Movie Review: Muholland Drive (spoiler warning)
Over the last week or so there has been some confusion espoused by a certain someone as to why I like Muholland Drive, so here it is, a review.
I liked Muholland Drive because I am fascinated with the dream/reality dynamic. Personally I have quite surreal dreams and am fascinated by such irrational composites of the mind. There could be many explanations to the movie, but to me, the following is the version that's most logical.
Diane Selwyn/Betty, a bit actress driven by a jealous rage of seeing her lover Camille/Rita together with their film director Adam ordered to have Camille killed. Camille dies and Diane goes back to her apartment, depressed, hid from the world and did a lot of sleeping. During her sleep she dreamt, and her dream is the first half of the movie.
Diane’s dream is the life she would like to have. In her dream she is Betty, a talented actress (in reality her lover is the talented one) helping an amnesiac to discover her true identity (in reality her lover, the “amnesiac” is the dominant one). The central plot in the dream is Diane's wish for Camille to not die. Ironically, while in reality Diane plotted Camille's murder in her dream she helped to save Camille. In their search for Camille's identity they went to the apartment of a “Diane Selwyn” and discover a dead body. The dead body’s position is exactly the same as Diane’s sleeping position when she later wakes up from her dream. This is symbolic, in her dream she is not Diane, she is the perfect Betty, and thus the “Diane” identity must suffer death. In the story’s climax they visit club Silencio, where the maestro repeats that everything is an illusion and nothing is real. The performance of Rebekah del Rio is both majestic and heartbreaking. The club Silencio serves as a wake up call to Betty/Diane, telling her that what she’s living now is an illusion, it is (quite literally) a dream. It is at this point the blue box is found. The blue box and key serves as the solution to the mystery, it also symbolizes truth. At this point the blue box is found because Diane is now ready to wake up, she knows now that she has been living an illusion, a dream. Back at the apartment Diane/Betty disappears, because she is in the process of waking up. Rita opens the box and Diane awakes. We now go to the second half of the movie.
Diane wakes up to the sound of her neighbor’s knocking. She makes coffee and hallucinates that her lover Camilla whom she has already killed, is standing in her kitchen. Here the film recaptures what happened previously and gives you the story of why Diane decided to plot Rita’s murder. After the explanation the film cuts to Diane facing the blue key, while on the other side of town the homeless man (representing fear) drops the blue box and out comes the old couple dancing in the street. The old couple represents the innocence lost, and as such, it is an open display of Diane’s guilt. The old couple crawls into Diane's apartment and Diane is finally driven mad by guilt and kills herself, end scene.
The many sub-plots in the dream are simply irrational composites of a dream. So many times in my own dreams I see people I’ve never talked to and experience sub-plots that make no sense at all. The people in the sub-plots of the film are random people Diane saw in her daily life that stuck in the back of her mind and worked their way into her dream.
There could be another interpretation of the film, one not of dream/reality but of dream/nightmare. There are evidence of this also, the strongest of which is the camera shot of the red bed spread at the beginning of the film. That scene is probably not a superfluous shot but one in which we see through Diane’s eyes as she hit her bed after shooting herself and sees her life flashing through her eyes in the form of a beautiful dream at first, and then a nightmare as she finally confronts what she did to Camille.
This film rates a B+
