16 Things to Look for When ‘Mulholland Drive’ Melts Your Brain

Some people will tell you there’s no sense in making sense of Mulholland Drive. But that’s lazy. Sure, there’s no single definitive answer to its many puzzles, but David Lynch’s dream logic leads us to decipherable clues to the meaning of this surrealist, weird, fun masterpiece that still awes and frustrates viewers nearly a quarter century after its release.

As the tagline puts it, the movie is “a love story in the city of dreams,” though it could just as easily go by the tagline for Lynch’s subsequent Inland Empire: “A woman in trouble.” But which woman isn’t always clear. Mulholland Drive is rife with doubles and delusions, set in a Hollywood that projects our deepest and most pernicious fantasies back at us. Betty, Rita, Diane, Camilla, Adam, and we need to figure it out together. (Have your remote and the pause button handy.)

In that spirit, we’ve rounded up the most enticing (and spoiler-filled) visual cues, Easter eggs, and behind-the-scenes tidbits to look for when you next watch Mulholland Drive. Or, if you’re so lucky, when you watch it for the first time. We don’t abide by any one grand theory of the movie, but we’ll weave in some of the most popular and convincing explanations. To which the notoriously tight-lipped Lynch would no doubt reply: “Silencio.”

1. The jitterbug contest is a wish fulfilled.
2. Those red pillows mean intense sleep.
3. Justin Theroux is ... the star?
4. It all goes back to Sunset Boulevard.
5. Rita Hayworth is much more than a poster.
6. There are theories about that painting.
7. Who the hell is Camilla Rhodes?
8. The call is coming from inside Diane’s brain.
9. The Cowboy is literally the Grim Reaper.
10. Laura Harring didn’t love doing that lesbian sex scene.
11. “No hay banda” may not be about a band at all.
12. Rebekah Del Rio is a David Lynch muse.
13. A box, a key, and an awakening.
14. The ashtray tells you what’s up.
15. Whose eyes are we watching this through?
16. The Cowboy takes his revenge.

The jitterbug contest is a wish fulfilled.

In the DVD release of Mulholland Drive, the usually inscrutable Lynch offered 10 suggestions for unlocking his movie. The first is especially important: “Pay particular attention in the beginning of the film: At least two clues are revealed before the credits.”

The first thing we see is Betty’s (what will turn out to be Diane’s) memory of her winning a jitterbug dancing contest back in Canada. But several things are off: Betty/Diane seems way too young to have participated in a jitterbug contest, we never see her partner, and dancers repeat and appear in silhouette. The lighting is extreme, and the camerawork becomes unsteady. She’s also joined in her celebratory moment by Irene and Irene’s partner, who as far as we know are not related to Betty/Diane but met her traveling to Los Angeles.

Diane may well have participated in a jitterbug dance contest that inspired her to pursue acting, as we find out later in the movie, but there’s more than a hint of wish fulfillment in this sequence, which then shifts to the glorious LA she’s built inside her mind.

Those red pillows mean intense sleep.

Mulholland Drive isn’t so much about dreaming as it is a dream—well, much of it. The second “clue” before the opening credits, per Lynch, is the shot of (sensual, ominous) red pillows. We hear labored breathing that sounds a lot like it comes from Naomi Watts. After the jitterbug memory, Diane is almost certainly falling into a REM state of sleep that will take us into the Betty/Rita fantasy. And who doesn’t want to be there? Simultaneously, throughout the movie, we see more pillows as well as (loud!) phones—a sign that we’re experiencing someone’s restless imagination that exists somewhere between dreaming and waking life.

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Justin Theroux is ... the star?

Once the opening credits kick in as Rita is in the back of the limo, notice that the top-billed actor is … Justin Theroux? Playing the director Adam, Theroux was more or less the opposite of famous in 2001, and both Naomi Watts and Laura Elena Harring have substantially more screen time. This is likely a vestige of the ABC TV pilot version of Mulholland Drive, before the network killed it and Lynch added footage to create a movie. In the alternate TV version of Mulholland Drive, assuming it ever got past the pilot, Theroux’s Adam probably played a bigger role.

It all goes back to Sunset Boulevard.

The shot of the street sign for Mulholland Drive—a stretch of road up in the hills of LA—is prominent in the movie. But notice that when Rita stumbles from her car accident toward the apartment Betty is staying in, we get a shot of a sign for “Sunset Bl.” Lynch, a student of Hollywood, is certainly making a reference to the movie Sunset Boulevard. The connection is clear enough: While there’s no aging, holed-up diva here, a similarly acrid sentiment about show business rules. Where there are would-be stars, there’s also misery.

Rita Hayworth is much more than a poster.

When Betty asks Rita what her name is, the amnesiac car crash survivor doesn’t know what to say. She literally doesn’t know who she is. But in the spirit of Hollywood, she turns to self-invention. Noticing a reflection (in a movie big on reflections and perspective shifts) of a poster for Gilda starring Hayworth in Aunt Ruth’s apartment bathroom, Rita adopts her fake name. But Lynch didn’t choose Hayworth out of thin air: The Brooklyn-born Latina herself changed her name from Margarita Carmen Cansino, an act of white-washing that gave her more credibility as a mainstream Old Hollywood star. It worked. And at least for a while, so does the relationship between Betty and Rita, played by Harring, who is herself Latina.

There are theories about that painting.

In addition to the Rita Hayworth poster, another piece of art in Aunt Ruth’s apartment nearly jumps off the wall. It’s a painting that looks awfully similar to Girl with a Pearl Earring, but is in fact a portrait of Beatrice Cenci, a Roman noblewoman who in the 16th century was beheaded for helping to kill her sexually abusive father. At one point, the piece is centered between Betty and Rita. It’s possible but highly unlikely that Lynch chose this artwork for purely aesthetic value. A popular theory holds that Diane (cast as Betty in her own dream) was abused as a child, and her tortured relationship with Camilla a.k.a. Rita is in part resonant with that past.

Who the hell is Camilla Rhodes?

Mulholland Drive has not only doubles but triples, or at least very weird coincidences. We learn that Rita is a fantasy version of the real Camilla Rhodes. But the actress Adam is forced to cast in the starring role of his movie during Diane’s Betty/Rita dream is named ... Camilla Rhodes. And she’s not Harring! Played by Melissa George, she looks a lot more like Naomi Watts. It’s possible that in her alternate version of events, Betty imagines Rita as her lover, while another blonde takes the role of professional competitor.

The call is coming from inside Diane’s brain.

On their Nancy Drew-style adventure to figure out who Rita really is, Betty calls the number of one Diane Selwyn found in the phonebook. It goes to the answering machine message. Listen closely: While Rita insists she doesn’t know this woman’s voice, it’s clearly that of Naomi Watts. It seems Diane’s projection of herself as sweet Betty is starting to fracture. Wake up, Diane! You’ve killed your lover! 

The Cowboy is literally the Grim Reaper.

You can’t talk about Mulholland Drive without talking about the Cowboy. First of all, he’s called just “the Cowboy” (a joke that Theroux’s Adam makes and lands well). But when Adam meets the Cowboy, no one is laughing. Perhaps the most legendary minor character in the movie, the Cowboy is played by a non-actor. Specifically, producer Monty Montgomery, known for his work on the fringes of Hollywood and for producing none other than Lynch’s earlier Wild at Heart. There are many ways to look at the Cowboy, who offers a veiled threat of death to Adam unless the filmmaker casts the right actress. But one way to think of him is as Death incarnate. He consistently looms over potentially (and actually) fatal paths, from Adam to Diane (more on that later).

Laura Harring didn’t love doing that lesbian sex scene.

Mulholland Drive wouldn’t work if Betty’s chemistry with Rita wasn’t so seductive. Naomi Watts and Laura Harring practically melt into each other’s arms, which makes the shattering end of their relationship that much more heartbreaking. Before we get to that conclusion, however, we get a very hot and heavy sex scene between Betty and Rita. This, like all of the other adult-oriented content, was not in the pilot intended for ABC. 

Per Harring on the Hollywood Reporter’s It Happened in Hollywood podcast, Lynch told her when delivering the news that the project would be turned into an “international feature film,” shaking her hand no less, “But there’s going to be nudity, Laura!”

“I’m not going to lie, I felt very uncomfortable,” Harring said of the lesbian sex scene, adding that she was in tears before arriving to set. Lynch comforted her by showing her how dark the lighting would be and by promising he wouldn’t show everything. But in the last take that’s used in the film, the director provided a verbal note: “Don't be afraid to touch each other’s breasts now!” To be fair, the scene comes off as beautiful rather than exploitative. Wild Things this is not.

“No hay banda” may not be about a band at all.

For many, the Silencio sequence is the most powerful in Mulholland Drive, a stark reflection of its emotional core. But what exactly moves us? We see a singer singing, a band playing ... or do we? “There is no band” translates to Harring, again per the Hollywood Reporter’s podcast interview with the actress, to something else entirely: “silencing the mind.” She’s surely not alone in this thought. “You see without seeing, you hear without hearing,” the actress added of her interpretation. Mulholland Drive, like so much of Lynch’s work, deals with how the mind plays tricks on us. Is that why Betty is shaking? 

Rebekah Del Rio is a David Lynch muse.

You’d be forgiven for thinking Lynch cast a relatively no-name but highly talented singer for the Club Silencio scene. But Lynch built the scene around the soaring vocalist (mentioned by her real name in the movie) after hearing her Spanish-language version of Roy Orbison’s “Crying.” Needless to say, much like Betty and Rita, our tear ducts get a workout from the song.

A box, a key, and an awakening.

Sometimes a blue box is much more than a blue box. Betty, tending to Rita, discovers that the amnesiac has a bizarrely triangular blue key along with a lot of cash in her purse. The box that matches the key appears after the revelatory Club Silencio performance, which it becomes clear is a breakthrough for the dreaming Diane. In her awake state, she’s in possession of a blue key (now a normal-shaped key), which the hitman told her she would get when Camilla was killed. When she asks what it opens, he heartily laughs. What it opens, we find, is a world of torment for the struggling actress/pursued murderer. Among her delusions in her last desperate moments, the alley bum toys around with the blue box that unlocks her terrible secrets.

The ashtray tells you what’s up.

OK, kind of weird to harp on an ashtray, but Lynch himself said, “Notice the robe, the ashtray, the coffee cup.” Let’s focus on the ashtray: Lynch is likely nodding toward the piano-shaped ashtray that Diane’s neighbor takes back from her late in the movie. So any scene we see involving the ashtray comes from the past (in a possibly unreliable memory or dream from Diane), while in the present the extremely cute ashtray is gone. Diane may have woken up, but no one said she was of clear mind.

Whose eyes are we watching this through?

Notice a clever camera trick: Immediately after the blue box falls to the ground and we arrive in Diane’s waking nightmare (reality, or a distorted version of it?), the camera largely switches to point-of-view shots that tell the story through Diane’s perspective—just as in the early shot of the pillows. In the Betty/Rita narrative, we essentially see everything from a third-person perspective (with exceptions for the concussed Rita), which makes sense for a concocted, peachy Hollywood fantasy.

The Cowboy takes his revenge.

“You will see me one more time if you do good. You will see me two more times if you do bad.” So says the Cowboy to Adam early in the movie. But as Diane’s dream of herself as Betty breaks apart, her fortunes trade places with Adam. We see the Cowboy once more, and then once more again at the dreadfully glamorous dinner party in which Adam and Camilla announce their engagement, and Diane is losing it. That quick last shot of our giddy-up villain means one thing: Diane’s permanent silence.