As we move through life, we tend to put on different faces to solve different problems. You’re polite to the waiter even though he brought your fries out cold to uphold social norms, you suck up to your boss because you want a promotion, you act coldly to your friends for fear of rejection: we become different people because this is the best way to survive. This concept of multi-facedness, this common, tragic error of self-preservation at the deprivation of a self, is demonstrated and elaborated on in David Lynch’s modern classic, Mulholland Drive.

We follow Betty Elms, a young woman who moves to L.A. and experiences the dark side of Hollywood. The whole idea behind Hollywood is to pull in a group of people from across the globe and force them to compete to be one person; production companies look at hundreds of actresses and decide who is best for a single role. “It’s not a competition,” the director says, but the men behind the glass say otherwise. “This is the girl.” Hence, they take people auditioning for a part and flatten them into a single entity. The “role,” the “character,” becomes all-encompassing, and has more of an identity than any of the single actresses asking to play her. On top of individual actresses sublimating their identity to the part, these actresses must sublimate their identity to a competitive alter ego, a different being entirely who must win, consume, and destroy at all costs. “I wanted the lead part so bad… [that it drove me to misery and despair.]” Because the “character” is the only one with an identity, the actress must become the character in order to have any identity herself. And because the competition to be this character is so monstrous, the actress must do anything and everything in order to win this competition.

This is best seen in the two script reading scenes, where Betty reads the scene two entirely different ways. When with Rita, the scene at first seems real, like Betty is genuinely threatening her, before it turns playful and ridiculous. With the film producers, it at first seems fake, a mere audition that Betty is playing over-dramatic, before it turns frighteningly real when the male actor’s sexual aggression is happening right there in full reality. Betty drops her nice-girl one-dimensional sheen for the first time and submits to the advance, with the goal of winning the part, and, ironically, in doing so, becomes more interesting to us. Betty’s identity is split, sublimated to whatever the current situation calls for, however the words of the script can be shifted to the emotional context around it. She is an “actress” in a deeper sense of the word, where “acting” a part is the only thing she can do, where “acting” each scene as it’s asked is her only character trait. This lends double meaning to the director’s line, “Don’t play it for real until it gets real,” during the audition. It is not until it “gets real” that Betty is able to “play it for real,” meaning that it is not until then that she is allowed to have a real identity.

These layers of identity become so confused and cloudy that any “true” identity the individual actress once had is lost entirely. When it is revealed that Betty Elms is a dream being dreamt by another woman named Diane, all the ways Betty’s identity has been constructed become clear. My theory that Rita is the subject whom Diane enters the dream through slightly complicates matters. I’m almost positive that the Winkie’s Diner scene with the monster jump scare is a third dream level/world. Directly before and after it we see Rita go to sleep and wake up. This could signal that the monster lies within Rita; at the end, both Rita and the Monster’s association with the blue box could support this. I can’t get over how the dominant reading of the “reality” world is so much more dreamy and surreal and nonlinear than the “dream” world. It’s like reality is where the Monster truly exists, and only in the Dream it shows its face to people. Additionally, if you take the logic that every time Rita goes to sleep (which is a lot!) the following scene is another dream, she sleeps right before the first “This is the girl” scene. And when she wakes up, Rita says, “I thought sleeping would help. I thought it would help me remember who I am.” While she is sleeping is the first time that we see the name “Camilla Rhodes.”

So much of this is about who controls stories— Betty’s career is at the whims of the men behind the curtain, Club Silencio shows us the band doesn’t truly control the music, the meaning of Betty’s audition scene is controlled by those she’s doing it with, Rita’s entire reality is controlled by Betty and Betty’s entire reality is controlled by Diane. The entire conceit of Hollywood is choosing who gets to tell other people’s stories, and it’s only those who are the most self-obsessed that would believe they have the right/ability to do this. Being the one who’s going to make it above everyone else, who’s going to win the Jitterbug contest. Ultimately Diane, if she is the Dreamer, is the one who controls which story we’re seeing in the dream, and the person she chooses as our entry point is Rita/Camilla. You forget how the Dream really isn’t Betty’s story, she has equal screen time with Adam and Rita. Even as Dreamer she loses control and the whole thing becomes dark and painful. It can’t escape the Vice grip reality has.

When she arrives in L.A., Betty is playing the role of a wide-eyed innocent. This is the role, the mask that Diane has created from an amalgamation of her past experience and the collective experience of all new actresses–Betty is not just a dream, she is a collection of dreams, she is all of the hope and disappointment coming from the Dream Factory. But even once this truth is revealed and the layers of identity are sorted out, we see that Diane has actually lost her identity, too. Betty is a false creation of Diane’s, and Diane is a slave to the destruction and jealousy of the real world. My theory comes into play because Betty is also creating Rita, the girl she “randomly” finds in her aunt’s apartment, guiding her through her memory loss and shaping her identity around her; Betty is not the one living inside the dream but instead a black hole in the dream through whom everyone is filtered. Another reason Rita makes sense as the dreamer’s point of view is because we see her sleep several times throughout the beginning, and it is after this that the other major players of Adam, the monster, the Castigliane brothers, and the assassin are introduced. I think that Rita is dreaming up all of these situations, and then they are looping back and being re-realized into Diane’s dream, the one Rita is already a part of. This is consistent with Diane as well, where she dreams the old people at the airport and then they loop back to haunt her in her reality. And the Winkie’s diner scene, where the guy says that he saw the monster in a dream, and then the thing he needed to escape is manifested right in front of him. The dreams that you subjugate yourself to become your reality, the identity that you chose to put on is not unreal simply by calling it a mask.

In my life I like to think that I’m generally adept at seeing the nuance in situations and relationships. I don’t like to see the “narrativized” version of things, because we “narrativize” things in order to rationalize them, in order to give ourselves peace, not in order to see the truth. Even the “good” narratives are usually just bullshit be-your-best-you self-help nonsense, which is just as much a bullshit narrative built on flimsy evidence as blaming other people for all your problems. The “true” narrative is not narrativized. “Truth” is all the complexity of existence, and it’s not something that we as individuals can wrap our heads around, and that’s okay because most of the time it doesn’t have anything to do with you. (“Narrativizing” is of course at some level necessary, because of how complex the world is, but that is a slightly longer discussion.) “Narrativizing” things most of the time is just another way of writing a story that revolves around you, it is the epitome of self-centered thinking.

This is exactly what is happening in Mulholland Drive. First and foremost, this is what Diane is doing with Betty: She is attempting to create a “narrative” to make sense of her broken world, to cast the blame on other people and rationalize why she has become the selfish, jealous monster that she is. By dreaming Betty’s world, she is retreating into a “narrativized” version of her life. She is telling herself a story that has flattened the truth of reality. But furthermore, this is also what Hollywood does. The Dream Factory chews up real people’s stories and hopes and ambitions and simplifies and narrativizes them for mass entertainment consumption. It can’t tell the truth because it’s not allowed to be real– “don’t play it for real until it gets real” — Hollywood, a diseased and empty corpse, is the entity that gets to choose which actress gets to reinterpret another person’s story, and only those who are self-obsessed would believe they have the right or ability to do so, to make it above everyone else, to win the Jitterbug contest. And Rita herself doesn’t even get her name from the dreamer– she gets it from a movie poster. She gets it from Rita Hayworth. Her character is directly shaped by the noir, by Hollywood.

“C’mon, it’ll be just like in the movies. We’ll pretend to be someone else.”