Do we love the films of David Lynchbecause they’re confusing, or is it just an added perk of our adoration? By now the man is practically synonymous with weird, difficult-to-explain narratives that cryptically examine the dark secrets buried deep within the lives of the characters. The narrative complexity of his work ranges from completely straightforward as with The Straight Story, to practically incomprehensible with Inland Empire, and Mulholland Drive finds the delicate sweet spot in the center. The film is anything but traditional, relying on a number of unconventional (and quite peculiar) stylistic and narrative techniques to convey its tragic story in a way that only Lynch could. By the time the credits roll, however, you might just be left with a “huh?”
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The movie seems simple enough for the first two hours. Betty (Naomi Watts) and Rita (Laura Elena Harring) play detectives in the mystery of the latter’s identity, eventually beginning a romantic relationship with each other. Until the narrative as we know it quickly disintegrates once the two women discover a dead body in what is presumed to be Rita’s apartment. From here, the camera becomes sporadic, the images blurry. The story takes a drastic turn when, after Rita’s blue key is found to open a mysterious blue box that contains nothing but darkness, we’re shown that the corpse found it the apartment actually belongs to...Betty?
The enigmatic, intimidating cowboy (Monty Montgomery) returns to wake her up, and we’re shown that everything seen up to this point was merely a dream. The dreamer, Betty, is actually Diane Selwyn (which is the name that Rita suddenly remembers, and the name of the corpse the women discover). Rita is actually Camilla Rhodes, the famous film actor who played the lead role in The Sylvia North Story. The two women did actually have a relationship, but it is suggested to have ended badly, with Diane being heartbroken at Camilla’s budding relationship with director Adam Kesher (Justin Theroux).
From here, it’s slowly revealed that everything from the film’s two-hour dream sequence has its corresponding anchor in Diane’s AKA Betty’s reality. Coco, the landlady at Betty’s aunt’s apartment, is revealed to be Adam’s mother, Diane’s actor-aunt turns out to be dead, and the bumbling hitman Joe (Mark Pellegrino) is actually a hitman...only, we see that he was hired by Diane to murder Camilla out of jealous hatred. “Rita’s” blue key, which opened the box and awakened Diane to her reality, is actually given to Diane by the hitman as a symbol that the hit is completed.
The film’s final moments feature a miniature elderly couple that chase Diane across the apartment until, terrified and desperate, she pulls out a gun from her nightstand and shoots herself. Smoke fills the room, and we see a brightly-lit image of Betty and Rita (the dream version of the couple, made clear by the blonde wig worn by Rita in the first half of the movie) over a backdrop of Los Angeles. Just as the first two hours of the film were simply a dream, this final moment is Diane’s dying fantasy—a life in which she and her love are free to be together as she pursues a promising career in the movies. The final word, spoken by the blue-haired woman at the theater visited by Betty and Rita at the end of the dream, is “Silencio”. Diane is being told to rest, to accept the silence of death.
In reality, Diane is a failed actress resorting to bit roles acquired solely through her friendship with Camilla. She has nothing that she desires— her life is in ruin—so she fabricates a dream world to live happily in. In her dreams, she and Camilla are in love, her aunt is alive and well, and her hopes of becoming a movie star are still attainable. When the dream world inevitably crashes upon itself and reality becomes too difficult to bear, she commits suicide.
But what about the hysterical elderly couple, or the frightening homeless man behind Winkie’s? Each serves as an important psychological symbol in Diane’s dream and a crucial component to understanding Mulholland Drive. At the beginning of the film, Betty is shown to have made friends with a kind older lady who promises to watch her movies once she makes it big. In this dream, we see her and her husband in the back of a car, smiling with eerily excessive happiness. Once Diane wakes from her dream of being Betty, the elderly couple appears again to symbolize her failed aspirations of stardom. They are no longer happy but terrifying. When they chase her around the apartment in the film’s final minutes, it becomes clear to Diane that she’ll never have what she wants. Her dreams of success were just that: dreams. The truth is too brutal to bear, and she cannot escape it.
Early in the film, a man tells of a dream in which a terrifying figure lurks behind the Winkie’s. When he searches in the back of the restaurant, a strange figure resembling a homeless man appears, causing the man to collapse in terror. This same figure appears twice at the end of the film, once holding the mysterious blue box, and again as a superimposed image following the image of Betty and Rita smiling over Los Angeles. Since in reality Winkie’s is the location where Diane orchestrates the hit on Camilla, it makes sense that the frightening figure would lurk behind the restaurant. He's meant to symbolize the terror within Diane, the hate and cruelty that lead her to have her ex-lover murdered. In the dream world, when the man finds the figure from his own dream and collapses out of fright, it's shown that the figure is too scary to bear. This translates in the real world to Diane’s inability to accept the truth. The ugliness of her crime is similarly too scary for her to bear.
So, Diane Selwyn comes to Los Angeles after the death of her aunt, who left Diane her apartment in her will. Once in Hollywood, Diane falls in love with Camilla, who helps get her small, low-key roles in films that she stars in. Eventually, Diane and Camilla’s relationship ends, Diane’s heart is broken, and Camilla becomes engaged to successful film director Adam Kesher. Out of jealous contempt, Diane hires a hitman to kill Camilla, but after the hit is actually carried out, Diane’s reality collapses upon her, causing her to fabricate a dream world in which all the key players in her life have entirely different roles. When she finds herself unable to escape from her cruel reality even in dreams, and once the truth that she can never become a successful star becomes inescapable, Diane kills herself. As she dies she dreams one last time of her fabricated reality in which everything is exactly how she wants it, but even this dream is overshadowed by the terrifying truth. She is finally allowed peace with the final “silencio”.
David Lynch seems to like keeping his films a mystery. His delightful refusal to elaborate on his work (or his personal or spiritual connection to it) has become an integral part of his artistic identity, even inspiring a number of memes based on his cryptic interviews. Of course, Lynch has never given an official explanation to any of his films including Mulholland Drive, but he did include a list of "clues" on the original DVD release of the movie. At face value, even without a clear explanation of what it means, Mulholland Drive is a strange, wholly singular expression unmatched by anything else. But: once the film's code is cracked, it becomes one of the greatest pictures ever made about Hollywood and its secrets. It's a masterful statement on the inescapable terrors hidden within us all, and a heartbreaking tragedy of a dreamer who never quite gets what she's always dreamed of.
