The PANY Bulletin

Psychoanalytic Association of New York
Vol. 40, #2, Summer 2002

Film Review
A Psychoanalytic Tour of Mulholland Drive
by Herbert H. Stein, M.D.

How does a film evoke our emotions? I found my own emotions buffeted about as I watched David Lynch’s recent film, Mulholland Drive. It can be a difficult film to watch. It appears to be a suspense/mystery story about two young women in danger. But there are strange intrusions into that story that are at times macabre. About three quarters of the way in, the plot dissolves, the characters change identity, and we experience a melange of scenes that suggest a very different story. Interestingly, amidst the confusion, I found myself responding with shifting affects, anxiety for the most of the first part of the film, with a strong feeling of sadness at the end.

Mulholland Drive is structured much like a dream, except that there is no clear identification of a dreamer. It is like a dream experienced rather than a dream remembered. There is no waking up, no available remembered day residue. A film and a dream have something important in common. They each must maintain our involvement. Freud pointed out over 100 years ago that dreams hold our attention, in part, with a coherent story created through what he called “secondary revision.” Films routinely use coherent plots to prevent our “waking up” to our personal worries and desires. A film that has dream-like structure may lose this hook. Mulholland Drive maintains the interest of the susceptible viewer, like myself, with a suspenseful plot, but it is disturbed by intrusions. It is as if we are watching a conflict in which a defended surface is used to ward off some repressed, disturbing material.

That surface is made up of two parallel plots. We shift back and forth between them, with occasional points of overlap. The main plot concerns a young woman who is amnesic after a terrible car crash, but with a sense of a terrible mystery and a need for her to hide from sinister pursuers. She is befriended by another young woman, who tries to help her recover her memory. The secondary plot concerns a young male film director who is being coerced by gangsters—the same ones apparently pursuing the young woman—into choosing a particular actress for the lead role in his next film. The women are presented more sympathetically than the film director. We experience their story as drama, whereas the secondary story sometimes has a slapstick quality.

In a dream, Freud has told us, affects that come from what is being repressed may be defensively incorporated into the surface of the dream. Each of these stories conveys a sense of imminent danger, of dark, violent forces. We are made to feel that these feelings have to do with danger within the story, but there are also brief intrusions that suggest the danger lies outside the storyline. The film creates an illusion of affects that cannot be repressed, but can be temporarily separated from their repressed source.

The film’s opening has little meaning for us when we see it, but will later prove to be part of what is being kept hidden from us. We see teenagers jitterbugging, with a young woman and an elderly couple, all three smiling, superimposed. At the end of this “scene” we hear cheering. We move to a closeup of something at first unintelligible, but which resolves into an unmade bed with pink sheets and pillowcase. We do not necessarily expect to understand the context of the opening of a film, but a subtle seed has been planted in our minds that there is more to this story than meets the eye.

Now, we enter the main plot. As the credits roll, it is night and we see a car moving slowly up Los Angeles’s Mulholland Drive. The music is dirge-like, with occasional minor chords that add tension. In the back seat of the car is an attractive brunette in evening dress. She becomes distressed (and we sense danger), saying to the two men in the front seat, “What are you doing? We don’t stop here.” The driver turns, points a gun at her, and tells her to get out of the car, while the other man gets out to open her door. We can sense her helplessness, easily empathize with her fear of impending death. But, we see two cars of screaming adolescents driving wildly down the drive side by side. Their loud noise makes them seem disconnected from the quiet of the car with the young woman. Suddenly the people in the car hear them and we see the woman staring into their bright lights moments before impact. She is saved from one fate and thrown into another. Once again, we have a sense of approaching, inevitable death, this time with blinding speed. We are barely into the film, but already we are aware of the dominant affect, fear, and of an overwhelming imminent danger.

That sense of tension continues as we see the brunette stumble out of the car. The teens’ car is in flames and she appears to be the only survivor, barely scratched, with a streak of blood trailing from the side of her mouth. This may stretch the viewer’s credulity, but most likely tension and curiosity will keep us engaged as we watch her climb down the hill into the city below, momentarily blinded again by the flash of headlights, her eyes showing fear. She hides behind a hedge overnight and in the morning sneaks into a house whose owner, a middle aged woman, is leaving for a trip. We believe that we are watching the beginning of a mystery/suspense drama, but in fact we are being drawn into the “secondary revision,” the creation of a coherent story that incorporates the underlying fear and tension.

At this point we get the first break in the plot, the first eruption of the “repressed.” We are in a “Winkie’s” Diner where two men are talking over breakfast. As they talk, we realize that they have no obvious connection to the dark haired woman. One man explains that he has come to this particular Winkie’s because he has had a recurring nightmare about it.

“... I’m in here, but it’s not day or night, it’s kind of half night, you know? ... And I’m scared like I can’t tell you. [We have experienced fear, now we hear about it.] Of all people, you’re standing right over there (looks back) by that counter. You’re in both dreams, and you’re scared. I get more frightened when I see how afraid you are. Then I realize what it is. There’s a man. In back of this place. He’s the one that’s doing it. I can see his face. I hope that I never see that face ever outside the dream. That’s it.”

“So, you came to see if he’s out there.”

“To get rid of that God-awful feeling.”

The other man goes to pay the check and the dreamer looks back at him at the counter, seeming to realize that it is recreating the dream. They walk slowly around to the back of the diner. There is a wall blocking their view. Suddenly, with a rush of noise a grotesque man with a soot covered face, a monster, comes out from behind the wall. The dreamer screams in fright and falls unconscious to the ground, his friend bending over him. He appears to be dead.

This jarring scene comes completely out of context. It breaks through the defensive structure of the story. It is a dream within a dream which then becomes a reality. As viewers, we are disoriented and then shocked. We are no longer sure what kind of film we are watching. It is as if a horror movie has intruded into a suspense thriller. It is the film version of conflict. Something is breaking into the story, a warning of danger. It tells us that a dream may be more than a dream, that the dangers we dream about may be real.

Just as suddenly, we are back into the main storyline, the defenses rising to cover over our distress. We see the young woman sleeping. The scene shifts to a series of men making phone calls. An older man gives the message, “The girl is still missing.” This is relayed to another man who makes a call to a phone sitting beside an ashtray with a cigarette butt in it. That phone keeps ringing as we move to the next scene. Someone is looking for her. We are back in the story. The fear and danger, which momentarily seemed to be coming from outside the plot, is again incorporated into it.

At this point, there is a shift in voice, to use Gray’s expression for a subtle affective shift that suggests a defensive covering over. We see a young blonde woman, Betty and an older woman, Irene, coming out of the airport wearing big smiles. The musical chords suggest something inspiring. The old woman and her elderly male companion say goodbye to Betty and wish her well on her hoped for acting career. These are the three people who had been superimposed over the jitterbuggers in the opening scene. Betty’s response to Irene’s wishes to see her on the screen is innocent and a bit archaic, “Won’t that be the day.” There is a moment of anxiety breaking through when Betty thinks her bags are missing, but they are with a cab driver ready to take her to her aunt’s home. We see the elderly couple in their own cab wearing exagerrated smiles and looking unnaturally happy.

Betty is innocent, wide-eyed, free of guile and except for her curiosity and ambitions to be an actress, devoid of any signs of sex or aggression. She is a defensive construct, in contrast to the mysterious brunette, who appears to be mixed up with something sinister.

Of course, Betty is heading to the very home that the brunette (Rita) has sneaked into. Betty is let in by the manager of the complex, Coco, who is upbeat and friendly except for a sudden outburst of rage at dog poop she finds in her courtyard, a subtle breakthrough of aggression. As Betty, now alone, walks through her aunt’s apartment, we are made to feel some tension in anticipation of her finding Rita. She finds her naked behind the frosted glass of the shower door.

Rita is suffering from amnesia. She takes her name from a Rita Hayworth poster she sees. Betty is innocently accepting, telling Rita about her plans to be an actress. She becomes concerned about Rita and wants to call a doctor, but Rita does not want to be discovered. Through her amnesia, she maintains a sense of danger. We see Rita fall asleep and then move to another plot intrusion, the beginning of the secondary plot.

It involves a young film director, Adam Kesher, whom we see on a very bad day. In a scene that evokes a sense of strangeness and fear, two Italian gangsters show him a picture of a girl named Camilla Rhodes and tell him that she will be the star of the film he is making. When he refuses, they tell him he is no longer in control of the film. He smashes their car window with a golf club before driving off, but soon finds they are making good on their threat. They “shut everything down.” His studio is closed down. This has been ordered by the same elderly gangster who made the call about the missing girl. This is the only obvious connection between the two plots. Nevertheless, we move back and forth between them, waiting to see how they will relate to one another. Each story maintains the sense of lurking danger.

A gunmen kills someone who appears to be his friend in an attempt to get hold of a book of phone numbers (presumably looking for the missing girl), but he accidentally shoots a strange woman in the next room and then has to shoot a janitor who is a witness in a scene that is both gruesomely violent and slapstick comedy. It is another strange intrusion in tone, a mix of open violence and defensive humor.

As they try to figure out Rita’s identity, Rita and Betty find a large amount of money in Rita’s pocket book along with a strange looking blue key. Rita is frightened and feels she needs to hide and to keep her identity from the police. We see the gunman outside the Winkie’s Diner, asking about a brunette. Rita remembers that she was in an accident and recalls, “Mulholland Drive,” but does not know anything else, including her name. Betty is sympathetic and somewhat excited by the mystery.

Adam’s bad day continues. He goes home to find his wife in bed with a muscle bound pool cleaner, who throws him out after he pours paint over his wife's jewelry.

Rita and Betty go to the same Winkie’s Diner to call the police from a phone booth for information about an accident on Mulholland Drive. Rita sees the name “Diane” on the I.D. badge of the waitress at the diner and remembers the name “Diane Selwyn.”

The “Winkie’s Diner” that was so important a part of the shockingly intrusive “horror” scene keeps returning as a site of the action. Although we are safely lulled by the moving plot lines, we can detect derivatives of the repressed material.

A very large man comes looking for Adam at his home, easily knocking out the pool cleaner and the wife when they try to get him out. Adam stays at a dirty hotel, but is told they have tracked him there to let him know his credit has been cut off. Finally, he is directed to meet a man called “the cowboy” in the mountains. The characters in this second plot seem to be grotesque exagerrations, the gangsters more powerful and malevolent than life, the violence with an exagerrated slapstick style.

Nevertheless, we are again comfortably absorbed in these competing plots, drawn into a double mystery, when there is another intrusion, a break in the “dream.” A strange older woman wearing a hood comes to Betty’s door at night. For me, the hood gave her an other worldly appearance, not unlike the monster behind the Winkie’s. She says to Betty in a slow drawn out style of speech,

“Someone’s in trouble. Who are you? What are you doing in Ruth’s apartment?”

“She’s letting me stay here. I’m her niece. My name’s Betty.”

“No, it’s not!. That’s not what she said. Someone is in trouble. Something bad is happening.”

Although it is not as jarring and is better contained by the plot than the scene with the monster behind the diner, we once again get a message that things are not what they seem. The strange woman is a kind of “seer.” Her denial of Betty’s name appears to be a challenge to the story we are being told, a breaking through of something past the defensive structure. It is partly smoothed over as Coco comes to the door and explains that the intruder is another resident in the complex with strange ideas, and lightens the mood by giving Betty faxed pages of a scene for an audition the next day. But even then there is a last warning by “Louise,” “No, she said it was someone else who was in trouble,” as Coco pulls her away. As Betty comes back into the room, Rita has a scared, far off stare, leaving us with a greater sense of something ominous, terrible lurking, something beyond the ordinary suspense plot.

The sense of something odd, unreal, continues in the next scene. Adam drives to a deserted corral in the mountains where a flickering light signals the arrival of “The Cowboy.” The Cowboy, speaking in riddles, finally orders him to go back to casting the lead role.

“Audition many girls for the part. When you see the girl that was shown to you earlier today, you will say, ‘This is the girl.’ The rest of the cast can stay, that’s up to you, but that lead girl is not up to you. Now, you will see me one more time if you do good, you’ll see me two more times if you do bad. Good night.”

We are still within the plot-lines, but with a growing sense that something strange is happening, that the story may be about something different than what we’d expected, that it may take strange turns. The rupture in the plot line continues into the next scene, but momentarily and covered over well enough so that we may only see in retrospect that there has been an eruption of repressed material.

Betty: “You’re still here?”

Rita: “I came back. I thought that’s what you wanted.”

Betty: “Nobody wants you here.”

The camera pulls back and we see that Rita is reading from a script. They are rehearsing a scene, a scene in which Betty brandishes a kitchen knife and says, “Get out of here before ... before I kill you, “ and ends with her saying, “I hate you. I hate us both.”

The film to this point has been replete with violence and aggression, but never between the two women, and particularly never coming from the fresh faced Betty. The film disguises this breakthrough of a drive derivative as play acting. It is much the same as a dream incorporates the sound of an alarm clock or phone into its defensive structure. The same technique continues into the next scene in which Betty goes for her audition and plays the scene with an oozily charming older man. Betty is telling him to go away, but their actions belie the words as they embrace and kiss. She is unsuccessfully warding off her sexual desire, and again in a partly disguised way bringing a drive derivative to the surface, the first appearance of overt sexuality.

It is after this scene that the two plots intersect momentarily. Betty is taken from the audition by an actor's agent and her female assistant to the set where Adam is choosing “Camilla Rhodes” for the lead role. (In retrospect we might or might not look at her being whisked away from the audition by these two women as a possible subtle breakthrough of homosexual material.) He and Betty stare at each other for a moment across the room, but then Betty runs out to join Rita to look for Diane Selwyn, the name Rita had remembered after seeing the waitress’s ID.

They had found an address in the phone book.When they go to it, Rita and Betty see ominous looking cars outside the complex, possibly men waiting to find Rita. Betty decides to enter Diane’s cottage through a window when there is no answer to their knock on the door. Rita is frightened, and we are apprehensive with her, but Betty persists. They enter the cottage to discover a terrible odor. Rita starts to scream when they find the woman’s decomposing body on the bed, Betty trying to muffle Rita’s screams with her hands.

We realize only later that the defensive structure has been breaking down with each little revealing element—the names, Diane Selwyn and Camilla Rhodes, the Winkie’s diner, the body that the two women discover. After that discovery, Betty and Rita return to Betty’s aunt’s home. Rita decides that she must change her identity. She starts to cut her hair, but Betty says she knows what she is doing and offers to help. We next see Rita with blonde hair much like Betty’s. The women have become sisters, twins. Betty, still seemingly innocently, invites Rita to sleep in the bed with her instead of on the couch in the other room. Rita takes off her blonde wig and enters the bed naked. She thanks Betty and they kiss, then begin to make love. The entire structure of the film has changed with this overt eruption of sexuality.

Rita opens her eyes in the middle of the night, reciting repeatedly in a trance-like way, “Silencio! No hay banda! No hay orquesta!” She takes Betty to a strange little theater in which the the master of ceremonies repeats these words. In a dramatic way, he is telling the audience that what they see and hear is an illusion. The music they hear is from a tape, the performers only going through the motions. This is a major undermining of the film’s defensive structure. We are being told to distrust the surface.

At one point, there is thunder and Betty begins to shake. The performance ends with a woman with tears painted on her face singing a sad song in a foreign language. She falls to the floor, not unlike the man behind the Winkie’s, while the singer goes on. Rita and Betty are weeping. Betty then finds a blue box in her pocketbook that appears to match the key they’d found earlier.

They take it home. Betty puts it down on the bed. Rita goes to get the key from the closet. When she turns around, Betty is gone. She calls for her and looks for her, then takes the key to open the box. As she opens it, we are swallowed up into its blue interior and the box falls to the floor. We see Betty’s aunt looking into the room as if she’d heard something, but no one is there. It is as if the two women have disappeared.

With this shift, the mood has changed. We begin to feel not so much fear as bewilderment and sadness. Where are the young women with whom we’d become identified? They are gone, at least as we have known them. Brenner has differentiated anxiety and its related affects from depression and its related affects by their temporality. Anxiety has to do with what will happen, depression with what has happened. The film to this point has been constructed to give us a sense of something imminent, something terrible, something to be avoided. In the second part of the film, we are made to feel that that terrible event has already happened, that the sense of imminent danger was an illusion (“There is no band, there is no orchestra”), that what we have been warding off is the awareness of a tragedy that has occurred.

Now, our need to have the divergent pieces come together is gratified. They could not be put together in the first part of the film because their interconnectedness was part of what we are made to feel was being warded off. The appearance of sexuality between the women is a catalyst. This sexual attraction, it will develop, is the prime mover that has been pushing the action. Now that it has broken through the repression, our “dream” changes from an anxiety dream to a true nightmare.

Now, we see “Betty” in Diane Selwyn’s cottage, except that she is not Betty but Diane. She looks haggard and depressed, no fresh-faced innocence. We see her making love to “Rita” who is now Camilla Rhodes. In the film’s structure, this makes sense to us because we wondered how the name, "Camilla Rhodes" fit into the plot. Diane is jealous of Camilla’s relationship with Adam. In retrospect, we can see that Adam's very bad day, all the violence directed at him, was a breakthrough of aggression. Now, we see Diane/Betty in the back of the limo driving up Mulholland Drive. She is anxious. She repeats Rita/Camila’s opening line, “We weren’t supposed to stop here,” but this time the driver turns to say, “It’s a surprise.” Camilla meets her and takes her to a party where Adam is the host. Coco is now his mother. We see some of the other characters from the earlier plot. The cowboy walks by in the background. The original Camilla Rhodes (the girl in the picture) gives Camilla a kiss, making Diane jealous. Diane tells her story, that she won a jitterbug contest in Ontario (giving us a context for the opening scene) and used the money to come to LA where her aunt tried to help her with an acting career. She met Camilla on the set of a TV show in which Camilla was the star and Diane jealous. Camilla and Asher announce that they will be married.

The film still has a surreal dreamlike quality as we move from scene to scene, but these scenes bring enough together from the earlier plot to give us a sense of a new story, a “day residue” if you will. We see an ashtray by a ringing phone, but now the call summons Diane to Camilla's party. The film-makers have used our need for structure, our penchant for making things fit so that we now grab onto this new story in which the various pieces fit together with a sense that it is closer to “reality” than the earlier one. We see Diane in the Winkie’s diner seated at the same booth that we’ve seen twice before (with the man who had the dream and his friend and with Betty and Rita). Now, she is with the hit man, obviously paying him to kill someone. She gives him the picture of Camilla Rhodes (we don’t actually see the picture) making sense of the earlier scenes in which the picture was shown with the same name. He tells her she’ll know “it” was done when she finds a blue key (which he shows her) in the place he’d told her. At one point we see the blue key in Diane’s apartment. Now, the waitress’s name tag says, “Betty” and the man with the dream is at the register looking back at Diane in the booth.

Although it is told in a somewhat confusing manner, our need for fit and closure pushes us to accept this new story of jealousy and revenge between two women. To the extent that we have been carried by the earlier story, we are now ready to be sad to find that the Betty and Rita we knew do not exist. They have been replaced by two women locked in a tragedy of jealousy. The formerly innocent Betty/Diane has paid to have Rita/Camilla killed in a fit of depression and sexual jealousy. The monster behind the diner, with whatever symbolism of death or darkness that he carries, is also a vehicle to displace Diane's aggression. We can only be saddened by our awareness of this loss of innocence.

We watch helplessly as a tormented Diane is driven by laughing, screaming images of the elderly couple (parents? grandparents?) to take a gun from her bedside drawer and shoot herself, presumably to leave the corpse we’d seen earlier. (I was reminded of the loud noise and blinding light of the car crash.) The images fade to the jitterbug contest and the beautiful, innocent Betty that we can no longer believe in superimposed over the LA skyline from Mulholland Drive. With both Camilla and Diane seemingly dead, we are left with an empty feeling, a sense of irretrievable loss that we cannot seem to fully explain.

David Lynch and his collaborators have made a film that for some can successfully reproduce features of defense, drive and affect to create a sense of our having had a nightmare, driven by fear and culminating in sadness and a deep sense of loss. In a way that could probably not have been accomplished with a straightforward story of jealousy and betrayal, we have been led to a feeling of having tried to ward off a terrible truth which ultimately overwhelms us with a sense of grief and distress.

We are left with a dream without a dreamer, the two central characters apparently dead. We can invent all kinds of scenarios to explain it: it is the dream of one of the women, an expression of homicidal/suicidal fantasy; it is Adam's dream, the dream of the man in the Winkie's, the director's dream etc. The answer, of course, is that it is not a dream. It is a film. We react to it with our own fantasies, wishes and speculations, adding to it, perhaps, in our minds. That is the artistry.