I hadn’t understood anything the first time that I saw Mulholland Drive.

I was all wrapped up inside a deep sense of apprehension, an almost synthetic sensation; really, the scent of rotting flowers and the after-effects of a sad drinking session. David Lynch has said that this film does not set off from a sole idea, or a narrative power of suggestion but from a sensation, albeit from a certain atmosphere. Indeed, that particular atmosphere which you perceive when you drive at night along this road that winds through the Hollywood hills with Los Angeles on one side and with the Valley on the other. Sometimes, you might even encounter owls and coyotes between one fine view and another one.

I drove on Mulholland Drive a few months back during a kind of pilgrimage around those Lynch-imbued places in California and it immediately became evident to me that the experience would not be properly fulfilled without listening to the music of Angelo Badalamenti since sound, for the American film director, is as fundamental as image. The next step on that trip was to the Tower Theatre, in downtown LA. This was the location in the film that was the Club Silencio. Now, it’s an Apple Store. During that memorable scene, Betty (Naomi Watts) and Rita (Laura Harring) are seated in the theatre watching the performance of a magician who is decrying the falseness of cinema and show business and, as a result, revealing its obvious superficial bi-dimensionality.

“There is no band! No hay banda! It’s all a mere recording.” Today, that theatre, with its faded plaster-work, and the air all bright and reassuring is almost unrecognisable to us compared to the lugubrious way it was represented by Lynch over twenty years ago. Nevertheless, you get the feeling that just by scratching a little beneath the surface you will be engaging once more with that decadent nocturnal atmosphere in the film.

Mulholland Drive is constructed like a set of Chinese boxes where dreams, the subconscious, reality and the meta-narrative of the cinema are fused together in one uninterrupted stream. A sort of blending of narrative registers which make the film in turns quite incomprehensible when first viewed but which, in later viewings, change so remarkably, over and over again. A sensory film, ultimately. As sensory, too, as Los Angeles itself where, once more, you get the feeling that the magnificent light of California will never quite be able to light up every single corner of the city.

Lynch has said that in each and every shot there is always a dark corner since it is within that very darkness that the viewing public is compelled to believe that monsters lurk. “Where there is a lot of light, the shade is darker,” Goethe once said, and this is especially true in this film which is “a love story in the city of stars.”