Mulholland Drive is a Hollywood story which expands across the limits of both fantasy and reality until the difference between the two can no longer be discerned. The film itself only lasts about two hours, but the experience of watching the film lasts much longer, with a contemplation period that never truly ends; it was a film made to create more questions than it was answers. This was clearly intentional. Lynch purposefully declines to give away the story on the basis that the magic would disappear with the mystery. [1]

But, he did leave some clues. Early on in Mulholland Drive there is a shot of a street sign that says “Sunset Boulevard”, which is another film that addresses the illusion of Hollywood. As it turns out, geographically, both Mulholland Drive and Sunset Boulevard run parallel to each other in LA, and both are windy, dangerous roads. That’s not the only similarity. David Lynch has admitted to many intentional parallels, including the shot of the street sign, Paramount Gates, and the reuse of the original car, which he found and purchased in Vegas. [2] However, he also claims that he didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about Billy Wilder’s film while making his own. [3] Given the former statement it is nearly impossible to believe the latter.

While there is no clear way to analyze this film, I began to lean on what I knew. The parallels between Sunset Boulevard and Mulholland Drive were undeniable, but at the same time, there was no way to prove that they were intentional. As Chris Rodley writes in Lynch on Lynch, the best words to that can be used to describe Lynch’s film are “’probably’, ‘possibly’, and maybe’”. For a while I got caught up in those three words, trying to find ways to erase them, but as I moved forward I made the decision that the inability to be absolutely positive about something was truly characteristic of film theory itself, and in this way Lynch’s Film embodies the tradition of complex films in a way that had yet to be seen. In order to do this non-certainty justice, there is only one way to create a comparative analysis, and that is through a found footage compilation of the two films.

In Jamie Baron’s book, The Archive Effect, she describes the slippery differences between found footage and archival film, saying that the line between avant-guard and documentary is too slippery because the found footage always implies a new context when being put into a new film, and this manufactures a subjectivity which comes off as fact. [4] This statement, while meant to be a critique, perfectly embodies what film theory is all about; it’s a subjective analysis which, if made convincing, is indiscernible from the directors original intentions.

As for the content of the film itself, my piece asks this question: what can we glean from Mulholland Drive based off of what we know about Sunset Boulevard? In watching both films many times, I’ve concluded that Diane’s character is actually the manifestation of the Hollywood experience as embodied by Joe Gillis, Betty Schaefer, and Norma Desmond.

Let’s start with Joe. Joe is a man trying to make it big in Hollywood, or at least big enough so that he can afford his cost of living. Threatened with the confiscation of his car, he seeks refuge in the garage of a house he thought was empty, but was actually inhabited by none other than Norma Desmond. She invites him to stay, and work on her script. He accepts, but struggles to make something usable out of her wretched work. By the end of the film he is murdered, but by the beginning he is already dead.

Diane goes through many of the same experiences. She too is trying to make it big in Hollywood, and is staying in a home that doesn’t belong to her; in the pre-blue-box stage of the film, Betty (who is Diane), is staying in her aunts home while she is on vacation in Canada to work on a film. Later, when we enter the box, Diane is staying in the former residence of her aunt, who has since died. To describe this parallel, I put the image of Betty first entering her home in LA next to the image of Joe first entering the home of Norma Desmond, following these shots is the image of both Betty’s aunt and Norma. This is in order to remind the viewer whom these homes truly belong to.

It is important to recognize, also, that Joe is dead at the beginning of the film. If this parallel stands true for Diane, then we can glean that Mulholland Drive isn’t merely a film about a bad dream, but actually a travel through purgatory, through which Diane must take in order to come to terms with the truth.

In addition, Betty also is attempting to make something usable out of a terrible script. We see her playfully practice for an audition with Rita in the kitchen. The two laugh about how awful the script is, but Rita admires what Betty is able to do with it through her acting. This is parallel in Sunset Boulevard, not only to Joe’s work on Norma Desmond’s script, but also in the times Joe meets with the young Betty Schaefer at Paramount, and the two begin to write something new and exciting together based off of something old. This parallel too is shown in my film, by combining the over the shoulder looks of both characters from one film into a single shot, and then fading into the two characters from the next. In this way you can see that the relationship between each set of characters is the same.

The next shot in my film shows Betty next to the director, which highlights the romantic aspect of the relationship between Betty Schaefer and Joe. I even cut Mulholland’s Betty’s face in order to replace it with Schaefer’s. They Share not only a face, and a name, but also their attitude. Schaefer is a spunky, confident woman who has a shot at making it big, and when we are in Mulholland Drive’s Betty’s interpretation of events, we can see that same attitude reflected.

Diane perhaps wishes she was more like Betty Schaefer, and thus conjures up a version of herself derived from this character. She embodies not only Schaefer’s attitude, but also her romantic lure; Sunset Boulevard’s Betty is engaged, and yet still pursued by Joe. Mulholland’s Betty is also pursued both by the director, and by Rita, but when Betty becomes Diane, much of this illusion, if that is what it is, becomes shattered.

In this way, Diane is Norma Desmond. In the post-blue-box portion of the film, Diane loses Rita to the director. Norma, similarly, suspects she is losing Joe to someone, although she does not necessarily know it is Betty. The two women, Diane and Norma, lose not only their romantic partnerships, but their dreams.

For Norma, stardom was unfairly taken from her grasp by introduction of sound in film. Ever since she has just been washed up, and suicidal, caught up in her delusion of self-importance. Diane struggles similarly. She too has lost her opportunity to become the star she was in the pre-blue-box stage of the film. Her talent, if any, goes unnoticed. This, in combination with her emotional dependency to Camellia (who was formerly addressed as Rita), causes her to spiral into depression once Camellia decides to pursue someone else.

Both women attempt to kill themselves, both women murder the people they loved, and both of them create a delusion to cope with it.

I displayed these similarities by showing the Joe’s murder after Diane discovers that Camellia is engaged. At the same moment which a shot hits Joe, the music plays a beat, and we see the blue key, which is a symbol of the death of Camellia.

It is important to note, however, that Diane and Betty aren’t the only versions we see of Diane’s character in Mulholland Drive. The homeless woman who lives behind Winkie’s has been interpreted as a sign of failure, because to Diane the failure to make it big in Hollywood is the equivalent of dying. After all, in Betty’s world the aunt is in Canada, which is where Diane is from; as we enter Diane’s world, however, we realize the aunt is actually dead. This draws the parallel that if Diane were to go back to Canada after a failed career in film, it would be the equivalent of dying. When the man explaining his dream, whose monologue is featured in my film, walks out to see the homeless person, he too faints.

His friend asks “why this Winkie’s?” to which the answer of course is this dream. However, that begs the question, why does the dream take place in this Winkie’s? Perhapse it is because the Winkie’s is located on Sunset Boulevard, the same location of Diane’s residence, as well as Norma Desmond’s. If this is true, than the homeless woman isn’t some stranger, but rather the embodiment of the failure of both of these women. The final montage in my film expresses this though the layering of Norma next to the homeless person, and also Diane’s face on top of hers.

When this analysis is complete, of course there are still holes. That, however is the beauty of Mulholland Drive, and of film theory itself. Lynch is right; if we truly understood every detail of his films the magic would die. If we compare his film to Sunset Boulevard, as we have, and uncover the parallels between Joe, Betty, and Norma, we can perhaps uncover some of the mysteries while simultaneously creating new ones. That is the beauty of film theory; it is a never ending puzzle which begs to be solved.

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[1] Lynch, David, and Chris Rodley. "Billy Finds a Book of Riddles Right In His Own Back Yard." In Lynch on Lynch, 266. London, England: Faber and Faber, 1997.
[2] Ibid. 273
[3] Ibid. 273
[4] Baron, Jaimie. The Archive Effect: Found Footage and the Audiovisual Experience of History. London, England: Routledge, 2014.