“Mulholland Drive” suffers from the same ailment that has threatened many a David Lynch movie in the past, namely irritating self-indulgence. The film’s pivotal scene occurs when our heroine, Diane Selwyn, has a moment of serious emotional revelation about her life.  Her parents, recast as yelping Lilliputians, scuttle out of a paper sack and proceed to ram the subtext down our throats while Diane whips herself into a frenzy of hair-ripping shrillness worthy of late-night horror schlock. The sequence ends with Diane— along with the film, sadly— suddenly self-destructing. Imagine Alfred Hitchcock and Jean-Luc Godard teaming up on a film, and then leaving the last, crucial five minutes in the hands of “Army of Darkness”-era Sam Raimi.

Until its abrupt and messy termination, I was prepared to call “Mulholland Drive” the best movie I’ve seen this year, and one of my favorites of the last few years. But Lynch gave it all away at the finish line, and that is all the more inexcusable since this film burns with genius for most of its two-hour plus running time.

The film’s opening sequence, the jitterbug contest which Diane wins back in Deep River, Ontario, quickly sets the stage for another variation on Lynch’s pet themes. As we get the colorful swirls of skirts and bobby socks, the whirling dancers are backed by larger, darker shadows of themselves, and we hear Angelo Badalamenti’s typically creepy ambient scores suddenly overlaid with chirpy fifties-style rock ‘n’ roll. Here we have the layering, the doubling, and the darker selves lurking in the back, all of which point to the foreboding underside of America that Lynch has been examining for years, most splendidly in “Blue Velvet”.

From there the film takes a fresher turn, becoming a meditation on cinema, as we are given a series of parodic and barely connected tableaux which are seen through the eyes of Betty Elms. Betty is really Diane Selwyn, who may or may not also be Camilla Rhodes. Part of the movie’s fun is the ambiguity of everyone’s identity, a device used with thrilling skill that matches the spectacular, punning brio of “Fight Club”. The brilliance of Lynch’s work here, both behind the camera and at the typewriter, is that Diane’s world—or “Mullholland Drive”—is really one bad movie in which she is both active participant and passive viewer. Never mind what’s real and what’s imagined, what is dreamed and what is happening; “Mulholland Drive” is essentially a psychological portrait of a (probably) mediocre actress whose Hollywood dream is crashing and burning like two cars hitting head-on somewhere on a darkened road. In the tradition of Godard's “Breathless”, Lynch explores the mind of a character who can make sense of the world only in cinematic language, the terms of Hollywood absorbed from countless Saturday matinees and pulp double features.  What we watch is frightening and funny, usually in rapid oscillations. The depths of Diane’s subconscious are little more than a drive-in screen on which her own lurid B-movie is projected.

Many of the early scenes, greatly enlivened by Justin Theroux as director Adam Kesher, form a wonderful pastiche of Hollywood clichés, including gangster movies, detective noir, wink-wink industry exposés, and even porn. And like Odile in Godard’s “Bande À Part”, Diane clearly suffers from Bovaryism. Her head is stuck in the clouds, and the longer it stays up there, the more squalid reality seems when she falls back to earth (breakfast at Winkie’s, anyone?). Diane’s autoerotic desperation near the end of the movie is the coup de grace, in which she must struggle to keep her eyes—Lynch gives us the P.O.V. shot, of course—out of focus. Indeed, Diane’s eyes are the instruments through which we see this movie, and Lynch has done an incredible, richly Hitchcockian job of showing us the distinctly cinematic way in which she has ordered her memory. It’s a perfect vision—literally—for a struggling young Hollywood actress who can see everything she wants right in front of her but can touch none of it.

The blue box will keep audiences guessing, but, in true Hitchcock fashion, the blue box is only a MacGuffin. The blue key is vaguely important to the plot, as we find out, but the blue box contains— well, what? Some essential part of Diane’s person which we’ll never get to see. I was reminded of a similar box in a somewhat thematically similar film, Joel and Ethan Coen’s “Barton Fink”, another tale of disenchantment in Hollywood. Barton, too, has a mysterious box whose contents he, and we, want very badly to have a look at. And how Lynch handles his box, and how the Coens handled theirs, is the difference between a very flawed movie and a great one. “Barton Fink” ends with Barton on the beach, the box next to him on the sand. The scene brings us back to the picture in his hotel room, and in that moment the Coens are tipping their hand: some, or much, of what we have been watching, has been a figment of Barton’s imagination. What matters is that Barton has realized something about himself that he can take with him back to New York. The only safe assumption is an abstraction: the box is the truth, and, if we don’t know what’s in it, at least we know he possesses it.

The point in the story in which Diane should have her epiphany, as Barton had his, occurs in the exquisitely melancholy scene in Club Silencio, in which Lynch picks the perfect metaphor for movies. “There is no orchestra. But you hear the music”, says the emcee, who resembles a demonic carnival barker and can be taken as a stand-in for Hollywood in general, or Lynch in particular. Diane and Rita, who watch from their seats and join us in the audience, settle in for one of those bizarre, campy scenes only David Lynch can pull off. Rebecca Del Rio slinks onstage to sing a doleful love song in throaty Spanish, and even though we’ve been told it’s all fake, we can’t help being drawn in by Rebecca’s performance, and neither can Diane and Rita, who begin weeping like oversensitive schoolgirls watching “The Spoon River Anthology”. And then Rebecca swoons and falls unconscious while her voice keeps belting out the notes— it was all an illusion, just like the man warned us. The magic of cinema is its ability to show us unreality and make us believe it fully, despite ourselves, and is a quality that many directors have celebrated and explored as an epistemological problem.  This is Lynch’s contribution, and most of it is magnificent.

If only Lynch had cared less about resolving the plot. Once Diane understands the film industry for what it really is, Lynch could have let his heroine off the merry-go-round of down-spiraling psychodrama by giving her the same gift the Coens gave Barton: self-knowledge, if bittersweetly obtained, and perhaps a way out of L.A. Odile, at least, escaped to Brazil, and carried with her the possibility of love. Leaving Diane standing at LAX ready to board the next flight to Canada would have been unforgivably trite, but Lynch makes a mess of things anyway, and in a hurry. The movie concludes with a series of totally unnecessary expository scenes, allowing us to work backward, “Memento”-style, toward the “truth” about Diane and then, once layer after layer of onscreen reality have come peeling off like so many loose pages from a script, implodes in a manner uncommonly lurid.

The problem is not that Lynch chose a “darker” conclusion for Diane, it’s that the visual style that makes “Mulholland Drive” so strong— the luscious mnemonic cinematography in Diane’s mind— turns out to have been in the service of a director who was in it just for kicks. Rita’s recurring nudity, for instance, seems all of a piece with the story that Diane is watching, but once Lynch puts Diane down a twilight cul-de-sac of guilt and madness, I had to ask, what was the point? If this film was intended as a critique of cinema, and early on it does set itself up as such, then Lynch committed a gross error in succumbing to the leering tendencies of the system he seems intent on shaking up. What was, for nearly the whole movie, a complex and tightly conceived narrative about a girl’s indoctrination into the tough realities of Hollywood, suddenly takes a nosedive at the end into pointless morbidity.

Godard delighted in taking the cinematic dream and tattered old reality and smashing them together, essaying on the trouble (usually tragic and comic all at once) caused by this collision. Lynch starts off with that kind of inquisition, but once the dream settles into some pleasing erotic rhythms, he’s more than content to back off the challenge of challenging his audience; he seems to want, in fact, never to wake up from the world he has created. His characters find themselves trapped in an insidious and beautiful nightmare, but they have no way out, and neither does the audience. The moment of Diane’s squalid, unredeemed, and pointless demise is the moment Lynch’s aesthetics cross over from artistic license into moral cowardice. In an especially bad year for movies, I wish Lynch would have found a way to infuse “Mulholland Drive” with less art and more guts.