Jay R. Lentzner and Donald R. Ross 101
American Imago, Vol. 62, No. 1, 101–123. © 2005 by The Johns Hopkins University Press
101
JAY R. LENTZNER AND DONALD R. ROSS
The Dreams That Blister Sleep:
Latent Content and Cinematic Form in
Mulholland Drive
“The dreams that blister sleep boil up from the basic
magic ring of myth.”
—Joseph Campbell,
The Hero with a Thousand Faces
Introduction
Few motion pictures have bedazzled, confounded, or
provoked viewers more than David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive
(2001). Dismissed by Rex Reed (2001) as “a load of moronic
and incoherent garbage,” but hailed by Philip Lopate (2001)
as “compelling, engrossing, well-directed, sexy, moving, beautiful
to look at, mysterious and satisfying,” it has garnered both
some of the harshest epithets and some of the most lavish
praise in recent cinematic history.1
Never intended as a theatrical feature, Mulholland Drive
was conceived as a television pilot, but rejected by network
executives after its first screening as “too dark and too weird”
(McGovern 2001). For more than a year the project languished
on the brink of abandonment, but it was ultimately
acquired by a French production company that enjoined
Lynch to transform it into a feature motion picture. The
director recalls having had no idea how to proceed. Then, in a
thunderclap of epiphany, inspiration struck him: “it was a most
beautiful experience. . . . Everything was seen from a different
angle. Everything was then restructured, and we did additional
shooting. Now, looking back, I see that [the film] always
wanted to be this way” (Macaulay 2001).
102 The Dreams That Blister Sleep
Lynch’s own coyness and teasing refusal to reveal much
about the film has only added to the confusion surrounding
his masterpiece. “Don’t look for answers in David Lynch’s
Mulholland Drive,” writes Owen Gleiberman (2001), who describes
the plot as “a pretzel that never connects with itself.” “If
David Lynch’s goal is to baffle,” adds Jean Tang (2001),
“Mulholland Drive has done him proud.” Kenneth Turan (2001)
dubbed the movie “a mystery that doesn’t want to be solved,”
while Glenn Kenny (2001) quipped: “You laugh, you wince,
you fall in love, you hold your breath, you cringe, you mutter
‘Oh my God.’ . . . The only problem is exactly what the hell
happens in this movie?”
Not every critic, however, has found the movie to be so
maddeningly incomprehensible. Some have argued that it
makes sense, especially when viewed from the perspective of a
dream. “The movie proceeds not with logic but with dream
logic,” wrote one critic (Allen 2001), while a second described
it as being “constructed entirely in the language of dreams”
(Taubin 2001). Others have concurred that the dreamlike
design provides a gateway into the meaning of the film, but
have found this pathway to be too difficult to follow.
This paper is based on the premise that the key to
understanding Mulholland Drive begins with the recognition
that its diabolically intricate form is a dream that obeys the
rules set forth a century earlier in Sigmund Freud’s The
Interpretation of Dreams (1900). While the nineteenth-century
scientific community largely viewed dreams as nonpsychological
phenomena, Freud revolutionized our understanding by finding
them to be purposeful mental communications linked to
the happenings of waking life. His Interpretation of Dreams
stands for the proposition that while dreams often appear to
be inexplicable and bizarre, they resonate with unconscious
meaning. Despite Lynch’s disavowals of interest in psychoanalytic
theory, the convergence between Mulholland Drive and
Freud’s royal road to the unconscious should not be greatly
surprising.2 Indeed, beholding this movie through the lens of
Freudian dream-analysis throws it into sharper focus by revealing
much of its hidden psychological complexity.
Jay R. Lentzner and Donald R. Ross 103
The Movie as a Dream
From the first moment that the lights go down, Mulholland
Drive projects an otherworldly quality, signaling the viewer’s
passage into a Lynchian dreamscape. As Frederick Lane, a
psychiatrist who was interviewed by Tang (2001) for her piece
in Salon, has argued, the film divides into two parts: Part A
comprises the first two hours and represents the manifest
dream content as experienced by the dreamer, Diane Selwyn
(Naomi Watts), while Part B spans the final twenty minutes and
presents fragments of her day-residue along with both her preand
post-dream waking reveries, which are the keys to unlocking
the dream’s latent content.
Diane Selwyn’s dream in Part A follows the murder of
Camilla Rhodes (Laura Elena Harring) and represents her
deeply conflicted wishes in its aftermath. From what can be
pieced together from the Part B day-residue, Diane and
Camilla began as two young, ambitious actresses, each of a
different Hollywood type, in search of fame and stardom.
Along the way they met, formed a deep romantic attachment,
which then came unraveled once Camilla’s career began to
soar. This occurred when she was discovered by the hot young
director, Adam Kesher (Justin Theroux), who cast her as the
new leading lady both in and out of his picture. Finally, at a
dinner party at Adam’s Mulholland Drive home celebrating
Camilla’s triumphs, Diane is not only brought face to face with
her former lover’s betrayal but is also forced to acknowledge
her own static professional career. The sting of Camilla’s
sexual rejection comes as Diane witnesses her brazenly kissing
another blonde-haired woman and Adam unexpectedly announces
his and Camilla’s wedding plans. At that moment,
Diane’s envy and jealousy turn murderous. Not long after, in a
Sunset Boulevard diner, she contracts with a hit man to kill
Camilla. When he asks whether she truly wishes to go forward,
she replies, “More than anything in this world!”
Diane’s dream, however, reveals a far more complicated
mental state. Much of its meaning concerns her desire to undo
and displace responsibility for Camilla’s killing. On a deeper
level, the dream also reflects Diane’s conflicted feelings toward
104 The Dreams That Blister Sleep
her parents, who become mocking persecutory objects when
she cannot disguise her failures.
Mulholland Drive starts with colorful flashes from an adolescent
dance contest with the superimposed photographic
image of a triumphant Diane Selwyn standing alongside an
aging couple, who smile back at her approvingly. This screen
memory quickly dissolves into a current dream-fantasy after a
brief glimpse of Diane’s unmade bed, which is at the center of
the ensuing drama. Ominously, the camera snakes along the
path of the rumpled, dirty linen, then disappears into the
darkness of her crimson pillow. At that point, the lights go out
and both the movie (Part A) and the dream begin.
The main plot of the dream concerns the adventures of
Diane’s blonde, plucky alter-ego, Betty Elms, who, like the
dreamer herself, comes to Hollywood to pursue her fantasy of
becoming a famous actress. The dream also involves the
misadventures of the glamorous, mysterious Rita, who opens
the drama by averting death twice over, narrowly avoiding both
a late-night contract killing and a tumultuous high-speed car
crash along the winding turns of Mulholland Drive. Dazed,
amnestic, and yet aware of the danger that surrounds her, the
raven-haired beauty flees the accident scene and takes refuge
in a nearby Hollywood apartment where the newly arrived
Betty finds her naked and cowering in the shower. The panicstricken
woman adopts the name Rita, based on an off-hand
glance at a framed movie poster featuring the sultry femme
fatale Rita Hayworth, whom she sees reflected back in the
mirror along with her own image. Initially, Rita tries to escape
from her troubles by retreating into sleep, but when this is
unsuccessful she woodenly helps Betty rehearse for her approaching
screen test. Betty’s audition turns out to be an
unexpected tour de force, with her raw sexuality breaking forth
to reveal a smoldering talent. However, before the full impact
of this triumph can be registered, Betty is whisked away by a
maternal casting agent to see a director “who is ahead of all the
rest” with a project that, it is promised, she “will kill for.”
The director turns out to be the brash and arrogant Adam
Kesher, who in an earlier subplot of the dream is summoned to
the office of the head of studio productions and, under an
ultimatum from nefarious business interests, ordered to accept
Jay R. Lentzner and Donald R. Ross 105
the unknown actress, Camilla Rhodes, as the lead in his
sought-after film. Adam initially refuses, but following a Joblike
day of hell in which he appears to lose everything—his
wife, fortune, and control of the movie—and which culminates
with a starlit rendezvous with the venomous Cowboy (Lafayette
Montgomery), the recalcitrant but chastened director finally
comes around.
Betty arrives at Adam’s sound stage just as the audition of
the inauspicious Camilla is taking place. Betty’s appearance
causes Adam to become momentarily distracted, and their
exchange of glances carries with it such electricity as to
overshadow Camilla with its glow of movie magic. Reluctantly,
Adam jerks himself back into the moment and carries out the
Cowboy’s instructions by awarding Camilla the star-making
part. Another exchange of soulful looks passes between him
and Betty, who then, with a Cinderella-like turn, bolts from the
movie set without looking back. Adam’s eyes follow her vaporous
trajectory with abject and profound yearning.
At this point, the dream also changes course as the highspirited
Betty rejoins Rita to search for her identity. The quest
leads this pair into the heart of darkness, which in this case
turns out to be the bedroom of Diane Selwyn’s apartment,
where they discover the dreamer’s rotting corpse lying across
her bed. It also brings the two women increasingly closer
together both physically and emotionally. With the aid of a
blonde wig, Betty helps Rita to disguise herself, giving her a
look not unlike her own. Later that night, the two women end
up sharing the same bed, and their lovemaking unleashes in
Betty a torrent of passion. Their subsequent sleep is interrupted
by Rita’s repetition of the word “Silencio” and by her
ominous sense that things are awry. Rita prevails on Betty to
accompany her downtown to the Club Silencio, an eerie,
dilapidated theater, where they attend a supernatural performance
in the early hours of the morning. The hallucinatory
interior of the club, where reality and fantasy become impossible
to distinguish, is like a dream itself. The women’s presence
here leads to the discovery of a mysterious blue box, the
opening of which causes them to disappear. As the camera
makes its way into the recesses of this unfathomable blue
106 The Dreams That Blister Sleep
receptacle, the screen is once again thrown into darkness and
the dream comes to an end.
Part B of Mulholland Drive begins with the same Cowboy
who previously had delivered the midnight wake-up call to
Adam now summoning Diane from her nocturnal slumber.
Diane awakens with an unshakeable depression and haunted
by Camilla’s murder. She, like Rita in her dream, was hoping
that sleep might afford her some relief, but instead arises from
her bed looking dispirited and haggard. With the police
knocking on her outer door, she appears trapped in her dreary
apartment, haunted by Camilla’s death, as confirmed by the
blue key lying on her table. A series of flashbacks of sexual
abandon with Camilla overtake her. This joyful reverie quickly
gives way to images of abandonment and loneliness that Diane
seeks to counteract by self-soothing through masturbation. It is
at this point that she seems forced to recall the disquieting
events leading to Camilla’s murder.
Mulholland Drive can therefore be summed up as the
harrowing tale of a young woman’s descent into despair once
the bitter taste of rejection forces her to realize that her dream
of becoming an object of adoration, both professionally and
personally, is nothing more than a delusion. By the end of the
movie, Diane loses all ability to distinguish between waking
reality and oneiric fantasy. With her depression deepening
into paranoid psychosis, she ends her life after being chased
back into her bedroom by terrorizing hallucinations of a
Lilliputian elderly couple, first glimpsed at the very beginning,
who represent her mocking parents. The locus of her fantasies
now becomes her death bed, where her dreams are finally laid
to rest. In the closing scene, the dizzied viewer is transported
once more to the deserted stage at the Club Silencio and given
one last glimpse of the site where reality, fantasy, and pyrotechnic
cinematic art all dazzlingly merge. It is in what might easily
be taken as an old-fashioned movie theater that Lynch leaves
his audience, silent and darkling, with the daunting task of
trying to sort out what has just taken place in this convoluted
phantasmagoria.
Jay R. Lentzner and Donald R. Ross 107
The Manifest Content of Mulholland Drive
According to Freud (1900), the mechanisms of the dreamwork
transform the dreamer’s latent thoughts into a more
primitive pictorial language that aids the censor in obscuring
and concealing their meaning. To interpret a dream, he
argued, one must undo the effects of these processes and work
back through free association to the sources of the disguised
elements in the manifest content. In a similar way, writes Glen
Gabbard (2001), “certain films defy conventional analysis and
understanding unless they are viewed as dreams subject to
condensation, displacement, and other elements of Freud’s
dream-work” (8).
Dramatization or concrete pictorial (plastic) representation is the
essence of the dream-work and involves the conversion of
latent thoughts into pictorial images. Freud viewed this process
as a regression to an earlier mode of thinking, analogous to
the plastic arts of painting and sculpture. In her classic work
Dream Analysis (1937), Ella Freeman Sharpe compared dramatization
to “a film of moving pictures projected on the screen
of our private inner cinema” (58).
As is true of all David Lynch’s movies, Mulholland Drive has
an arresting visual style, which reflects his early training in the
fine arts. In an interview, Lynch has compared the nonverbal
aspects of painting and film-making in a way that aids us in
understanding the emphasis on primary-process mentation in
his dreamscapes:
There are things that can’t be said with words. And
that’s sort of what painting is all about. And that’s what
film-making, to me, is mostly about. There are words
and there are stories, but there are things that can be
said with films that you can’t say with words. It’s just the
beautiful language of cinema. And it has to do with time
and juxtapositions and all the rules of painting. Painting
is the one thing that carries through everything else.
(Rodley 1999, 26–27)
108 The Dreams That Blister Sleep
In Mulholland Drive, Lynch uses this language of pictorial
representations wittily to evoke associative links to his own past
pictures as well as to other notable examples of Hollywood art.3
While visually arresting, the dream at the center of Mulholland
Drive is formed from a pastiche of other Hollywood movies and
as such invites a kind of free association to popular culture.
This results in the conceit that Diane’s fantasy of becoming a
movie star is not only inspired by the cinema but is also a
reflection of the movies themselves.
Condensation is the process by which latent thoughts are
combined in the manifest dream content so that a single figure
or situation may bear qualities emblematic of a number of
different counterparts in real life. Perhaps the most obvious
example of condensation in Mulholland Drive is the way that
the dreamer’s entire acting career is telescoped into a single
enigmatic screen test. Betty’s love scene with Rita is also part of
a much more complicated relationship between Diane and
Camilla. On a deeper level, Rita’s character may also synthesize
aspects of the dreamer’s mother and rekindle childhood issues
of dependency, seductiveness, and competitiveness. Indeed,
Diane’s dream in part represents her unsuccessful efforts to
free herself from constricting maternal attachments. While
struggling to break out as a leading actress, she becomes
trapped by her dependency on Camilla/Rita/Mother. In the
process, Betty/Diane is relegated to a supporting role.
Displacement shifts psychically intense elements in a dream
away from their original sources onto objects more acceptable
to the censoring ego. This mechanism appears continuously
throughout Diane’s dream in a variety of ways. It is even
described in the scene where Betty, in her effort to coax Rita to
search for her identity, tells her they will don a disguise: “It will
be just like in the movies. We’ll pretend to be somebody else” (italics
added). The rage that Diane feels when the full extent of
Camilla’s betrayal finally becomes known to her is displaced
onto a middle-aged man whom she sees at that same moment
sitting on the other side of the room. In the dream he becomes
the espresso-drinking Italian businessman who had earlier spit
out the coffee and excoriated Adam with bilious rage. One of
the most elegant examples of displacement occurs in the
exchange of names between Diane and the blonde waitress in
Jay R. Lentzner and Donald R. Ross 109
the Sunset diner, to whom she bears a close resemblance. In
the dream, the identity of Camilla Rhodes is displaced onto
the blonde-haired woman whom she kisses at Adam’s dinner
party. Indeed, the various blondes—the waitress, Betty, and
Rita (in a wig)—all look alike enough to confuse the movie
audience and thus keep the dream censor off-guard as well.
Symbolism in dreams also serves to disguise and replace
unacceptable latent abstract thoughts with less threatening
visual images. In Diane’s dream, the pearl earring lost by Rita
at the time of the near-fatal car accident becomes linked to the
pearl-filled jewelry box that Adam desecrates out of rage over
his wife’s infidelities, and it is also symbolic of Diane’s wish to
despoil Camilla’s genitals for her sexual betrayal. The blue key,
which both unlocks and deepens the mystery, serves as a
symbol of Camilla’s death. Rita’s amnesia, her attempts at
concealment and physical alteration, her unspoken love of
Betty and general inability to express herself, and her link to
the “Club Silencio” all serve to associate her with death. The
Cowboy and the dark, misshapen figure behind the Hollywood
diner are harbingers of Diane’s own demise and symbols of her
self-destruction.
A further aspect of symbolism can be discerned in the
palate of Lynch’s dreamscape, with pink and pale tones being
associated with Diane and Betty, while darker reds and blacks
are linked to Camilla and Rita. As in Blue Velvet (1986), Lynch
again uses lush shades of blue as emblems both of mystery and
of the loss of innocence.
No symbol in Mulholland Drive is more prominent or
initially more bewildering than the blue box discovered by
Betty inside her purse. Freud, however, viewed boxes, purses,
and other containers as symbols of female genitalia.4 It is
therefore comprehensible that the unlocking of the blue box
should come at a point in the dream sequence shortly after
Betty’s sexual awakening and the unleashing of her passion.
Rather than construing the box as a generic Alice-in-Wonderland
rabbit hole, it seems more compelling to equate it
specifically with Diane’s dream, and to see it as capturing the
paradox of its ultimate mystery and bottomless nature.5
110 The Dreams That Blister Sleep
Sorting Out the Day-Residue
Freud’s discovery that dreams are cobbled together from
the scraps of day-residues is central to appreciating the manifest
content of Part A in Mulholland Drive. Diane’s experience
both at Adam’s dinner party and in her subsequent meeting
with the hit man introduces many of the characters who figure
in her dream and it informs our understanding of its displaced
affect. Upon her arrival at the party, Diane is greeted by
Adam’s mother, Coco, who later makes polite, knowing inquiries
into Diane’s tale of Hollywood sorrow. In Diane’s dream,
Coco plays the role of the solicitous apartment manager who
counsels Betty following her arrival in the city. The sober-faced
Italian gentleman who is glimpsed by Diane sipping a cup of
espresso on the other side of Adam’s living room is transformed
in her dream into an intimidating studio investor
whose rage toward the director is a projection of her own. The
enigmatic Cowboy whom Diane also spies on the far side of
Adam’s dining room as he hastens to make his exit returns in
her dream to become yet another powerfully menacing presence.
At the party, Diane locks eyes with a blonde-haired
woman who at that same moment is planting a sensual kiss on
Camilla’s mouth. The woman stares back brazenly with Camilla’s
lipstick markings clearly visible across her lips. In Diane’s
dream, this same woman is recast as the blonde Camilla who is
forced upon Adam and whose lip-synching audition leads to
the role in his movie.
While Diane reacts at the party to all these events with a
steely anger, in her dream these feelings are displaced, blunted,
and transformed into their opposites. Similarly, in the dayresidue
scene at the Hollywood diner where Diane contracts
with a hit man for Camilla’s murder, there is a fleeting moment
just after the money changes hands in which her glance
wanders across the room and meets the doe-eyed gaze of a
male customer as he is standing at the register innocently
paying his check. This same character substitutes in a pivotal
early scene of Diane’s dream for the dreamer herself, serving
as a projected expression of her guilt and fears and desire for
undoing.
Jay R. Lentzner and Donald R. Ross 111
The Latent Content of Mulholland Drive
Central to Freud’s understanding of the function of
dreams is the notion that every dream represents a disguised
fulfillment of a repressed wish (1900, 121). Freud regarded the
simplest wish-fulfillment of dreams to be their satisfying of the
desire to sleep, with the distortion of the dream-work serving
to ward off both the inner and outer disturbances that threaten
to awaken the dreamer. At a deeper level, he considered that
dreams gratify through fantasy our unacceptable instinctual
wishes, the origins of which can be traced to early childhood,
and thus serve as a safety valve for discharging such impulses.
With a depth and complexity that rival Freud’s famous
“Irma Dream,” Diane’s dream in Mulholland Drive weaves a
narrative tapestry that expresses her latent fantasies and agonizing
unconscious conflicts. Diane’s dream is not only a plea
for penance but also a wish for punishment. It is both a
statement of her desire to destroy her more glamorous and
successful rival as well as a wish to abrogate those feelings of
envy and jealousy. It is a declaration of hate and a confession of
love. She longs to rid herself of this alluring competitor and to
merge with her in a transcendent union. From a genetic
standpoint, Diane’s dream represents a desire to redress
childhood hurts and to repair her bond with a narcissistic
mother. In short, Freud’s premise that dreams are the disguised
fulfillments of repressed wishes is at the heart of
Lynch’s movie.
Diane’s desire to flee reality through sleep is expressed in
her dream by the concussed Rita: “It will be okay, if only I can
sleep.” Following her accident, Rita makes a series of attempts
to escape into sleep, but awakens to find herself unchanged.
Near the end of the dream, after her evening of lovemaking
with Betty, Rita is gripped by a nightmare in which she talks
aloud in the throes of fitful slumber. When Betty awakens and
attempts to reassure her friend that everything is “okay,” she is
met with Rita’s fierce protests. Doubtless this reflects Diane’s
own uneasy awareness that sleep as a defensive retreat has
failed her.
112 The Dreams That Blister Sleep
Diane’s dream is also designed to exculpate her from the
responsibility for Camilla’s death. The assassination attempt
on Rita is aborted at the very outset of the dream by a deadly
car collision that miraculously leaves her as the only survivor.
Later, by depicting the hit man as a hopelessly inept bungler
who loses the trail of the missing woman, Diane’s dream
further serves to deny and reverse the reality of Camilla’s
murder. Other attempts at undoing occur in the apartment of
Betty’s aunt when Rita reaches into her purse and, to everyone’s
astonishment, pulls out three stacks of tightly wrapped onehundred-
dollar bills, an amount that appears to be several
times greater than that handed over by Diane in the diner.
Rita’s possession of the money means that the payment never
happened. Rita also produces an ornate blue key, with the
implication that as long as this emblem remains in her
possession rather than where it was supposed to be at the time
of Camilla’s death, then the actress continues to live. Betty’s
efforts throughout the dream reverse the dreamer’s murder of
Camilla through her intrepid caring for the childlike Rita and
the assistance she renders Rita in the search for her identity.
But perhaps the most powerful expression of Diane’s wish
to undo Camilla’s murder involves a male dreamer haunted
into retelling his dream within her dream. The episode occurs
early in Diane’s dream, immediately following the failed attempt
on Rita’s life. The scene shifts to the Sunset Boulevard
diner, here playfully named “Winkie’s”—in a pun on the act of
sleeping—where Diane had plotted Camilla’s murder. There
sits in the same spot an embarrassed man who finds himself
compelled to confess to having “had a dream about this place.”
His dream is terrifying and conjures up the specter of a ghastly
face, probably the dreamer’s own, that is sensed to be lurking
behind the building.
Dreamer: He’s the one who’s doing it. I can see him
through the wall. I can see his face. I hope that I never see
that face ever outside a dream. [smiles] That’s it.
Other Man: So, you came to see if he’s out there.
Dreamer: To get rid of this god-awful feeling. (italics
added)
Jay R. Lentzner and Donald R. Ross 113
As Freud argued, when the act of dreaming becomes the
subject of the dream itself, the material is of special significance:
What is dreamt in a dream after waking from the
“dream within a dream” is what the dream-wish seeks to
put in the place of an obliterated reality. It is safe to
suppose, therefore, that what has been “dreamt” in the
dream is a representation of the reality, the true recollection,
while the continuation of the dream, on the
contrary, merely represents what the dreamer wishes. To
include something in a “dream within a dream” is thus
equivalent to wishing that the thing described as a
dream had never happened. In other words, if a particular
event is inserted into a dream as a dream by the
dream-work itself, this implies the most decided confirmation
of the reality of the event—the strongest affirmation
of it. The dream-work makes use of dreams as a form
of repudiation, and so confirms the discovery that
dreams are wish-fulfillments. (1900, 338)
Diane’s male alter-ego expresses her wish both to forget
and to reverse her murderous actions. The grotesque figure
who remains fixed in her mind’s eye and looms uneasily at the
rear of the diner represents her displaced sense of self-loathing
and fear of retributory vengeance. In the portions of the
dream that follow, Diane struggles to substitute a more pleasing
fantasy in place of this harrowing specter. She accomplishes
this by conjuring up Betty, an altruistic, self-sacrificing,
idealized version of herself, who spends much of her time
befriending Rita in a doomed attempt to undue Diane’s
murderous feelings and behavior towards Camilla in waking
life.
Diane’s wish to achieve popular and artistic success is also
given clear expression in her dream-fantasy. Shortly after
Betty’s arrival on the Hollywood scene and her discovery of
Rita cowering in the bathroom shower, the dreamer’s exuberant
alter-ego is moved to reveal her own ambitions. While
admitting she is a guest in her Aunt’s lavish apartment, Betty
confides:
114 The Dreams That Blister Sleep
I could never afford a place like this in a million
years. Unless, of course, I’m discovered and become a
movie star. Of course I’d rather be known as a great
actress than a movie star, but sometimes people end up
being both, and that is, I guess you’d say, sort of why I
came here. I’m just so excited to be here. I mean I just
came here from Deep River, Ontario.6 And now I’m in this
dream place. You can imagine how I feel! (italics added)
This confession provides one of the clearest statements of the
design in Part A. It reveals Diane’s unbridled yearnings to get
ahead, and the strong regressive and narcissistic forces at work
in her dream as well.
Diane’s dream represents a compromise-formation between
her id impulses to destroy Camilla and her superego
constraints tempering these urges for vengeance. Her murderous
rage, while present throughout the dream, remains largely
displaced and stripped of its affect. Rita’s narrow escape from
death twice over in the opening moments of the dream, and
her ominous sense of being pursued, is an ever-present portent
of the danger in which she finds herself. Another indication of
the dreamer’s underlying hostility occurs in the scene where
Rita helps Betty prepare for her screen test. While reciting her
lines, Betty brandishes a butter knife in Rita’s direction and
with a theatrical flourish threatens to kill her. The script, Betty
notes, calls for her, in a torrent of tearful emotion, to cry out to
her acting counterpart, “I hate you, I hate us both.” Perhaps, in
this play within a play, word is tethered to the action, and
within both lurks the truest expression of the dreamer’s
sentiments.
Diane’s destructive impulses toward Camilla are manifested
also in other portions of the dream. Adam responds to
his wife’s infidelity by pouring a canister of pink paint over the
pearls that she keeps in her jewelry box, a symbolic genital
defiling of the unfaithful Camilla. If Diane can’t have Camilla,
the dream is saying, then nobody can. And yet, when Camilla
jumps from Diane’s bed to Adam’s, the dream equates Rita to
a common whore. Thus, the hit man travels the back streets of
Hollywood making inquiries about Rita’s whereabouts, searching
for leads among the local hookers.7
Jay R. Lentzner and Donald R. Ross 115
Diane’s malignant envy and wish to destroy Camilla are
replaced in her dream by a less venomous desire to neutralize
her rival by pushing her out of the way. Rita’s amnesia allows
Betty to assert her own ambitions while at the same time
making use of Rita as a source of support. This is illustrated in
the dream-fantasy where Betty is seen rehearsing for her
screen test with the amateurish Rita woodenly cuing her lines.
“You’re really good!” coos Rita, prompting Betty to respond
with a mocking expression of gratitude in a voice reminiscent
of Garbo. But it is not until Betty’s actual screen test that her
talents emerge in a wishful fantasy that is both hypnotic and
arresting. When “it gets real,” she surprises even herself. As the
awe and excitement generated by her audition work their
magic on the small audience, she succeeds in capturing
everyone’s attention and outshines the efforts of the darkhaired,
unidentified actress who had auditioned for the part
just before her.
Beyond Diane’s desire to surpass and destroy Camilla, her
dream-fantasy reflects primitive yearnings for merger. While
the two dream-women are of similar age and striking beauty, at
the time of their chance meeting they appear emblematic of
antithetical Hollywood types. The earnest, wholesome Betty
represents a cross between the 1950s stars Doris Day and Grace
Kelly, while the full-figured Rita is a throwback to such 1940s
femme fatale icons as her namesake Rita Hayworth. In Diane’s
dream, both women embark on a quest for identity, and as
their journey leads them down the same path, their differences
begin to fade.
After Rita allows herself to be transformed by Betty into
her platinum-wigged Doppelgänger, the two women stare questioningly
at their converging images in the bathroom mirror.
Later that evening Betty and Rita make love, signifying a
progression of their physical and psychological merger. Thereafter,
in matching hair styles and in similar dress, they head off
to the Club Silencio and, for the remainder of their time
together, are so synchronized in action and manner that
distinctions between them seem no longer to exist. Together
they sit huddled in the smoke-filled theater, hands clasped,
heads touching. One’s tears are reflected in the other’s eyes.
One’s panic triggers in the other a similar alarm. The mysteri116
The Dreams That Blister Sleep
ous blue box that Betty pulls from her handbag is unlocked by
the equally ominous blue key that Rita retrieves from her
purse. The psychological dissolution of one woman presages
the demise of the other. Indeed, the connection between them
in the mind of the dreamer is deep, complex, and impossible
to deny.
Just as the Irma dream explains away Freud’s professional
derelictions, so too Diane’s dream rationalizes the lack of
success in her career. Despite Betty’s electrifying screen test
and ability to capture Adam’s attention upon her arrival at his
set, the dream excuses her failure to become a star as the result
of unsavory studio politics. In the end, the director is forced to
accept Camilla Rhodes, even though Diane’s dream makes her
appear to be the lesser talent.
Adam’s selection of Camilla over Diane and his coming
between the two women both professionally and sexually are
played out in the dream through fantasies of denial, reversal,
and retribution. In the Part B day-residue, Diane is seen
standing in the background of Adam’s production set staring
sullenly as Camilla and Adam rehearse a romantic interlude.
In the Part A fantasy sequence, when Betty first walks onto
Adam’s sound stage, her presence wholly distracts him from
the Camilla surrogate, and he casts a look of such palpable
yearning as to leave little doubt that, were he not otherwise
constrained, she would be the one whom he would want in his
movie. The subplot involving the calamitous day in the life of
the brash young director not only provides a pretext for
Diane’s inability to achieve stardom, but at the same time
satisfies her wish to punish Adam for his complicity in unsettling
both her professional and her personal life.
Although Diane’s parents are never explicitly mentioned,
the elderly couple who are paired with the blonde-haired
ingenue in and out of the dream function as parental figures,
taking on both protective and persecutory functions. Our first
glimpse of Betty, as she arrives at the Los Angeles airport, is in
the company of the grey-haired, doting Irene, who up to this
point has been her traveling companion. The maternal attachment
of the older woman to the younger one appears fulsome
and idealized. Irene embraces Betty with open arms, wishing
her a fond farewell, and pledges to keep a close eye on her
Jay R. Lentzner and Donald R. Ross 117
even in their separation, before ambling away with her shadowy
husband. The artificial quality to the airport scene suggests
that the dreamer’s desire for parental love and approbation
is more a wish than a reality. This notion is reinforced in
the next dream segment where this same couple, now seated in
the back of a luxury car, undergo a sinister change in demeanor
and delight in some wicked joke that appears to be at
Betty’s expense.
Later, during Betty’s auspicious screen test, another parental
pair shower her with affection. This occurs when the
fatuous, antiquated movie producer is reunited with his former
wife, whom he introduces as “the best casting agent in town
but, alas, someone we can’t afford.” Both producer and agent
fuss over Betty following her star-making performance. Their
attentions seem both gratifying and uncomfortable, and pull
the ingenue in opposite directions.
Diane’s dream hints at her hostile feelings toward her
parents, although these are masked through heavy distortion.
Most notable is the scene where the hit man, on the trail of the
vanished Rita, guns down two middle-aged office-workers,
possibly representing Diane’s debased parental surrogates.
The woman is an obese, foul-mouthed cleaning lady, and the
man is a taciturn janitor. While both murders appear to be
gratuitous and to involve two innocents who happen unluckily
to find themselves in the hit man’s path, perhaps the superficially
random nature of these crimes serves as a cover for the
dreamer’s sinister wishes.
As we have argued, Diane’s dream constitutes a compromise-
formation between her warring id and superego agencies
over the consequences of her murderous actions. While aspects
of the manifest content provide veiled glimpses of
Diane’s wish to deny her complicity in Camilla’s destruction,
the dream also expresses a deep sense of revulsion and desire
to punish herself for all that she has done. Thus, while the
“dream-within-a-dream” sequence at Winkie’s represents Diane’s
wish to undo Camilla’s murder, it also conveys her dread that
this is impossible. The male dreamer-within fervently hopes
that he might never again look upon the face that he knows is
staring at him behind the wall at the back of the diner.
Overwhelmed by guilt, however, he treks compulsively to
118 The Dreams That Blister Sleep
behold that fearsome specter, and the scene ends in his
collapse and death.
Indeed, Diane’s entire dream enacts the same fateful
trajectory. Despite its lush-colored tones and optimistic
leitmotifs, there are deeper chords of foreboding and despair.
The persistent knocking at the dreamer’s apartment door, the
cascade of telephone callers pressing for information about
the missing woman’s whereabouts, the nondescript men lurking
in the shadows behind the wheels of unmarked cars, the
studio head who seems to control all these nefarious machinations
without issuing any explicit orders—all of this gives the
dream a haunted, juridical, persecutory quality.
There is also the Cassandra-like premonition offered by
the black-veiled interloper, Louise Bonner, who appears in the
night at Betty’s door to advise her that “something bad is
happening” and “someone is in trouble.” Later in the dream,
Rita is stirred from the depths of a restless sleep and issues a
similar warning. The sinister Cowboy also admonishes Adam
that anyone who does “bad” will see him thrice, as indeed
befalls the dreamer. All of these incidents speak to Diane’s
unpardonable guilt and her wish for self-destruction. But no
scene in the dream provides a more telling indication of this
desire than the one where Betty, following her break-in at the
apartment of Diane Selwyn, comes face-to-face with the
dreamer’s rotting corpse and recoils at the ghastly spectacle.
As Betty turns to run, the frame shudders as if to symbolize the
shockwaves of anxiety pulsing through Diane’s own body. At
that moment, the dream turns from id gratification to superego
punishment, signaling the retributive lengths to which the
dreamer soon will go when she takes her own life upon
awakening.
The Club Silencio Sequence:
Where the Real and the Fantasy Meet
The centerpiece of Lynch’s dreamscape in Mulholland
Drive is the phantasmagoric interlude that takes place at the
Club Silencio. “Certainly the pivotal sequence,” notes one
commentator, it represents “not only an important clue in this
Jay R. Lentzner and Donald R. Ross 119
puzzle, but one of the saddest, most heartbreaking moments in
contemporary cinema” (Freeman 2002). “If there is one scene,”
writes another, “that encapsulates the main themes of the film
and Lynch’s recurring concerns as an artist, this is it” (Chaw
2001; see also Chappell 2001). The scene occurs in a dilapidated,
half-empty cabaret theater where a lip-synching Spanish
singer belts out a soul-wrenching a capella rendition of the Roy
Orbison ballad “Crying” before collapsing dead on the stage.
Even as the woman’s body is unceremoniously dragged away,
her singing continues uninterrupted. Just prior to this disquieting
drama, a maniacal-looking impresario steps forward to
explain how theater is built on trickery. You may hear a
trumpet, or any one of a number of instruments, he intones,
where none, in fact, is playing. There is no orchestra. It is all an
elaborate fake. In the spine-tingling theater of the Club
Silencio, the line between reality and fantasy blurs in much the
same way as it does in the dream itself.
Although on one level the mystery being celebrated here
is that of sound-image synchronization or, more generally, the
craft of movie-making, Lynch is also exploring the production
of dreams, in both literal and metaphorical senses. The
preternatural happenings on the blue-lit stage of the Club
Silencio are at once cinematic special effects and dreamfantasies.
On the “other scene” of the movie screen, when the
lights go down and the viewer is lured into the hallucinatory
projection, the effect is like that of being submerged into a
dream-state. “A motion picture is a dream,” notes Mike Nichols.
“When you see it, you are in the dark. A movie involves
drawing on your unconscious in the same way that dreams
come out of the unconscious” (Pettet 2003, 24).8
In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud sounds a metaphoric
note similar to that of the impresario at the Club Silencio:
Dreams are not to be likened to the unregulated sounds
that rise from a musical instrument struck by the blow of
some external force instead of by a player’s hand; they
are not meaningless, they are not absurd; they do not
imply that one portion of our stores of ideas is asleep
while another portion is beginning to wake. On the
contrary, they are psychical phenomena of complete
120 The Dreams That Blister Sleep
validity—fulfillments of wishes; they can be inserted into
the chain of intelligible waking mental acts; they are
constructed by a highly complicated activity of the mind.
(1900, 122)
Freud was convinced that dreams, when rightly interpreted,
represent communications of high import and definite meaning.
This appears to be at variance with Lynch’s nihilistic
challenge to the distinction between fantasy and reality. Yet
Freudian theory allows us to apprehend the happenings at the
Club Silencio as Diane’s last desperate attempts at projection,
reversal, and denial. If all is illusion, then so too is Camilla
Rhodes’s death no more real than the demise of the Spanish
singer whose voice continues to be heard despite her collapse
upon the stage. If all is an illusion, then where does the border
between dreams and our waking life lie?9
The Club Silencio sequence occurs when the dreamer’s
defenses are beginning to crumble. Despite her best efforts to
escape through sleep, reality and unreality are finally starting
to come into focus. The message of the club that reality cannot
be distinguished from artifice represents a desperate reactionformation
against this nascent clarity. Despite its name, the
Club Silencio is anything but quiet. With the death of the
cabaret singer, it offers a portal to the other side of the grave
and a baleful reminder of Camilla’s death. As Diane draws
increasingly closer to embracing her awful secret, in recognizing
her failed career and her act of cruel murder, there is no
longer a safe place in the dream for her to hide. Uncertainty
and confusion give rise to panic and possibly a glimmer of
insight. At this juncture, the censor is overwhelmed by a rush
of anxiety that causes the dreamer to awaken. All that is left is
Diane’s psychotic decompensation and her final act of suicide.
Conclusion
As this paper has tried to illustrate, Diane Selwyn’s dream
in and of Mulholland Drive is a master class in Freudian dream
theory. It illustrates many of the cardinal tenets of The Interpretation
of Dreams, particularly exemplifying the precepts of wishJay
R. Lentzner and Donald R. Ross 121
fulfillment and intrapsychic conflict at the heart of the underlying
metapsychology. David Lynch’s movie is also a piece of
sublime tragic art, which follows the trajectory of human
emotions from blissful hopes and youthful desire to abject
dissolution and loss of innocence. It is no accident that Diane’s
surname, Selwyn, is linked to the early film pioneer Samuel
Goldwyn, whose name was sutured together from his collaborations
with the Selwyn Brothers, which led to the founding of
Goldwyn pictures. Like Goldwyn, Diane strives to be the
producer of her own dreams, but like the now-forgotten
Selwyn Brothers she finds herself eclipsed by more towering
figures. Like many an aspiring soul who has come to Hollywood
in search of the promised land, Lynch’s heroine reaches
a dead end in Babylon with her dreams transformed into
nightmares.
1475 Bryant Drive West
Long Beach, CA 90815
jlentzner@pol.net
Sheppard and Enoch Pratt Health System
6501 N. Charles St.
Baltimore, MD 21285
dross@sheppardpratt.org
Notes
1. While failing to recoup even half of its fifteen-million-dollar production costs
during its United States theatrical run, the movie earned Lynch his third
Academy Award nomination for Best Director along with shared directorial
honors at the Cannes Film Festival. It was awarded Best Picture by the National
Society of Film Critics, as well as by leading critical groups in New York,
Chicago, and Boston. Despite being lauded for its powerful acting, lush
cinematography, hypnotic score, and the ingenuity and pyrotechnics of its
screenplay, the film failed to receive Academy Award nominations in any of
these categories and was dismissed by host Whoopi Goldberg as an inexplicable
curiosity.
2. In an interview in The Village Voice (Lim 2001), the “unflappably tight-lipped”
director responded to the following questions:
Interviewer: Your work has inspired many psychoanalytic and academic
readings. Do you pay much attention to them?
Lynch: No. I don’t read them. . . .
Interviewer: Are you familiar with psychoanalytic theory?
Lynch: Not really.
3. The scene in the conference room where Adam comes face to face with two
Mafia business types who present him with an offer he can’t refuse comes from
The Godfather. And in a subsequent dream fragment, the same hit man hired to
kill Camilla triggers a chain-reaction of burlesque violence leading to the deaths
of two unsuspecting office workers that pays homage to Pulp Fiction. Still other
122 The Dreams That Blister Sleep
parts of Diane’s dream bring to mind Chinatown and other hard-boiled noir films
of a still-earlier era. Perhaps most of all, Mulholland Drive invites comparison to
The Wizard of Oz, a movie repeatedly referenced by Lynch both in tribute and as
savage parody. The orphaned female protagonists in both Mulholland Drive and
the 1939 classic embark on a dream-quest leading them over the rainbow, but
they arrive at very different destinations. While Dorothy’s journey is one of
adolescent growth and integration, Diane’s results in role confusion and
psychotic decomposition. Her yellow-striped road leads to a loss of mind, heart,
and courage, and finally to a despairing death. In a more sardonic vein, Lynch’s
clue that Diane Selwyn is no Dorothy Gale comes in the scene where, upon
arriving at her Aunt’s courtyard apartment, Betty replies negatively to Coco the
landlady’s inquiry about whether she owns a dog.
4. In “The Theme of the Three Caskets” (1913), Freud discusses the symbolism of
boxes in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice and King Lear: “If what we were
concerned with were a dream, it would occur to us at once that caskets are also
women, symbols of what is essential in woman, and therefore of a woman
herself—like coffers, boxes, cases, baskets, and so on” (292; see also Freud 1900,
354).
5. Freud (1900) believed that every dream contains a “navel” (111n1; 525) that
makes it impossible to interpret fully and serves as the point of contact with its
unplumbable reaches. See also Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (4.1.206–
24), where this same idea is given poetic expression.
6. In Blue Velvet, the Deep River apartments are the domicile of another lost
woman-child, Dorothy Vallens, and the location represents a terrain of sinister
foreboding. Indeed, Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive both employ a hallucinatory
style to probe beneath the façade of conventional normality. The youthful,
haunted protagonists, Jeffery Beaumont and Diane Selwyn, are each drawn into
a detective hunt that propels them back into the heart of childhood darkness,
rekindling traumatic feelings of enmity and passion toward both parents. Their
odysseys evoke not only sexual desire but also fantasies of murder and revenge
that are played out in their dreams and given conscious expressions in both
movies. For further incisive analysis of Blue Velvet, see Kael (1986, 1109–15) and
Atkinson (2000).
7. Given that the hooker in this scene extracts a cigarette from the same shirt
pocket of the hit man from which Diane brings forth the blue key, the dreamer
may well be feeling that she has sold herself out as well.
8. Bertram Lewin (1946; 1948) was among the first psychoanalysts to see affinities
between dreams and movies. As Freud drew an analogy between sleep and the
return to the womb, Lewin linked the “screen” onto which the dream is
projected to the nursing infant’s view of the mother’s breast, its first object. For
a scholarly exploration of how dreams have been used in movies, see Eberwein
(1984).
9. In a narrower sense, the Club Silencio sequence functions as Lynch’s allegory of
the unreliable nature of dreams and cinematic artifice. Earlier in the dream,
just prior to Betty’s screen audition, she is counseled by the enigmatic director
not to play it like it’s real “until it becomes real.” In a world where illusion and
fakery are the coin of the realm, how can any such advice be of value? If the
voice of a Spanish singer is no more real than the disembodied notes of a
glittering trumpet sounded without a player, then Diane’s dream is also a
counterfeit and Camilla Rhodes is dead. Perhaps this is the realization that
causes the dreamer to awaken.
Jay R. Lentzner and Donald R. Ross 123
References
Allen, Mike. 2001. “Mulholland” Stays in the Mind. The Roanoke Times, http://
www.roanoke.com/roatimes/news/story119804.html.
Atkinson, Michael. 2000. Blue Velvet. London: British Film Institute.
Chappell, Crissa-Jean. 2001. Mulholland Drive. Film Scout’s Reviews, http://filmscouts.com/
scripts/review.cfm?ArticleCode=2983.
Chaw, Walter, and Bill Chambers. 2001. Mulholland Drive. Film Freak Central DVD
Review, http://filmfreakcentral.net/dvdreviews/mulhollanddrive.htm.
Freeman, Mark. 2002. David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive. http://home.vicnet.net.au/
~freeman/reviewsip/mulhollanddrive.htm.
Eberwein, Robert. 1984. Film and the Dream Screen: A Sleep and a Forgetting. Princeton:
Princeton University Press.
Freud, Sigmund. 1900. The Interpretation of Dreams. S.E., vols. 4 and 5.
———. 1913. The Theme of the Three Caskets. S.E., 12: 289–301.
Gabbard, Glen O., ed. 2001. Psychoanalysis and Film. London: Karnac.
Gleiberman, Owen. 2001. Mulholland Drive. Entertainment Weekly, http://www.ew.com/
ew/article/review/movie/0,6115,253984_1_0_,00.html.
Kael, Pauline. 1986. Blue Velvet: Out There and in Here. In For Keeps: Thirty Years at the
Movies. New York: Dutton, 1994, pp. 1109–15.
Kenny, Glenn. 2001. Mulholland Drive. Premier the Movie Magazine, http://
www.premiere.com/article.asp?section_id=2&article_id=483&page_number=1.
Lewin, Bertram. 1946. Sleep, the Mouth and the Dream Screen. Psychoanalytic
Quarterly, 25:419–34.
———. 1948. Inferences From the Dream Screen. International Journal of Psychoanalysis,
29:224–31.
Lim, Dennis. 2001. Gone Fishin’: David Lynch Casts a Line Into the City of Dreams.
The Village Voice, http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0141/flim.php.
Lopate, Philip. 2001. Welcome to L. A. Film Comment, http://www.lynchnet.com/mdrive/
filmc1.htm.
Macaulay, Scott. 2001. The Dream Factory. FilmMaker, http://www.lynchnet.com/mdrive /
dffm.html.
McGovern, Joe. 2001. Mulholland Drive. Matinee Magazine, http://www.rottentomatoes.
com/author-3234/movies.php?letter=m&cats=1&genreid=&switches=.
Pettet, Simon, ed. 2003. Only in Dreams: A Book of Quotes. New York: Barnes and Noble.
Reed, Rex. 2001. Mulholland Drive. New York Observer, http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/
mulholland_dr/.
Rodley, Chris, ed., 1999. Lynch on Lynch. London: Faber and Faber.
Sharpe, Ella F. 1937. Dream Analysis. New York: Brunner/Mazel, 1978.
Tang, Jean. 2001. All You Have To Do Is Dream. Salon.com, http://dir.salon.com/ent/
movies/feature/2001/11/07/mulholland_dream/index.html?pn=1.
Taubin, Amy. 2001. In Dreams. Film Comment, http://www.lynchnet.com/mdrive/
filmc2.html.
Turan, Kenneth, 2001. The Twists Along Mulholland. The Los Angeles Times, October
12, Section F21.
Jay R. Lentzner and Donald R. Ross 101
American Imago, Vol. 62, No. 1, 101–123. © 2005 by The Johns Hopkins University Press
101
JAY R. LENTZNER AND DONALD R. ROSS
The Dreams That Blister Sleep:
Latent Content and Cinematic Form in
Mulholland Drive
“The dreams that blister sleep boil up from the basic
magic ring of myth.”
—Joseph Campbell,
The Hero with a Thousand Faces
Introduction
Few motion pictures have bedazzled, confounded, or
provoked viewers more than David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive
(2001). Dismissed by Rex Reed (2001) as “a load of moronic
and incoherent garbage,” but hailed by Philip Lopate (2001)
as “compelling, engrossing, well-directed, sexy, moving, beautiful
to look at, mysterious and satisfying,” it has garnered both
some of the harshest epithets and some of the most lavish
praise in recent cinematic history.1
Never intended as a theatrical feature, Mulholland Drive
was conceived as a television pilot, but rejected by network
executives after its first screening as “too dark and too weird”
(McGovern 2001). For more than a year the project languished
on the brink of abandonment, but it was ultimately
acquired by a French production company that enjoined
Lynch to transform it into a feature motion picture. The
director recalls having had no idea how to proceed. Then, in a
thunderclap of epiphany, inspiration struck him: “it was a most
beautiful experience. . . . Everything was seen from a different
angle. Everything was then restructured, and we did additional
shooting. Now, looking back, I see that [the film] always
wanted to be this way” (Macaulay 2001).
102 The Dreams That Blister Sleep
Lynch’s own coyness and teasing refusal to reveal much
about the film has only added to the confusion surrounding
his masterpiece. “Don’t look for answers in David Lynch’s
Mulholland Drive,” writes Owen Gleiberman (2001), who describes
the plot as “a pretzel that never connects with itself.” “If
David Lynch’s goal is to baffle,” adds Jean Tang (2001),
“Mulholland Drive has done him proud.” Kenneth Turan (2001)
dubbed the movie “a mystery that doesn’t want to be solved,”
while Glenn Kenny (2001) quipped: “You laugh, you wince,
you fall in love, you hold your breath, you cringe, you mutter
‘Oh my God.’ . . . The only problem is exactly what the hell
happens in this movie?”
Not every critic, however, has found the movie to be so
maddeningly incomprehensible. Some have argued that it
makes sense, especially when viewed from the perspective of a
dream. “The movie proceeds not with logic but with dream
logic,” wrote one critic (Allen 2001), while a second described
it as being “constructed entirely in the language of dreams”
(Taubin 2001). Others have concurred that the dreamlike
design provides a gateway into the meaning of the film, but
have found this pathway to be too difficult to follow.
This paper is based on the premise that the key to
understanding Mulholland Drive begins with the recognition
that its diabolically intricate form is a dream that obeys the
rules set forth a century earlier in Sigmund Freud’s The
Interpretation of Dreams (1900). While the nineteenth-century
scientific community largely viewed dreams as nonpsychological
phenomena, Freud revolutionized our understanding by finding
them to be purposeful mental communications linked to
the happenings of waking life. His Interpretation of Dreams
stands for the proposition that while dreams often appear to
be inexplicable and bizarre, they resonate with unconscious
meaning. Despite Lynch’s disavowals of interest in psychoanalytic
theory, the convergence between Mulholland Drive and
Freud’s royal road to the unconscious should not be greatly
surprising.2 Indeed, beholding this movie through the lens of
Freudian dream-analysis throws it into sharper focus by revealing
much of its hidden psychological complexity.
Jay R. Lentzner and Donald R. Ross 103
The Movie as a Dream
From the first moment that the lights go down, Mulholland
Drive projects an otherworldly quality, signaling the viewer’s
passage into a Lynchian dreamscape. As Frederick Lane, a
psychiatrist who was interviewed by Tang (2001) for her piece
in Salon, has argued, the film divides into two parts: Part A
comprises the first two hours and represents the manifest
dream content as experienced by the dreamer, Diane Selwyn
(Naomi Watts), while Part B spans the final twenty minutes and
presents fragments of her day-residue along with both her preand
post-dream waking reveries, which are the keys to unlocking
the dream’s latent content.
Diane Selwyn’s dream in Part A follows the murder of
Camilla Rhodes (Laura Elena Harring) and represents her
deeply conflicted wishes in its aftermath. From what can be
pieced together from the Part B day-residue, Diane and
Camilla began as two young, ambitious actresses, each of a
different Hollywood type, in search of fame and stardom.
Along the way they met, formed a deep romantic attachment,
which then came unraveled once Camilla’s career began to
soar. This occurred when she was discovered by the hot young
director, Adam Kesher (Justin Theroux), who cast her as the
new leading lady both in and out of his picture. Finally, at a
dinner party at Adam’s Mulholland Drive home celebrating
Camilla’s triumphs, Diane is not only brought face to face with
her former lover’s betrayal but is also forced to acknowledge
her own static professional career. The sting of Camilla’s
sexual rejection comes as Diane witnesses her brazenly kissing
another blonde-haired woman and Adam unexpectedly announces
his and Camilla’s wedding plans. At that moment,
Diane’s envy and jealousy turn murderous. Not long after, in a
Sunset Boulevard diner, she contracts with a hit man to kill
Camilla. When he asks whether she truly wishes to go forward,
she replies, “More than anything in this world!”
Diane’s dream, however, reveals a far more complicated
mental state. Much of its meaning concerns her desire to undo
and displace responsibility for Camilla’s killing. On a deeper
level, the dream also reflects Diane’s conflicted feelings toward
104 The Dreams That Blister Sleep
her parents, who become mocking persecutory objects when
she cannot disguise her failures.
Mulholland Drive starts with colorful flashes from an adolescent
dance contest with the superimposed photographic
image of a triumphant Diane Selwyn standing alongside an
aging couple, who smile back at her approvingly. This screen
memory quickly dissolves into a current dream-fantasy after a
brief glimpse of Diane’s unmade bed, which is at the center of
the ensuing drama. Ominously, the camera snakes along the
path of the rumpled, dirty linen, then disappears into the
darkness of her crimson pillow. At that point, the lights go out
and both the movie (Part A) and the dream begin.
The main plot of the dream concerns the adventures of
Diane’s blonde, plucky alter-ego, Betty Elms, who, like the
dreamer herself, comes to Hollywood to pursue her fantasy of
becoming a famous actress. The dream also involves the
misadventures of the glamorous, mysterious Rita, who opens
the drama by averting death twice over, narrowly avoiding both
a late-night contract killing and a tumultuous high-speed car
crash along the winding turns of Mulholland Drive. Dazed,
amnestic, and yet aware of the danger that surrounds her, the
raven-haired beauty flees the accident scene and takes refuge
in a nearby Hollywood apartment where the newly arrived
Betty finds her naked and cowering in the shower. The panicstricken
woman adopts the name Rita, based on an off-hand
glance at a framed movie poster featuring the sultry femme
fatale Rita Hayworth, whom she sees reflected back in the
mirror along with her own image. Initially, Rita tries to escape
from her troubles by retreating into sleep, but when this is
unsuccessful she woodenly helps Betty rehearse for her approaching
screen test. Betty’s audition turns out to be an
unexpected tour de force, with her raw sexuality breaking forth
to reveal a smoldering talent. However, before the full impact
of this triumph can be registered, Betty is whisked away by a
maternal casting agent to see a director “who is ahead of all the
rest” with a project that, it is promised, she “will kill for.”
The director turns out to be the brash and arrogant Adam
Kesher, who in an earlier subplot of the dream is summoned to
the office of the head of studio productions and, under an
ultimatum from nefarious business interests, ordered to accept
Jay R. Lentzner and Donald R. Ross 105
the unknown actress, Camilla Rhodes, as the lead in his
sought-after film. Adam initially refuses, but following a Joblike
day of hell in which he appears to lose everything—his
wife, fortune, and control of the movie—and which culminates
with a starlit rendezvous with the venomous Cowboy (Lafayette
Montgomery), the recalcitrant but chastened director finally
comes around.
Betty arrives at Adam’s sound stage just as the audition of
the inauspicious Camilla is taking place. Betty’s appearance
causes Adam to become momentarily distracted, and their
exchange of glances carries with it such electricity as to
overshadow Camilla with its glow of movie magic. Reluctantly,
Adam jerks himself back into the moment and carries out the
Cowboy’s instructions by awarding Camilla the star-making
part. Another exchange of soulful looks passes between him
and Betty, who then, with a Cinderella-like turn, bolts from the
movie set without looking back. Adam’s eyes follow her vaporous
trajectory with abject and profound yearning.
At this point, the dream also changes course as the highspirited
Betty rejoins Rita to search for her identity. The quest
leads this pair into the heart of darkness, which in this case
turns out to be the bedroom of Diane Selwyn’s apartment,
where they discover the dreamer’s rotting corpse lying across
her bed. It also brings the two women increasingly closer
together both physically and emotionally. With the aid of a
blonde wig, Betty helps Rita to disguise herself, giving her a
look not unlike her own. Later that night, the two women end
up sharing the same bed, and their lovemaking unleashes in
Betty a torrent of passion. Their subsequent sleep is interrupted
by Rita’s repetition of the word “Silencio” and by her
ominous sense that things are awry. Rita prevails on Betty to
accompany her downtown to the Club Silencio, an eerie,
dilapidated theater, where they attend a supernatural performance
in the early hours of the morning. The hallucinatory
interior of the club, where reality and fantasy become impossible
to distinguish, is like a dream itself. The women’s presence
here leads to the discovery of a mysterious blue box, the
opening of which causes them to disappear. As the camera
makes its way into the recesses of this unfathomable blue
106 The Dreams That Blister Sleep
receptacle, the screen is once again thrown into darkness and
the dream comes to an end.
Part B of Mulholland Drive begins with the same Cowboy
who previously had delivered the midnight wake-up call to
Adam now summoning Diane from her nocturnal slumber.
Diane awakens with an unshakeable depression and haunted
by Camilla’s murder. She, like Rita in her dream, was hoping
that sleep might afford her some relief, but instead arises from
her bed looking dispirited and haggard. With the police
knocking on her outer door, she appears trapped in her dreary
apartment, haunted by Camilla’s death, as confirmed by the
blue key lying on her table. A series of flashbacks of sexual
abandon with Camilla overtake her. This joyful reverie quickly
gives way to images of abandonment and loneliness that Diane
seeks to counteract by self-soothing through masturbation. It is
at this point that she seems forced to recall the disquieting
events leading to Camilla’s murder.
Mulholland Drive can therefore be summed up as the
harrowing tale of a young woman’s descent into despair once
the bitter taste of rejection forces her to realize that her dream
of becoming an object of adoration, both professionally and
personally, is nothing more than a delusion. By the end of the
movie, Diane loses all ability to distinguish between waking
reality and oneiric fantasy. With her depression deepening
into paranoid psychosis, she ends her life after being chased
back into her bedroom by terrorizing hallucinations of a
Lilliputian elderly couple, first glimpsed at the very beginning,
who represent her mocking parents. The locus of her fantasies
now becomes her death bed, where her dreams are finally laid
to rest. In the closing scene, the dizzied viewer is transported
once more to the deserted stage at the Club Silencio and given
one last glimpse of the site where reality, fantasy, and pyrotechnic
cinematic art all dazzlingly merge. It is in what might easily
be taken as an old-fashioned movie theater that Lynch leaves
his audience, silent and darkling, with the daunting task of
trying to sort out what has just taken place in this convoluted
phantasmagoria.
Jay R. Lentzner and Donald R. Ross 107
The Manifest Content of Mulholland Drive
According to Freud (1900), the mechanisms of the dreamwork
transform the dreamer’s latent thoughts into a more
primitive pictorial language that aids the censor in obscuring
and concealing their meaning. To interpret a dream, he
argued, one must undo the effects of these processes and work
back through free association to the sources of the disguised
elements in the manifest content. In a similar way, writes Glen
Gabbard (2001), “certain films defy conventional analysis and
understanding unless they are viewed as dreams subject to
condensation, displacement, and other elements of Freud’s
dream-work” (8).
Dramatization or concrete pictorial (plastic) representation is the
essence of the dream-work and involves the conversion of
latent thoughts into pictorial images. Freud viewed this process
as a regression to an earlier mode of thinking, analogous to
the plastic arts of painting and sculpture. In her classic work
Dream Analysis (1937), Ella Freeman Sharpe compared dramatization
to “a film of moving pictures projected on the screen
of our private inner cinema” (58).
As is true of all David Lynch’s movies, Mulholland Drive has
an arresting visual style, which reflects his early training in the
fine arts. In an interview, Lynch has compared the nonverbal
aspects of painting and film-making in a way that aids us in
understanding the emphasis on primary-process mentation in
his dreamscapes:
There are things that can’t be said with words. And
that’s sort of what painting is all about. And that’s what
film-making, to me, is mostly about. There are words
and there are stories, but there are things that can be
said with films that you can’t say with words. It’s just the
beautiful language of cinema. And it has to do with time
and juxtapositions and all the rules of painting. Painting
is the one thing that carries through everything else.
(Rodley 1999, 26–27)
108 The Dreams That Blister Sleep
In Mulholland Drive, Lynch uses this language of pictorial
representations wittily to evoke associative links to his own past
pictures as well as to other notable examples of Hollywood art.3
While visually arresting, the dream at the center of Mulholland
Drive is formed from a pastiche of other Hollywood movies and
as such invites a kind of free association to popular culture.
This results in the conceit that Diane’s fantasy of becoming a
movie star is not only inspired by the cinema but is also a
reflection of the movies themselves.
Condensation is the process by which latent thoughts are
combined in the manifest dream content so that a single figure
or situation may bear qualities emblematic of a number of
different counterparts in real life. Perhaps the most obvious
example of condensation in Mulholland Drive is the way that
the dreamer’s entire acting career is telescoped into a single
enigmatic screen test. Betty’s love scene with Rita is also part of
a much more complicated relationship between Diane and
Camilla. On a deeper level, Rita’s character may also synthesize
aspects of the dreamer’s mother and rekindle childhood issues
of dependency, seductiveness, and competitiveness. Indeed,
Diane’s dream in part represents her unsuccessful efforts to
free herself from constricting maternal attachments. While
struggling to break out as a leading actress, she becomes
trapped by her dependency on Camilla/Rita/Mother. In the
process, Betty/Diane is relegated to a supporting role.
Displacement shifts psychically intense elements in a dream
away from their original sources onto objects more acceptable
to the censoring ego. This mechanism appears continuously
throughout Diane’s dream in a variety of ways. It is even
described in the scene where Betty, in her effort to coax Rita to
search for her identity, tells her they will don a disguise: “It will
be just like in the movies. We’ll pretend to be somebody else” (italics
added). The rage that Diane feels when the full extent of
Camilla’s betrayal finally becomes known to her is displaced
onto a middle-aged man whom she sees at that same moment
sitting on the other side of the room. In the dream he becomes
the espresso-drinking Italian businessman who had earlier spit
out the coffee and excoriated Adam with bilious rage. One of
the most elegant examples of displacement occurs in the
exchange of names between Diane and the blonde waitress in
Jay R. Lentzner and Donald R. Ross 109
the Sunset diner, to whom she bears a close resemblance. In
the dream, the identity of Camilla Rhodes is displaced onto
the blonde-haired woman whom she kisses at Adam’s dinner
party. Indeed, the various blondes—the waitress, Betty, and
Rita (in a wig)—all look alike enough to confuse the movie
audience and thus keep the dream censor off-guard as well.
Symbolism in dreams also serves to disguise and replace
unacceptable latent abstract thoughts with less threatening
visual images. In Diane’s dream, the pearl earring lost by Rita
at the time of the near-fatal car accident becomes linked to the
pearl-filled jewelry box that Adam desecrates out of rage over
his wife’s infidelities, and it is also symbolic of Diane’s wish to
despoil Camilla’s genitals for her sexual betrayal. The blue key,
which both unlocks and deepens the mystery, serves as a
symbol of Camilla’s death. Rita’s amnesia, her attempts at
concealment and physical alteration, her unspoken love of
Betty and general inability to express herself, and her link to
the “Club Silencio” all serve to associate her with death. The
Cowboy and the dark, misshapen figure behind the Hollywood
diner are harbingers of Diane’s own demise and symbols of her
self-destruction.
A further aspect of symbolism can be discerned in the
palate of Lynch’s dreamscape, with pink and pale tones being
associated with Diane and Betty, while darker reds and blacks
are linked to Camilla and Rita. As in Blue Velvet (1986), Lynch
again uses lush shades of blue as emblems both of mystery and
of the loss of innocence.
No symbol in Mulholland Drive is more prominent or
initially more bewildering than the blue box discovered by
Betty inside her purse. Freud, however, viewed boxes, purses,
and other containers as symbols of female genitalia.4 It is
therefore comprehensible that the unlocking of the blue box
should come at a point in the dream sequence shortly after
Betty’s sexual awakening and the unleashing of her passion.
Rather than construing the box as a generic Alice-in-Wonderland
rabbit hole, it seems more compelling to equate it
specifically with Diane’s dream, and to see it as capturing the
paradox of its ultimate mystery and bottomless nature.5
110 The Dreams That Blister Sleep
Sorting Out the Day-Residue
Freud’s discovery that dreams are cobbled together from
the scraps of day-residues is central to appreciating the manifest
content of Part A in Mulholland Drive. Diane’s experience
both at Adam’s dinner party and in her subsequent meeting
with the hit man introduces many of the characters who figure
in her dream and it informs our understanding of its displaced
affect. Upon her arrival at the party, Diane is greeted by
Adam’s mother, Coco, who later makes polite, knowing inquiries
into Diane’s tale of Hollywood sorrow. In Diane’s dream,
Coco plays the role of the solicitous apartment manager who
counsels Betty following her arrival in the city. The sober-faced
Italian gentleman who is glimpsed by Diane sipping a cup of
espresso on the other side of Adam’s living room is transformed
in her dream into an intimidating studio investor
whose rage toward the director is a projection of her own. The
enigmatic Cowboy whom Diane also spies on the far side of
Adam’s dining room as he hastens to make his exit returns in
her dream to become yet another powerfully menacing presence.
At the party, Diane locks eyes with a blonde-haired
woman who at that same moment is planting a sensual kiss on
Camilla’s mouth. The woman stares back brazenly with Camilla’s
lipstick markings clearly visible across her lips. In Diane’s
dream, this same woman is recast as the blonde Camilla who is
forced upon Adam and whose lip-synching audition leads to
the role in his movie.
While Diane reacts at the party to all these events with a
steely anger, in her dream these feelings are displaced, blunted,
and transformed into their opposites. Similarly, in the dayresidue
scene at the Hollywood diner where Diane contracts
with a hit man for Camilla’s murder, there is a fleeting moment
just after the money changes hands in which her glance
wanders across the room and meets the doe-eyed gaze of a
male customer as he is standing at the register innocently
paying his check. This same character substitutes in a pivotal
early scene of Diane’s dream for the dreamer herself, serving
as a projected expression of her guilt and fears and desire for
undoing.
Jay R. Lentzner and Donald R. Ross 111
The Latent Content of Mulholland Drive
Central to Freud’s understanding of the function of
dreams is the notion that every dream represents a disguised
fulfillment of a repressed wish (1900, 121). Freud regarded the
simplest wish-fulfillment of dreams to be their satisfying of the
desire to sleep, with the distortion of the dream-work serving
to ward off both the inner and outer disturbances that threaten
to awaken the dreamer. At a deeper level, he considered that
dreams gratify through fantasy our unacceptable instinctual
wishes, the origins of which can be traced to early childhood,
and thus serve as a safety valve for discharging such impulses.
With a depth and complexity that rival Freud’s famous
“Irma Dream,” Diane’s dream in Mulholland Drive weaves a
narrative tapestry that expresses her latent fantasies and agonizing
unconscious conflicts. Diane’s dream is not only a plea
for penance but also a wish for punishment. It is both a
statement of her desire to destroy her more glamorous and
successful rival as well as a wish to abrogate those feelings of
envy and jealousy. It is a declaration of hate and a confession of
love. She longs to rid herself of this alluring competitor and to
merge with her in a transcendent union. From a genetic
standpoint, Diane’s dream represents a desire to redress
childhood hurts and to repair her bond with a narcissistic
mother. In short, Freud’s premise that dreams are the disguised
fulfillments of repressed wishes is at the heart of
Lynch’s movie.
Diane’s desire to flee reality through sleep is expressed in
her dream by the concussed Rita: “It will be okay, if only I can
sleep.” Following her accident, Rita makes a series of attempts
to escape into sleep, but awakens to find herself unchanged.
Near the end of the dream, after her evening of lovemaking
with Betty, Rita is gripped by a nightmare in which she talks
aloud in the throes of fitful slumber. When Betty awakens and
attempts to reassure her friend that everything is “okay,” she is
met with Rita’s fierce protests. Doubtless this reflects Diane’s
own uneasy awareness that sleep as a defensive retreat has
failed her.
112 The Dreams That Blister Sleep
Diane’s dream is also designed to exculpate her from the
responsibility for Camilla’s death. The assassination attempt
on Rita is aborted at the very outset of the dream by a deadly
car collision that miraculously leaves her as the only survivor.
Later, by depicting the hit man as a hopelessly inept bungler
who loses the trail of the missing woman, Diane’s dream
further serves to deny and reverse the reality of Camilla’s
murder. Other attempts at undoing occur in the apartment of
Betty’s aunt when Rita reaches into her purse and, to everyone’s
astonishment, pulls out three stacks of tightly wrapped onehundred-
dollar bills, an amount that appears to be several
times greater than that handed over by Diane in the diner.
Rita’s possession of the money means that the payment never
happened. Rita also produces an ornate blue key, with the
implication that as long as this emblem remains in her
possession rather than where it was supposed to be at the time
of Camilla’s death, then the actress continues to live. Betty’s
efforts throughout the dream reverse the dreamer’s murder of
Camilla through her intrepid caring for the childlike Rita and
the assistance she renders Rita in the search for her identity.
But perhaps the most powerful expression of Diane’s wish
to undo Camilla’s murder involves a male dreamer haunted
into retelling his dream within her dream. The episode occurs
early in Diane’s dream, immediately following the failed attempt
on Rita’s life. The scene shifts to the Sunset Boulevard
diner, here playfully named “Winkie’s”—in a pun on the act of
sleeping—where Diane had plotted Camilla’s murder. There
sits in the same spot an embarrassed man who finds himself
compelled to confess to having “had a dream about this place.”
His dream is terrifying and conjures up the specter of a ghastly
face, probably the dreamer’s own, that is sensed to be lurking
behind the building.
Dreamer: He’s the one who’s doing it. I can see him
through the wall. I can see his face. I hope that I never see
that face ever outside a dream. [smiles] That’s it.
Other Man: So, you came to see if he’s out there.
Dreamer: To get rid of this god-awful feeling. (italics
added)
Jay R. Lentzner and Donald R. Ross 113
As Freud argued, when the act of dreaming becomes the
subject of the dream itself, the material is of special significance:
What is dreamt in a dream after waking from the
“dream within a dream” is what the dream-wish seeks to
put in the place of an obliterated reality. It is safe to
suppose, therefore, that what has been “dreamt” in the
dream is a representation of the reality, the true recollection,
while the continuation of the dream, on the
contrary, merely represents what the dreamer wishes. To
include something in a “dream within a dream” is thus
equivalent to wishing that the thing described as a
dream had never happened. In other words, if a particular
event is inserted into a dream as a dream by the
dream-work itself, this implies the most decided confirmation
of the reality of the event—the strongest affirmation
of it. The dream-work makes use of dreams as a form
of repudiation, and so confirms the discovery that
dreams are wish-fulfillments. (1900, 338)
Diane’s male alter-ego expresses her wish both to forget
and to reverse her murderous actions. The grotesque figure
who remains fixed in her mind’s eye and looms uneasily at the
rear of the diner represents her displaced sense of self-loathing
and fear of retributory vengeance. In the portions of the
dream that follow, Diane struggles to substitute a more pleasing
fantasy in place of this harrowing specter. She accomplishes
this by conjuring up Betty, an altruistic, self-sacrificing,
idealized version of herself, who spends much of her time
befriending Rita in a doomed attempt to undue Diane’s
murderous feelings and behavior towards Camilla in waking
life.
Diane’s wish to achieve popular and artistic success is also
given clear expression in her dream-fantasy. Shortly after
Betty’s arrival on the Hollywood scene and her discovery of
Rita cowering in the bathroom shower, the dreamer’s exuberant
alter-ego is moved to reveal her own ambitions. While
admitting she is a guest in her Aunt’s lavish apartment, Betty
confides:
114 The Dreams That Blister Sleep
I could never afford a place like this in a million
years. Unless, of course, I’m discovered and become a
movie star. Of course I’d rather be known as a great
actress than a movie star, but sometimes people end up
being both, and that is, I guess you’d say, sort of why I
came here. I’m just so excited to be here. I mean I just
came here from Deep River, Ontario.6 And now I’m in this
dream place. You can imagine how I feel! (italics added)
This confession provides one of the clearest statements of the
design in Part A. It reveals Diane’s unbridled yearnings to get
ahead, and the strong regressive and narcissistic forces at work
in her dream as well.
Diane’s dream represents a compromise-formation between
her id impulses to destroy Camilla and her superego
constraints tempering these urges for vengeance. Her murderous
rage, while present throughout the dream, remains largely
displaced and stripped of its affect. Rita’s narrow escape from
death twice over in the opening moments of the dream, and
her ominous sense of being pursued, is an ever-present portent
of the danger in which she finds herself. Another indication of
the dreamer’s underlying hostility occurs in the scene where
Rita helps Betty prepare for her screen test. While reciting her
lines, Betty brandishes a butter knife in Rita’s direction and
with a theatrical flourish threatens to kill her. The script, Betty
notes, calls for her, in a torrent of tearful emotion, to cry out to
her acting counterpart, “I hate you, I hate us both.” Perhaps, in
this play within a play, word is tethered to the action, and
within both lurks the truest expression of the dreamer’s
sentiments.
Diane’s destructive impulses toward Camilla are manifested
also in other portions of the dream. Adam responds to
his wife’s infidelity by pouring a canister of pink paint over the
pearls that she keeps in her jewelry box, a symbolic genital
defiling of the unfaithful Camilla. If Diane can’t have Camilla,
the dream is saying, then nobody can. And yet, when Camilla
jumps from Diane’s bed to Adam’s, the dream equates Rita to
a common whore. Thus, the hit man travels the back streets of
Hollywood making inquiries about Rita’s whereabouts, searching
for leads among the local hookers.7
Jay R. Lentzner and Donald R. Ross 115
Diane’s malignant envy and wish to destroy Camilla are
replaced in her dream by a less venomous desire to neutralize
her rival by pushing her out of the way. Rita’s amnesia allows
Betty to assert her own ambitions while at the same time
making use of Rita as a source of support. This is illustrated in
the dream-fantasy where Betty is seen rehearsing for her
screen test with the amateurish Rita woodenly cuing her lines.
“You’re really good!” coos Rita, prompting Betty to respond
with a mocking expression of gratitude in a voice reminiscent
of Garbo. But it is not until Betty’s actual screen test that her
talents emerge in a wishful fantasy that is both hypnotic and
arresting. When “it gets real,” she surprises even herself. As the
awe and excitement generated by her audition work their
magic on the small audience, she succeeds in capturing
everyone’s attention and outshines the efforts of the darkhaired,
unidentified actress who had auditioned for the part
just before her.
Beyond Diane’s desire to surpass and destroy Camilla, her
dream-fantasy reflects primitive yearnings for merger. While
the two dream-women are of similar age and striking beauty, at
the time of their chance meeting they appear emblematic of
antithetical Hollywood types. The earnest, wholesome Betty
represents a cross between the 1950s stars Doris Day and Grace
Kelly, while the full-figured Rita is a throwback to such 1940s
femme fatale icons as her namesake Rita Hayworth. In Diane’s
dream, both women embark on a quest for identity, and as
their journey leads them down the same path, their differences
begin to fade.
After Rita allows herself to be transformed by Betty into
her platinum-wigged Doppelgänger, the two women stare questioningly
at their converging images in the bathroom mirror.
Later that evening Betty and Rita make love, signifying a
progression of their physical and psychological merger. Thereafter,
in matching hair styles and in similar dress, they head off
to the Club Silencio and, for the remainder of their time
together, are so synchronized in action and manner that
distinctions between them seem no longer to exist. Together
they sit huddled in the smoke-filled theater, hands clasped,
heads touching. One’s tears are reflected in the other’s eyes.
One’s panic triggers in the other a similar alarm. The mysteri116
The Dreams That Blister Sleep
ous blue box that Betty pulls from her handbag is unlocked by
the equally ominous blue key that Rita retrieves from her
purse. The psychological dissolution of one woman presages
the demise of the other. Indeed, the connection between them
in the mind of the dreamer is deep, complex, and impossible
to deny.
Just as the Irma dream explains away Freud’s professional
derelictions, so too Diane’s dream rationalizes the lack of
success in her career. Despite Betty’s electrifying screen test
and ability to capture Adam’s attention upon her arrival at his
set, the dream excuses her failure to become a star as the result
of unsavory studio politics. In the end, the director is forced to
accept Camilla Rhodes, even though Diane’s dream makes her
appear to be the lesser talent.
Adam’s selection of Camilla over Diane and his coming
between the two women both professionally and sexually are
played out in the dream through fantasies of denial, reversal,
and retribution. In the Part B day-residue, Diane is seen
standing in the background of Adam’s production set staring
sullenly as Camilla and Adam rehearse a romantic interlude.
In the Part A fantasy sequence, when Betty first walks onto
Adam’s sound stage, her presence wholly distracts him from
the Camilla surrogate, and he casts a look of such palpable
yearning as to leave little doubt that, were he not otherwise
constrained, she would be the one whom he would want in his
movie. The subplot involving the calamitous day in the life of
the brash young director not only provides a pretext for
Diane’s inability to achieve stardom, but at the same time
satisfies her wish to punish Adam for his complicity in unsettling
both her professional and her personal life.
Although Diane’s parents are never explicitly mentioned,
the elderly couple who are paired with the blonde-haired
ingenue in and out of the dream function as parental figures,
taking on both protective and persecutory functions. Our first
glimpse of Betty, as she arrives at the Los Angeles airport, is in
the company of the grey-haired, doting Irene, who up to this
point has been her traveling companion. The maternal attachment
of the older woman to the younger one appears fulsome
and idealized. Irene embraces Betty with open arms, wishing
her a fond farewell, and pledges to keep a close eye on her
Jay R. Lentzner and Donald R. Ross 117
even in their separation, before ambling away with her shadowy
husband. The artificial quality to the airport scene suggests
that the dreamer’s desire for parental love and approbation
is more a wish than a reality. This notion is reinforced in
the next dream segment where this same couple, now seated in
the back of a luxury car, undergo a sinister change in demeanor
and delight in some wicked joke that appears to be at
Betty’s expense.
Later, during Betty’s auspicious screen test, another parental
pair shower her with affection. This occurs when the
fatuous, antiquated movie producer is reunited with his former
wife, whom he introduces as “the best casting agent in town
but, alas, someone we can’t afford.” Both producer and agent
fuss over Betty following her star-making performance. Their
attentions seem both gratifying and uncomfortable, and pull
the ingenue in opposite directions.
Diane’s dream hints at her hostile feelings toward her
parents, although these are masked through heavy distortion.
Most notable is the scene where the hit man, on the trail of the
vanished Rita, guns down two middle-aged office-workers,
possibly representing Diane’s debased parental surrogates.
The woman is an obese, foul-mouthed cleaning lady, and the
man is a taciturn janitor. While both murders appear to be
gratuitous and to involve two innocents who happen unluckily
to find themselves in the hit man’s path, perhaps the superficially
random nature of these crimes serves as a cover for the
dreamer’s sinister wishes.
As we have argued, Diane’s dream constitutes a compromise-
formation between her warring id and superego agencies
over the consequences of her murderous actions. While aspects
of the manifest content provide veiled glimpses of
Diane’s wish to deny her complicity in Camilla’s destruction,
the dream also expresses a deep sense of revulsion and desire
to punish herself for all that she has done. Thus, while the
“dream-within-a-dream” sequence at Winkie’s represents Diane’s
wish to undo Camilla’s murder, it also conveys her dread that
this is impossible. The male dreamer-within fervently hopes
that he might never again look upon the face that he knows is
staring at him behind the wall at the back of the diner.
Overwhelmed by guilt, however, he treks compulsively to
118 The Dreams That Blister Sleep
behold that fearsome specter, and the scene ends in his
collapse and death.
Indeed, Diane’s entire dream enacts the same fateful
trajectory. Despite its lush-colored tones and optimistic
leitmotifs, there are deeper chords of foreboding and despair.
The persistent knocking at the dreamer’s apartment door, the
cascade of telephone callers pressing for information about
the missing woman’s whereabouts, the nondescript men lurking
in the shadows behind the wheels of unmarked cars, the
studio head who seems to control all these nefarious machinations
without issuing any explicit orders—all of this gives the
dream a haunted, juridical, persecutory quality.
There is also the Cassandra-like premonition offered by
the black-veiled interloper, Louise Bonner, who appears in the
night at Betty’s door to advise her that “something bad is
happening” and “someone is in trouble.” Later in the dream,
Rita is stirred from the depths of a restless sleep and issues a
similar warning. The sinister Cowboy also admonishes Adam
that anyone who does “bad” will see him thrice, as indeed
befalls the dreamer. All of these incidents speak to Diane’s
unpardonable guilt and her wish for self-destruction. But no
scene in the dream provides a more telling indication of this
desire than the one where Betty, following her break-in at the
apartment of Diane Selwyn, comes face-to-face with the
dreamer’s rotting corpse and recoils at the ghastly spectacle.
As Betty turns to run, the frame shudders as if to symbolize the
shockwaves of anxiety pulsing through Diane’s own body. At
that moment, the dream turns from id gratification to superego
punishment, signaling the retributive lengths to which the
dreamer soon will go when she takes her own life upon
awakening.
The Club Silencio Sequence:
Where the Real and the Fantasy Meet
The centerpiece of Lynch’s dreamscape in Mulholland
Drive is the phantasmagoric interlude that takes place at the
Club Silencio. “Certainly the pivotal sequence,” notes one
commentator, it represents “not only an important clue in this
Jay R. Lentzner and Donald R. Ross 119
puzzle, but one of the saddest, most heartbreaking moments in
contemporary cinema” (Freeman 2002). “If there is one scene,”
writes another, “that encapsulates the main themes of the film
and Lynch’s recurring concerns as an artist, this is it” (Chaw
2001; see also Chappell 2001). The scene occurs in a dilapidated,
half-empty cabaret theater where a lip-synching Spanish
singer belts out a soul-wrenching a capella rendition of the Roy
Orbison ballad “Crying” before collapsing dead on the stage.
Even as the woman’s body is unceremoniously dragged away,
her singing continues uninterrupted. Just prior to this disquieting
drama, a maniacal-looking impresario steps forward to
explain how theater is built on trickery. You may hear a
trumpet, or any one of a number of instruments, he intones,
where none, in fact, is playing. There is no orchestra. It is all an
elaborate fake. In the spine-tingling theater of the Club
Silencio, the line between reality and fantasy blurs in much the
same way as it does in the dream itself.
Although on one level the mystery being celebrated here
is that of sound-image synchronization or, more generally, the
craft of movie-making, Lynch is also exploring the production
of dreams, in both literal and metaphorical senses. The
preternatural happenings on the blue-lit stage of the Club
Silencio are at once cinematic special effects and dreamfantasies.
On the “other scene” of the movie screen, when the
lights go down and the viewer is lured into the hallucinatory
projection, the effect is like that of being submerged into a
dream-state. “A motion picture is a dream,” notes Mike Nichols.
“When you see it, you are in the dark. A movie involves
drawing on your unconscious in the same way that dreams
come out of the unconscious” (Pettet 2003, 24).8
In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud sounds a metaphoric
note similar to that of the impresario at the Club Silencio:
Dreams are not to be likened to the unregulated sounds
that rise from a musical instrument struck by the blow of
some external force instead of by a player’s hand; they
are not meaningless, they are not absurd; they do not
imply that one portion of our stores of ideas is asleep
while another portion is beginning to wake. On the
contrary, they are psychical phenomena of complete
120 The Dreams That Blister Sleep
validity—fulfillments of wishes; they can be inserted into
the chain of intelligible waking mental acts; they are
constructed by a highly complicated activity of the mind.
(1900, 122)
Freud was convinced that dreams, when rightly interpreted,
represent communications of high import and definite meaning.
This appears to be at variance with Lynch’s nihilistic
challenge to the distinction between fantasy and reality. Yet
Freudian theory allows us to apprehend the happenings at the
Club Silencio as Diane’s last desperate attempts at projection,
reversal, and denial. If all is illusion, then so too is Camilla
Rhodes’s death no more real than the demise of the Spanish
singer whose voice continues to be heard despite her collapse
upon the stage. If all is an illusion, then where does the border
between dreams and our waking life lie?9
The Club Silencio sequence occurs when the dreamer’s
defenses are beginning to crumble. Despite her best efforts to
escape through sleep, reality and unreality are finally starting
to come into focus. The message of the club that reality cannot
be distinguished from artifice represents a desperate reactionformation
against this nascent clarity. Despite its name, the
Club Silencio is anything but quiet. With the death of the
cabaret singer, it offers a portal to the other side of the grave
and a baleful reminder of Camilla’s death. As Diane draws
increasingly closer to embracing her awful secret, in recognizing
her failed career and her act of cruel murder, there is no
longer a safe place in the dream for her to hide. Uncertainty
and confusion give rise to panic and possibly a glimmer of
insight. At this juncture, the censor is overwhelmed by a rush
of anxiety that causes the dreamer to awaken. All that is left is
Diane’s psychotic decompensation and her final act of suicide.
Conclusion
As this paper has tried to illustrate, Diane Selwyn’s dream
in and of Mulholland Drive is a master class in Freudian dream
theory. It illustrates many of the cardinal tenets of The Interpretation
of Dreams, particularly exemplifying the precepts of wishJay
R. Lentzner and Donald R. Ross 121
fulfillment and intrapsychic conflict at the heart of the underlying
metapsychology. David Lynch’s movie is also a piece of
sublime tragic art, which follows the trajectory of human
emotions from blissful hopes and youthful desire to abject
dissolution and loss of innocence. It is no accident that Diane’s
surname, Selwyn, is linked to the early film pioneer Samuel
Goldwyn, whose name was sutured together from his collaborations
with the Selwyn Brothers, which led to the founding of
Goldwyn pictures. Like Goldwyn, Diane strives to be the
producer of her own dreams, but like the now-forgotten
Selwyn Brothers she finds herself eclipsed by more towering
figures. Like many an aspiring soul who has come to Hollywood
in search of the promised land, Lynch’s heroine reaches
a dead end in Babylon with her dreams transformed into
nightmares.
1475 Bryant Drive West
Long Beach, CA 90815
jlentzner@pol.net
Sheppard and Enoch Pratt Health System
6501 N. Charles St.
Baltimore, MD 21285
dross@sheppardpratt.org
Notes
1. While failing to recoup even half of its fifteen-million-dollar production costs
during its United States theatrical run, the movie earned Lynch his third
Academy Award nomination for Best Director along with shared directorial
honors at the Cannes Film Festival. It was awarded Best Picture by the National
Society of Film Critics, as well as by leading critical groups in New York,
Chicago, and Boston. Despite being lauded for its powerful acting, lush
cinematography, hypnotic score, and the ingenuity and pyrotechnics of its
screenplay, the film failed to receive Academy Award nominations in any of
these categories and was dismissed by host Whoopi Goldberg as an inexplicable
curiosity.
2. In an interview in The Village Voice (Lim 2001), the “unflappably tight-lipped”
director responded to the following questions:
Interviewer: Your work has inspired many psychoanalytic and academic
readings. Do you pay much attention to them?
Lynch: No. I don’t read them. . . .
Interviewer: Are you familiar with psychoanalytic theory?
Lynch: Not really.
3. The scene in the conference room where Adam comes face to face with two
Mafia business types who present him with an offer he can’t refuse comes from
The Godfather. And in a subsequent dream fragment, the same hit man hired to
kill Camilla triggers a chain-reaction of burlesque violence leading to the deaths
of two unsuspecting office workers that pays homage to Pulp Fiction. Still other
122 The Dreams That Blister Sleep
parts of Diane’s dream bring to mind Chinatown and other hard-boiled noir films
of a still-earlier era. Perhaps most of all, Mulholland Drive invites comparison to
The Wizard of Oz, a movie repeatedly referenced by Lynch both in tribute and as
savage parody. The orphaned female protagonists in both Mulholland Drive and
the 1939 classic embark on a dream-quest leading them over the rainbow, but
they arrive at very different destinations. While Dorothy’s journey is one of
adolescent growth and integration, Diane’s results in role confusion and
psychotic decomposition. Her yellow-striped road leads to a loss of mind, heart,
and courage, and finally to a despairing death. In a more sardonic vein, Lynch’s
clue that Diane Selwyn is no Dorothy Gale comes in the scene where, upon
arriving at her Aunt’s courtyard apartment, Betty replies negatively to Coco the
landlady’s inquiry about whether she owns a dog.
4. In “The Theme of the Three Caskets” (1913), Freud discusses the symbolism of
boxes in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice and King Lear: “If what we were
concerned with were a dream, it would occur to us at once that caskets are also
women, symbols of what is essential in woman, and therefore of a woman
herself—like coffers, boxes, cases, baskets, and so on” (292; see also Freud 1900,
354).
5. Freud (1900) believed that every dream contains a “navel” (111n1; 525) that
makes it impossible to interpret fully and serves as the point of contact with its
unplumbable reaches. See also Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (4.1.206–
24), where this same idea is given poetic expression.
6. In Blue Velvet, the Deep River apartments are the domicile of another lost
woman-child, Dorothy Vallens, and the location represents a terrain of sinister
foreboding. Indeed, Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive both employ a hallucinatory
style to probe beneath the façade of conventional normality. The youthful,
haunted protagonists, Jeffery Beaumont and Diane Selwyn, are each drawn into
a detective hunt that propels them back into the heart of childhood darkness,
rekindling traumatic feelings of enmity and passion toward both parents. Their
odysseys evoke not only sexual desire but also fantasies of murder and revenge
that are played out in their dreams and given conscious expressions in both
movies. For further incisive analysis of Blue Velvet, see Kael (1986, 1109–15) and
Atkinson (2000).
7. Given that the hooker in this scene extracts a cigarette from the same shirt
pocket of the hit man from which Diane brings forth the blue key, the dreamer
may well be feeling that she has sold herself out as well.
8. Bertram Lewin (1946; 1948) was among the first psychoanalysts to see affinities
between dreams and movies. As Freud drew an analogy between sleep and the
return to the womb, Lewin linked the “screen” onto which the dream is
projected to the nursing infant’s view of the mother’s breast, its first object. For
a scholarly exploration of how dreams have been used in movies, see Eberwein
(1984).
9. In a narrower sense, the Club Silencio sequence functions as Lynch’s allegory of
the unreliable nature of dreams and cinematic artifice. Earlier in the dream,
just prior to Betty’s screen audition, she is counseled by the enigmatic director
not to play it like it’s real “until it becomes real.” In a world where illusion and
fakery are the coin of the realm, how can any such advice be of value? If the
voice of a Spanish singer is no more real than the disembodied notes of a
glittering trumpet sounded without a player, then Diane’s dream is also a
counterfeit and Camilla Rhodes is dead. Perhaps this is the realization that
causes the dreamer to awaken.
Jay R. Lentzner and Donald R. Ross 123
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