10 Theories That Help Explain The Works Of David Lynch
2. Mulholland Drive's Narrative Is A Dream
The David Lynch film that has seen the most readings and interpretations dedicated to it, without a shadow of a doubt, has been Mulholland Drive. This is primarily because its complex narrative - unlike the apparently "meaningless" structures of, say, Eraserhead, Lost Highway and Inland Empire - is teasingly set out in a way that seems to suggest there is hidden meaning there if one digs deeply enough. The most common readings of Mulholland Drive centre around the entire that it is a dream. This revolves around the idea that "Betty" (Naomi Watts) is the fantasy image of the person that Diane (also Naomi Watts) has always wanted to be, and that she has invented "Rita" (Laura Elena Harring), who loves her in the way that Camilla (also LEH) never has in reality. When she wakes from the dream and realises she has had Camilla killed, she goes crazy with guilt and commits suicide. Although there are many different readings - some unbelievably carefully thought-out and complex - most analyses are, in some way, a variation of this. There are several clues that point to this interpretation. There is the ridiculously stylised lighting and performance style that introduces Betty to the audience, evocative of the fake niceties of Lumberton in Blue Velvet. There is the fact that Betty refers to arriving in a "dream place". There are the parallels between characters in the "sleeping" section of the film and the "waking" section. There's the characters and image in the first part of the film that can be spotted in differing roles in the second part (The Cowboy or the diner, for example). Betty is everything that Diane cannot be. She is a gifted actress (like Camilla in the "real" world). She is adored by the woman she wants. She even gets to live out her own film noir-inspired fantasy in which she is "looking after" her beloved as they try to solve the mystery of her existence. It is telling that Rita initiates their sexual relationship, as if Betty is the irresistible one, but that she does not respond to Betty's desperate declaration of love (by this stage, the dream is unraveling). The Club Silencio scene is revelatory for Betty. Bondar reminds the sleeping Diane that this is all "an illusion", shaking her entire world and causing both women to cry as their lives come to a close, and The Cowboy demands that she wakes up from the illusion immediately. When she does so, with the blue box that should offer answers proving nothing but an empty non-sequitur in her dream, she faces reality once again. Rita is in fact Diane, and is sleeping with the director that rejected her. Betty is really Diane, a down-and-out failed actress living alone and with no direction in life. The film concludes with her shooting herself, haunted by the apparitions of the "dream place" she longs to return to.
