Mulholland Dr. A tragic masterpiece

Rating: Null/10 (2 March 2020)

A marvelous complicated storyline that mesmerizes you in a way you can not help thinking about it even hours after having finished watching it. Not only the chronological order of events in the plot is complicated but they are also artistically well-arranged with a meticulous care and subtlety that could only be found in Lynch. The movie has you attached with itself all the way through since the first second of it till the last and once you unravel the whole thing, by any more time you watch it again, it pleasures you not any less than the first time if not more.
Throughout the movie we encounter some symbols in Betty, or as in reality Diane's dream which the most obvious of them could be the two colors pink, red and most importantly blue. A black stretch limo could in a way represent the bringer of the good news in Betty's dream as she wished them to be true in reality as well as the scary man at the back of Winki's who bestows Betty's dream to her by giving her the blue box. But the blue box has to be blue since it is a symbol of Betty's conscious and also the color of the key the hitman delivers to her as a sign that what she wanted was realized successfully. One may even think that Betty's conscious chose blue due to the feeling of guilt brought up upon her by the blue key given to her by the hitman. And more interestingly, the hitman remains the hitman in her dream but this time as someone who is trying to smoothen her dream and make it more plausible by killing everyone in her dream who talks and knows about the accident which is the first lie in Betty's dream and by which she brings her favorite Camilla, whom is dramatically far from reality, to her dream.
The way she wants to develop imagination in her dream is interesting and contrary to reality. She tries to show that she is the head-hunted successful actress with a bright future ahead and coming from a successful family background and Camilla, or in her dream Rita, is one lost person who needs her help and support; the part of dream which Betty cherishes herself into being more than enough kind and supportive to Rita. This, however, could be interpreted as her compensation for murdering Camilla. And when they go to find who really Rita is, they find Diane in her bed when Diane, as Betty in the dream, wants to prove herself that the poor powerless and helpless Diane in reality is dead and her face shows that maybe the scary guy at the back of Winki's has done Dian this great favor.
After finding out that the Diane in the dream is dead, surprisingly Rita stops enquiring about her identity and in order to make the dream even more pleasant, Diane leads her dream into Rita deciding to change her appearance so that she would not look like Camilla anymore. And this fantasy reaches its peak when they both make passionate love in bed at night.
However, one's conscious can not be ignored for long and sooner or later the superego surfaces and comes into play when Rita starts saying "Silensio" in her dream and they both wake up and go to a place where Rita seems to have known already. But this place is nowhere but the place Diane's conscious takes her to face the truth. The truth that all she has been seeing is a dream and more of this truth starts to appear in her hand bag; the blue box. This dream ends when Rita opens the blue box. The interesting point worth paying attention to here is that Rita enters Diane's dream with the key to this box which means Dian's conscious has been present there since the very beginning of her dream but she desperately tries to dream on.
When Diane is woken up by the cowboy in her dream, we start to have a grasp on reality of what had really happened. The beauty in arrangement of events in a rather mind-provoking chronological order here has to be praised. The clues given in this part, for instance the ashtray, guides the audience through the understanding of the fact that the story is going backward until the phone ring makes Diane flinch; from this point on the story starts going forward. On the other end of the line is Camilla asking Diane to get in the car she had sent to pick Diane up to the party Camilla and the director have arranged to announce their partnership. This time in reality, the black stretch limo is a sign of misery for Diane and it goes the same route Rita was going at the beginning of the movie and similarly, it stops suddenly in the middle of the road where Camilla takes Diane to the part through a shortcut in the jungle as Camilla got into before she reached Diane in Diane's dream. Most of the characters in Diane's dream, if not all, are chosen in this party when she experiences sympathy, anger, hatred, fierceness and misery (how the cowboy character, with its extremely short appearance in reality, was picked in Diane's dream still remains a mystery to me).
After Diane pays the hitman to murder Camilla, we get back to moments after the cowboy says: "Pretty girl! Time to wake up." Diane is sitting on her couch in her living room with the hitman's blue key on the coffee table in front of her. Now when her door is knocked on, by a schizophrenic reaction, Diane commits suicide due to the guilt of killing her beloved one.
After Diane's death we again enter her dream which is a tearful moment in this movie. An unfulfilled dream.... A far-fetched happiness.... All that could have come true but didn't. A tragedy accompanied by the fascinating soundtrack of this movie which leaves no eye dry. However, the true tragedy might lie in the fact that how Hollywood screws the life and talent of hundreds of thousands and how it manipulates through its hollow charm and values set by the men behind the curtain. Being made in 2001, this movie also tries to defend and make homosexuality look more decent. Moreover, it confronts the biased atmosphere in the US against the issue of homosexuality.
The symmetrical structure of this movie is something to praise; the fact that the movie starts and finishes with almost similar scenes but in different situations and what you see at the first half, you see likewise in the second in a mirrored order. And how all this symmetry can come along with a sense and a beauty in the plot, makes this movie a masterpiece.