Mulholland Drive: Behind Hollywood’s Velvet Curtain

Written by Kerem Muldur

Movies are the mirrors reflecting our characters, social realities, and narratives. However, this industry is generally observed to be exploited by politicians demanding to shape the societal norms or culture and change it as a filtered camera featuring the realities society should know and filtering the facts that must be kept as “secret”. This filtering also applies to limit the nature of human beings and portray the world as a beautiful, fair euthopia where they are hallucinogenic and hopeful. This best claim could lead them to be unable to distinguish two distinct pathes: desire to stay hopefull and make our earth a better place, and acting as generated angels or robots. 

        Humans are obviously a combination of  id, the wild side of our character, super ego, our polite, successful, judicator side, and ego, our personality setting the balance between super ego and id. In this point, industry is constituted by two types of filmmakers: The ones focusing on reflecting the duality of the human equally based on their id, ego, and super ego, and others erasing the wild side and describe an analyzed and studied human scheme according to societal norms they attempt to maintain. In this article, we will dive into one of the best examples of this imposition with the cult film of David Lynch, Mulholland Drive, and analyze how he reflects his own society and nature of people in his own interpretation.

David Lynch, who passed away at the age of 78, was one of the most influential figures in film history with his creativity, surreal works, and unique experience. Even though he is mostly known for his awarded movies, he also studied fine arts at Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. The reason why he started to make movies was explained by himself during an interview as his desire to make his paintings move, which resulted in each scene of his films to appear as a separate art piece. His cinema not only uniquelly emphasized aesthetical appearance, but also exposed the repressed, darker sides of American society while simultaneously weaving in abstract images drawn from the subconscious. His famous illustration about the similarity between ideas and fishes was worth-seeing: The deeper you go, the more powerful, pure, and abstract they become. This philosophy created the unsettling yet mesmerizing atmosphere of his films, where dream logic and reality run side by side. His characters often confronted their own suppressed desires, and Lynch neither glorified nor censored them. 

Lynch’s formative years in Philadelphia deeply influenced this vision. The poverty, crime, harsh working conditions, and streets shaped his perspective. The city’s constant sense of danger infused Eraserhead and later works, while painters like Francis Bacon inspired the distorted and existential visual language Lynch became known for.

One of the clearest examples of this approach is Mulholland Drive, Lynch’s one of the most successful films, earning the Best Director award at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival. The film begins by presenting Hollywood’s “glittering” surface, but soon peels it back to reveal disillusionment, identity breakdown, and merciless competition happening underneath. Taking his subconscious themes to their extreme, Lynch successfully illustrates how the American dream is not just an idealized outward narrative but also a combination of buried desires, fears, and tragedies; his aim is not merely unsettling the audience but forcing them to confront both their own subconscious and the unseen face of society.

At its core lies the story of Diane Selwyn, an actress who is in love with her fellow actress Camilla Rhodes, desiring to live a wealthy life in Hollywood with her passionate love for Camilla Rhodes. 

The first half of the film features the dreamlike life of Diane aiming to create an alternative story for herself to forget her past. She renames herself as “Betty”, a talented actress who also won a dance contest and is now coming to Los Angeles to her aunt’s house. After arriving in Los Angeles, she realizes her luggage has already been taken by a taxi driver while she was looking for a taxi, supporting the claim that she dreams everything to be perfect, and everyone seems to help her. After she arrives at her aunt’s apartment, she finds a beautiful stranger taking shower. At first, Betty thinks she is a friend of her aunt, she eventually learns that she is an amnesiac who don’t know how did she find herself in this situation, claiming her name as Rita. Betty and Rita try to search for the identity of Rita together; they chat, discuss, even have sex, all stages happening very smoothly. This relationship is appearantelly the relationship Diane dreamed to have with Camilla; therefore Rita is a sweet, senseful Camilla archetype in the head of Diane. 

Apart from addressing this relationship, she wants to live with Camilla with Rita, Diane also has a desire in holywood career. Therefore, in the dream state, the filmmaker Adam Kesher looks for an actress to play the main character in his movie, but the so-called “Holywood’s unseen hand” recommends his own actress, Camilla to take the role. Betty, who prepares for auditions with Rita and performs iconically successful is unaware of background incidents. As she is taken to the filmmaking room, where she and director exchanged glances, Betty learns that Camilla will be selected not because she is better then Betty, but because the director has no other choice.

Meanwhile, with various phone calls and research, they find the place Rita used to stay. However, when they enter to the bedroom of Rita, they find a dead blonde body laying on the bed. This is a hint of the end coming soon for Diane’s dream.

As the dream progresses, Betty and Rita find a mysterious blue box — an object that, once opened, collapses this fantasy entirely. Scene shifts to the Club Silencio, where a singer sang a very emotional song with themes expressing Diane’s situation; Betty feels unsettled and starts to shake. When the performer announces, “There is no band… it is all an illusion.” Their heartbreak mirrors Diane’s dawning realization that her idyllic narrative cannot shield her from guilt.

Thus, Rita opens the mysterious blue box, and the dream world collapses. Betty disappears, and the illusion replaces with the bleak reality of Diane Selwyn’s life. The fragments of the dream begin to align with reality: Betty was Diane’s fantasy projection of herself, Rita was a softened and senseful version of Camilla Rhodes, the girl named as Camilla directed to Kesher in the dream was the unfair, wicked side of the real Camilla.

In this real timeline, Diane is an aspiring actress from Deep River, Ontario with a jitterbug contest award that she once believed would catapult her into stardom. However, in Hollywood, she found herself lost in obscurity, overshadowed by Camilla possessing not only beauty but also the shrewdness to navigate the industry. Their sexual yet toxic relationship unraveled as Camilla’s career flourished and Diane’s stagnated. The imbalance fueled Diane’s insecurities, transforming love into obsessive jealousy.

    The pivotal moment arrives at the dinner party hosted by director Adam Kesher. Diane receives an invitation from Camilla, not out of affection, but as a cruel gesture of finality. She attends, only to be humiliated in every chance. Adam, now romantically involved with Camilla, introduces her with a possessive intimacy that crushes Diane. In a devastating display, a blonde actress — the girl named Camilla that unfairly took the main character role in the dream state — kisses real Camilla on the lips in front of everyone, underscoring Diane’s displacement and the fluidity of Camilla’s affections, revealing the reason why Diane chose this person to play the hated version of Camilla at the dream.

      The gathering is filled with figures Diane had encountered or reimagined in her dream: Coco, Adam’s mother, greets guests warmly; the enigmatic cowboy silently observes; and the very pathways and courtyards from Diane’s fantasy appear, now stripped of their idealized glow. Adam announces his engagement to Camilla, cementing Diane’s sense of exclusion and failure. The camera lingers on Diane’s face as humiliation and heartbreak silently harden into rage. It is this moment that piqued the hate and rage inside Diane.

        Diane talks with a hitman and hires him at a restaurant called Winkie’s, where a waitress named Betty takes their orders positively, in contrast to Diane’s heavy feelings. That is why Diane named herself as Betty, a positive and happy person, aligning with the character of Betty at the start of the dream. 

           While she is fighting with dark feelings at the Winkie’s, she also sees a man paying the bill. At this moment, she matches her anxious feelings with this man, also featured in the dream while telling his dream to another man. He says that he saw a monstrous, dark woman behind the generator at the courtyard of Winkie’s. He and the man go to check that, finding out the monster is real, leading to a shock at the man, resulting in his death. This event draws a parallel to Diane and her wild id side. It is realized that the monster bite is actually reflecting Diane who feels terrified after waking up from her dream and shoots herself, resulting in the denial of the dark reality.

       Even though she hates Camilla as she didn’t respond to Diane’s love and used her sexuality to take the main role, Diane doesn’t want Camilla to be murdered, regretting hiring the hitman. Hitman also appears in a dream, depicted very clumsy and low-quality hitman, where he tries to kill a man but inadvertently leads to accidents like fire, alarming, etc. He is also featured as tasking his men to control the street for a black haired white woman, who is actually Camilla, meaning that Diane dreams that the hitman wasn’t successful at killing Camilla. 

After Diane wakes up from the dream, the first knock at the door comes from Diane’s neighbor. She enters casually, retrieving a few belongings and mentioning that detectives have been looking for Diane. This brief exchange carries heavy implications: the police know about Camilla’s disappearance or death. 

The blue key rests ominously on the coffee table. This is the exact key the hitman promised he would leave behind once Camilla was dead. Diane stares at it with silent horror and anxiety. The weight of the truth that the murder she orchestrated is real begins to crush her psyche.

The film then plunges into Diane’s unsettled mind. Shadows fill the apartment, and noises echo unnaturally. Suddenly, we see the homeless tramp behind Winkie’s diner — the same figure glimpsed in her dream — clutching the blue box. In the dream, this tramp represented her own self-loathing and moral rot; here, it’s as if that inner corruption is fully exposed.

She hears furious knocking at her door. Diane, trembling, approaches to door to open it, but she sees an elderly couple crawling from the door. Now grotesquely miniaturized and laughing maniacally, they charge at her. These figures symbolize Diane’s lost innocence and shattered Hollywood dreams, now turned into mocking demons. Their laughter grows unbearable as they chase her across the room.

Screaming in terror and guilt, Diane stumbles into her bedroom. She grabs a revolver from her nightstand, the same drawer containing another blue box, unifying death and her crime. With no escape from the torment of memory, guilt, and hallucination, she places the gun to her head and pulls the trigger.

The cowboy’s cryptic warning to Adam Kesher — “If you see me two times, you are good. If you see me three times, you are bad” — resonates beyond the director’s arc and becomes a moral verdict on Diane and, implicitly, the audience. Diane sees the cowboy three times: first in the dream, delivering his “attitude determines fate” lecture; second at the engagement party, silently witnessing her humiliation; and finally in reality, waking her from her dark moments before suicide. This repetition confirms Diane’s damnation, her jealousy, her decision to have Camilla killed, and her failure to accept reality. But Lynch turns the lens on us as well. We, too, have seen the cowboy three times, not as passive viewers but as participants in the Hollywood machine that Diane is crushed by. We idolize actors, elevating them to divine figures, demanding perfection, and discarding them once they falter. In doing so, we perpetuate the same blindness that plagues the casting room in Betty’s audition: Talent, sincerity, and humanity become irrelevant before the shallow demands of image and allure. Lynch’s Hollywood does not just corrupt through the mob-like forces pulling Kesher’s decision; it does corrupt in the silent complicity of those who consume its dreams without questioning what — or who — is sacrificed to make them. By the film’s end, the cowboy’s judgment lingers not only over Diane but over us: in watching her unravel, did we truly care for her humanity, or only for the watch of her fall?

References:

1- Rosseinsky, K. (2022, July 10). Mulholland drive explained: A guide to David lynch’s movie. Radio Times. https://www.radiotimes.com/movies/mulholland-drive-explained/

2- Ferrier, A. (2023, April 1). David Lynch’s ‘Mulholland Drive’ explained. faroutmagazine. https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/david-lynchs-mulholland-drive-explained/

3- Galloway, S. (2025, January 17). David lynch, auteur drawn to the dark and the dreamlike, dies at 78. The Hollywood Reporter. https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/david-lynch-blue-velvet-mulholland-drive-1236110711/