Deciphering Mulholland Drive

Mulholland Drive is a twisted and exhilarating movie directed by David Lynch. The movies tells the story of a Canadian women, Diane Selwyn, who moves to Los Angeles to pursue a career in acting. For the most of the movie, we are thrown into a dream Diane has. In this dream many of the characters and people in her actual life are integrated into her dream with new identities. The last part of the movie we are brought back to Diane’s actual reality. Only once I was brought into Diane’s reality did I realize the importance of the fantasy. I believe Diane has realized the hard, cruel reality of Hollywood and this has caused her to have a breakdown. She has lost the love of her life to this Hollywood scene and is faced with the fact that she is a failed actress. These inner conflicts and struggles have caused her despair and ultimately her demise. David Lynch is highly praised in this movie because of his ability to mesh fantasy and reality. The fantasy part digs into Diane’s deepest desires and conflicts. A lot of the things that happen in the dream part of the movie, I feel display the way she wished things had happened, mostly with her relationship with Camille. In order to understand Mulholland Drive you must be able to distinguish between Diane’s dream and her reality. The movie starts with Diane arriving to Hollywood, she is very excited and thrilled for her new opportunity. In the fantasy Diane is introduced as Betty and is described as wholesome girl who has come to Hollywood after winning a Jitterbug Contest. Throughout the movie many odd things happens with different random characters. One of the first things that happen is an old couple that Betty befriends on her plane ride to Los Angeles. They seem very thrilled for Betty and wish her the best of luck on her new journey. Oddly, after the scene ends in the airport they are pictured in a limousine laughing and smirking, as if to be laughing at Betty. This was very interesting and is one of the many moments in the movie that appear to be random and have no significance. However, I believe that the old couple represents the people of Hollywood and how two-faced they can be. Betty has arrived to Hollywood with great ambitions and somewhat very naïve about the Hollywood scene. Many people will smile in your face and wish you the best, but turn around and stab you in your back. As we learn as the movie continues, Diane’s journey does not turn out the way she expected and she doesn’t become the star she wished for. Rita represents the young, wholesome girl that Diane wishes she still was and this is why she portrays herself this way in the dream/fantasy part of the movie. In reality, we learn that Diane is not the girl she once was and has even ordered the death of her former lover. Towards the end of the movie we meet the older couple again, they appear laughing at her and end up causing her to commit suicide. The couple not only represents Hollywood, but they represent failure as well. This is why they come at the end to torment her pushing her to kill herself. They are laughing at the fact she was unable to survive in Hollywood and at the person it has caused her to become. Much of the fantasy focuses on Betty’s relationship with Rita. In the fantasy, Diane’s real life ex lover Camille is introduced as Rita after the famous Rita Hayworth. Rita had got into the car accident the night before Betty’s Hollywood arrival causing her to suffer with amnesia. Betty meets her at her aunt’s apartment where she will be staying though her stay. Betty is intrigued by Rita and chooses to help her find out her identity and what has happened to her. Throughout their journey to discover what has happened to Rita, many things bizarre things occur around them and sometimes even to them. I believe many of the bizarre events that happen in her fantasy represent situations that have happened in her real life. In one part of the movie, Betty is auditioning for a role. In the audition she is acting out a scene with Woody, an older man. In the scene, Woody and Betty seem to have something going on even though he is suppose to be Betty’s father’s best friend. Because Woody is much older she threatens to tell her father about it and have him arrested. You can tell there is a lot of sexual tension going on and they have been involved with each other. You can tell that character Betty is playing is confused by her wants and what she knows is right when she screams, “I hate you, I hate us both”. Alan Shaw who wrote, “A Multi Layered Analysis of Mulholland Drive”, speculates that this scene acted out by Woody and Betty represents a dark past in Diane’s life. He believes that Woody is acting out a figure in her life who was like a father, maybe even close to her father who has taking advantage or abuse her. Although, I do not agree with his theory that the old couple we saw at the beginning and end of the movie represent her grandparents, and that the grandfather could be the person that Woody is representing, I do believe that this scene has significance. What makes the fantasy part of the movie so important is that is shows many of feelings and realities that Diane is trying to suppress. At the same time, it shows things in the way that Diane wish had happened. I do believe that this scene could represent a past that she is trying to avoid. Diane does not speak much of her past and life in Canada and this could because there is something she is trying to hide. What also made this scene interesting was how praised and loved she was by the directors and casting agent for her acting. Her dream swiftly shifts from suppression of reality to fantasy. In her dream, they have embraced and admired for her acting, even saying that she is guaranteed the role but in reality she is unable to book good roles and no one in Hollywood as embraced her acting. This only further proves that Diane’s dream is interlocked between the actuality of her life and the desire of what she wished her life was like. As Rita and Betty begin looking for clues to Rita’s accident, one of the first things they find is a $50,000 in cash and a blue key. As I mentioned before in real life, Diane has ordered a hit man to kill Camille because Camille has rejected her love, which I will go into further on. When Diane hired the hit man she gave $50,000 in cash for doing the hit and he in return says she will find a blue key at her house once the deed is done. This moment in her dream where they discover those items represent the guilt that Diane felt from hiring the hit man. She knows what she has done is wrong and she is beginning to realize what she just caused. The blue key shows up multiple times throughout the movie, and I believe it’s only as a constant reminder for Diane of what she has done. Throughout the time that Betty is trying to help Rita, she begins to fall in love with her. Eventually they do end up sleeping together and Betty professes her love for her. What was most interesting about this scene is that when Betty professes her love for her Rita does not reciprocate in the same way Betty does. It is obvious that Betty is way more into Rita than Rita is, just like in real life. Like in the movie Diane has fallen in love with Camille, but she does not seem to feel the same way about Diane. This is why I believe Diane has giving Camille/Rita amnesia in the story because she wants her to be dependant of her and need her help. This helps bring them a lot closer which leads them to end up sleeping together. However, you can tell that that Betty is the one who has initiated the whole situation and wanted to sleep with Rita. Once again Diane is toying with reality and fantasy. In real life, it is Diane who needs and is dependent of Camille. It is Camille who helps her receive roles and it her who is on her way to becoming a big movie star. Camille is everything Diane wishes to be and I believe this is one the main reasons she has fallen in love with her. It is once Camille falls in love with Adam, a big shot Hollywood director, and begins to flaunt in front of her that Rita loses it and orders for her hit. The fact that Diane and Camille’s relationship was vastly different than the relationship she portrayed in her fantasy with Betty and Rita, only furthers add to the speculation that the first part was all a dream. I think the most important aspect of the dream is the fantasy part of it because she portrays things the way they wished they were. She wishes that Camille was dependent on her the way Rita was. She wishes that she were some praised Hollywood actress, when in reality it is Camille who is. Once again, we can see how reality is meshed with fantasy when she sleeps with Rita because although Rita has become so dependent of her she still does not love her. When Betty tells Rita she loves her, as they’re about to sleep together, Rita responds with silence. No matter how much she tries whether in her dreams or in real life she could never make Camille/Rita love her the way that she does. Mulholland Drive was a very dynamic story and much of it I still wasn’t able to explore or touch upon in this paper. There are many aspects of it that I still don’t fully understand and many people have tried to speculate what they think Lynch was trying to accomplish through this movie, but I don’t think he meant for us to fully understand what was going on. What is obvious is that Diane was going through a tough time in her life and it has not turned out the way she hoped. She has dealt with the reality of losing the love of her life, Camille, and the fact that she did not become the Hollywood starlet she thought she would be. Most of the movie takes place in a dream she had, I think that there is aspects of the dream that are real and some that are fantasy. Betty represents the wholesome girl that Diane once was when she first arrived to Hollywood. This girl was very naïve to the Hollywood scene, as she was when she met Rita and took her in. As the movie goes on we see Betty transforming into the person Diane is now. At first, she tries to suppress this person in her dream, but slowly you see her changing. It was cool to see Lynch toy with the dynamic of reality and fantasy because every human has fantasies, inner ambitions and desires. I’ve never seen a movie where all these elements are thrown in and you are left to figure out the truth from the lies, the reality and the fantasy. It did get confusing at times because many other story lines were thrown in as well making it harder to decipher everything. It was sad to see that Diane life had turn out so dark causing her to commit suicide, but I do think that her past in Canada had a lot to do with it, thus the Alan Shaw theory of her abuse as a child. Overall, this was a great movie and every time I watch it I find myself looking for new clues and theories to help decipher Mulholland Drive.
Bibliography: MLA Format • Shaw, Alan. "Lost on Mulholland Dr." Lost on Mulholland Dr.. N.p., n.d. Web. 4 Dec. 2013. .