The two women are beautiful and utterly composed, their couture dresses fall smoothly towards slim ankles and high heels. Beyond and far below them, through the picture window that hangs as if in a stage-lit void, the distant streetlights and traffic of Los Angeles spread out in a grid of fire dissolving into the smoggy dusk. Outside, in the shadows, a man stands quietly, looking in, waiting for his moment.

Just out of shot, two tanned men discuss a film script, When they talk their lips hardly move. Their foreheads are smooth because they've never frowned. "Carmel has some good points," says one in a monotone. "Do you mean the place or our writer?" says the other, deadpan. They hardly notice the room they're in. They take it for granted because one of them paid for it, cash, handed to some big-deal intellectual architect called Pierre Koening. And the men are thinking: the girls are good enough to eat, with a squib of Mort's Red Dog barbecue sauce, right here and right now in this dream home on the edge of JFK's New Frontier.

2. "Moon Over Mulholland Drive."

Mulholland Drive snakes along the crest of the Santa Monica Mountains that divide North and South Hollywood. If you believe in the mythology of Old Hollywood you get the impression that Mulholland is redolent with evil, haunted by the sad and bad spirits of stars and starlets who have been murdered, committed suicide or participated in orgies this past century. Mulholland Drive Mansions, Errol Flynn's old place, has a reputation equal in notoriety to the Hellfire Club. The drive is named after William Mulholland, the ruthless Irish-born engineer who participated in the conspiracy to rob whole inland communities of their water that inspired Roman Polanski's Chinatown (1974). The dam on nearby Lake Hollywood is named after him and alongside that is the vast Hollywood sign, from which the 24-year-old British actress Peg Entwistle hanged herself in 1932 when a studio declined to offer her a contract.

This then is the brooding setting of a film that is as nightmarish and darkly absurd as anything David Lynch has created.

David Lynch's Mulholland Drive (2000) is about an obsessive love affair. In this respect it doesn't have to make sense to anybody else. It's like stepping into the mind of someone who's obsessed. This is a film about the darkness of a woman, the destructive elementof woman. The romance lies in a tragedy. The film narratively depicts the themes of love, impossible love, the boundaries of forbidden love, and the consequences of tragic love.

"When you sleep, you don't control your dream. I like to drive into a dream world that I've made, a world I chose and that I have complete control over." (David Lynch) Is a dream, which you cannot control the dream of the Other, a dream in which you risk being ensnared?

So, whose dream am I in? This is the question which Betty Elms must avoid asking herself too clearly.

A woman being driven in a limousine up Mulholland Drive realises she is about to be murdered. Two cars, driven by drag-racing kids, crash into the limo before the hit can be executed. The woman staggers away, takingrefuge in the apartment of Ruth, a movie star just leaving town. Betty Elms, Ruth's aspiring actress niece, is shown into the apartment by the manager of the complex, Coco Lenoix, and finds the woman, who calls herself Rita but can't remember her real name, in the shower.

In a diner called Winkie's, a man confides to another that he has had a bad dream set around the corner, when they venture there, the dreamer has a seizure at the sight of a burned derelict.

Peter Deming's sinuous camera constantly leads around menacing corners, and drags us down into lakes of satanic darkness. Death beckons as an end and an escape, and while everything is sharp, hyper-real, we know that this is a phantasmagoria.

We're experiencing the horrors and nightmares of somebody’s dream, possibly a collective nightmare based on personal anxieties and the seething source of a community’s knowledge of itself.

Mulholland Drive is an impossible film. Not only is it a film presenting an image of several women rolled into one, an image of Woman as a compilation figure with all its destructive overtones, it is simultaneously an essay on schizophrenia and a visit to parallel worlds. It is not accidental that that this film of duality-in-one –woman is at the same time a film in which the co-existence of worlds ceases to be pacific and relatively feasible. Instead, Lynch's worlds fuse, oscillating dangerously from one to the other, each preying parasitically on the other. The worlds overlap, interpenetrate and merge, as in the film's early scene of Camilla's reappearance; they grind against and crush each other on two parallel planes. This process starts from the very beginning in the film's car crash on Mulholland Drive, with clues leading nowhere and the images of Betty's apartment. We see the surface, but nothing appears. It is seamless; there is no way in.

The entire film performs as a choreographed dance of memory: past, present and future.

3. "You Belong to Me."

Betty comes to Hollywood not to be in films but to be in a story. She mixes with the melodramatic, voluptuous Rita, who takes her name from a Gilda (Charles Vidor, 1946) poster and comes complete with noir baggage – amnesia, a purse full of cash, a mystery key – The two women run through several possible versions of an anecdote just as Jacques Rivette's (Celine et Julie Vent en Bateau: Phantom Ladies Over Paris, 1974) Celine and Julie enter a house which is at once a cyclical ghost story and an endlessly recut film, while their identities meld and switch.

Rita/Camilla, trying to make sense of why her life has become so strangely unfamiliar, only feels that she "seems" to know Betty/Diane. However she's severely disorientated, stumbling through what seems to be a nightmare of someone else's making. It's just possible – in Lynchland – that she is actually part of a highly organised hallucination: Betty's mental creation.

Adam Kesher, a young film director, resists the shadowy backers of his latest project, who want him to cast an actress named Camilla Rhodes in the lead.

A hit man executes a murder that becomes complicated by absurd circumstances, then begins to search for a "new girl" on the street.

Adam discovers his wife is having an affair with the pool-man, and that the backers have cut off access to his money.