It would appear that Los Angeles cannot catch a fucking break in 2025. Between the onslaught of the city’s worst-ever firestorms and the death of one of their most beloved “mascots” as a direct result of those evacuations, it’s enough to make one ask “God” or whoever: can you go focus on New York now?
While David Lynch might be most well-known for acutely playing up the sinister underbelly of idyllic suburban landscapes (see: Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks), his best film is typically regarded as Mulholland Drive (as confirmed by a Sight and Sound critics’ poll from 2022)—which focuses on “the city” atmosphere. More to the point, “the city of dreams.” Released in 2001, not long after the American dream-crushing nature of 9/11, Mulholland Drive did actually arrive on the scene at what was to become one of Los Angeles’ “apex” periods. For everything. It was about to be the decade of Madonna leaving the Robertson Boulevard Kabbalah Center bedecked almost entirely in Ed Hardy attire, of Paris, Britney and Lindsay (whether engaging in various nighttime shenanigans separately or together), the birth of TMZ (which changed the shape of fame entirely), the dawn of “aspirational” reality TV like The Hills. But, of course, belying all those “pretty on the outside” people and things was something ugly underneath.
And yet, while some believed that the twenty-first century signaled the death of all remaining traces of glamor in Hollywood, Lynch depicts a world in which an aspiring actress like Betty Elms (Naomi Watts) still goes off to L.A. with nothing more than a dream and an eagerness to “succeed”—whatever it takes. A classic L.A. “fairy tale” that never seems to change, no matter what decade it is (just ask Emma Stone). Except that Lynch opts to make it a cautionary tale in the end, rather than a “fairy” one.
This because, in keeping with Lynch’s fixation on small-town ways, it is Betty’s naïveté (being from Deep River, Ontario) that condemns her to being chewed up and spit out by the big city. As the viewer eventually comes to find about two hours into the movie (which tops out at roughly two hours and twenty-six minutes), when Betty’s “true” self, Diane Selwyn, enters the narrative. In many ways, the Betty side of this character (and, depending on who you ask, Betty is the “real” version or Diane is—it’s all a matter of interpretation, like everything in a Lynch movie) is a symbol of L.A. itself. On the surface, anyway. But, as many people find out when they stick around in the “City of Angels” for long enough, things aren’t quite as glittering as they appear. In fact, they can be quite, quite dark. And this is what the Diane Selwyn iteration of Naomi Watts’ character represents.
Although the viewer is vaguely introduced to Betty in the “impressionistic” introductory scene of the movie, it is Rita (Laura Elena Harring) who is shown most “concretely” in the true opening scene, which homes in on a limo driving up Mulholland. Rita’s in the back seat, suddenly jarred by the fact that the two goons up front have stopped driving, and one of them has a gun pointed at her. The intercut scene of a pair of cars being commandeered by reckless, youthful drivers headed in the direction of the parked car spells the disaster to come. Only Rita survives the impact of the crash, and slowly heads down the hill on foot. The street signs of the Hollywood Hills being a key component of this intro scene.
It starts, naturally, with Mulholland Drive. Then, as she descends the hill, Lynch gives us close-ups of the street names Angelenos of the area are all too familiar with: Franklin Avenue, Sunset Boulevard. Of course, the latter is a glaring nod to the film that most influenced Mulholland Drive: you guessed it, Sunset Boulevard. Lynch experienced his fair share of Joe Gillis-related jadedness as a result of his time orbiting Hollywood the Metaphor. And yet, that didn’t stop him from continuing to live in Hollywood the Place. His house on Senalda Road, as a matter of fact, was situated right between Mulholland Drive and the hill where the Hollywood sign rests. He was a man who knew, better than most, the simultaneous charms and ills of Los Angeles. Though no one expected that Lynch would be one of the biggest victims of the very city he loved in terms of its increasingly irascible weather moods. Evacuated from the heart of the Sunset Fire, there’s no doubt that Lynch’s already frail lungs (due to emphysema) couldn’t handle the stress of the event or the air quality that followed. In this sense, it’s fair to say that capitalism killed Lynch. Because, yes, capitalism is at the root of these insane, unprecedented tinderbox conditions in Los Angeles.
In many regards, the bum (played by Bonnie Aarons) in Mulholland Drive can still be placed as a totem within the current landscape of L.A. The ominous warning/harbinger of doom no longer even bothering to hide behind the dumpster to warn Angelenos (and the world at large) that something very, very bad is happening. The telltale signs of something sinister afoot are shown early on in Mulholland Drive, in the forms of not only the most horrifying “bum” ever rendered to screen, but also by way of an elderly couple smiling in a manner that is decidedly “lobotomized” and a pile of dog shit in the courtyard where Betty is about to move in. The landlady who welcomes her, Coco, is fittingly played by none other than an actress of Old Hollywood: Ann Miller (in, appropriately, her final role). This being a touch of Lynchian irony with a slant directly related to Hollywood and its inner workings (namely, discarding “elder” female actresses back into the “normal” world after a certain point).
Of the ten features that Lynch released, three were set in/focused on the backdrop of Los Angeles: Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire. None of them with especially “positive” statements about the town. And yet, there was no denying that he genuinely loved the city. For the simplest and purest of reasons. Not only because of its cinema history, but because, “of the light. The light makes me feel so good. It’s really beautiful. And there’s something about L.A.” His undeniable affinity for the place eventually landed him a gig as an unofficial “weatherman” for local radio station Indie 103.1 (the too short-lived L.A. station that was on the city’s radio airwaves from 2003 to 2009) to give one of his now famously whimsical and upbeat weather reports. Lynch would also comment of the city, “But like every place, it’s always changing. And it takes a lot longer to appreciate L.A. than a lot of cities because it’s so spread out and every area has its own mood.” And now, it will take a lot longer to appreciate for those who have no patience for extreme weather/environmental phenomena in an area that most insurance companies currently refuse to insure.
Los Angeles, in its cinema-centric history, has by now been marked by six distinct periods: Hollywood Babylon, pre-Code Hollywood, Old Hollywood, post-studio system Hollywood, 90s-00s (a.k.a. post-internet) Hollywood and, presently, some terrible unknown era ruled, more than ever, by bottom lines and box office returns (however that might translate in the next few decades). The death of Lynch at a time when L.A. itself has geographically died as a result of this slew of fires is a cruel irony that would not be lost on him. Hell, it might even be the sort of thing he would have included in a movie of his own—if he had felt inclined to make movies after 2006, when technology became too much of a “thing” that he wouldn’t want to include/incorporate in his narratives.
But Lynch, being the hopeful son of a bitch (while dichotomously seeing everything through a lens, darkly) that he was, might be the first to tell you that L.A. isn’t over. That it’s still got too much going for it to give up. To throw in the towel and let the whole thing just burn (as writer Mike Davis once suggested). No, he would likely still defer to one of his European inspirations, Werner Herzog, who pronounced, “Los Angeles is the city in America with the most substance, even if it’s raw, uncouth and sometimes quite bizarre. Wherever you look is an immense depth, a tumult that resonates with me… Things actually get done in Los Angeles. Look beyond the glitz and glamor of Hollywood and a wild excitement of intense dreams opens up.”
Alas, to quote another Lynch go-to, Roy Orbison, “It’s too bad that all these things/Can only happen in my dreams/Only in dreams/In beautiful dreams…” That was true for Diane Selwyn, who dreamed of a life like Betty Elms’ and was ultimately driven to madness by what she couldn’t have. Hopefully, it’s not only “in dreams” that Los Angeles can rebuild itself to what it was before the cataclysms of January 2025. But in beautiful dreams audiences can still walk with Lynch. Who walked with the fire…very literally at the end.
