Lynch's Hollywood, authoritarian moguls of the Otto Preminger type still assert an imperial will in offices that feel like giant mausoleums. It is a place where a ludicrous monster in a bear costume hides behind a graffiti-spattered Denny's-like restaurant. Lynch's distillation of Hollywood vibrates weirdly between the present and the pop cultural climate of 40 years ago. Lynch is biting a hand that has fed him off and on, even though the Hollywood depicted by the film is a dream world that bears only a passing resemblance to the everyday film business of corporate yuppie sharpshooters. Its sheer audacity and the size of its target make the director's earlier eviscerations of idyllic American oases and the rot beneath them seem comparatively petty. Lynch makes an extraordinary leap to embrace the irrational. The notion of Hollywood as the world capital of corrupt, twisted fantasy is hardly new, thanks to Nathanael West, Raymond Chandler, Roman Polanski and countless others. Lynch ends up shooting the moon with ''Mulholland Drive.'' Its frenzied final 45 minutes, in which the story circles back on itself in a succession of kaleidoscopic Chinese boxes, conveys the maniacal thrill of an imagistic brainstorm. The newest film from the creator of ''Blue Velvet'' and ''Twin Peaks'' is a nervy full-scale nightmare of Tinseltown that seizes that concept by the throat and hurls it through the looking glass.īy surrendering any semblance of rationality to create a post-Freudian, pulp-fiction fever dream of a movie, Mr. While watching ''Mulholland Drive,'' you might well wonder if any film maker has taken the cliché of Hollywood as ''the dream factory'' more profoundly to heart than David Lynch.