Mullholland Drive is a 2001 neo-noir mystery, R rated film written and directed by David Lynch. Neo-noir is a dark movie genre – indicating a sense of something sinister and shadowy, but also expressing a style of cinematography. It’s based on crime movies from the 1940s and 1950s that had dark wit; however, neo-noir has updated themes, content, style, visual elements and media to better suite the more recent world.

As mentioned in a previous post, postmodern theory is essentially the artistic outcome of a person’s perspective on the political, cultural and economic aspects that have shifted within their respective eras. Another aspect of postmodern theory is that there can be non-linear storytelling: the plot is revealed by learning the information the same time as the character. Meta films are “self aware” or even “self referencing,” meaning that the film acknowledges its creator, genre and circumstances of creation, the audience or acknowledges itself directly. In this film, the plot acknowledges the process of making film and behind the scenes of ‘big brother’ influencing choices in casting.

The film begins in the middle of the plot, the main character has amnesia and cannot remember who she is or what she was doing when she got into a car accident, after being threatened by the hit men drivers of the car she was in. The rest of the plot is revealed with the little adventures that the main character and her ‘savior,’ Betty, take to figure out who she is. It’s revealed that she is a phenomenal actress and was dating the director of the movie she was in, the hit men were hired to take her out because of the broken hearted ex- female lover.

Rewatching creative pieces like Mullholland Drive can give audiences a sense of clarity when it comes to the story telling. The non-linear storytelling of this film is uncommon, or nontraditional, from more recent artistic films. Editing the plot to have the audience only reveal as much as the character knows in that moment is a risk to take because it would take several viewings of the film to fully understand what’s going on.