Diane's fantasy is a number of things. It's obviously a dream of a world in which her relationship with Camilla was different -- a place where Camilla loves her and is dependent on her. But it's also a requiem for her lost career, and arguably an elegy to a lost Hollywood as well. But Lynch seems rather ambivalent about the lost Hollywood, which by analogy undermines Diane's dream vision, too.
Lynch may be telling us that this is the dream we all share when we watch Hollywood movies, and reminding us at the same time that it is a dream -- that it is wishful, and says a lot about the dreamer. The movie's most problematic conceit is Diane's hallucination of the mad powers behind the scenes in Hollywood. Are those imaginings the incoherent ones of a cockeyed youngster turned sour by failure? Or the unvarnished truth of someone who'd seen it happen, up close and personal?
Whaddaya mean, "We don't know about the box"?
Readers give their views -- from the persuasive to the far-fetched -- on "Mulholland Drive"
Indeed, Diane herself is someone who deals with personal rejection by hiring an assassin. Lynch does a great job intertwining the dicier sides of Diane's character with a wider critique of Hollywood as a business and the complex relationship between Hollywood as dream factory and its audience. It's possible Lynch sees consumers of popular Hollywood fare as unable to work out their grievances in their real lives, so they resort to fantasies of revenge.
What's the time period of the movie?
It's apparently the present, but the dream part of the film is an eras-spanning romanticized netherworld of ivied Hollywood apartment buildings, aging stars and picture-perfect period re-creations on busy sound stages. (In "Blue Velvet," too, Lynch pulled off the trick of creating a modern setting that seemed somehow to have previous decades still hanging heavily in the air.) The women ride around in cabs a lot, an anachronistic touch. But the thuggish hit men and crack-addled hookers wandering around are up to the minute. Overall it's typical of the fine line Lynch walks between the fantastic and the real, all set against a malevolently filmed skyline, harsh parking lots and the endless expanse of light that is L.A. from the hills at night.
Speaking of which, despite a few night scenes, this is one of those odd noirs in which terror lives in broad daylight.
OK, so what about the box?
We don't know about the box.
What about the monster?
The monster, who hides behind the diner where Diane contracted the killing, seems to be the demon Diane metaphorically begins dealing with when she decides to have her girlfriend knocked off. In the end we see he's just a homeless man, a reminder of the grimy Hollywood Diane came to know after her jitterbug-queen optimism got beaten out of her. And, OK -- he's also the keeper of the box, the symbol of Camilla's death and perhaps reality contained (sort of like a movie). Once it's unlocked, Diane has to return to the physical world and accept that she's done an inhuman thing.
Readers see a lot more in the box: Several found an amusing -- and hard to argue with -- sexual connotation. (Maybe that's why the hitman laughs when Diane asks what the key opens.) Others make a case that it's a television. The multiplicity of meanings fits in well with the film's texture.
The blue key is supposed to mean Camilla's dead; but we see her alive after that.
After the fairly straightforward narrative of the film's first two-thirds, the last part of the movie is a staccato sequence of flashbacks. Diane sees the key, and understands that the deed is done. (She probably understands that she's going to pay a price for it, too; her neighbor even tells her that "Those detectives were here again.") She starts reflecting on how she came to be in this position, from Camilla's coolness to her flirtations with Adam to the unforgivable humiliations at the party. Diane sees that she's been reduced to an object of pity and contempt by even someone like Coco. That takes her into the downward spiral that produces the hallucinogenic first part of the movie and then her decision to shoot herself.
Let's talk about the 50 grand. Diane gives it to the hit man; why is Rita carrying it?
This is a good example of Lynch's dream logic. Diane fetishizes it, and it turns up in an odd place in the dream. Same with the mysterious blue key. The hit man says he'll leave a normal blue key in her apartment when the deed is done. This transmogrifies in her fantasy into that futuristic one. Both are also necessary to Diane's dream mélange of film clichés, particularly noir film clichés (and the director's deconstruction of the genre as well: "A dame appears out of nowhere with 50 grand in her purse and a mysterious key.")
Watch the movie carefully and you see that many characters and props in the last third of the film are picked up in Diane's mind and repurposed for the dream: The hit man's black book; her grouchy neighbor; the waitress at the diner; the director's mom; the director who didn't give her the movie part; the woman Camilla kisses at the party; the cowboy; even her aunt.