Visualization: Mulholland Drive

Given how captivated and confounded I was by the film, I chose to create a diagram mapping out my initial interpretation of the sequence of events in Mulholland Drive, focusing on the different metaphysical states/planes that Diane/Betty’s character inhabits and traverses. This reading rests on the assumption that Betty’s discovery of Diane’s body in the dream world is not a premonition or projection of a sleeping Diane’s anxieties regarding an impending death yet-to-come, but rather is a sign that Diane has already died by the time the dream takes place. This reading is, of course, up for debate, and I was even led to revise it as my de facto interpretation of the film after reading David Andrews’ “An Oneiric Fugue: The Various Logics of Mulholland Drive.” Andrews’ analysis of the film’s befuddling opening sequence made a lot of sense, particularly in the way that it accounts for the POV shot of the bed as the prelude to a living, sleeping Diane’s dream. This made me realize that my theory was unable to account for this POV shot quite as neatly, but I by no means think that it discredits the theory’s plausibility, coherence, or faithfulness to the film’s themes.

The diagram starts at the beginning of Diane’s actual life, i.e., her birth in the real world, and continues up until her real death. This segment of the diagram is not depicted in the film itself (unless one takes her death at the end of the film to be her actual death), and so requires inference or assumption on the part of the audience to fill in. The choice of dark magenta, besides being a color that Diane/Betty wears in the film, is meant to represent the living Diane and the plane of reality/actuality which exists external to the dreamscape/purgatory that the whole of the film takes place in. The next point marks the end of Diane’s real life and the simultaneous beginning of her post-death experience or dream, which necessitates a sort of existence or subjectivity that I situate as within a distinctly supernatural plane such as purgatory. It is purple because it marks the confluence of the real world, with the event of Diane’s death, and the dream world/afterlife that begins in its wake, which I defined with the box and key’s color of blue. A potential further complication of the diagram might be found in considering whether this transition after death is truly instantaneous/simultaneous or if there could be a sort of disjunction/rift representing the time that could have elapsed in between. The next point is the end of Betty’s narrative with the opening of the blue box, after which Diane inhabits an afterlife version of her real self in which she is forced to relive a representation of the actual events she experienced leading up to her death. This post-death re-experiencing is a way of confronting the repressed and distorted “truth” of the situation over again, in a cycle which ultimately culminates in the re-experience of her own death before starting all over again in a twisted eternal recurrence of her trauma.