So a little more about "Mulholland Drive," now that I've had time to digest it. Can't get it out of my head. Previously, I had seen snippets - namely, the "Silencio" scene and some of the lesbian stuff ...
SPOILERS
I'm fairly convinced that this is something of a love letter from Lynch to what I bet are two of his favorite films: "The Wizard of Oz" and "Sunset Boulevard." Perhaps also some nods to Tarantino for "Pulp Fiction," as well, maybe from one narrative tinkerer to another.
Basically, it seems to be to be a twisted "Wizard of Oz" in many ways. Here, Hollywood is Oz. Like the source material, the film centers around a real-life person's dream. In "Mulholland Drive," the main character Diane has a dream - which is the first 2/3 of the movie - in which images and people from her life are re-incorporated into her dream plot/fantasy. So someone dressed as a cowboy at a dinner party, seen out of the corner of her eye, becomes a fully imagined character in the dream. The blue key, just a normal key in real life, becomes a cartoonishly odd key in the dream. A woman from the dinner party, Coco, ends up as her aunt's housekeeper in the dream. And on and on. Obviously, this is exactly what happens to Dorothy in the "Wizard of Oz." But Lynch brilliantly flip-flops the order on us, resulting in the best representation I have ever seen in a film of the disorientation that dreams can cause.
I also have little doubt that "Sunset Boulevard" is a huge influence. I think that, though it's a classic, SB loses something today for a couple of reasons. First of all, it was probably weird as all get-out in 1950, but today seems almost campy compared to where film makers have taken weirdness since then. And that includes prominently Lynch, who I suspect still appreciates what SB made possible for he and others the same way Clapton would appreciate Robert Johnson. It's also thematically much like SB, as far as the corruption of Hollywood and how the industry chews people up and spits them out.
I would put this film in my top five movies of the 2000s. It's a staggering achievement.