Pseudaimonia

Reflections on "Mulholland Drive" (2001)

I recently had cause to rewatch Mulholland Drive and was staggered by how little I remembered. The other edge of that sword was how much I got to enjoy it a second time. It's the best of David Lynch: balancing classic dream-like storytelling and mystery with enough cohesion to not lose an attentive viewer. There's nevertheless much left to interpretation. If you've not seen it, please read no further. Much of this post is my interpretation of what happened. I'm also going to use the lead actress's names rather than their characters whenever I feel the distinction is less important, as they play two characters each that are selectively interchangeable.

At a high level, the first half or so of the film is likely a dream/ hallucination sequence in the mind of Naomi Watts' character, threaded together from experiences real, imagined, or somewhere in between.

That "somewhere between" is probably where the film is at its best. Specifically, in her relationship to Harring's characters. We learn near the end of the film that Harring is married to the director "Adam" played by Justin Theroux. It's clear Watts is deeply in love with Harring, or at the very least the idea of Harring. It appears to be a potentially collegial, one-sided relationship, where Harring is surrounded by romantic affection of which Watts isn't a part. E.g., Harring is a star, and gives scraps of work to Watts, which is revealed when Watts communicates with "Coco" played by Ann Miller.

These clarifying scenes near the end of the film are vital context for the first half. The very premise of how Watts meets a runaway Harring in her aunt's apartment is implausible, but there are small details that don't quite make sense. For instance, we see first-person camera work from both Harring and Watts' perspective: visual language previously used to establish Harring's viewpoint. Harring is always at her very best: sultry eye makeup, red lipstick, and hair perfectly done, no matter the time of day or context. The sex scene between them is also laced with sinister music. This entire act is suspicious, from subtle details to the fundamental premise, and that suspicion is rewarded during the back half of the film.

The reality appears to be that both these women are fictional: fabrications in the mind of the second character played by Watts, "Diane". "Betty", her first, is the ideal actress. "Rita", Harring's character in the first half, is merely a romanticised version of "Camilla". The very plot of Rita not having her memory is something of a warning to the viewer: she doesn't have her memories because Diane hasn't created any for her. Rita is not really a person: she's a romantic fantasy based on someone real and nothing more.

We get hints at what the sources of these fantasies might be. When we are first confronted by the reality of Diane, but not the first time in her apartment, we see an emotional breakdown when she hallucinates Rita in her kitchen. We see Diane masturbating, and soon a naked Rita appears on her couch. This all suggests Diane might have schizophrenia or something akin to it. Prior to the Diane reveal in the 2am theatre scene, we see the first break in the fantasy: Betty begins convulsing as though she's having a seizure while Rita simply holds her. This suggests she might be having an overdose on something, and that this elaborate fantasy of the first half of the film is partly drug-induced. Lynch is bludgeoning us over the head at this point, as Rita wears a blonde wig to match that of Betty: the two are physically similar now; they're intermingling and becoming indistinguishable.

These latter scenes help us piece together the film's chronology too. My interpretation is that

  1. Diane (Naomi Watts) meets Camilla (Laura Harring).
  2. Camilla extends work opportunities to Diane, perhaps on the premise of friendship, or perhaps because she enjoys torturing Diane. We get evidence of the latter during the dinner scene at Adam's apartment. Camilla freely kisses another woman, then checks for Diane's anguished reaction afterward. We also see this during a scene on a film set. Camilla asks Diane to stay when the rest of the room is dismissed during a moment where Adam and Camilla share a hurtful kiss.
  3. Diane is eventually chauffeured up to Mulholland Drive for a party at Adam's place. The car stops, and Camilla leads her by the hand to the party.
  4. The agonising party takes place where Diane resolves to kill Camilla.
  5. Diane meets with an assassin at the Denny's equivalent, where the earlier exchange involving Patrick Fischler's character took place. This is where we see the origin of the blue key.
  6. Diane swaps apartments with her neighbour in another unit.
  7. Diane retreats into a fantasy while she waits for the assassin to carry out his work. This is the first half of the film. She imposes pieces of her life onto a version of Camilla who isn't cruel to her and simply loves her: Rita. She becomes an idealised version of herself, Betty. "Retreats into" either means "pre-existing mental condition causes her to hallucinate it", "heroin/ other drugs", or some combination of both.
  8. Diane "awakens" with the blue key on her coffee table, realising the deed is done. She can't bring herself to contemplate what it means, instead trying to conjure Rita again and again, and perhaps re-enter the fantasy. She grieves for the imagined life she's lost, eventually entering an unstable mental state.
  9. She hallucinates the old couple we saw when Betty was introduced. They harass her during a psychedelic horror sequence, and Diane kills herself to escape it. She dies on the bed where the corpse Betty and Rita found was near the end of the first act. This suggests she might have felt some pull toward that imagined destiny, even in the midst of the fantasy.

There's so much to love about this film. It's confronting, thought-provoking, and drenched in details ripe for analysis. For instance, we get a payoff on the drawn-out actress head-hunting board room sequence where the espresso critic continually says "this is the girl". The fact we see the server with the "Betty" name tag, and the guy standing at the counter. The score perfectly captures the atmosphere when it needs to. It tactically contradicts the instincts of the viewer, acting as a clue in and of itself. We don't seen any physical evidence of drugs, but we see their effects, particularly in the theatre hallucination as Betty convulses. Even the content of the taped performances is as informative as it is haunting. A woman sings passionately and abruptly dies, yet the song keeps being sung as men drag her corpse off stage. This could be interpreted as a representation of the ephemeral, illusory nature of the performance and the fictional world in which it resides. And there's so much else I haven't covered, like the sheer detail of Adam's plot, and the fictitious torture Diane inflicts upon him in the conjuring of it!

I'm glad I rewatched this.