Mulholland Drive
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Publishing:12th Nov '26
£12.99
This title is due to be published on 12th November, and will be despatched as soon as possible.
An in-depth study of David Lynch's surreal psychological thriller, Mulholland Drive (2001), in the BFI Film Classics series.
Mulholland Drive (2001), David Lynch’s hallucinatory noir, is one of cinema’s most original, despairing portraits of Hollywood’s dream factory. A backstudio film, Mulholland Drive follows bright-eyed actress Betty Elms (Naomi Watts), who arrives in Los Angeles and becomes caught in a mysterious conspiracy of power with Rita (Laura Harring), an alluring amnesiac.
Justus Nieland’s timely study approaches Mulholland Drive as a film haunted by the fragile infrastructure of its city. He revisits Mulholland Drive’s origins as a failed TV pilot for ABC, exploring Lynch’s relationship to various studios as material spaces of world-building and environmental control. He argues that LA’s unstable atmospheres and uncanny landscapes, with deep roots in the history of film noir, are the essential setting of Mulholland Drive’s tragic queer love story and its dark meditation on identity and fantasy.
Tracing the film’s enduring influence on contemporary film culture, Nieland shows how Mulholland Drive’s radical ambiguity continues to provoke obsession and interpretation. Born of an analogue world of paint, plastic and celluloid, Lynch’s surreal masterpiece now enjoys an eternal digital afterlife among fans.
Justus Nieland addresses the greatest film of the twenty-first century and provides a work fully adequate to the film’s status. Nieland’s masterwork covers everything about the production and reception of Mulholland Drive that we need to know, and it offers an interpretation of the film that is stunning in its originality and breadth. Nieland plumbs the depths of Lynch and the film, giving us a new grasp on both that was previously inaccessible. After this book, there is nothing more to say on Mulholland Drive. -- Todd McGowan, University of Vermont, author of 'The Impossible David Lynch' (2007)
No film of the 21st century has received more critical and online attention than David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive. Somehow Justus Nieland manages to pull it all together, in a richly researched, gorgeously written commentary on every aspect of this incomparable work’s creation, production, and afterlife. Nieland offers thorough, intricate readings of all the major scenes, and includes equally fascinating accounts of weather, architecture, film noir layering, performance strategies, hybridity, and the bubbling stew of online interpretations. Nieland’s accomplishment is film criticism of the highest order. -- George Toles, University of Manitoba, author of 'Curtains of Light: Theatrical Space in Film' (2021)
This is the book. Not to be missed and an absolute joy to read, Justus Nieland’s Mulholland Drive brilliantly takes up David Lynch’s engagement with media, genre, gender, and Hollywood and cinephilia, while also providing a deeply insightful and gratifying analysis of many of the film’s most stunning and memorable scenes. -- Julie Grossman, LeMoyne College, author of 'Twin Peaks: TV Milestones Series' (2020)
A brilliant study that illuminates new aspects of Lynch’s celebrated film. Nieland offers a revelatory reading of Mulholland Drive as not only an indelible meditation on cinema, but on the nature of our cinematic attachments. By considering Mulholland Drive in relation to the media environments that inform it as well as Lynch’s multi-faceted artistic practice, Nieland’s book provides a dynamic analysis of this richly intertextual film. -- Elizabeth Alsop, Associate Professor, Communication and Media, CUNY School of Professional Studies
ISBN: 9781805750826
Dimensions: 188mm x 134mm x 12mm
Weight: 200g
120 pages