Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #4092 in DVD
• Released on: 2007-03-12
• Rating: Suitable for 15 years and over
• Aspect ratio: 1.85:1
• Formats: Anamorphic, Box set, PAL, Special Edition
• Original language: English
• Number of discs: 2
• Running time: 141 minutes

Synopsis
David Lynch strikes again with this literal nightmare of a motion picture--a brilliant, scathing, hysterical, and haunting ode to Hollywood. In the film, a mysterious dark-haired woman (Laura Elena Harring) emerges from an accident with a purse full of cash and a head full of amnesia. Meanwhile, Betty Elms (Naomi Watts), a wide-eyed gal from Deep River, Ontario, has just landed in Los Angeles with dreams of movie stardom. When Betty finds the nameless beauty in her aunt's apartment, she is deeply intrigued by the situation and offers to help her. This sends the two women on a bizarre search for the truth through the macabre, sun-soaked streets of the City of Angels, where the mob, a young film director (Justin Theroux), a studio executive with a tiny head, and an enigmatic figure named the Cowboy all float into the picture, then out again, until there is no longer any distinction between what is dream and what is reality.
Originally filmed as a pilot for ABC, Lynch's daring, open-ended vision was coldly rejected by the network. As he was about to abandon the project, French producer Pierre Edelman convinced Lynch to rethink it as a feature. The result is this stunning expression of the subconscious, a testament to the power of personal artistic vision.

Customer Reviews

Dreams and nightmares
A truly astonishing film from David Lynch. This film is in two distinct parts, it is the 'understanding' of these parts that will help in following the narrative. This is just my opinion and many will argue that the film is not supposed to be understood in any one particular way. I feel the first part is a dream/fantasy world created by Naomi Watts, when she appears later in the film, in the second chapter, this is her life in 'reality'. I could go on a lot more about this but there are many other elements to Mulholland Drive.
The main male actor (Justin Theroux) is a film director trying to cast his new project. But he is under pressure from the studios, portrayed as mafia-type gangsters, who want him to cast a particular girl in the main role. He resists this pressure and finds himself stripped of everything he owns. His mind is eventually changed by the mysterious 'Cowboy'.
My favourite scene is the bungling hitman. Accidently killing two extra people whilst trying to do his job.
Mulholland Drive has so many elements to it, it is hard to say for sure what it is about and who is doing what and why. Some have said it is two parrallel universe's happening at the same time, occasionally crossing paths with each other! Which ever way you look at it, it is a brilliant peice of film making. Similar to the Mona Lisa, the more you look at it, the less you know. High art. Genius.

the best version of mulholland drive currently available, 2007
contrary to what another review has said here, i do think this edition is worth upgrading for. i did, and i'm very happy

if like me you are as drawn to a dvd's packaging as well as its contents then this dvd is well worth owning. the cover artwork is far better than other releases and you get a cool plastic slip case also

inside you get a lengthy 24 page booklet on the film/lynch, as well as some pointers to clues in the movie

i even liked lynchs joke at choosing random chapter selections 'approved' by the director. as for the movie.. you can decide but lynch certainly hasn't sold out over the years. and thats a rare thing.

this is a fabulous dvd package and i urge you to buy it, and if you own and love the movie then upgrade for sure

Modernist, Jungian etc.
This special edition of Mulholland Drive is probably not going to offer much to hard-core Mulholland Drivinians but to people who are not in possession of a dvd version of this dandy film this is a must buy.
The new features are not so enlightening in the end, the interviews are not very insightful and the actors are somewhat gushing in their reverence of Lynch without really articulating anything of particular interest.

Still, it is the film that is the point. I like this film very much, I'm not sure if it really makes sense but I don't think it is necessarily supposed to. From the interviews with Lynch on this special edition dvd it is not clear that he has or had a clear vision of what this film is about - it appears to have been an organic process that is more or less open to cohesive interpretation.

I don't think clarity or coherence is necessarily a weakness however, as Watts suggests in her interview, adult viewers, generally, don't want to be spoon-fed the plot details - it is much more satisfying to work out what is going on and be able to offer various different assessments of what that is. Ultimately such a film is liable to tell us something of our own fears and stage of development in life as we attempt to apprehend a thread.

The central themes revolve around identity, self-delusion, lack of control. We aspire to become something better and beyond what we are and often delude ourselves into thinking that we can become more than we in reality can be. The character(s) of Betty/Diane is in an amalgam of a dream, hallucination or delusional state but it might also be seen that all the characters are figments of a dream/illusion that is not being dreamt by anyone in particular - in this film the unreality particularly pertains to the Hollywood dream factory, but it could equally apply, albeit in generally less strong measure, to all walks of life.
People change and exchange roles all the time, we move to different places, different work environments, different situations and we attempt to fit in or to impose ourselves on our new situations. A measure of how successful we are in fitting in relates to the extent to which we identify to a bigger perspective at the expense of individuality. Constraints on such success are often beyond our control, we rationalize our existence and lie a little to ourselves in order to fit in to the new 'objectified' world that we perceive that is ultimately illusory...the 'wahn' - an emergent higher order perception that exists only within the confounds of the particular environment.
Sometimes things happen that break us out of this 'wahn', this illusion, and we become self-aware - that is we perceive how different we are and in what ways we do not fit in... our perception of the illusory world becomes internalized and we thus have, and simultaneously question, our individual identity.
The characters in Mulholland Drive, at different stages in the film, exhibit loss of such individual identity. 'Rita' does not know who she is but aptly labels herself with the first name of a famous actress, her confident character Camilla Rhodes in the latter third of the film is really just a product manufactured by Hollywood, she has found her place at the expense of her sense of self. Betty is a confident and independent character aspiring to be a part of the Hollywood dream. When, in the latter third, she becomes Diane, it is not clear if her life as Betty was a dream or perhaps a somewhat glossed sense of herself as confident newby apt to fit into Hollywood but whose ultimate frustration at not being accepted by Hollywood led to pained internalized perception of the world - Diane possibly being a new name that she chooses in order to fit in but without success. Adam Kescher fits in by accepting his lack of identity in the film project over which he thought he originally had some control - he becomes another product of Hollywood who loses interest in artistic integrity as an expression of individual identity. His sense of self becomes occluded in the 'wahn', individual reality drowned by an externalized bigger re-presentation of the world imposed by the Hollywood dream factory and commercial interests.
Essentially we see dreams and aspirations of fitting into some bigger picture soaking up individual identity and control.

This is how I identify with the film. I think it is one thread but I don't pretend to offer a definitive interpretation of a film which probably does not yield this. The use of music and cinematography speaks to us at the level of the subconscious: the strangely spooky black monster, the clairvoyant woman, the club silencio - all evocative and seemingly demonstrative of our fears relating to lack of both self-knowledge or and 'external reality'.