I have some comments to add to your analysis of David Lynch's "Mulholland Drive."
I would like to mention a running theme in Lynch's films. An inappropriate relationship between a younger person with an older person. Like Spielberg's recurring theme of orphan's or lost children in his films because of his felling of abandonment when his parents divorced, Lynch may be trying to reconcile something from his past.
In "Eraserhead," the mother of the main character's girlfriend makes a sexual pass at him. In "Twin Peaks," there is implied incest between Laura Palmer and her father, and the resort owner and his own daughter. You'll remember in "Blue Velvet," Frank Booth calls himself daddy as he abuses Dorothy Vallens. In "Mulholland Drive," Diane may have been acting out a scene in her audition that actually happened to her. The movie's director and talent agent may represent her parents, who seem enthusiastic about her, but are indifferent to the content of her audition scene of statutory rape.
You may note that there are no children in Lynch's work (except for that spooking child magician in "Twin Peaks"). The only child in "Blue Velvet" is being held hostage by Frank Booth. Even the high school girls in "Twin Peaks" are not children, but full-grown women, implying that sexual activity robs people of their childhood. The recurring theme of an outwardly innocent and happy world with a dark sinister secret is consistent with child sexual abuse.
Might be an interesting article about Lynch's films and sex abuse.
A couple of other notes:
Where did Diane get the fifty grand?
Probably some from her aunt, probably some from hooking. That is probably how she met the hit man.
The audition practicing with Rita shows how lousy Diane thinks Camilla's acting is.
-- David Castenson
The theory that "Mulholland Drive" is a composition of dreams and fantasies has been the dominant one in the press lately. It's thoroughly Lynchian, and it does makes a modicum of sense. But to me, there's something about that hypothesis that feels too easy, too incomplete. Especially when you glibly pronounce, "We're not sure about the box."
Here's my theory. The blue box is the portal between two parallel universes -- a motif not without precedent in Lynch's oeuvre (remember the evil Agent Cooper in "Twin Peaks"?). Although the box represents the only direct access to each universe, each character retains vestigial memories of their parallel universe counterpart. Betty and Rita, for instance, fall into such an easy, trusting friendship since they are each subconsciously familiar with Diane and Camilla's relationship. Rita recalls the name "Diane Selwyn." Adam even seems to recognize Betty at the audition.
For me, the linchpin of the movie is that audition scene. The cowboy and the mobsters are omniscient, otherworldly characters intent, for reasons I can only speculate, on reversing the universes. They don't care about Adam's movie so much as they need him to send a subliminal message -- "This is the girl" -- to Betty. As soon as he utters it, Betty recognizes the blonde Camilla on stage as "the girl" who kissed the brunette Camilla at Adam's party, and she suddenly runs off. By the time she finds Diane's corpse, the discovery of the box is inevitable; through various memory triggers, Betty becomes persistently drawn toward "the other side."
Both the bedroom scene and the Club Silencio scene take place in a realm between the two universes. Betty and Rita channel the sexual attraction between Diane and Camilla, but keep the passion dreamy and idealized, in accordance with how we've seen them thus far. Crying in the theater, their identities finally collapse as easily as Rebekah del Rio's voice dissolves into tape recording. They have nowhere to go but sideways.
Here, we may notice the movie is constructed, as with "Lost Highway," like a Möebius strip. In one of the last scenes of the movie, we see Diane arranging a murder with the hitman -- the same murder that goes awry in the opening scene. And there is a peculiar symmetry in the old people's appearances. In the final moments, they're a downright demonic presence appearing to end Diane's life; flip back to the beginning, and they're a kindly couple helping Betty start hers. If you doubt that the blue box is a portal, remember that the old people appear to literally escape from the box in miniaturized form before attacking Diane.
My final take is this. Suppose Camilla really dies in the car crash, but the cosmic force of Diane's simultaneous death is enough to resurrect the two as Rita and Betty, innocent new Angelenos. But suppose the powers that be, such as the cowboy, are so alarmed by this cosmic disruption that they will do everything they can to restore the women's original identities. Suppose the story then keeps circling on and on, eternally.
-- John Cunningham
The homeless man as the custodian of the blue box has its parallel in Lil, the women dressed in red near the beginning of "Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me". Attached to her dress is a blue rose. The murder investigation that drives the plot is described as a "blue rose case" by detectives, but when one of them asks for a more concrete meaning, he is told that it can't be divulged.
Like the homeless man, Lil never speaks but is an obvious signifier of something that cannot be verbalized into meaning. (As the homeless man is literally black, Lil is literally red, her hair matching the color of her dress and shoes. A single field of pure color makes each figure uncanny; they appear human but are finally unknowable.) As with the blue box, Lynch often fills the screen with the blue rose, attached to no character's point of view and given a mysterious life of its own. For Lynch, the color blue in general seems to hold unknown depths; it's something that can be seen but not fully understood. There are the obvious examples of Dorothy Vallens' blue robe that fills the screen in the title credits of "Blue Velvet" (Dennis Hopper's fetishistic attachment to it is never explained) and the intense blue light that floods over Laura Palmer and Agent Cooper in the Red Room from an unknown source at the enigmatic conclusion of "FWWM."
-- Darrin Sullivan
One thing I might mention that in the last part of the film, the waitress at Winky's is named "Betty," which raises the question of whose dream the first part of the film represents. Yes, it makes sense that it is Diane's fantasy, a dream that she awakes from after the box is unlocked. But the camera deliberately fixes on Betty's nametag (in the scene where Diane is arranging the hit), which makes me think of two related possibilities:
That Diane has taken that name for her character in the first part of the film in the way we take everything we experience as material for our dreams. Or, that the first part of the movie is actually Betty the waitress's dream. How many aspiring actresses go to Hollywood only to end up waiting tables? The waitress could be another casualty of the system. At her own big audition, she didn't turn into a seductress as "Betty" did -- she didn't give that extra ten percent. She didn't pander to the desires of the leading man (and Chad Everett was sleazy), so she ended up shlepping coffee and hash browns, dreaming of what might have been. And she is the only character in the film that would have known about the Monster/Homeless Guy in the alley behind the place.
Does this make sense? I've only seen it once (so far), but I think you'll get the point.
-- Rob Codey
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