Rita are laid over the city at night, smiling. In the balcony of the empty theatre the blue-haired woman says one word, quietly, and the film ends on it.
Mulholland Drive was shown at Cannes in May 2001, where Lynch shared the prize for direction, and Lynch was nominated for the Academy Award for directing. The reviews were strong and divided over whether the thing could be understood, and the understanding arrived over the next years, through viewers who watched it again and critics who wrote it up as the case of its decade. In 2016 a BBC poll of critics named it the best film of the century so far, and in 2022 it stood eighth in the Sight and Sound poll. What they returned to was a shape rather than a solution: a wish that repairs a guilt, running for as long as it can, and a box that does not open until the dreamer lets go.
Act III · The Twelve
Judged on the whole as released, with the pilot’s remains inside it. The dream’s stations are required: Winkie’s, the audition, the set, the apartment at Sierra Bonita and Club Silencio are each the repaired form of a fact the waking half will show plain. Most of the television pilot kept in the film is converted rather than carried: the Castigliane brothers become the dreamer’s account of why the part was not hers, the hitman’s botched job over a black book her wish that the man she paid were a fool, Adam Kesher’s wife, the pool man and the paint in the jewellery box her revenge on the director who took her lover. What remains is vestige, present because a series once needed it: Mr Roque behind his glass and his chain of telephones, the detectives who never return, Louise Bonner at the door. The give is real but narrow, and it holds the figure here.
Score: 8.3 / 10
The disclosure can be stated: a fantasy is a defence, built from the materials of a failure and a guilt, and it repairs every fact it cannot bear. Diane did not get the part, so Betty astonishes the room at her first reading. Camilla left her for the director, so Rita has no memory and no one but Betty. Diane paid for a murder, so the hitman in the dream is a fool who kills the wrong people. The waitress’s name tag and the man behind the diner are fragments of one evening set to work. It is a meaning, not a mood, and it reaches past the one woman: the dream is given first, so the audience has wanted what she wanted before it learns why, and finds the defence in itself. The industry’s choosing of girls is the wound the dream repairs, not a backdrop. Held below the top because that industry is seen from the casting room and the hill house only, and is never argued as a system.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Elevation is frequent and dreadful: the man at Winkie’s describing the face behind the diner and then meeting it in daylight; the Cowboy’s corral, the lamp coming on without a hand; Betty’s audition, where a flat scene turns charged and the room goes quiet; Rita in the blonde wig beside Betty in the mirror; and Club Silencio entire, the magician saying there is no band while the trumpet plays, Rebekah Del Rio falling while the voice goes on, Betty shaking. The two old people crawling under the door is terror at the pitch of a nightmare. Badalamenti’s low strings keep the film near height between these. What holds it down is weighed: the pilot’s comic business, the paint in the jewellery box and the pool man, is at ground level by design.
Score: 9.2 / 10
Myth built, not cited. The doppelgänger is the load-bearing structure: the dreamer divides herself into an innocent and a woman in need, and divides her lover into the helpless Rita and the cruel Camilla, and the second half can be read only by matching each figure to its double. The girl who comes to the city and the city that chooses girls is the Hollywood myth of Sunset Boulevard lived from the inside. The blue box is Pandora’s and the key is Bluebeard’s, and neither is named. The particulars stay hard: Deep River, Ontario, the jitterbug contest, the Havenhurst courtyard, a waitress’s name tag. The dreamed double life was first tried in Lynch’s own Lost Highway, where a man dreamed himself another man; here it is split across two women and made the key to the whole film. Held just below Vertigo (9.1), whose doubled woman it inherits.
Score: 9.0 / 10
The inheritance is the Hollywood mystery and the television pilot, and the departure is the abandonment of narrative coherence for the logic of dreams at feature length, in a film about Hollywood that Hollywood would have to distribute. The stake was real and was paid: ABC rejected the pilot; the completion came from French money; the film was built from footage shot for a series that would never exist, and an ending had to be invented over open material. The turn is not a stylistic accent, since the whole first part is set up to be loved as a story and then taken away. Held just at the figure by precedent: Lynch had already made the dreamed double life in Lost Highway (1997), and Bergman’s Persona had merged two women on screen in 1966.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Change the form and the film loses what it knows. Rechronologise it (affair, party, diner, hired killing, death, then dream) and nothing remains but a sad story and a long fantasy sequence; the knowledge lies in the order. Because the dream comes first, the audience lives inside the defence before it sees what is defended against, and is implicated in the wish: we wanted Betty to be brilliant and Rita to be hers. The box is the formal hinge, placed where the dreamer can no longer hold the lie. The proportion of the parts, two hours against thirty minutes, is itself the argument about how much of a life is spent in repair. Held below the top where the form is a container: the cross-cutting between unrelated threads is series grammar.
Score: 9.2 / 10
Evidence over promise, and there are twenty-five years of it. The film became the case for a decade’s writing on the puzzle film: George Toles’s “Auditioning Betty in Mulholland Drive” in Film Quarterly (2004), Todd McGowan’s The Impossible David Lynch (2007), and the chapters on it in the collections that gave the puzzle film its name. The reading in which the first part is Diane’s dream is now standard and does not close the film: the blue box, the Cowboy’s two appearances, the old couple and the blue-haired woman in the balcony are not accounted for by it. Formal depth counts with semantic: the sound design rewards a fifth hearing. Two things hold it at the figure: the span, twenty-five years, short beside the decades behind the oldest films on the desk, and the share of the return drawn by debris, not by depth, the pilot’s loose threads mistaken for clues.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Released in 2001, so force and reach are scored together. The force: a feature that made dream logic its whole structure rather than an episode, and set the key to its own reading late and small. The reach is real and can be traced. The puzzle film of the following decade owes it a grammar, and its way of withholding the key was taken up in art cinema and in long-form television, where the unexplained became a mode rather than a lapse. Heirs are open: Aronofsky’s Black Swan (2010), Villeneuve’s Enemy (2013), Mitchell’s Under the Silver Lake (2018), and Lynch’s own Twin Peaks: The Return (2017). On that record it clears the gate. Held below Persona (8.8) and Vertigo (9.0), which count it among their own heirs, because the redirection is of a sector, the ambitious art film and the drama series, and not of the industry it describes, which went on choosing girls.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Survival is weighed across a quarter-century, against two conditions. It outlived its origin as a television pilot: the seams are visible and are now studied rather than a reason to set the film aside. It outlived the fashion for the puzzle film, which it helped to make; the film did not pass with it, because its puzzle is a grief and not a trick. The surface fixed to its moment is charged: the telephones, the videotape, the Hollywood of agents and casting rooms around 2000. Presence holds the figure at the gate: it was named the best film of the century in the BBC critics’ poll of 2016 and stood eighth in the Sight and Sound poll of 2022, a critics’ standing more than a public one, level with Kid A and far below what has lasted centuries.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Command of the medium, and the making bears weight throughout: Peter Deming’s photography, the gold of Betty’s arrival and the brown murk of Diane’s kitchen; Angelo Badalamenti’s score, its low held strings under empty scenes; Lynch’s own sound design, the room tone that rises until it becomes dread; Jack Fisk’s courtyard apartments and the red curtain of Silencio; Mary Sweeney’s editing, which keeps the pilot’s threads moving so their abandonment is felt as unease, not error; Naomi Watts’s double performance, the bright girl played a shade too brightly so the real woman can show through, then the ruined one; Laura Harring’s stillness. The costs are weighed in full: the digital stretching of the old couple reads as a device of its moment, and the hitman sequence is paced as a series would pace it.
Score: 9.2 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: Adam Kesher’s comedy, the espresso spat into a napkin and the pink paint in the jewellery box, and Diane on her bed with a gun. One law governs them: the dreamer’s physics, in which every humiliation of the waking life is reassigned to someone else and played as farce. Kesher is comic because Diane needs the director who took her lover to be a man things happen to. The hitman is a fool for the same reason. The Cowboy, who belongs to no genre, obeys the law: he appears twice, as he said he would, once in each world. What breaks it is the pilot’s residue the dream cannot claim: Mr Roque and his telephones, the detectives, Louise Bonner at the door, present without a dreamer’s motive.
Score: 8.7 / 10
The orders held are few and are held fully: consciousness, in dream, wish and guilt; desire, between two women and across a power that chooses one of them; the industry, from casting room to the director’s hill house; the city, from the ridge road to the diner on Sunset. Integrated, since the industry’s choosing is the wound the dream repairs. What holds the axis lowest is absence. There is no family seen from inside: an aunt who dies and leaves money, parents reduced to an old couple who crawl under a door. Labour is the industry’s only, the state is two detectives who do not return, history does not enter, and the sacred appears once, as a magician saying there is no band. It is a film of two women and one wish.
Score: 7.3 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.8 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Sublime, The Living Form and The Made at 9.2, then The Swerve, The Unconcealment and The Archetypal Deep at 9.0. Dread and transport that return from the diner to the club, a two-part form that is itself the disclosure and cannot be reordered without loss, a making in which Deming’s light, Badalamenti’s strings, the sound and Watts’s double performance each bear weight, a departure from story that cost its maker a series and was paid, and a wish that repairs a guilt, built on doubles through which the whole film must be read.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.3: consciousness, desire, the industry and the city are held in one dream, but there is no family seen from inside, no history, no sacred beyond a magician’s announcement, and labour and the state are glimpsed; a film of two women and one wish. Above it, The Inevitable at 8.3, held by the remains of a television pilot the dream could not claim, Mr Roque, the detectives and the woman at the door, and The Imperishable at 8.5, a quarter-century’s standing that is a critics’ more than a public one.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.3 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 9.2, The Made at 9.2, The Inner Law at 8.7, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: The Unconcealment at 9.0, The Archetypal Deep at 9.0, The Swerve at 9.0 and Pressure on Tradition at 8.7 clear the bar of 8.5, and The Imperishable at 8.5 meets it exactly. The Universal Minimum is met: no axis but The Encompassed falls below 8.3, against 7.5, and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.3. Every summit condition is met; the work is held below the summit by its aggregate alone, 8.8 against the 9.0 that Tier V requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Mulholland Drive as released in 2001, about 147 minutes, from the jitterbug titles to the word spoken from the balcony at Club Silencio: the feature cut assembled from the pilot shot for ABC in 1999 and the footage added in 2000. No print, script or recording was consulted. The pilot as delivered to the network is not the object, and nothing known of it is imported except where the finished film shows its seams. Dialogue is described rather than quoted. Figures that could not be verified, among them the minute at which the box is opened, the cost of the completion, the number of pilot scenes retained and the box-office returns, are not given.