David Lynch

[viciousliar]

I dunno what it is about Bergman... I respect the hell out of his movies and think very highly of them but they just don't do much for me and leave me a little cold. As I said, different strokes.

You don't have to excuse yourself, to each his own, some "masters of cinema" leave me cold, too. It's not something one has to justify, that's how I feel, anyhow.

[zedz]

Everything does make sense on the level of traditional narrative logic in this film.

A heart-broken and crushed wannabe starlet dreams up an alternate scenario of her life, but her tragic reality seeps into her dream, and ultimately, she has to wake up . . . and snuff it.

Wonderfully concise! I was thinking about how to "tell the story" last night and just didn't have the patience. You pulled it off beautifully. This is also how I put the narrative together.

Well, my take's quite different. I don't find a reading that treats the first half of the film as a dream is particularly persuasive: it's the section of the film that is least dream-like (and Lynch certainly knows how to do dream-like), and we can be pretty sure that it was not originally conceived as a dream (having been filmed as a TV pilot). There's also a pretty clear demarcation in the film between the naturalistic (TV pilot) material and the surreal, subsequently-filmed second half - it doesn't read as a continuous dream, but as two contradictory alternative versions of reality.

So here's my reading. It seemed easiest to present this in a catechismal form (think "Ithaca").

OK. What are the narrative obstacles in this film?

The double roles; the fact that the second half of the film contradicts the assumptions of the first half (changes in identity and what-have-you).

What's a simple way of understanding the two contradictory levels of the picture?

One is real; the other a fantasy.

Which part of the film is more likely to be real?

The first.

Why is that?

Production history: the first part of the film was originally filmed as the pilot for an ongoing TV series, and thus could be assumed to provide a realist foundation on which to build the subsequent episodes

Internal evidence: the first half of the film has a greater degree of internal logical narrative consistency; purely fantastic elements (such as the miniature people) are restricted to the second part.

Are there any sequences in the first part of the film that violate internal logical narrative consistency?

Yes, the interlude at the diner that features none of the main cast of characters.

At what point of the film does reality end and fantasy begin?

When Betty and Rita go to Silencio. This is a clearly ‘heightened' scene which doesn't follow traditional narrative logic, and it follows on from the bedroom scene. (Is there even the traditional character-goes-to-sleep / character-wakes-up filmic dream-cue here?) Lynch undertakes a nifty bit of misdirection here by making a far more obvious break with the film's reality – the swapping of personae – immediately afterwards. That kind of extreme transition is perfectly natural within a dream, however.

OK, so if the end of the film is a dream, why? And what does it mean?

The story so far: Rita has lost her memory; somebody wants to kill her. We can assume that Rita is the missing actress from the other major plot strand of the first half, and that her attempted killing is closely related to the machinations around replacing her with The Girl.

What immediately leads to the dream sequence is Rita and Betty's kiss. What we're seeing in the second part of the film is the fragmentary, confused, return of Rita's memory (and thus identity) in her subsequent dream, cued by the reawakening of a crucial aspect of that identity, her sexual orientation, sparked by the kiss.

The dream of the second half is not only an exemplary cinematic representation of dream logic, it makes careful and deliberate use of dream psychology. The manner in which material from Rita's waking life is repurposed and distorted (and combined with her slowly emerging memories) is convincing, and true, at least, to my own dream experiences. The most important aspect of the dream sequence, in my reading of the film, is the psychological underpinnings of the stream-of-unconsciousness, and Lynch seems to me to take pains to provide a recoverable subtext.

This is what we can recover from the dream-narrative about Rita's former life. She had a lover named Diane. Rita has just been confronted with the traumatic spectacle of the real Diane's corpse, and in her dream-reconstruction she replaces the still-unrecovered face of her former lover with that of her new lover Betty (that's why Naomi Watts is playing the double role – Rita is substituting one lover for another. Again, this is a completely unremarkable dream trope).

We can also see Rita's confused memories of the film she was making (which, as we've seen, involved lip-synching) in the eerie lip-synching of Silencio.

The machinations of the movie-world (‘Rita' replacing Diane just as she is herself now being replaced; an affair with the director) fill in the background of the first half's back-story.

There's some great dream-logic bits in there, as when Rita is driving again along Mulholland Dr. and improvises a magical alternative route to the director's house.

Most of the content of the extended dream sequence can be traced back to its presumed real-life antecedents if you accept a certain level of dream-distortion and take into account the Diane / Betty substitution.

What elements of the dream sequence aren't explained by this theory, and can they be explained in other ways?

There are two aspects of the dream-sequence that seem to ‘break the rules', i.e. they apparently build upon material / information that is not obviously available to Rita.

The first is the appearance in the dream of the characters from the earlier, mysterious sequence in the diner. But look at that initial sequence again, and it's quite clearly signalled as a dream sequence, dreamt by Rita. The shot that immediately precedes it is of Rita falling asleep; the one immediately following is of Rita waking up: a classic dream-sequence frame. The sequence itself is related in a manner quite unlike any of the surrounding material (the floating camera), it lacks traditional narrative logic, and explicitly evokes a dream world (the character relates a dream which he turns out to be actually living). I'd say that if this film had been made by anybody other than Lynch, this sequence would have been recognised as Rita's dream sequence very easily.

So, it's perfectly natural for Rita to be recycling in her dream-world material from a previous dream.

The other element is the appearance in the dream of the weird couple Betty had encountered on the plane (their earlier appearance is itself a classic bit of gratuitous Lynchian weirdness, but I don't think it's odd enough to demand an explanation). How does Rita know of two characters that had been experienced by Betty, but not by her? I don't see this as a logical inconsistency. Even though we don't see such a scene, Betty could easily have simply told Rita about the nice couple from the plane. In fact, I find it harder to believe that chatty Betty would have withheld this bit of information from Rita.

So what does this reading do to the film as a whole?

The implications of this reading are interesting. Although we can infer some important background ( the Diane / Camilla relationship, for example) it doesn't actually take the plot much further forward – all we're seeing is the very beginning of the return of Rita's memory, and there's a lot still unresolved (as you'd expect of a TV pilot).

We're also seeing at the end of the film Rita's imagination trying to account for the attempt on her life and the death of Diane (two traumatic facts from her real life that she is trying to account for in her dream-narrative). The scenario we see in the dream is Rita's projection / reconstruction of what might have happened, based on her partial information. The real story (i.e. that the attempt on her life was part of the "This is The Girl" Hollywood conspiracy and that Diane was killed by the thugs trying to track down Rita - as I recall, we see the thug call Diane in the first half of the film) is likely quite different and that tension creates a real element of risk for the character.

If Rita remembers who she is but doesn't see the bigger picture and realise that there are people out to kill her, she's going to be in extreme danger. To this point, her amnesia, by making her disappearance more complete, has protected her. Presumably this is the sort of storyline the series would have followed – Rita's slow recovery of her memory, the further development of the conspiracy, the chase coming closer etc.

So that's it, for what it's worth. I've only seen the film twice, on its initial release. This hypothesis seemed to check out on the second viewing (and there were other supporting bits and pieces I can't quite remember – the name of the waitress in the diner, maybe), but more dedicated members of the Lynch mob are invited to test it against the film and add or detract.

[Fletch F. Fletch]

Well, my take's quite different. I don't find a reading that treats the first half of the film as a dream is particularly persuasive: it's the section of the film that is least dream-like (and Lynch certainly knows how to do dream-like), and we can be pretty sure that it was not originally conceived as a dream (having been filmed as a TV pilot). There's also a pretty clear demarcation in the film between the naturalistic (TV pilot) material and the surreal, subsequently-filmed second half - it doesn't read as a continuous dream, but as two contradictory alternative versions of reality.

That's interesting because I always felt it was the other way around -- that the first half of the film is a dream and the second half is reality.

If you think about it, everything leading up to opening of the little blue box takes on this hyper-real quality. And Lynch's sets this up right from the get-go with the jitterbug sequence that opens the film. It has this amped up, otherworldly quality to it. And then, you have Rita's attempted assassination and subsequent car crash which is like something right out of a noir movie. Then, she eventually hooks up with Betty and they investigate Rita's real identity acting like female detectives a la Nancy Drew.

And then you have the whole Adam Kesher subplot that takes on the air of a heightened mystery with surreal bits like his meeting with the Castigliane brothers that goes sour and the mysterious Mr. Roque waiting in the wings and who seems to be pulling the strings from behind the scenes as it were. And then you have the whole bizarre meeting with the Cowboy that also takes on a surreal, abstract quality not based in any kind of reality but something out of crime thriller.

To me, the first half of the movie feels like an invented reality by Diane who, as we find out in the last part of the film, is actually a burnt out actress who has been chewed up and spit out by the whole Hollywood scene, betrayed by Diane and Adam and eventually kills herself out of desperation and sadness.

I always felt that when Rita and Betty go to Club Silencio and they start crying at the end of Rebekah Del Rio's song that it is Betty actually remembering her tragic reality where she's a failure and so she actually creates this whole other fantasy where she's a bright eyed starlet fresh off the plane and gets caught up in this intriguing mystery with another woman, has a successful audition and so on.

I have always felt that Mulholland Drive is like Lost Highway but in reverse with the the reality of the situation in the second half and the first half being the fantasy world that Diane creates to escape her horrible actual life.

Anyways, that's my theory.

[javelin]

And my take is that it is exactly as you say, except the first part of the film is the elongation of the final thoughts going through Diane's brain before she dies, not a dream. At Club Silencio, when she starts shaking, that there is the involuntary spasm that sometimes accompanies a person's dying.

[Titus]

I agree with Fletch's take--the 1st half is a dream (combination of self-delusion, idealistic fantasy, and sporadic bursts of reality peaking through) and the second half is reality, at least as Diane perceives it (I wouldn't necessarily consider the latter half "objective" reality).

One important point to note is that, if I remember correctly, the opening sequence is a POV shot of (presumably) Diane, with blurred vision, settling down into bed. Thus begins the dream.

Also, the end of the dream seemed to be signalled by the opening of the Blue Box. After Silencio (which I also agree with Fletch on--Diane is coming to the realization that everything up to that point had been an illusion), the Blue Key had magically materialized in the purse, and they open it (acually, Rita/Camilla opens it, I believe, while Diane disappears off-screen), and then the camera (facing into the open box) is inhaled by the Blue Box and then spit back out. The Cowboy then opens up the door and sees a sleeping Diane on the bed and says "Time to wake up, pretty girl", an obvious signal that the dream is over (actually, I believe the first shot of Diane on the bed is of her decayed body--possibly a premonition of her inevitable suicide?).

What's more, the second half just doesn't seem to be commensurate with zedz take, at least not in the way I've understood both the film and zedz' interpretation. If it was actually Rita/Camilla's, story, why does it revolve around Diane almost completely? In the second half, especially, Diane is in every single scene (and is the focal point of each). We're meant to identify with her. With the inverse interpretation, the second half of the film is presumably just guesswork by a recovering amnesiac--it probably works, but it doesn't have the same bite as the tragic Diane angle has, IMO. The last scene(s), in particular, have much more potentcy with Fletch's reading: Diane shooting herself (being haunting by those old folks, symbols of her beginning in Hollywood and relative innocence, so to speak), with those smoke enveloping the entire room, swallowing Diane (almost seems to be a descent into Hell), and then the subsequent superimpositions of Diane and Rita in the night sky as haunting reminders of their beginning--powerful stuff in the Diane-oriented take.

Rita/Camilla's role is kept at a distance from us--apparently she helped get Diane's foot in the door of the film industry, was her lover, had flings with other women, and became engaged to Adam Kesher, who directed her in a film (the film's portrayal of her as a vindictive bitch may be exaggerated, though). We're seeing, in the later half, reality as Diane sees it.

In all honesty, I think the first half is just as surreal as the second, just in a different manner. There are too many excursions away from realism to be able to swallow it as the truth, IMO: the Cowboy, the midget in that bizarre auditorium behind a plate of glass, the creature behind Winky's, the old folks with those eerie, sinister smiles plastered on their faces in that limo, the Blue Box, etc. What's more, why would there be such an emphasis on the director's story? If we are to believe that this is Diane's story and the first half is a dream, it makes relative sense and serves a couple of purposes: 1. it allows Diane some sort of fantasized vengeance on the man who stole her lover, and 2. it allows Diane to maintain the belief that she failed in Hollywood due to studio interference/manipulation, not lack of talent (which, in the dream, she had in spades). I can't make sense of this tangent if the first half is reality and the story revolves around Rita/Camilla.

Just a few rambling thoughts I figured I'd spit out.

[zedz]

That's interesting because I always felt it was the other way around -- that the first half of the film is a dream and the second half is reality.

If you think about it, everything leading up to opening of the little blue box takes on this hyper-real quality. And Lynch's sets this up right from the get-go with the jitterbug sequence that opens the film. It has this amped up, otherworldly quality to it. And then, you have Rita's attempted assassination and subsequent car crash which is like something right out of a noir movie. Then, she eventually hooks up with Betty and they investigate Rita's real identity acting like female detectives a la Nancy Drew.

And then you have the whole Adam Kesher subplot that takes on the air of a heightened mystery with surreal bits like his meeting with the Castigliane brothers that goes sour and the mysterious Mr. Roque waiting in the wings and who seems to be pulling the strings from behind the scenes as it were. And then you have the whole bizarre meeting with the Cowboy that also takes on a surreal, abstract quality not based in any kind of reality but something out of crime thriller.

The first half of Mulholland Dr is certainly arch, and plays with genre conventions, but it seems to do so in very much the same way that Lynch does in Blue Velvet or Twin Peaks, both of which are presented as "real". Isn't that just Lynch's idiosyncratic way of rendering reality in the context of the thriller genre that you're seeing? (And don't you see as much Hardy Boys in Dale Cooper as you see Nancy Drew in Betty?)

I also think the notion that the first half is somehow an "idealised" version of a grim reality fails to take into account the considerable darkness of that part of the story, with its ominous background conspiracies and murder attempts: and Betty may be a nice person in the opening, but she's hardly a rousing success (and she is pointedly not The Girl), so it's a pretty meagre fantasy.

Also, if the first part of the film is a self-actualising fantasy, why are there all those convoluted subplots involving third persons who never actually figure in Betty's story. If this were such a fantasy, wouldn't it focus much more exclusively on Betty / Diane? And, even more peculiar, why would her fantasy include the completely unrelated dream (the diner interlude) dreamt by a character invented within her fantasy (and why would that dream subsequently intrude on the allegedly more 'realistic' material in the second half)?

For me, that reading leaves far too many elements unexplained, and inexplicable. It would also have to have been an afterthought on Lynch's part, as it couldn't have provided the basis for an ongoing TV series.

[shirobamba]

Free DVD w/ Lynch

[Fletch F. Fletch]

The first half of Mulholland Dr is certainly arch, and plays with genre conventions, but it seems to do so in very much the same way that Lynch does in Blue Velvet or Twin Peaks, both of which are presented as "real". Isn't that just Lynch's idiosyncratic way of rendering reality in the context of the thriller genre that you're seeing? (And don't you see as much Hardy Boys in Dale Cooper as you see Nancy Drew in Betty?)

Ah, but that analogy doesn't work with Mulholland Drive because in both it and Lost Highway there is a schizm or some kind of break that, as I see it, signals a jump from "reality" (whatever that means) to a idealized fantasy world of the protagonists making. Sure, there are dream sequences in Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks but they take up only a small part of the running time whereas in MD and LH they take up significant portions and are brought on by extreme trauma (i.e. Camilla's betrayal triggers Diane's fantasy world and Fred killing Renee triggers his fugue state). In MD, there seems to me a definite delination between Diane's fantasy world and her reality whereas in BV the arch tone is pretty consistent throughout.

I also think the notion that the first half is somehow an "idealised" version of a grim reality fails to take into account the considerable darkness of that part of the story, with its ominous background conspiracies and murder attempts: and Betty may be a nice person in the opening, but she's hardly a rousing success (and she is pointedly not The Girl), so it's a pretty meagre fantasy.

Maybe idealized isn't the right world but it is definitely a fictional reality that she has created much like Fred creates in LH. It is supposed to be a form of escape but in the end provides only a brief respite for Diane.

Also, if the first part of the film is a self-actualising fantasy, why are there all those convoluted subplots involving third persons who never actually figure in Betty's story. If this were such a fantasy, wouldn't it focus much more exclusively on Betty / Diane? And, even more peculiar, why would her fantasy include the completely unrelated dream (the diner interlude) dreamt by a character invented within her fantasy (and why would that dream subsequently intrude on the allegedly more 'realistic' material in the second half)?

You raise some good points and I'll be the first to admit that my theory certainly is far from perfect. I don't want to cop out with the "abstract dream logic" because that is too easy to explain away the examples you mention. Admittedly, most of the fantasy world in the first half does feature Betty/Diane but it doesn't explain the other subplots, except for Adam's because she was an acquaintance of his so she could have interwoven him into her fantasy world... heh, I know, she must have one helluva an imagination! I dunno... It's the same with LH, there are things in that film that defy any one unified theory and I think the same holds true for MD as well.

It would also have to have been an afterthought on Lynch's part, as it couldn't have provided the basis for an ongoing TV series.

Well, as soon as he realized that LH was going to be turned into a movie instead of a TV show I'm sure he made some major revisions/tweaks to the screenplay. In fact, if you watch the pilot vs. the movie there are quite a few changes.

[Titus]

I also think the notion that the first half is somehow an "idealised" version of a grim reality fails to take into account the considerable darkness of that part of the story, with its ominous background conspiracies and murder attempts: and Betty may be a nice person in the opening, but she's hardly a rousing success (and she is pointedly not The Girl), so it's a pretty meagre fantasy.

It's not really a "version" of reality, and it's not completely idealised, only partially. Betty sees herself as the gifted actress that, it's implied, she actually isn't. She sees Rita as reliant on her when, in actuallity, it's the reverse. She absolves herself of guilt/blame regarding her murder of Rita in reality by turning the hitman into a clutz and having the hit placed on her by others, not herself (and, obviously, Rita survives the attempted murder in the dream). She allows her failure in Hollywood to be the result of studio manipulation rather than her own shortcomings. Despite this, reality is still present, and it seaps into the dream on occasion.

Also, if the first part of the film is a self-actualising fantasy, why are there all those convoluted subplots involving third persons who never actually figure in Betty's story. If this were such a fantasy, wouldn't it focus much more exclusively on Betty / Diane? And, even more peculiar, why would her fantasy include the completely unrelated dream (the diner interlude) dreamt by a character invented within her fantasy (and why would that dream subsequently intrude on the allegedly more 'realistic' material in the second half)?

The subplots all hinge on Diane's psychosis. The Winky's scene, for example, seems to be one of the grim reminders of reality and the creature itself seems to represent the evil present within Diane, or something in that vein. The man recounting the dream in the dream was actually witness to Diane's meeting with the hitman, so he himself is a reminder of what actually happened (i.e. her putting the hit on Rita, and it working, as opposed to unnamed higher-ups putting the hit on her, and it failing). The man was witness to Diane's evil, and her subconscious transplanted him into her dream as a symbol of her deed. If one were to run with this reading, it's probably not reconcilable with your interpretation that Rita dreamt the Winky's scene (which hadn't occurred to me).

For me, that reading leaves far too many elements unexplained, and inexplicable. It would also have to have been an afterthought on Lynch's part, as it couldn't have provided the basis for an ongoing TV series.

I think most of it makes sense, to an extent, when we familiarize ourself with Diane. What we're seeing is a character study that takes place inside said character's head. When you combine both dream and reality in the film, it adds up fairly well (suggestion: try watching it again soon with this inerpretation in mind and see if it becomes any more feasible to you). I don't think any interpretation is completely foolproof due to the fragmented history of the production and Lynch's sensibilities (one thing, for example, that's always baffled me is Diane's aunt's appearance to check on the noise after the Blue Box falls onto the floor), but this seemed to be where Lynch was heading. We know what happens and why, but some of the minor details throughout are left fuzzy and ambiguous.

[zedz]

Actually, raising Lost Highway in this context is extremely relevant (that last LH was a slip, right?). I think that's a far more complicated case, and I'm positive that familiarity with that film and its far less soluble mysteries conditioned audience reactions to Mulholland Drive. If Lost Highway presented two different, irreconcilable realities, then his next confusing film-of-two-halves is assumed to be of the same order. I'm sure that the obscurity of Highway is what leads audiences to read the diner sequence, clearly signalled in conventional film terms as the dream of a particular character, as simply obscure and inexplicable - and more to the point not requiring explanation, for instance.

My approach was that there was a recoverable, 'realistic' narrative underlying the film. The alternative approaches proposed seem to be that the entire film is a dream (with different elements within that dream more or less close to an undisclosed reality). As far as I can see, that's a theory that can be neither proven nor disproven (since a dream can make up its own rules, and we don't have access to an unvarnished version of the character's reality against which to assess the dream-distortions). My theory is falsifiable, so I'm interested to see if anybody can test it and refute it.

[Titus]

Actually, raising Lost Highway in this context is extremely relevant (that last LH was a slip, right?). I think that's a far more complicated case, and I'm positive that familiarity with that film and its far less soluble mysteries conditioned audience reactions to Mulholland Drive. If Lost Highway presented two different, irreconcilable realities, then his next confusing film-of-two-halves is assumed to be of the same order. I'm sure that the obscurity of Highway is what leads audiences to read the diner sequence, clearly signalled in conventional film terms as the dream of a particular character, as simply obscure and inexplicable - and more to the point not requiring explanation, for instance.

True, but the film's origins as an abandoned TV-series/pilot can also greatly influence a viewer's interpretation of the film, which probably has something to do with the divergence in the alternative (general) interpretations of which half is the supposed "dream" (you yourself have cited the fact that the film started as a TV-pilot several times).

My approach was that there was a recoverable, 'realistic' narrative underlying the film.

I think that's what we're doing, as well, with a slighter emphasis on 'narrative'. There's still a story being told or, more pointedly, expostion of a character being extracted.

The alternative approaches proposed seem to be that the entire film is a dream (with different elements within that dream more or less close to an undisclosed reality).

True enough, but not entirely what I was getting at. The second half is reality, not dream, but there are minor elements that are left ambiguous as to whether they're ironclad, 100% truisms due to the story being filtered through Diane's state-of-mind, as well as the fact that a good chunk of it is Diane remembering what happened as opposed to actually experiencing it (which can always be construed as potentially faulty, but here we have no real reason to think the gist of what happened has been altered). We're given what actually happened, it's just confounded by Lynch's insistence to adhere to his first-person POV to it's absolute limits.

As far as I can see, that's a theory that can be neither proven nor disproven (since a dream can make up its own rules, and we don't have access to an unvarnished version of the character's reality against which to assess the dream-distortions). My theory is falsifiable, so I'm interested to see if anybody can test it and refute it.

A dream can make up it's own rules, sure, but the dream we're given in MD makes sense when given the reality of the story, if we're trying to unearth the reasoning behind the obscurities prevalent throughout it. I don't think your theory is any more falsifiable than our's (the latter half, in your interpretation, is still a dream of sorts, and it's a dream relying on conjecture rather than a past that has actually been shown to the audience)--I'm skeptical of it because of the subtle signposts that Lynch plants throughout the picture, as well as what I see as more thematic (and dramatic) weight when looking at it as Diane's story. The story never really emphasizes Rita's story/backstory and, if it is her we're supposed to be interested in, we leave her at a very anticlimactic moment (her realization that her lover has been murdered and that her life is in danger). We're then supposed to shift our concerns over to her past lover's life which, in hindsight, had very little bearing on what happened in the first half.

In your interpretation, Rita stumbles onto her lover's body. This triggers her slow recovery of her memory (via the dream in the second half). We're then let in on the tortuous history of her relationship with this woman--but it's always shown through her lover's perspective (also, keep in mind, the explicit shots of Diane/Betty noticing characters who popped up in her dream, such as Angelo Badalamenti's cameo character who we previously saw making a scene in the meeting with Adam Kesher, Camilla from the dream, and the Cowboy). We eventually find out that her lover has put a hit on her (which, according to the dream in the second half, was successful--yet she somehow lived in actuallity) and committed suicide through either guilt or possibly the hope of being reunited with Rita in the afterlife (which would make the superimpositions at the end a kind of sadistic red herring).

Where do all of the mysterious Hollywood shenanigans of the first half go to? What the hell was the Blue Box? Who was the Cowboy (who seemed to have different motives than the Hollywood execs)? I haven't seen the film in close to two years, so maybe I should pop it in and approach it from this angle, but there just seem to be too many non-sequitors and inconsistencies for this reading to work. If you can further elaborate on what you think happens, I might be able to get a better handle on it.

[zedz]

This is more like it.

I don't think your theory is any more falsifiable than ours (the latter half, in your interpretation, is still a dream of sorts, and it's a dream relying on conjecture rather than a past that has actually been shown to the audience)

Mine's easily falsifiable. If you can prove that the first half cannot work as objective reality (e.g. if there are little dwarf people running around the apartment, or monsters behind the diner, or one character being in two places at once), then it's out the window. Similarly, if you can demonstrate that Rita's dream incorporates material that Rita (based on what we know of her from the objective first half) would not have access to, then it's also debunked.

Since we don't have any objective reality to extrapolate from in an "it's all a dream" theory, neither of these apply, and any logical inconsistency can be dismissed as dream (il)logic. One of the reasons I resist this reading (which is perfectly valid) is that I'm more interested in the ways in which dream-narratives obey their own idiosyncratic rules of logic than in the way they violate logic, and that's what I'm trying to track. Another is that the rich emotional content of the film is severely downvalued for me if it lacks grounding in real characters. If the entire film is a dream, it becomes sort of moot whether its Diane's dream, or Betty's, or Rita's, or Ann Miller's, or Lynch's. If Diane is capable of dreaming up narratives completely unrelated to herself in the first half of the film (all the Hollywood conspiracy stuff), who's to say that someone else isn't dreaming up narratives about Diane in part two? (How about a toss-up between Billy Ray Cyrus and Tony Longo?)

The second half is reality, not dream. . .

So the tiny, giggling couple from the plane really do infest Diane's apartment? Is that why she projected them into the more realistic context of chance acquaintances in her dream? And so there really is a monster living behind the diner? Sorry, but this 'reality' is far too fantastic for me to accept it as such, and that applies generally to the second half. Isn't it more plausible that mundane people from real life appear in fantastic form in a dream than vice versa?

I'm skeptical of it because of the subtle signposts that Lynch plants throughout the picture, as well as what I see as more thematic (and dramatic) weight when looking at it as Diane's story. The story never really emphasizes Rita's story/backstory

Well, if you accept my interpretation that Rita is the missing starlet (and that's pretty obvious to people, right?), then the first half of the film is primarily pre-occupied with Rita's story / back-story (i.e. half of the Betty story and all of the rest). Betty is the traditional outsider through whom we see much of the unfolding drama (cf. Jeffrey in Blue Velvet, Cooper in Twin Peaks).

. . .and, if it is her we're supposed to be interested in, we leave her at a very anticlimactic moment (her realization that her lover has been murdered and that her life is in danger).

Absolutely, but as an elaboration of a TV pilot, that's presumably a given, and when Lynch 'completed' the Twin Peaks pilot for video release he didn't feel obliged to provide narrative closure. Minor point: I don't think Rita does realise Diane has been murdered (doesn't she kill herself at the end of the film (what I see as Rita's dream)?) or that her life is in danger (if Diane was behind the hit, and Diane is dead, and the killers are dead, won't Rita assume she's now safe? - which is where the danger really begins, unbeknownst to her).

In your interpretation, Rita stumbles onto her lover's body. This triggers her slow recovery of her memory (via the dream in the second half). We're then let in on the tortuous history of her relationship with this woman--but it's always shown through her lover's perspective

Don't forget the lesbian kiss, which is the real catalyst. If Rita has lost her memory / identity, and fragments of that identity are starting to come back, might it not be natural for her to see herself in the third person? If the recovered identity is cued by a recognition of Diane, then Diane is naturally the dominant figure in the dream (Rita now knows who Diane was; she doesn't quite know who she is herself yet).

(also, keep in mind, the explicit shots of Diane/Betty noticing characters who popped up in her dream, such as Angelo Badalamenti's cameo character who we previously saw making a scene in the meeting with Adam Kesher, Camilla from the dream, and the Cowboy)

Remember that if Rita is the missing starlet, and the first half's subplot is her back-story, she presumably knows or has seen these people, and they'd naturally turn up in the dream in which she's reconstructing that world.

Where do all of the mysterious Hollywood shenanigans of the first half go to?

See above: they're an essential part of the back-story.

What the hell was the Blue Box?

In my reading this is the dream mechanism for unleashing the recovery of Rita's memory - since it seems to trigger the personality switch (as in a lot of dreams, weird things don't simply happen: there's a vestige of cause-and-effect, even if the cause-and-effect is irrational). I see this poses a bigger problem for those who argue that the second half represents reality. Very faint memories here, but I seem to recall this box being visually rhymed with Rita's bag of money (are they both in the closet?), which is the only thing she has brought with her from her former life.

Who was the Cowboy (who seemed to have different motives than the Hollywood execs)?

No idea. Not a problem for my reading, which assumes openendedness and an ongoing conspiracy. I see this as one of the many threads that would have been followed through had a series resulted. It does pose a problem if you assume that the pilot material was completely subsumed within a completely different, self-contained narrative for the released movie.

I haven't seen the film in close to two years, so maybe I should pop it in and approach it from this angle, but there just seem to be too many non-sequitors and inconsistencies for this reading to work. If you can further elaborate on what you think happens, I might be able to get a better handle on it.

By all means, check it out. My revisiting of the film is also long overdue. For the record, I was aware of the "first half is a dream" reading before my second viewing (it seems to be the immediate interpretation for a lot of people I knew who'd seen it, but none of them could explain the mechanics), but it just didn't stack up for me.

[Titus]

This is more like it.
Mine's easily falsifiable. If you can prove that the first half cannot work as objective reality (e.g. if there are little dwarf people running around the apartment, or monsters behind the diner, or one character being in two places at once), then it's out the window. Similarly, if you can demonstrate that Rita's dream incorporates material that Rita (based on what we know of her from the objective first half) would not have access to, then it's also debunked.

The problem is when we're talking about a David Lynch film, the line between "dream" and "reality" is easily obfuscated. I've cited a number of examples in the first half of things which are head-scratch-inducingly baffling if we were to take them as reality, but that doesn't necessarily mean they can't be explained within the context of a Lynch film. The problem with the "Rita's Dream" theory, for me, is not that it doesn't make sense on a strictly narrative level, but that Lynch is so much more interested in Diane throughout the entire picture (and makes no secret of this). Everything in the film is slanted towards Diane.

Also, as we're not treated to Rita's story entirely (it's fragmented just as Diane's is, Lynch just didn't take an axe to the structure of how he was presenting the material for the first half), logical inconsistencies could, in fact, be excused.

Since we don't have any objective reality to extrapolate from in an "it's all a dream" theory, neither of these apply, and any logical inconsistency can be dismissed as dream (il)logic. One of the reasons I resist this reading (which is perfectly valid) is that I'm more interested in the ways in which dream-narratives obey their own idiosyncratic rules of logic than in the way they violate logic, and that's what I'm trying to track.

You're dismissing my assertion that everything (or nearly everthing) that occurs in the first half of the "Diane's Dream" theory is related to everything that happens in the second half, i.e. reality. No one's parading the "it's all a dream" excuse to sweep any logistical flaws under the rug. I'm not sure why you're hesitant to explore these options which, in my opinion, add more depth to Diane's character than your interpretation adds to Rita.

And despite the fact that the reality isn't objective (and this is debatable, but I don't see it as objective), I don't see how that excuses it from the same hangup that you're presenting; that is, whether or not she incorporates something into her dream that she didn't (to our knowledge) have access to in reality.

Another is that the rich emotional content of the film is severely downvalued for me if it lacks grounding in real characters. If the entire film is a dream, it becomes sort of moot whether its Diane's dream, or Betty's, or Rita's, or Ann Miller's, or Lynch's. If Diane is capable of dreaming up narratives completely unrelated to herself in the first half of the film (all the Hollywood conspiracy stuff), who's to say that someone else isn't dreaming up narratives about Diane in part two? (How about a toss-up between Billy Ray Cyrus and Tony Longo?)

It's a compromise. With this interpretation, every character, in both halves, is being seen through Diane's eyes and, thus, they don't have much depth (the only ones that have any are Rita/Camilla, Adam Kesher, and briefly, Ann Miller--whose revealed as Kesher's mom). However, it greatly enhances the density in character of Diane. The entire film isn't a dream, but most of it does take place within Diane's mind. This devalues the goings-on in the first half insofar as they didn't actually happen, but they nevertheless enhance our view of Diane a great deal. You seem to be suggesting that, if the first half was Diane's dream (and was infused by a myriad of fantasy and self-delusion), it's inconsequential. I disagree with that sentiment.

So the tiny, giggling couple from the plane really do infest Diane's apartment? Is that why she projected them into the more realistic context of chance acquaintances in her dream? And so there really is a monster living behind the diner? Sorry, but this 'reality' is far too fantastic for me to accept it as such, and that applies generally to the second half.

You're exonerating the leaps of logic that abound in the first half. Lynch emphasizes Diane's unstable state-of-mind at the end. The monster and the couple are symbolic (of any number of things) and are, again, figments of Diane's imagination. Diane commits suicide by shooting herself--that's it. Lynch chose to dramatize the act (and establish Diane's frame-of-mind) in his typical surreal fashion. I've never made the argument that everything in the second half happened exactly as shown (in fact, I've quite clearly argued that it doesn't), but we do get the facts--we just get them through Diane's eyes.

Isn't it more plausible that mundane people from real life appear in fantastic form in a dream than vice versa?

This happens with both interpretations (such as Diane's brief glimpse of the Cowboy at the Dinner Party and her subsequent substitution of him into her dream as some otherworldly figure of power).

Absolutely, but as an elaboration of a TV pilot, that's presumably a given, and when Lynch 'completed' the Twin Peaks pilot for video release he didn't feel obliged to provide narrative closure. Minor point: I don't think Rita does realise Diane has been murdered (doesn't she kill herself at the end of the film (what I see as Rita's dream)?) or that her life is in danger (if Diane was behind the hit, and Diane is dead, and the killers are dead, won't Rita assume she's now safe? - which is where the danger really begins, unbeknownst to her).

The closest antecedent to MD is Lost Highway, which focuses on a single character throughout the film (though he "morphs" into someone else for a time). I just don't see this as Lynch trying to condense a would-be TV-series into 2 1/2 hours--I see it as using the footage he shot as a springboard for a 2 1/2 hour film (as opposed to a 2 1/2 hour fractured TV-series). I'm beginning to see where you're coming from (and am increasingly interested in watching it with your theory in mind), but it seems we're substituting one valid theory with a disjointed narrative and muffled thematic/dramatic pull in for another that manages to retain the aforementioned qualities. The fundamental difference between the two theories is that, in mine, we get an immensely devoted character study, whereas in yours, we get a confounding narrative that, with the evidence at hand, we can't make complete sense of.

Don't forget the lesbian kiss, which is the real catalyst. If Rita has lost her memory / identity, and fragments of that identity are starting to come back, might it not be natural for her to see herself in the third person? If the recovered identity is cued by a recognition of Diane, then Diane is naturally the dominant figure in the dream (Rita now knows who Diane was; she doesn't quite know who she is herself yet).

She's not really seeing herself from the third-person, though. She's barely seeing herself at all. Basically, in your theory, we're getting a "how it may have happened" dream regarding her former lover's demise. She wasn't privy to all of what we're shown, so we can only assume that she's logically guessing what's happening on screen. What's more, the second half is still from Diane's POV and infused with her emotions. I find it hard to believe that Rita would more intimately remember her former lover (whose face she can't even place) and her lover's presumed perception of Rita herself than she could remember or aknowledge about herself (and could thus remember her relationship with her lover from her own perspective). It's possible, but a tough pill for me to swallow.

It also doesn't add a lot of insight into her past (nor does it have anything to do with the Hollywood happenings of the first half), so it seems a tad pointless. It's just that, for me, your theory makes the second half of the film into the second episode of a mini-series that will never be finished.

Remember that if Rita is the missing starlet, and the first half's subplot is her back-story, she presumably knows or has seen these people, and they'd naturally turn up in the dream in which she's reconstructing that world.

But why the emphasis? There are explicit, otherwise throwaway shots of Badalamenti and the Cowboy at the dinner party from Diane's POV. What purpose do they serve in this dream? It seems you're using the same argument that you were disparaging supporters of the alternative theory for (it's just a dream).

See above: they're an essential part of the back-story.

But the back-story vanishes midway through the film. Isn't it more likely (or as likely) that Lynch intended the back-story(ies) to shed more light on one character, as opposed to present a semi-conventional story and then abandon it for a a character's dream from the POV of her former lover?

In my reading this is the dream mechanism for unleashing the recovery of Rita's memory - since it seems to trigger the personality switch (as in a lot of dreams, weird things don't simply happen: there's a vestige of cause-and-effect, even if the cause-and-effect is irrational).

Granted, but the Blue Box didn't appear for the first time after Club Silencio--it was in her bag along with the cash (neither of which is explained in "reality") when she and "Betty" go through her purse. On the flipside, if we were to look at it from the alternative theory, it surfaces for the first time in Diane's dream and is revealed as the portal back into reality (via the Blue Key, which comes from Diane's hit on Rita--another cogent reminder for Diane of what she did).

I see this poses a bigger problem for those who argue that the second half represents reality. Very faint memories here, but I seem to recall this box being visually rhymed with Rita's bag of money (are they both in the closet?), which is the only thing she has brought with her from her former life.

I don't recall the Blue Box ever making an appearance after the seque into the second half, but I could be wrong.

No idea. Not a problem for my reading, which assumes openendedness and an ongoing conspiracy. I see this as one of the many threads that would have been followed through had a series resulted. It does pose a problem if you assume that the pilot material was completely subsumed within a completely different, self-contained narrative for the released movie.

Not really. Lynch had the option of excising it completely, but he chose to leave it in, which means it has some purpose, in one theory or another. In one manner, he serves to bring Diane's fetishized vengeance on and harrassment of Kesher to cosmic proportions. He also is the one who instigates the transition back into reality, which brings on another point--the Cowboy clearly opens up the door to Diane's bedroom and says "Time to wake up, pretty girl"--we then see Diane wake up and meet her neighbor (whom she swapped apartments with recently), and then her reflections on what had happened are kickstarted (during a cup of coffee). The bookending shots implying the first half is Diane dreaming (the first person shot of someone, presumably Diane, going to sleep to begin the film, and the shot of Diane waking up (at the behest of the Cowboy) directly following the first half) can't be explained, to my knowledge, in your theory.

By all means, check it out. My revisiting of the film is also long overdue. For the record, I was aware of the "first half is a dream" reading before my second viewing (it seems to be the immediate interpretation for a lot of people I knew who'd seen it, but none of them could explain the mechanics), but it just didn't stack up for me.

The "first half is a dream" theory is certainly the more common one. I've heard all sorts of other interpretations, and the notion that the second half is a (Rita's) dream is doubtlessly the second most favored, but I hadn't heard anyone expound on it quite as well as you have. I'm intrigued, but not convinced

[Werewolf by Night]

The movie that Mulholland Dr. most closely resembles is Sunset Blvd., not Lost Highway.

[Michael]

Can't ignore Persona and 3 Women.

[Werewolf by Night]

Can't ignore Persona and 3 Women.

Well, of course. But the plot structure--the facet up for debate--is closest to Sunset Blvd.

[yukiyuki]

Can't ignore Persona and 3 Women.

don't forget Last Year at Marienbad

[Michael]

Can't ignore Persona and 3 Women.

Well, of course. But the plot structure--the facet up for debate--is closest to Sunset Blvd.

How? The plot structure of Sunset Blvd is pretty straight forward, not a jumble of puzzle pieces like Mulholland Dr. or Persona or the last third of 3 Women.. Sunset Blvd is basically a flashback being expressed by a man who's already dead, very much an inspiration for American Beauty.

I haven't seen Last Year of Marienbad so I can't comment on that. You should watch Persona, 3 Women and Mulholland Dr (yes, in that order) in one long, rainy weekend.

[devlinnn]

Many thanks Zedz and Titus for the insightful discussion. It has been a few years since I've seen it, but will do so soon with new eyes wide open.

In respect to other films with a wiff of inspiration on MD, I was always drawn to the similarities with Bergman's The Silence, as well as Persona. Erotically charged drama about two women, time-lapse dreaming, the trouble of getting out of bed, the happenings at Silencio/cinema, etc. Oh, and little people running about.

[Schkura]

I always thought one of the clever clues to the "first half as dream" reading was A-untRuth, but I suppose there are a great many lies in the film that could refer to.

Anyhow, I don't completely buy the inverse reading, but I'm so glad this film is being discussed here. I can't wait to revisit it MD this weekend and share my thoughts.

[Fletch F. Fletch]

The New York Times ran a nice little retrospective piece on Blue Velvet's 20th anniversary:

David Lynch, Still Disturbing After 20 Years
By TERRENCE RAFFERTY
Published: February 26, 2006

ONE of the very, very few rules about art you can take to the bank is that shock ages badly. But David Lynch's "Blue Velvet," unleashed on a largely unsuspecting public 20 years ago, is, I'm happy to say, breaking that rule as blithely and as decisively as, once upon a time, it broke most of the others. Even after two more decades of Lynchian eccentricity and sensual derangement — years, besides, in which the bar for serious outrage in popular culture has risen to a nearly unreachable height — "Blue Velvet" looks as odd and as beautiful as ever, and it's still a shock.

Film Forum in Manhattan is marking the movie's anniversary with a two-week run that starts Friday. This is a new print but the same old "Blue Velvet," because Mr. Lynch never revises past work; for him, that process would be as senseless as trying to fill in the gaps of a dream once it's been dreamed. What audiences will see, then, is exactly the nightmare that moviegoers of 1986 saw, in all its lurid and lyrical and stubbornly irrational glory, and context makes as little difference to the experience as it does to the experience of any powerful dream: when you wake up, it might take a minute to remember where you are anyway.

The signature line in "Blue Velvet," first spoken by its amateur-detective hero, Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan), is "It's a strange world" — a sentence that 80's viewers greeted with a you-can-say-that-again laugh, and that critics seized on gratefully, as perhaps the lone unimpeachably true statement that could be made about this movie. "Blue Velvet" is a mystery story — Mr. Lynch loves mysteries — but not precisely a whodunit: finding the single, inevitable thread of connection that makes sense of a baffling set of clues is pretty emphatically not the point here. For all the dense portent of the film's hushed, avidly watchful atmosphere, the plot is in fact extremely simple, as brutally functional as the lines in a child's drawing.

Jeffrey has come home from college to his native Lumberton, a small city where his father runs a hardware store; Mr. Beaumont, after collapsing on the lawn, is in the hospital, hooked up to ominous equipment, and Jeffrey takes over the family business. One day, walking through a field, he finds a severed human ear, moldy and crawling with insects, and dutifully informs the police, who thank him but then won't disclose anything about their investigation. The detective's daughter, Sandy (Laura Dern), however, takes it upon herself to tell Jeffrey what she's overheard her father say about the case, and before long this clean-cut college boy is hiding in the closet of a weary-looking local chanteuse named Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rossellini). There, he watches in fascination — and in maybe a shade less horror that you might expect — as Dorothy is insulted, beaten and finally raped by a vicious thug she calls Frank (Dennis Hopper), a drug dealer who has apparently kidnapped her husband and her son.

That's about it, as far as conventional mystery plotting goes: the solution, such as it is, is more or less nailed down in the first third of the picture. As "Blue Velvet" moves forward, though, deeper into the nighttime murk and daylit unease of Lumberton, it becomes clear (if anything is) that the movie's detective-story trappings were always just a means to an end — the director's scheme to lure a couple of appealing, normal young folks like Sandy and Jeffrey into the sick, strange world of the man called Frank. Mr. Lynch's idea, that is to say, is not to make new connections, as detectives do, but to sever as many of the old ones as possible.

That's what surrealists do. And one of the reasons, I think, that "Blue Velvet" seemed so startlingly fresh at the time is that there was not, to put it mildly, a vigorous tradition of surrealism in commercial American film.

About the only precedents for the deliberately disorienting method of this picture can be found in some of the later works of Alfred Hitchcock: in "Vertigo" (1958), "The Birds" (1963) and especially "Marnie" (1964), which shares with "Blue Velvet" a peculiar, awkward formality of tone and a raging undercurrent of psychosexual abnormality, and which was not embraced warmly by Hitchcock's usually loyal audience. Mr. Lynch had himself made just three previous feature films, only one of which — his brilliant debut, the low-budget black-and-white domestic horror fantasy "Eraserhead" (1977) — delivered Lynchian surrealism in its pure state. In the others, the delicately grotesque "Elephant Man" (1980) and the ungainly science fiction epic "Dune" (1984), his wilder fancies were held at least partly in check.

So for most members of the audience, "Blue Velvet" was a completely new kind of movie experience. Its sordid matter unnerved people less, I think, than its unfamiliar — hence vaguely threatening — manner. After all, most moviegoers had seen much more graphic violence than anything in "Blue Velvet," had heard a greater quantity of foul language in prestigious pictures like "Raging Bull" and had probably gazed, with some interest and maybe even some pleasure, on a naked body or two. (Though rarely, it should be said, on one quite so rawly and unglamorously exposed as Ms. Rossellini's is here.) What's tough to handle, particularly if you aren't used to it, is the volatility of the film's tone — the abrupt, unsignaled alternations between teen-movie sweetness and splatter-movie depravity, between brazenly sophomoric humor and abject horror, between innocence and the direst kind of experience.

And it's the innocence, finally, that makes "Blue Velvet" genuinely and uniquely shocking. Mel Brooks, whose company produced "The Elephant Man," once famously described Mr. Lynch as "Jimmy Stewart from Mars"; and there is something wide-eyed and wholesome and all-American about Mr. Lynch, which is real and is, it seems to me, the ultimate, improbable source of his work's power to disturb and appall.

The central question of "Blue Velvet," voiced with winning bluntness by Jeffrey, is "Why are there people like Frank?" Frank, played with insane gusto by Mr. Hopper, is such a one-of-a-kind monster of obscenity that the line might make you laugh: Are there people like Frank? But it's a sincere question, because in Mr. Lynch's imagination there are. Frank is, when you come down to it, a child's vision of adulthood, the cartoon embodiment of all the things a curious kid might picture grown-ups doing when they're on their own and out of sight: they do drugs, they curse a lot, they have parties with incomprehensible friends (like this movie's indelibly weird Ben, played by Dean Stockwell as the epitome of suavity), and, when the opportunity presents itself, they have fast, loud, ugly sex.

It takes a mighty innocent eye to see the world that way: a way that, although it generates monsters, also keeps everyday life interesting, surprising and perpetually strange. That's what all Mr. Lynch's movies are about, and why they have, in their demented fashion, a kind of Peter Pan quality: they're made by someone who has willed himself not to outgrow the immediacy and berserk randomness of a child's perceptions, and to take the really scary stuff along with the really neat stuff, just as it comes.

Mr. Lynch's Neverland, whether it's called Lumberton or Twin Peaks or Mulholland Drive, is by design timeless, fundamentally impervious to the grown-up perspective that lets most of us assimilate our experiences into something like a traditional detective story: a narrative that explains the past and allows us to move (however dully) on. The world "Blue Velvet" creates is static, an imaginative city of simultaneity in which everything, good and bad, is present all at once.

Of course that's shocking. "Blue Velvet," which delighted many and repelled many others in 1986, is likely to evoke roughly the same mixture of reactions today, and 20 years from now, and on and on. There's no assimilating its dark-and-light vision, no explaining its real mysteries, and no handy term to categorize it: not "hip" (as might have been said back in the day), and certainly not "edgy" (as canny marketers have trained us to say since). Why are there movies like "Blue Velvet"? Because the world is strange, and the strangeness never goes away.

[Fletch F. Fletch]

Guy Maddin has a nice little write up on Blue Velvet's 20th anniversary in this week's Village Voice:

[denti alligator]

Saw the new print of Blue Velvet at the Film Forum last night. This thing just never ceases to amaze. So great!

I noticed some funny details I'd never seen before, like when Frank & Co. pull up to Paul's place Frank says "This is it." I just figured he was referring to their destination, but there's a little neon sign in the window that says "This is It." Marvellous.

Does Frank's third cohort have a name? It's Raymond, Paul and ...?

[Fletch F. Fletch]

Does Frank's third cohort have a name? It's Raymond, Paul and ...?

I believe in the credits he's identified as "Hunter"? Not sure...

Every time I watch this movie I notice little details that make the film so rich. I love watching Jack Nance during the whole sequence at Ben's. He's priceless and almost steals the scene away from Hopper and Stockwell.

[Fletch F. Fletch]

Here's a pretty funny trailer reimagining Blue Velvet as a zany comedy...

Synopsis
Jeffrey Beaumont's life was going great, until he met his girlfriend's zany dad!