Like Eraserhead, Mulholland Drive is a film about the creative process, although altogether different. It's the best film I've ever seen along with Blue Velvet (tonally and stylistically quite different). There's a lot to write about, but I'll try to be to the point. Like Blue Velvet it's about the inner life of one being, Diane Selwyn, her waking life manifest in her subconscious and vice versa when she awakens (reawakens?). I say that because I think the film implies that her "dream" (film really draws no line and there is none) is no less real and exists in eternity, despite being forgotten in her perceived waking state amid the destructive influence of the Hollywood film industry, which in her dreaming ideal really is a place of dreams in which her creativity and inquisitiveness flourishes against the odds, as opposed to the stifling, closed off den of prostitution we see once the key turns and she "awakens." So if one were to put it in narrative order, Diane Selwyn went to Hollywood with dreams of becoming an actress, fell in love with and became obsessed with the ideal of the voluptuous, sultry film star Rita that she aspired to be and wished to possess (who she is also in a lesbian love affair with). Diane hasn't much of an image, as she lacks charisma and is very confused and lost, but lives a rich inner life and has a great creative centre, which is the source of the great mystery dream that takes up most of the film, in which she is Betty, a bright, charismatic, confident newcomer, and Rita is an amnesiac who has been in a car accident who stumbles into Betty's new apartment. The two form a bond and Betty tries to help her discover her identity. In this state Rita as objectified in Diane's mind is totally at the suggestion and the mercy of Betty, Diane's sort of perfect inner-witch, who gradually moulds "Rita" into her own image. This dream also follows the story of Adam Kesher, a hot shot young film director who is making some kind of weird 50s hot rod musical, but finds himself struggling not to sell out to the studio bosses under the influence of the mafia and their own falsely enthroned egos which are concealed without oxygen behind a glass case as a dwarf and a bodyguard. It's the destructive process of Hollywood shown as a shadowy, secretive cabal of indecisive, crawling executives.
As Betty arrives in Hollywood with what I presume are her grandparents, leading her unwittingly to her doom, she is all confidence and smiles, completely hypnotised. Unbeknown to her, she is being led on by the hidden hypnotist of her own psyche and her experience is her mind revealing itself to itself. Things take a turn for the strange when she discovers amnesiac Rita in her apartment, who had just stumbled down from Mulholland Drive after a car accident in the night after stopping on the road. A shell without an identity, Betty tries to discover one for her. Rita is sort of like a sexualized imaginary friend to her, a real body but without an identity, leading Diane's psyche to become a sort of puzzle. In one nightmare scene in the film, a man talks with his therapist in a diner about a dream he's had in which he finds a man in the back of the place who is causing all the fear he and his friend feel, and that everyone feels, a sort of malevolent force hidden and revealed without warning but ever present. He goes out back to show his friend, who catches him as he falls from the fright of his encounter. It's a sort of demonstration of the way fear reveals itself to us suddenly and without will, and how we are saved and returned. He goes outside Betty has to go to an audition for a second rate film produced by some guy named Wally. The director is a half asleep hack who tells her and some old actor to "be with themselves, but not let it get real until it gets real." This sounds like pretentious crap but has a ring of truth to it. When she starts reading the lines, she automatically lets herself go and inhabits the role totally, in turn hypnotising the old Clint Eastwood looking guy, who himself turns in a natural, real performance. I guess this goes to show that "acting" is just as real as anything else, a sort of mutual unconscious hypnosis that happens without resistance, hampered only by distraction and self-consciousness. Having turned in the performance of her life she is quickly snatched by two "catty" casting people, who are quick to package the performance and make a "star" of it, by taking her to the studio where Adam Kesher is working on his...50s musical...thing auditions, where plastic looking girls and minstrels in frocks are singing 50s tunes. Having arrived she immediately makes eye contact with Adam and the two connect as if by force, but Adam must sell out lest his life go to hell (a cowboy tells him he will have the "good things in life" if he casts a certain girl). When he sees this girl audition, he reluctantly casts her in the part because he is forced to by the company boss and his shadowy conspirators. Essentially he sells out and loses his best actress. Betty and "Rita" continue to investigate her missing identity, going to the apartment of Diane Selwyn, a name they heard earlier, only to find her decomposing corpse lying on the bed. This is Diane rotting away as she has this dream by what has happened to her in her "reality." "Rita" runs out in shock and horror with her hands to her face, fading in and out of traces of herself while Betty reassures her.
Later that night, Betty alters "Rita'" and gives her a blonde wig and makes her look "different," but actually more like Betty. She is moulding her in her own image. They fall in love and end up making passionate lesbian sex together, but "Rita" senses something is not quite right, so she leads Diane in the middle of the night to some mystery club called "Silencio," which it turns out is a sort of stage demonstration of illusory power. It is the innermost realm of the psyche that she can reach. What is behind the curtains cannot be known. There is some strange magician on the stage chanting "No Hai Banda" and making fire effects. A trumpet player comes out and seemingly plays the trumpet, only to lift it away while the sound continues, the magician saying "it is all a recording." Eventually a beautiful woman with orange and red eyeliner comes out and sings "Llorando," a beautiful song with moves the pair to tears, devastating them when she falls to the ground and the song continues. The image is destroyed, the mask has fallen. "Rita" finds herself alone in the apartment again with the mysterious blue box which was found earlier. She puts her key in it, and the box falls to the floor from hands unknown and the dream is over.
Diane Selywn awakens to find herself in her apartment, only it is not the glamorous, luxurious Hollywood apartment of her dream, it is a dour mess of a place and the coffee is crap. There is no longer some grand order of events like what was envisioned in the dream, she is now drifting in and out of different half remembered, bitter confrontations with her lover, who is "Rita," only not her, instead a dominant, powerful, manipulative woman who has the upper hand on Diane and hurts and humiliates her and makes her feel small every chance she gets. Diane has lost something vital, but also discovered something divine. She is a shell of her former self, a void in her heart from her inner revelation in Silencio. The frozen death of her dream invades every aspect of her life, she is in a way "dead inside" and yet this black hole is really the source of all her creativity, which is at this point stifled by a Hollywood image factory that seems completely dead and worthless to her, a mere object that burns her whenever she touches it, and yet tragically she keeps pursuing it knowing full well that her creative paradise is within, despite its' dark secret. Driven to despair by the scheming, crawling people she encounters she goes mad. Adam Kesher is no longer a struggling director, but a hack sell out who got into the business through his actress mother and lives in a fancy house with Rita his hot wife who is banging everyone else on the side male or female and taunting Diane with it. Diane has found herself in a hell where her doubtful, hesitant self image cannot compete with the confident models and pictures, and her creativity is locked away in a box and not even take into consideration. Creative success cannot be had there and she is a starving artist, but instead of leaving or doing her own thing despite the great photocopier, she gives in and self destructs, a martyr. The Hollywood ego is a photocopier of glossy images and this only degrades and kills true creativity.
There are many nuances to be found in the film, many details that make up the whole. Really it's about identity and how identity is a prison, and yet only an illusion. Below that, it's much softer and looser, and this is closer to the source of creativity, which is the source of everything, the blue lady and whatever lies behind the dark curtain. Hollywood is an illusion, even films are a mere demonstration of this, like Mulholland Drive. Egoic power is entirely illusory, and the real power lies below this in the waters of dream. Diane Selwyn becomes a hapless prisoner of her egoic power and her strong identification with it, which causes her so much pain and torment and vanquishes her from the world, although as we see at the end, her spirit lives on. She dies, the dream does not. It is all a recording. Silencio...
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