Driving without a destination

David Lynch, who has made a career out of frustrating his audience's natural expectations for conventional film narrative, has made one of his most frustrating films in "Mulholland Drive" -- and also one of his most compelling.\nAs the story begins, a woman riding in a limousine is suddenly held at gunpoint by her drivers. A car crash ensues from which only she escapes alive, but loses her memory in the process. She stumbles into a house where a bright-eyed young Canadian named Betty has just moved, nursing dreams of making it big in Hollywood. The two women begin a search for the truth behind the identity of "Rita." (A name the amnesiac takes from a Rita Hayworth movie poster.)\nAny viewer of "Mulholland Drive" hoping for a satisfying solution to the mystery surrounding Rita -- or any of the other seemingly tangentially related subplots that swirl around the film -- is going to be disappointed. Lynch is only interested in questions, not answers, as he has shown in earlier films like "Eraserhead" and "Lost Highway." The film abandons any attempt at coherence in the last half hour, taking a sharp right turn into the realm of dream logic. Characters' roles and names shift, but nothing really adds up. The beauty of the film is that each viewer's mind desperately tries to draw a straight line between the seemingly contradictory plot points, because that's what we've come to expect. But there are as many interpretations of "Mulholland Drive" as there are people who see it.\nThe film was originally made as a television pilot that was never bought, and Lynch expanded it to feature length with money from French producers. While a "Mulholland Drive" series may have clarified much of the film's chaos, it would have been beside the point. For Lynch, the journey is the destination.