“No hay banda—there is no band,” says The Magician at Club Silencio, right at the breaking point between the realities (or illusions) that comprise David Lynch’s 2001 masterpiece Mulholland Drive.
There are, of course, many bands in Lynchworld. A whole array of them, either with direct Lynch involvement, or buzzing within the oceans of his vast mental reference library, or fellow-traveling bands, or spiritual heirs and successors. All kinds: classic vocal bands, lush crooner backing bands, industrial bands, conceptual bands, one-person bands, world-changing soundtracks (bandas de sonido, The Magician may call them), bands of mercury, bands of fuzz, bands of ambient sound, bands of ghosts of electricity. A whole festival of bands. Which Lynch, naturally, eventually made a reality with his Festivals of Disruption in 2016 and 2018, bracketing his last important flurry of artistic activity around Twin Peaks: The Return.
Music, particularly Los Angeles music, looms large in the creative tapestry that resulted in Mulholland Drive, now recognized by many as one of the Greatest Movies of the 21st Century, perhaps its first stone-cold classic.
The movie’s structure literally hinges on a show-stopping performance at Silencio, a fictional theatre that would enter the Lynchian imagination with such a strength that it eventually crossed into our consensual reality in the guise of a private members’ club at 142 Rue Montmartre in Paris, with Lynch’s full blessing and participation.
And the soul of Mulholland Drive—like Laura Palmer, wrapped in plastic and immortalized in a prom queen portrait, haunting the original two seasons of Twin Peaks—appears onscreen for only a few transcendent minutes, courtesy of master-of-tempo Lynch. You don’t need me to tell you: it’s Rebekah Del Rio, stepping up into her fate (and eternal cinematic glory) to take the pseudo-Sirkian melodrama of Betty and Rita into something much purer and more real.
The Magician may have warned us that whatever transpires at Silencio “is an illusion,” but Del Rio’s voice (like Naomi Watts’s acting audition, which was our first clue) pierces through the tropey shenanigans of the first part of Mulholland Drive and sucks the characters, and us, into a vortex of emotion—which also makes us, and them, question the nature and purpose of art, and the veil between dreams and reality. It may be a cappella, but also hay banda. And we may all be in it. The soundtrack, like the film, is a Hollywood dream haunted by the sounds of the actual Los Angeles.
Rebekah Del Rio is so incredibly important to Mulholland Drive that its soundtrack CD, released by Milan in October 2001, also revolves around her (“Llorando” is track 10 of 17). It’s quite literally the performance of a lifetime. When she passed away in June 2025 at 57, reportedly following a cancer diagnosis, the New York Times defined her as “the virtuosic singer best known for her forlorn Spanish-language rendition of Roy Orbison’s ‘Crying’ in David Lynch’s 2001 film Mulholland Drive” and noted her career had been “marked by misfortune and tragedy.”
