Trust me, the plot fits together

Rating: Null/10 (28 January 2002)

Mulholland Dr. is a fast-paced, visually arresting, wonderfully acted, fascinating movie, that starts out surreal and becomes extremely surreal. But although the movie might not seem to make sense, there is actually a plot with a beginning, a middle and sort of an end; it's just told in a distorted, dream-like fashion. Just think about it, and you'll get it.
In chronological order, the events are: a nobody actress who's on the verge of making it big time (probably named Carmen) lets success go to her head, and starts ignoring her lover, a struggling actress named Diane. When Carmen has an affair with, then gets engaged to, her current director, Diane hires a hit man to kill her - but when she's about to be shot, a car accident leaves Carmen amnesiac and her potential assassin dead. Meanwhile, Diane is overwhelmed with guilt and kills herself.
She then takes refuge with Betty, an actress newly arrived in Hollywood, and the two of them try and figure out her past; and we have another storyline about a movie director who is ordered to cast a particular actress in his latest movie, or face dire consequences.
The reason this is all so confusing is because Betty and Diane are played by the same actress, and both directors are played by the same guy, and the actress who is blackmailed into the film is called Carmen; not to mention the waitresses who look identical to Betty and Diane (named Betty and Diane), and all kinds of events that repeat themselves in different contexts.
The way I see it, the first scene is the only literal scene in the whole movie - Carmen leaves the scene of an accident in a daze, all her memories in a blur; she then crawls to a nearby house, which she sees being vacated by an elderly couple, and collapses into a coma.
Then comes a long, vivid dream she slips into, which borrows elements from her own life, allowing her to see glimpses of what happened without them actually fitting into a story. She invents Betty as a composite of herself, Diane and a waitress she once met named Betty who resembles Diane. She puts in her director fiance, recreating at one point an anecdote he told her about his ex-wife. She also recreates the audition she once did for a failing producer and a washed-up director; and the sinister plot to put Carmen Rhodes into the film springs from Diane's plot to have her killed - specifically, the image of somebody being handed a photo of Carmen Rhodes and told, "This is the girl."
Then at last, Carmen's memories fall into place. Betty disappears, and the real events play out before her eyes.
David Lynch has given us a cinematic interpretation of that feeling we all get - when are haunted by a half-memory, those times where we know the size, the shape, the colour and the smell of a memory, but the memory itself stays just out of reach. We have the blue key, but we can't find the blue box. And then when we find the blue box, and open it, it all rushes back to us; and it feels as real and as present as it ever did. Neither part of the film, the dream or the recollection, is an actual event, it all takes place in Carmen's head, and even the recollection is an obviously falsified construction of Carmen's mind, only a vague version of the truth. We'll never know all that happened, but we know the truth behind what happened, and that's all that matters.
That's my interpretation, at least. I could be wrong.