To debunk the claims from the crowd who shouts there's no meaning behind
Mulholland Drive and we the fans are only pretentious f*cks who "pretend" to derive meaning, I will illustrate to the best of my memory how there are the underlying themes of control and personal responsibility.
Everything is out of our control.
- We have a car of teenagers recklessly drive into a limo.
- We have the man behind the diner who is said to be in control of everything.
- Everything goes wrong with a hitman; he shoots his target, accidentally shoots the wall and hits a fat warpig; just when he kills her, a janitor walks by; just when he kills him, a vaccuum cleaner turns on; just when he shoots that, sparks fly and a fire alarm sounds. (Quite an hilarious scene!) (Also, it could be said that Diane wished her hitman was inept, thereby eliminating her responsibilty of her actions.)
- We have mafiaso thugs bully the film director and his refusal shuts down the whole production. Consequently, the film director finds out he's suddenly bankrupt and his wife is cheating on him. We have Cowboy Man who tells the director to either obey and cast a certain girl, or face dire consequences.
- Diane performs great in an audition and the director sees her (as if he knows her from reality) but her role is out of his control. Soon after, we see a black dressed blonde with bodyguards go into a black limo, giving us a feel of paranoia.
- When Diane and Rita have that first great lesbian scene, Diane says "I love you" but most notably Rita doesn't say it back.
- We have the beautiful scene in a theater in which "No hay banda" -- there is no band. Everything is tape recorded. One small detail is that the motel manager where the director stayed at is the same guy who pulls a dead body off of the stage, suggesting that in the film universe which we are in everything is out of our control.
And tying all this together is a mysterious blue box which represents the portal to reality. There is also the recurring theme of red and blue, even when we are watching an overhead helicopter view of the city.
Now, if we consider the framework that the first three-fourths of the film is a dream inside the head of a dying suicide victim, the theme of the movie was that Diane could not escape her actions. Hence, why I say the theme is personal responsibility. Diane's life sucked, she was a horrible actress, and displays having borderline personality disorder; clingy, sucky, whiney, blaming everyone else for her shortcomings. She was very immature, had her former lover murdered, and then felt guilty about it. So when she shoots herself in the head, she somehow manages to experience this two hour dream in the few seconds before she actually dies, and gets to replay life how she had wanted it to turn out. But during the course of the dream, some other force periodically interjects--maybe god--essentially saying "No, no, the price is wrong, bytch. You can't do that." She was immature in her real life but in the dream the film director is immature, even going as far as taking a golf club and pounding a limo (another hilarious scene!). But that divine force, embodied by the Cowboy Man, takes control of the director's life and tells him to basically grow up. Consequently, Diane/Betty can't have things her own way in her own dream by not being able to get casted into a movie. Secondly, at the beginning of the film Rita suffers amnesia from the car accident, affording Diane/Betty the opportunity to get close to Rita without being recognized, but in the end she still can't have things work out how she deviantly wanted. There was even a scene in which a group of bandits, outside of a coffee shop, expressed the desire to hunt her down, and towards the end of the dream we see one of them at the theater (along with the motel manager). After the wonderful performances at the theater, Betty's body shakes and trembles, death is near. They hurry off go back to her Aunt's apartment, Rita vanishes into thin air. Betty opens the box, vanishes, dies.
Other tidbits:
- As previously mentioned, in the beginning, the license plate of the limo reads "2GAY4U".
- In the series of phone calls, the movie studio calls the theater, which calls the motel manager, which calls Diane's real house.
- As I previously mentioned, when the girls call Diane's house, Betty says "It's weird to be calling myself."
- In the scene in which a witch-looking woman comes to the apartment, Betty answers the door saying "I'm Betty." The witch reponds with "No you're not!"
- Diane's aunt is dead.
So there you go. Anyone who persists to argue that there is no meaning or message behind the film, after I have laid out its cohesiveness, is doing a Diane and denying reality.
