The score is doing the exposition
Angelo Badalamenti's music announces threat before the image has earned it — a technique he and Lynch had been building since the 1980s.
01 A language of dread
Angelo Badalamenti first worked with David Lynch on Blue Velvet in 1986, scoring the film in which Isabella Rossellini's Dorothy Vallens performs "Blue Velvet" at the Slow Club. What started as a single collaboration became a working method that runs through Twin Peaks, Wild at Heart, and into Mulholland Drive: music that does not describe what is on screen but predicts what the screen is about to become. By the time Badalamenti scored Mulholland Drive, this technique had been refined to the point where it functioned as a kind of advance narration.
The opening sequences demonstrate it immediately. A woman survives a car crash on Mulholland Drive at night and walks down into Los Angeles in a daze. Nothing in the image is yet frightening — it is disorientation, not violence. But Badalamenti's low, slow orchestral writing underneath the scene registers as menace. The strings are not agitated; they barely move. Their stillness is the signal. A first-time viewer has no plot information here, no prior cause to be alarmed, and the music provides what the narrative has not yet supplied.
This is what Badalamenti and Lynch understood together: in film, threat can be installed by the score before the story confirms it. The image catches up later, or sometimes never quite does. The gap between the musical promise and the visual delivery is where Mulholland Drive lives for much of its first half.
02 The seam between warmth and dread
Badalamenti scores the two registers of the film differently and almost tactically. Betty Elms's arrival in Los Angeles — bright-eyed, suitcase in hand, everything slightly too perfect — is accompanied by a warmer, almost comic orchestral sound that is itself slightly wrong, slightly overlit, like a memory of a television pilot rather than the thing itself. Then the key changes. A corridor, a closed door, a face glimpsed unexpectedly, and Badalamenti's bass frequencies arrive before the cut completes. The Sight and Sound critical writing on the film has repeatedly noted this temporal displacement — the score operating in a different tense from the image.
The device reaches its clearest expression at Club Silencio, but there it works in reverse. By the time Betty and Rita enter the theatre, Badalamenti's music has been largely suspended; the scene proposes silence and dissonance instead of the familiar orchestral texture. When Rebekah Del Rio walks on stage and sings her a cappella version of Llorando — Roy Orbison's Crying, translated into Spanish — the scene insists that what you are hearing is not a live performance. No hay banda. There is no band. Even Del Rio's voice, it turns out, is a recording. The score has been telling you this all along: the thing you respond to emotionally is assembled, constructed, played back. The film makes that explicit here and Badalamenti's collaboration with Lynch on the soundtrack is the mechanism by which you had already been feeling it.
The technique does not explain the film. It does not resolve what the second half does to the first, and it does not close down the competing readings — the dream logic, the Hollywood parable, the fractured identity. What it does is ensure that even a viewer who cannot account for the film's structure while watching it has been accurately guided emotionally throughout. The score is not decoration and it is not commentary. It is information delivered ahead of schedule, in a frequency the intellect does not immediately register but the body does. Lynch and Badalamenti had been building this instrument since 1986, and Mulholland Drive is where it operates at full range.