Mulholland Drive’s final quarter represents Diane’s waking life. If seen as such, her dream world becomes fascinatingly sorted and processed, with a mysterious blue box (not to mention its elusive key) indicating the passage from sleep into reality. Betty disappears, Rita opens the box, and the film’s details become clear: Diane is the struggling actress living in the great Camilla’s shadow; she is victim to her muted desire, shunned upon by a powerful elite whose roles she recasts in dreams. Diane is both tragic and pitiful, projecting her deepest fears and desires into a hypnotic netherworld of wishful half-consciousness, a place where she is able to control the Camilla/Rita paradox. Details delicately vary within Diane’s waking life and Betty’s imaginary world, showcasing Lynch’s profound understanding of the rhythm of dreams: Diane may pay big dollar for a black book that brings her closer to Camilla but Rita, in reality, is the one who is rich. Rage fabulously transforms itself into auto-erotic pleasure when Diane’s final pathetic orgasm becomes the logical accompaniment to the sexual engorgements that often accompany REM sleep. Mulholland Drive is a haunting, selfish masterpiece that literalizes the theory of surrealism as perpetual dream state.
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