What Does ‘Mulholland Drive’ Really Mean?
Explaining the real meaning behind Lynch’s Mulholland Drive
Mulholland Drive is a mystery/thriller/detective film, a non-linear narrative, a film-noir masterpiece — but even more importantly, it is a David Lynch film. David Lynch is known for his unique and surreal storytelling, taking the concept of mystery to the extreme. He often avoids providing concrete answers for what is happening in his films, believing that defining something too clearly limits its potential and reduces it to nothing more than that. Instead, he invites us to analyze and interpret his work, allowing his films to transcend their original intentions.
On the surface, or according to the generally accepted understanding, Mulholland Drive follows a young woman named Diane Selwyn. Diane wins a jitterbug contest, inspiring her to move to Hollywood to become an actress. Once there, she begins a relationship with fellow actress Camilla Rhodes. Camilla helps Diane get some parts in movies, but Camilla becomes more successful, eventually dumping Diane for director Adam Kesher. Camilla even invites Diane to a party to rub in her engagement to Adam, or so Diane thinks. Out of revenge, Diane hires a hitman to kill Camilla.
Afterwards, Diane spends three weeks hiding in her apartment, haunted by her actions and fearful of the authorities. She goes to sleep and dreams about her experiences in Hollywood. In her dream, the hitman is incompetent and fails to kill Camilla, or the job is interrupted by a car accident. This leaves Camilla wandering around with amnesia, leading her to stumble upon Diane’s rich aunt’s Hollywood apartment, where Diane happens to be visiting at the same time.
In this dream scenario, Camilla depends entirely on Diane, allowing Diane to play out her own fantasies of a detective story set in the glitz and glamour of her naive, idealized version of Hollywood. Diane likes to believe that she is an incredible actress and that the reason she isn’t getting any lead roles is due to a mob that controls the film industry, pushing around directors and deciding who gets to play a role. All dreams have an end, and this one ends with a blue key — the same blue key that indicated the hitman killed Camilla. Diane feels guilty, leading her into a descent of madness where she hallucinates the two old people she helped at the start of the film haunting her. In her despair, she takes a gun out of the drawer and ends her own life.
This is the basic understanding of the film, and if you were just here for that, then I’m glad to explain it to you. But isn’t it too straightforward for someone like Lynch? This film is better than “it was all a dream.” This film can be dismissed as “Lynch being Lynch,” but that isn’t what Mulholland Drive is. As Lynch explains, cinema can be two things: either deep or shallow. Great cinema tells a surface-level story that goes deep into the psyche.
To understand what this film really means, we need to detach ourselves from the idea that “it was just a dream.” We shouldn’t take anything literally in a David Lynch film but instead think of everything in terms of abstract concepts and then observe how those concepts are represented literally in his work. Lynch feels that films can be dreams, that the audience is entering a dream world as we watch. David Lynch said this in the 2013 film What is Cinema?: “If the picture’s giant, and the sound is beautiful and the people are quiet and they get into this world — it’s very, very delicate how you get into that world. It’s so delicate. But if you get into that world, it can be like a dream. Mulholland Drive is a film dream that allows us to explore a particular dream world.”
Diane Selwyn says that winning a jitterbug contest was what started her dream of an acting career. Lynch uses this film dream to portray the concept of the “Hollywood Dream” using Diane’s literal dream. Our understanding of this Hollywood Dream is the same as Betty understands it. It’s a movie of the movie that is our dream about the movies. David Lynch loves films and he loves old films. He loves the Hollywood dream. And what does the Hollywood dream look like to him? It looks like one of his favorite films, a classic case from the Golden Age of Cinema, Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard.
But what does it take to be a movie star? We want to be “discovered” while we wait tables in some diner or land some audition within 24 hours of landing in LA, just like Betty. What does an audition look like? We might imagine it being in a room full of production’s most important parties. And how lovely and welcoming they all are: the producer and his assistant, the director and his assistant, another actor in the production to work with. And then, the audition for the really big movies — they’ve got the whole production crew involved: costumes, makeup, cameras… like they’re shooting the movie already! We walk into that room, the director has one look at us and goes, “This is what I was looking for. This is the one!” And it’s a Hollywood Dream come true.
But that isn’t how it turned out for Betty. In Betty’s mind, her failed audition is: They can’t see my talent, the movie was bound to fail, I had other important things to do that day, it wasn’t fair because some kind of mob had already decided the role, or the artist’s hands were tied. There might be three reasons why your Hollywood dreams went up in flames: not getting through even with your pure talent, a cabal that picks favorites, or the most powerful reason, Russian Roulette — everything bet on luck.
David Lynch talks about this in Lynch on Lynch: “Everyone is willing to go for broke and take a chance. Hollywood is a modern town in that way. It’s like you want to go to Las Vegas and turn that one dollar into a million dollars. This particular girl — Diane — sees things she wants but she just can’t get them. It’s all there — the party — but she’s not invited. And it gets to her. You could call it Fate — if it doesn’t smile on you, there’s nothing you can do. You can have the greatest talent and the greatest ideas, but if that door doesn’t open, you’re fresh out of luck. It takes so many ingredients and the door opening to finally make it.”
Fate is “An Abstraction With a Human Form,” which we see in the film, “The Cowboy.” The Cowboy is played by David Lynch’s producer friend, Monty Montgomery, who is wearing the real-life clothing of Tom Mix, an actor from the silent film era who is considered to be the very first Western star. So, the very face of the Hollywood Dream is this guy wearing the real clothing of the first Western movie star from the birth of motion pictures, who decides which actors get to be stars, and you have no choice but to go along with him. The Cowboy is “THE HOLLYWOOD DREAM.” Remember, Lynch is all about the abstraction of concepts. Mulholland isn’t just some road — Lynch is using it as a metaphor for an actor’s ascension to Hollywood success. Mulholland Drive is a dark, twisting dream road that leads to the Cowboy. Where does this dream exactly start from? David Lynch gives us 2 clues to this: “Pay particular attention in the beginning of the film: at least two clues are revealed before the credits.” The first clue is the jitterbug contest where Diane gets the inspiration for Hollywood success, and the second clue is the camera panning out on the pillow, initiating the dream that represents the Hollywood Dream.
“Well, there’s many characters. All are dealing with somewhat of a question of identity,” David Lynch said in an interview. Diane might be suffering from a personality split. Both Diane’s and Camilla’s limousine journeys up Mulholland are stopped, both with the same dialogue: “What are you doing?” “We don’t stop here.” At the end of the dream, after Camilla and Betty discover the body in Diane’s apartment, there’s this doubling effect suggesting something like a split personality. Then Camilla changes her hair to resemble Betty’s, and they go to Club Silencio, where Betty receives some kind of revelation that makes her shake in her seat like something intense is happening to her. When they arrive back at home, Betty disappears without a trace. Does Betty become Rita here?
Diane’s Hollywood Dream comes to an end as soon as her identity matches with Camilla, or could it be that her dream is ended by the merging of identities? Becoming Camilla signifies Diane’s realization of that dark truth. What truth about the Hollywood Dream would Camilla represent?
The answer to this question is also the answer to David Lynch’s clue no. 8, “Did talent alone help Camilla?” The question itself implies that the answer is “No.” It is shown to us, or according to Diane, that Camilla might have slept her way to the top, and once there, she brought Diane along with her.
In the Hollywood Dream, success is symbolized by the Hollywood sign at the top of the Mulholland Highway. In reality, success is symbolized by the Hollywood party at the top of Mulholland. “This particular girl — Diane — sees things she wants but she just can’t get them. It’s all there — the party — but she’s not invited. And it gets to her” (David Lynch in Lynch on Lynch). Diane’s journey to the party is stopped before she reaches the top, just like her journey to stardom was stopped when she lost the lead in The Sylvia North Story to Camilla: “I wanted the lead so bad.” Diane never reaches the top, so how does Diane get to the party? This is where Camilla comes to show her another way, “A Shortcut,” a path that leads to success in Hollywood. Diane is being introduced to the “casting couch.” The casting couch is a term used for situations when a casting agent, producer, or director offers a part in a film in exchange for sexual favors. It gets its name from the couch in a casting agent’s office where, presumably, said favors would take place. But I don’t think Camilla is just showing Diane the shortcut to the Hollywood Dream; I think Camilla is THE SHORTCUT, an abstraction of the concept in human form. This is when the film starts making sense because now we know that the person Camilla Rhodes is not a person and never was.
The Golden Age actresses see Betty messing with this problem (casting couches) and try to warn her. It’s not until Diane wakes up to the reality of Hollywood that she learns that the Golden Age had been complicit. Hollywood Dream directors are good-hearted artists, but Diane is learning that, in reality, this isn’t always the case. Diane’s lack of success leads her to give in to the casting couch. This is where Diane had to abruptly leave because something had come up. This is the period where Diane gets a reality check. She guards herself from outer judgment by her avoidance of authority figures, the police, or the public. She sees her own dead body in her apartment — she knows on some level that her decision will be the death of her dream. Diane’s casting couch moment is Betty making love with Camilla. Diane is so in love with the idea of becoming a movie star that she will go to any lengths to do that. This is the moment that Diane becomes Camilla Rhodes, a casting couch actress.
What was Club Silencio all about? David Lynch Clue №7: “What is felt, realized, and gathered at the Club Silencio?” The performance depicted at Club Silencio is a depiction of Diane’s new understanding of the dark truth about the Hollywood Dream. The dream is a facade, movie magic, a trick that Hollywood plays on us and that we play on ourselves. “It is an illusion.” The silence and secrecy about the casting couch are on full display in this production. Betty begins to shake because it starts to all break for her; her naivety and innocence are questioned. The Blue Box symbolizes this secrecy. Betty disappears completely to signify that the part of Diane that believed Hollywood was a wonderland is gone. Joe is the hitman hired by Diane, but Joe is also an abstraction of a concept in human form. If the Cowboy is the Hollywood Dream, then Joe is the reality of Hollywood. Joe gives Diane the key that opens the box, the box that breaks Diane’s dream.
The Cowboy tells the director that he’ll see the Cowboy one more time if he does good, two more times if he does bad. If he follows the instructions, he’ll have a successful movie with a successful lead actress and achieve his Hollywood dreams. If he doesn’t, his Hollywood dream will come back to say goodbye and wake him up to the real Hollywood, like the Cowboy does for Diane when she learns the truth. We see two versions of Diane for most of the film: the Diane that believes in the dream and the other who knows about reality. But there is this third version that has been locked into a blue box, still trying to believe in the Hollywood dream but slowly dying as she tries to navigate the guilt and shame of what she has done. She might have slept her way into the pictures like blonde Camilla, but at some point, it stopped working for her. “We shouldn’t do this anymore.” “Stop saying that.” David Lynch Clue №6: “Notice the robe, the ashtray, the coffee cup.” The coffee cup is straightforward, signifying that it’s time to wake up; the Hollywood dream is over. The ashtray is how we know the real Diane doesn’t die at the end. The Grand Piano ashtray on Diane’s table symbolizes Movie Magic, Music is magic. The ash dump of the Hollywood Dream. This ashtray is taken away by the women in apartment 12, but suddenly it reappears, and the coffee cup disappears, symbolizing that Diane believes or still wants to believe that the dream might be coming back. The judges of the Jitterbug contest that inspired Diane’s Hollywood Dream come back to haunt her into ending it. The Love for the Dream is what killed the Dream that she would do anything to achieve it, even something that would kill it. Diane’s dream, like the dreams of many before her, kills itself in a blue smokescreen of silence.
