If we assume Diane's story — rejected by Hollywood, ditched and humiliated by Camilla Rhodes, forced to watch as her beloved ascends to stardom and marries a filmmaker — to be "reality," then many things in the movie's first minutes suddenly snap into place. The pure, innocent, immediately successful Betty is Diane's idea of who she'd like to be. Rita is a version of Camilla that reciprocates her affection.
Then there are the finer details. Betty's "Aunt Ruth" is Diane's deceased aunt. The car crash happens on Mulholland Dr. The woman referred to as "Camilla Rhodes" Melissa George is who the real Camilla kissed in front of Betty to spite her. Even the two subplots could be imagined by Diane: Adam's woes might be Diane's subconscious punishing him for marrying Camilla.
The mysterious hitman Mark Pellegrino is, of course, the very same Diane hired to kill Camilla, bumbling around offing innocent people as an expression of her guilt. Finally, the rotting corpse Betty and Rita find at the height of their investigation is Diane imagining herself dead, alone, her body abandoned for days.
The "dream vs. It makes so much sense, in fact, that watching Mulholland Drive that way feels almost wrong. Certainly the tidy blanket of dream interpretation can't cover the movie's many Lynchianisms.
Although David Lynch insists that, unlike some of his other movies e. Lost Highway , Mulholland Drive does have a coherent plot that can be understood. But do we really want to understand it?
Ben Sherlock is a writer, comedian, and independent filmmaker. He's currently in pre-production on his first feature, and has been for a while because filmmaking is expensive. In the meantime, he's sitting on a mountain of unproduced screenplays. Like real dreams, it does not explain, does not complete its sequences, lingers over what it finds fascinating, dismisses unpromising plotlines. If you want an explanation for the last half hour of the film, think of it as the dreamer rising slowly to consciousness, as threads from the dream fight for space with recent memories from real life, and with fragments of other dreams--old ones and those still in development.
The last half hour of the film does suggest a level of reality, although I still believe that real life and fragments of dream are interconnected. The more times you watch the film, the more the buried structure reveals itself. At the most basic level, I believe " Mulholland Drive " involves a failed blonde actress named Diane Selwyn, disappointed in love by a brunette woman, who hires a hit-man to kill her.
Neither Diane nor her lover looks the same at the reality level as at the dream level, although the blonde actress is played all the way through by Naomi Watts. Most of the movie involves Selwyn's dreams or nightmares, in which she appears as a chirpy young actress named Betty. Her brunette love in the dreams is a slinky 40s-style sexpot named Rita played by Laura Elena Herring.
In the dreams, Betty and "Rita" a name taken by the amnesiac sexpot from a Rita Hayworth movie poster investigate Rita's missing identity, Nancy Drew-style, and become involved, at various levels of reality, with the casting and production of a movie. There is also material about gangsters who are dictating a casting choice to the film's director Justin Theroux.
There are scenes at which neither " Betty " not "Rita" are present; there is a haunting performance in a nightclub; there is a monstrous homeless man played by a woman behind a diner where several crucial conversations take place; musical numbers are performed; a decomposing corpse makes an appearance; a man in a wheelchair wields great power; a cheery elderly couple turn up later reduced to cockroach-size, and there are two lesbian scenes of unusual frankness for today's Hollywood--perhaps because one is Diane Selwyn's erotic dream, and the other her masturbatory fantasy.
Well, yes, you're thinking, I've seen the movie, so tell me something new. But that, you see, is precisely what I was unable to do by the end of the week. Having trekked through " Mulholland Drive " in great detail, I confess myself still outside looking in. I speak for many of my fellow Interrupti, whose interpretations ranged from "her life is flashing before her eyes at the moment of death" to "it's a version of the Odyssey, with every character corresponding to a character in Greek mythology.
In short: " Mulholland Drive " resists, defies and finally defeats logical explanation. It is impossible to produce a consistent precis of the film that accounts for everything. And there is an admirable reason for this: Like a dream, it does not have to make sense. And yet the movie still plays--like a movie. Then, about two-thirds of the way through, she wakes up and is faced with reality: she is a failed actress who has been dumped by her lover and is working as a waitress.
The old couple coming back to haunt her seems like a classic anxiety dream projection - people who are nice to your face but laugh about you behind your back. The fact that they are old may suggest that they are her parents; she is a disappointment to herself, and so her nightmare is of parental disapproval. The s element in the first half is a pointer to the theory of this idealising dream. It is a vision of the way things were and is full of idealised trappings that don't exist any more.
The cowboy is another side of this, but above and beyond that he seems to me to be just another David Lynch bogeyman figure, there to scare the bejesus out of you without much rational purpose beyond that.
All the symbols in the film will mean different things to different people: the box for me seems to represent consciousness, but, as I said, I'm not sure if it helps to be so specific.
It seems to me that it is a collective dream - the clue is in the title. Mulholland Drive is a twisting, turning road that tells a story of the history of Hollywood. Lynch's favourite film is Sunset Boulevard, but this road tells a different story, one set at the edge of Hollywood.
Much in the film seems to come from a previous time. The young woman, Betty, seems to have come from another world, and her suicide reminded me of Peg Entwistle's suicide from the Hollywood sign in , which has become a symbol of Hollywood tragedy.
It is very much a Gothic fairy tale, like Bluebeard. For example, the older couple who seem kindly and benevolent but turn out to be cackling demons in disguise.
Lynch leads us around corners we are not sure that we want to go around, like the box, where we are swallowed into a black hole that we don't really want to go into.
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