“There's a man... in back of this place. He's the one who's doing it. I can see him through the wall. I can see his face. I hope that I never see that face, ever, outside of a dream.”

Down the rabbit hole is the world you enter when you watch David Lynch’s Mulholland Dr. An experiment in the dominion of surrealism that defies all logic and reason, Mulholland Dr. is an ingenious film that will twist your mind around till it hurts…and then it won’t stop going. You don’t have to understand it to be immersed in it.

On the long list of Lynch’s hits (Blue Velvet, “Twin Peaks”) and misses (Eraserhead, Lost Highway), Mulholland Dr. remains his most confusing, but ultimately the most emotional rewarding. What separates this from his other films is the tragic characters that delves us into the human emotions...one that can actually bring us to tears.

The story follows…Well the film is about…I don’t really know. There are two women named Betty (Naomi Watts) and Rita (Laura Harring) and Rita has amnesia. They are in Los Angeles, the city of dreams, a phrase that Mr. Lynch takes to heart. There’s also a frustrated director, a frightening bum, a dwarf in a wheelchair who seems to control everything, lesbian sex, a god-like cowboy, and a dead body. Or maybe there’s nothing and its all a dream…or maybe not.

There is a hypnotism to Lynch’s work here. Even if we don’t understand it, we are following it every second. Mr. Lynch leaves hundreds upon hundreds of clues within his film for us to follow, using his trickery to pull us through the mystery. His visual style feels like film noir in one scene, TV cop drama in the next, and well Lynchian absurdism in the next.  Without any rationality, Mr. Lynch has created a truly insane trip.

The most important scene appears right in the middle at the Club Silencio. What is this place? As the conductor tells us “There is no band, but we hear a band.” We see a young woman sing a beautiful song that she doesn’t sing. Everything that happens in the scene is a reflection of the film as a whole. As everything happens, nothing really happens.

So how can we care for characters in a story that makes no sense? One testament to that is our star, Naomi Watts. As Betty (or is she Betty?), Watts makes us our emotional ride. In one scene, she auditions for a part in a Hollywood film. We saw her do it earlier and she sounded good. But when she completely changes her style for the audition, it’s truly outstanding. Despite being simply a pawn in David Lynch’s world, Watts transcends the film by becoming an emotional ride for the audience.

Mulholland Dr. originally began as a pilot for a TV series on ABC, but after the company demanded too much changed from Mr. Lynch’s original idea, he skipped off to the French company Stuido Canal to reform it into a feature film that is even more brilliant than maybe Lynch could have imagined. Some of the scene may feel like out of place and should have been scrapped from this film, but by the end it all makes sense…sort of. It’s Lynch’s fun house, and we are all a part of his strange dream.

Maybe Lynch is creating a love story at heart. The film is about two women who love each other. Or maybe they hate each other. It’s hard to say. Lynch keeps us guessing to his last image. The chemistry between Watts and Harring is beautiful…these are not only two of the sexiest women (as Lynch as created them) but their personalities are beautiful.

So in the end, what is Mulholland Dr? It’s a Rubik’s Cube of a film. The closer you think you might be to discovery the final clue, the further you may be. You can watch it over and over to see another clue or put another piece of the puzzle together. David Lynch may be insane to a certain degree, but he is truly a brilliant man. He once said, “Cinema is a medium that can translate ideas. But wood can translate ideas, too. You have wood and then you get a chair.” Mulholland Dr. is a trip down the rabbit hole worth taking over and over.