Still brilliant, and yet not difficult to watch

Rating: Null/10 (19 July 2016)

At 15 years after release, Mulholland Drive is not only way past the statue of limitations (a manner of speaking) for spoiler purposes, but has also attracted hundreds of thousands of words in background literature. In this IMDb posting, therefore, I would (a) assume that readers have seen this enigmatic masterpiece that won David Lynch his Cannes Best Director Award and (b) try to take a different angle, even though it is unlikely to be feasible.
What I am trying to do here is to explore how the real-life events (last 25 minutes of the film) have been used to construct the realistic dream (beginning two hours), the word "realistic" used in the context of a dream.
The first two hours depicts Diane's (Naomi Watt) dream in which she in Betty. At the end of the dream, she wakes up and eventually shoots herself in a highly emotional state, in a 25-minute segment. This short segment, however, has a subtle construction that needs to be highlighted.
The only true "real-time" scenes occur only at the beginning and the end of this 25-minute real-life event segment. They bookend a series of flashbacks that is really the "meat" that explains the dream. The trigger point is Diane bringing a cup of freshly made coffee to the sofa then jumping (flashback) to a steamy sex scene with Camille (Laura Harring) on the same sofa. All the events needed to explain the dream are in this 20-minute flashback which is consistently and internally linear. At the end of it, the scene jumps back to the coffee and the brief conclusion of Diane killing herself.
The trick thing is that a viewer not paying close attention may challenge the logic: how can Diane dream about people she hasn't met? Now you can see that when Diane wakes up everything have already happened (as depicted in the flashback) and that is why she can dream about them. The only things that really happen AFTERE she wakes up are (1) neighbor comes to get back her things (2) neighbor telling her that two detectives are looking for her (3) from the blue key she knows that the hit man she hired has already killed Camille (4) under unendurable stress, Diane kills herself. It is the FLASHBACK embedded in this 25-minute final segment that tells the full story: small town Canadian girl Diane comes to Hollywood seeking fame and fortune; Diane meets Camille who introduces her to the movie universe (small parts only but at least a start) and also becomes her lover; the Lesbian love however is only transient to Camille who announces her intention to marry director Adam (Justin Theroux) during a party at Mulholland Drive; Diane hires a hit-man to kill Camille (financial by a recent inheritance). This main story plus a lot of surrounding details finds its way into Diane's two-hour dream.
You and I, and everybody else, are veteran dreamers. Dreams come in an infinite number of forms, from the most outlandishly surreal to the most natural (like winning a lottery or, alas, being fired from one's job). Real people and incidents appear in dreams, as in real life or twisted around. I would venture to suggest that Diane's dream as created by Lynch with her real life experience is "realistic" as aforementioned.
All the key elements appear, but get twisted around. Even Diane's adopted name Betty is "inspired" by what she sees on the nameplate of a waitress. Three crucial motifs from the key plot line, the assassination, appear in the dream under different contexts: the hit money (two hundred plus grands) and blue key to tell her the job has been completed becomes mysterious contents in the mysterious woman Rita's (Camille's alter ego) purse. The photo of Camille that Diane shows the hit-man becomes the photo of a casting candidate (also called Camille, but a different face) that director Adam is forced to choose by gangsters. The sentence "This is the girl" carries different meanings. Uttered by Diane in real life to the hit-man, it means this is the girl you have been hired to kill. Uttered by Adam in the dream, it indicates the girl he wants to choose (is forced to, more precisely) for the part.
Characters also appear in different guises. The neighbor is just about real as real can be. The hit-man is also real but his killing spree in the dream is entirely imaginary. Coco, Adam's mother that she meets in real life in the party at Mulholland Drive, become the manager of the apartment where Betty stays in the dream. The self-introduction line "Just call me Coco, everybody else does" however is identical in both real life and dream. Most important is Adam the director in both real life and dream. In real life, we see him not much more than the man for whom Camille dumps Diane. The dream gives Diane her channel for pouring out her innate hatred for the man: Adam has his integrity compromised, is cheated by his wife, gets beaten up and chased out of his own house, loses his credit with the banks and generally gets humiliated. Diane's revenge in her dream.
I can go on and on and this can easily take a chapter, or a book. The point, as highlight in my summary line, is Lynch's brilliance in constructing a dream from a real-life plot line. You see that brilliance in every scene.