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Mulholland Drive

Mulholland Drive cover

Mulholland Drive

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Pre-order. Available 12 Nov 2026
$19.43 RRP $24.29 Website price saving $4.86 (20%)

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Description

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.

Accessibility Information

Additional accessibility information

  • PDF/UA-2, 1.4
  • accessibility@bloomsbury.com

Hazards

The publication contains no hazards

Support for non-visual reading

Has alternative text descriptions for images

Navigation

  • Page list to go to pages from the print source version
  • Elements such as headings, tables, etc for structured navigation
  • All or substantially all textual matter is arranged in a single logical reading order

Table of Contents

Prologue: The Burning of Los Angeles
1. Studio Lynch
2. Noir Infrastructure
3. This is the Girl!
4. My Mulholland
Notes
Credits

Product details

Published 12 Nov 2026
Format Ebook (PDF)
Edition 1st
Pages 120
ISBN 9781805750840
Imprint British Film Institute
Illustrations 60 colour illus
Series BFI Film Classics
Publisher Bloomsbury Publishing

About the contributors

Author

Justus Nieland

Justus Nieland is Professor of English and Film St…

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