"We are such stuff, as dreams are made on---and our little life is rounded with a sleep"

Rating: 10/10 (4 October 2016)

So the haunting quote of Shakespeare goes, so Mulholland Drive goes---Life and dreams: the same stuff. And we can turn both dreams and life into nightmares, even if they are made in Hollywood---the quintessential "Dream Factory".
Borges expressed that same mystery in his poem "The Dream"; I would suggest to read it carefully as accompaniment for this film:
"If dreaming is (as they say) a truce, a sheer repose of the mind, why is it, if abruptly you wake from one, you feel you've been robbed? Why's rising too soon so sad? The early hour takes from us an unthinkable gift, one so intimate that it's only translatable in a trance the night gilds with dreams that may well be cut-off reflections of the treasures of the darkness, of a timeless, nameless orb that the day distorts in its mirrors. Who will you be tonight in the dark dream, on the other side of the wall?"
When we sleep, we fabricate dreams. Borges thought that dreams are works of fiction. He concluded that dreaming is perhaps the oldest aesthetic activity of humanity. Seemingly dreams could be, then, our very own "films"---Although in them we are everything: director, theater, audience, actors, scriptwriter, producer, editor, camera, sound,... all coming from our own emotions, fears, hopes, from our very life.
...But life... perhaps is just a series of dreams, dreams we live. The dream of achieving some aspirations, the dream of becoming a Hollywood star, the dream of being loved, the dream of being happy. Maybe our whole life is a dream, a big play, the greatest film of all.
And sometimes, like Diane Selwyn, we turn our dreams into nightmares. For Borges, when dreaming, feelings inspire the images (if in the dream we feel fear, we engender a tiger, or a ghost). He went further and said that since in dreams fear precedes the improvised apparition of the image, then we can project horror on any thing (regardless if that thing is horrific in real life). A house, a theater, a little blue key... for Borges "every form in the universe can be contaminated with horror. That's the peculiar taste of nightmares, more diverse from the things that scare us in real life".
Mulholland Drive stages a nightmare. But which one? The one that Diane dreams? The one that Diane lives? Both? What is "the real" story? Who knows? Who cares? Mulholland Drive shows the power of film and the chance for us to actively engage in cinematic experiences. Mulholland Drive is a mood, an atmospheric and suspenseful experience about dreams, nightmares, fiction and life. As dreams, films are illusions, like shows performed at Club Silencio. We enjoy them, suffer them, taste them, and make sense of them (or not). We make of them what we want, out of what we are. We create always our own versions of the films we watch--like in this forum. Perhaps our very life is made of the same stuff; illusional, creative, fearful, crazy, absurd, emotional. That might be the real horror. Or the real hope.