Muholland Drive was the first Lynchian nightmare to make it into the mainstream American consciousness.  Premiering at Cannes in 2001, it won Lynch the Best Director Award and went on to receive thirty other distinguished film awards around the world. It even converted Lynch's long time nemesis—the critic Roger Ebert— into a fan: Ebert gave it four stars and a thumbs up. In addition, critics hailed newcomer Naomi Watt's breakthrough performance as a "tour de force"—launching her career.
In the film, two armed men threaten a brunette (Laura Harring) in a limousine driving down a winding mountain road. There's a car accident, she loses her memory and wanders into the apartment of an aspiring actress (Naomi Watts). Eventually, they fall in love, someone commits suicide—and in between— there's Hollywood, a mysterious box with a glowing blue key, jitterbugging dancers, red lamps, and a shadowy figure behind a local diner. As with most of Lynch's movies, it's hard to explain what is really happening; yet we leave the theatre with the disturbingly invisible blueprint of a black-market world in which innocence,identities, fears and desires are traded and sold by unknown forces.

David Lynch originally wrote the script for Muholland Drive as a TV pilot for ABC. When the network decided not to go forward with the series, Lynch transformed the pilot into a feature film funded by French production company StudioCanal. He brought together his usual crew – composer Angelo Badalamenti, production designer Jack Fisk, and editor Mary Sweeney. And thank goodness the movie got made: there's only one director who can make the image of a woman lip-synching to Roy Orbison's song "Crying" a source of deep, inexplicable dread or who can solve a story's central mystery by exponentially creating more mysteries; and there's only one director who always manages to make us feel like a violated pink bunny: some old thing we once held dear becomes the very portal through which dark things enter.

(Picture: MUHOLLAND DRIVE, Justin Theroux, 2001)