When David Lynch’s film Mulholland Drive was released in American cinemas 25 years ago this Monday, the critic Roger Ebert rejoiced that one of Lynch’s experiments at last ‘doesn’t shatter the test tubes’. Ebert seemed delighted that Lynch had focused on some of the more prosaic aspects of filmmaking – plot, character, dialogue – instead of privileging sound and vision: he argued that his 1997 film Lost Highway was ‘about design, not cinema’.

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Lynch had been having a bad run. Lost Highway was largely panned by critics for being too obscure, and he responded with the 1999 road drama The Straight Story. It’s tempting to see The Straight Story as a wounded joke: the film was rated a family-friendly ‘U’. Ebert loved the film this time, and compared the dialogue to Hemingway’s. The New York Times’s critic Janet Maslin said that Lynch seemed ‘burned out on the surreal and the grotesque’. Here we were at the turn of the millennium: Gladiator was heading for Best Picture at the Oscars and David Lynch was making Disney films. Big Hollywood had defeated the auteur.

By this point, Lynch was less famous for film and more for television because of Twin Peaks. So he turned to TV studios when he was looking to do a series called Mulholland Drive. The name came first: since at least 1990, he knew he wanted to just make something called ‘Mulholland Drive’. It was a road that he lived near in the Hollywood Hills, and he would have been driven down it when he was evacuated due to wildfires shortly before his death in January 2025. In 1999, Lynch shot a 90-minute pilot for ABC, the difficulties of which are documented in a New Yorker profile, but the studio didn’t like it. It never aired, but with the help of the French production company StudioCanal, Lynch shot additional material in October 2000 after writing an ending.

Lynch closely guarded which parts were shot for the pilot, and which parts weren’t. In the opening sequence, the Hollywood great Robert Forster appears as a detective investigating a car crash. He is not seen again for the rest of the film. Would the detective have popped up later in a series? We don’t know, but when the film premiered at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival, Forster was surprised to learn from a friend that he was in it.

The advantage of Mulholland Drive being a film is intimately wound up with it being freed from the demands of television: the pressure to resolve, to explain, to provide reasons to keep watching. Lynch ended up abhorring even the idea that people could pause this film: there were no chapters on the DVD release. The best arguments for cinema are that it requires concentration, that it involves a kind of ego death, as opposed to a lot of passive, consequence-free television, which you can chill out and laugh to, yes, but doesn’t have the same depth.

Despite the difficult process, Mulholland Drive is now considered Lynch’s greatest work, where he achieves his golden mean, where his virtues conquer his vices. It has achieved more popular recognition than any of his other works: Sight and Sound named it as their ninth best film of all time in 2022, and the New York Times declared it the second best film of the 21st century in 2024, behind Parasite. Even the Academy, who largely ignored his career, nominated him for Best Director. That this was produced in a hit-and-miss period for Lynch makes it more interesting. In the same year of Mulholland Drive’s release, he released a sitcom about humanoid........

© The Spectator