David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive starts with a foreboding atmosphere, dropping its audience straight into an unknown setting after a seemingly random dancing scene. Without explaining anything about the setting, the characters, the conflict, or any piece of information, the first cataclysmic event occurs. The emulation of the passage of time, or lack of a cohesive sequence of events, in this film contributes to the overall tone: Fear.

A typical film will tell its story in chronological order of comprehensible events to tell a story, usually following the five act structure in some manner. There will be an introduction establishing primary characters and setting, a rising action to develop the conflict and main antagonist, a climax to centralize all side arcs, action, and high points, a falling action to ruminate on the story, and a conclusion to wrap up any loose threads and resolve story points. But, Mulholland Drive actively avoids this setup. The first few minutes of the movie are a non-sequitur to people dancing, then an inexplicable car crash out of nowhere. The scene cuts to a woman running from something, but abruptly ends that thread once again to introduce two new characters, then again for another, and so on. The lack of cohesion in this film lends itself to confusion, the unknown. The average human being is deathly afraid of the unknown because of an inherent preference towards certainty. The five act structure exists because audiences take comfort knowing how a story will naturally progress, but diverting from the typical structure will make audiences unaware of what the story will become or how it will develop. Anything can happen, which frightens people the most.

How Lynch further exploits the innate fear of the unknown by using sequence is through his shot composition. Most of Lynch’s shots when preparing for a climatic event will focus on first-person perspective shots inching closer to a given point of interest. The shakiness of the camera movements during these scenes coupled with the first-person view allow the audience to “see” from the character’s perspective. But, again, the lack of a comprehensible chain of events makes relating to the characters even more unnerving, since there’s no way to expect what comes next. Of course, looking at this older film through a modern lens means it’s easier to predict a jumpscare, or shock-value scare tactics designed to appear for a fraction of a second, but viewing it from a past perspective makes the trope a lot less campy.

Additionally, connecting each isolated event/scene with each other using time is near to impossible because of the lack of establishing the setting and time in relation to each other. For instance, in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, the opening scene is shown to be Arizona and then the audience follows the main character to another town. Each setting is established in relation to each other because of the centralized focus on a single character and the subtle passage of time conveyed through each consecutive scene showing the gradual shift to nightfall. In Mulholland Drive, the closest Lynch gets to showing the passage of time clearly is between the woman from the opening and the diner, when nighttime shifts to open daylight. But, because there’s little to no indication of the events’ relation to each other through a scene transition or central character, viewers will have a difficult time telling if the two scenes were right next to each other chronologically, days apart, weeks apart, etc.