In 2013, classwork in the second semester of junior year.
Real Visions and Cinematic Dreams
——My full analysis of "Mulholland Drive"
According to Freud's theory of dreams, the subconscious realm is the realm of boundless desires. Desires in the subconscious have been suppressed and sealed by consciousness for a long time, and its breakthrough is the dream. That is to say, a dream is a concentrated explosion of suppressed desires, but this explosion is not an explosion of pure desires, but a hybrid existence that merges with consciousness after certain filtering (or censorship) of consciousness.
The mix of various elements is also a consistent feature of David Lynch's films. This mix establishes the style of David Lynch's films and often makes the film itself obscure. "Mulholland Drive" is such a Typical of movies.
Diane is woken up by the owner of Room 12 in the two thirds of the movie. It was Diane's dream before, and then Diane's real life.
In terms of lens language, most of the shots in the front section are wandering, erratic behind or beside the subject. The part where Betty just went to look around the room at Aunt Ruth's house was particularly evident. Betty shuttles through various rooms, the camera drifts behind her, and occasionally walks beside her in parallel with her, creating an "other" perspective, which not only creates a suspenseful and tense atmosphere, but also Its deep meaning will not be mentioned for the time being. The camera is still moving, sometimes it is Betty's subjective camera, sometimes it is the perspective of the "other" just mentioned. The frequent switching of the two perspectives in the film is not common in such a concentrated scene, which is in fact intended to reveal the fact that what we are seeing is a dream. Because this kind of frequent switching of perspectives is most common in dreams, in which people jump out of themselves to see themselves, as if the soul is out of the body, but the body does not stop moving and thinking because of the out-of-body soul.
"Betty" and "Rita"
Character-wise, Diane is gloomy, unsuccessful, jealous, and depressed in real life, but Betty, her avatar, isn't exactly those qualities. Instead, Betty clearly has some of the upbeat and confident qualities of Diane's love interest Camilla in real life. In Diane's dream, "Betty" was more than just an avatar of Diane herself.
Freud has an important concept called "mimicry", that is, a person will substitute himself into another person's psychological phenomenon for some reason. This seems to be a key to unlocking the film. The use of "mimicry" in the film goes far beyond simply substituting oneself into another person's psychology. In this film, Betty has the characteristics of both Diane and Camilla. In real life, we see that Diane loves Camilla to the point of killing her, and Camilla's most important personal trait is optimism, confidence, and temptation. Diane likes her optimistic self-confidence, so Betty has Camilla's optimistic self-confidence; Diane hates Camilla's temptation (because she seduced director Adam and another actress), so Betty has no temptation.
From the movie, we can see that Betty in the dream is also super powerful. This is the characteristic that Diane envies Camilla in real life, and it is also something that Diane does not have.
So it is not difficult for us to see that the image of Betty is actually a "perfect" self imagined by Diane, and this "perfect" is not really perfect. It has both the characteristics that Diane wants to have in the characteristics of Diane and Camilla, and excludes the characteristics that Diane rejects in their personalities, so it is "perfect" in Diane's mind. Betty is Diane's virtual perfection.
Rita's symbolic meaning is more pronounced.
In real life, Diane hired someone to kill Camilla, which was her greatest sin and the factor that eventually led to her suicide. She wanted to kill Camilla because Camilla had an affair with director Adam and other female stars, which made Diane, who was in love with Camilla, jealous. decisive behavior. But it wasn't her intention, because she was deeply in love with Camilla. In the dream, Rita's appearance as Camilla's incarnation vividly reveals Diane's inner contradiction. The killer was unsuccessful in killing Rita, who survived. But Rita, who survived, lost her memory, and the amnesiac Rita met Betty again - the "perfect" self.
Betty excluded Coco and aunt's obstruction and insisted on keeping Rita, but also showed the tendency of personal heroism. This kind of heroism is based on self-perceived sacrifice to others to fulfill herself as a "hero", which is a kind of As a result of enduring the pain brought about by the self-confessed sense of glory that is superior to others, there is a certain perversion tendency. This tendency is very common in modern society, and it often appears in frustrated little people. In reality, Diane is such a person. We notice that the next Rita is completely attached to Betty, who helps her find her own identity and even helps her live. This is clearly what such "sacrificial" heroists take for granted.
It is worth analyzing that in the episode where Betty and Rita auditioned, Betty showed her outstanding acting skills, and it was in front of Rita. This is the most personal passage of Camilla in the whole dream. Because the brilliance of this characteristic is too bright, Camilla's personal image protrudes, which poses a threat: what Diane needs is not Camilla with outstanding personality, It was Rita who was entirely hers. So the dream mechanics react when Camilla's personality comes to the fore, and Coco discovers Rita. And this time Betty settles Coco again, which emphasizes the sacrifice Betty made for Rita and emphasizes that Rita belongs to Betty. This sacrificial personal heroism is at its most powerful. Diane thought that deserved a man.
And Rita, as the "Camilla" in Diane's imagination, is not only completely attached to Betty by Rita. Rita's dress in the dream is mainly in red and black, with neat tailoring, highlighting Rita's graceful figure. The sleeves of the black clothes have a drapey feeling, and the provocation is obvious. The red tube top especially highlights the sexual characteristics of women. All these dresses are purely ornamental dresses for women's bodies, which is to highlight and exaggerate Rita's sexy and seductiveness, which means abnormal danger to Diane. And it is precisely because of this characteristic of Camilla that Diane decides to kill her. There is no doubt that "Camilla's attractive temptation" is Diane's biggest knot, and it is also the factor she cares about the most but cannot control, so the more she wants to reject it, the more important and dangerous the "temptation" is.
Therefore, Rita, as the image of Camilla in Diane's imagination, focuses on two points: one is the image that Diane hopes to be completely attached to herself, and the other is the tempting and dangerous image of Camilla that Diane fears. An exaggerated temptation in peace of mind.
Betty and Rita are interdependent, in the dream they exist with each other and almost disappear together. An analogy can be made.
Lacan's "Desire and the Interpretation of Desire in Hamlet" says: the acquisition of language enables the subject to adopt a set of words, transforming his various needs into "requirements", which means that the set of words must Another person speaks. So in the claim, the fundamental thing is no longer the individual object, but the "other" that makes the claim possible. It means that, somewhere, there will be someone (the "requesting subject", another subject) who can satisfy the subject's demands, provide a guarantee of meaning for speech, posit an "absolute truth" (as Lacan Think of the request in full form as a request for "love"). The primary meaning of "other" is "the address of language", which refers to the "other" imagined by the subject, which guarantees the possibility of meaning of all words (requests).
Here, Rita is Betty's "other", and Betty's "perfect" image can only complete her own image with the help of Rita's dependent image. And Betty is Diane's "language", and the object she asks is Camilla. The existence of Rita as the image of the "other" enables Betty to exist as a "language" and acquire meaning. On the contrary, it is Betty's active request as a "language" that Rita can respond as an "other", because this "response" obligation has a meaningful existence.
danger and fear
Danger and fear are very important elements in the film. Diane's fear is the direct driving force of the story. Many dangerous implications in Diane's dreams basically establish the style of the film and reflect Diane's restless heart.
There are two basic dangers in the movie: First, the characteristics of Camilla gradually become stronger in Rita and Betty, and her outstanding personality will inevitably lead to her losing Diane's control, that is, Diane is facing the loss of Camilla. danger, which is more prominent in dreams. The second is that Diane hired someone to kill Camilla, a dangerous symbol of facing the evil side of her own heart, which is more obvious in the real part of the film.
In the dream, the "opposite" scene mentioned above is the recovery of Camilla's personality, which is exactly what Diane loves and cannot control. The "trial" scene immediately after the "match" is where Diane's dream of freedom gets out of control. Betty's performance is excellent, and we can know from the back that this paragraph is almost a replica of Camilla in real life, so in this paragraph Diane's envy and jealousy of Camilla reached the extreme, which is why Camilla's image It's about to come out, and if Diane wants to get Camilla completely, she must make Camilla an amnesiac Rita, so this passage is extremely dangerous for Diane in the dream. This danger finally reached its climax when Betty met the director, Adam, and the two fell in love. This is a replica of Camilla and Adam in real life. In real life, it is precisely because of this that Diane finally decides to kill Ka Mira. So at this time, the danger was at its peak, and the dream was alert, and then the dream forced Betty to leave the scene and help Rita find herself. The final emphasis is on Rita's belongingness. And this time was the worst.
Betty took Rita to room 12 to find Diane Selwyn, and learned that in room 17, Betty insisted on entering the room, and finally led Rita to see the body lying on the bed. The symbolic meaning of the corpse is obvious. The corpse was dressed in black, had wavy hair, and was exactly Camilla's image; and the corpse's name was Diane Selwyn. The corpse's face is blurred, all of which proves that the corpse is actually the combined incarnation of Camilla and Diane in real life. It is also the ultimate pursuit of Diane's dream, everything in real life is dead, and now they are hiding in the dream and hugging together, they are Betty and Betty's Rita.
Sure enough, the trick worked. After going back, Betty helped Rita to reshape her hair to look like her, and the two had sex. Betty assimilates Rita completely, and owns her in a complete sense.
In this way, the danger in the dream seems to be solved, but it is not. The turning point is the scene at Silence Bar, which is the turning point of the whole film.
In the Silence Bar, the performers shout that everything is an illusion, everything is deceit. This pierces Diane's carefully crafted dream - it's possible to get Rita completely, but it's impossible to get Camilla completely. The light on the stage shone, and Betty shivered with fear when she was pierced under the stage. This passage is explained by Freud's theory as the censorship of consciousness over the subconscious. Consciousness makes a complete sentence on the subconscious dream in this passage, and this sentence finally makes Betty disappear from the dream completely. The Spanish woman sang: "I thought I would forget, but the truth can't escape... What will I do, dear, when you no longer love me..." The lyrics seem to be the decree of the sentence, and beat Betty who was hiding in the dream back. True, so she trembled, so she cried.
When the two returned home, Rita went to get the box where the money was hidden, and the hat that Betty had put on the box disappeared. Hats generally mean patriarchy in psychoanalytic theory—that is, possession. At this point, Betty's possession of Rita has disappeared, and Betty has disappeared with it.
And at the end of the dream, the cowboy woke Diane, and it was the real sin that woke Diane.
If the Silence Bar is too symbolic, then the symbol of the specific dangerous fear is the blue key. It was the key to witness Diane killing Camilla, and the blue box they got was a symbol of the dream itself. Due to the censorship of consciousness, Rita was released from the status of Betty and opened the box with the blue key herself. Rita herself ended Diane's dream. Rita finds Camilla.
In this sense, Diane also failed in the dream, and finally did not get Rita, but Camilla.
The reason why the blue key has such great power is because it is also what Diane fears the most in real life. This is directly demonstrated in the movie. It was at the end that Diane stared at the key in a daze, heard someone knock on the door, the key turned into an aunt and uncle, and shot himself in a panic under their pursuit.
My uncle and aunt have great expectations for Diane, and they are also relatives. Depressed and anonymous, Diane felt ashamed of her uncle and aunt, so she preferred to treat them as strangers in her dreams. The uncle and aunt's expectation and concern for him also symbolized family affection and conscience, so Diane finally committed suicide under the torture of conscience.
The beggar is a more direct symbol, he directly symbolizes Diane's inner fear, because in real life it is through this beggar that the killer handed her the blue key (the news of Camilla's death). So Diane was reluctant to face beggars. It is quite meaningful that the strange man who began to be frightened to death by the beggar in the dream was the witness of the restaurant when Diane and the killer planned. Witnesses of sin are frightened to death by sin. It can be seen that Diane is very afraid of killing Camilla, which she does not tolerate. This witness is the embodiment of Diane's conscience.
dream, style, irony
The jump from the perspective of the camera language symbolizes the dream world that Diane has constructed but cannot fully grasp; the ashtray taken by the owner of No. 12, the coffee cup that Diane used as a testimony when making out with Camilla has become a restaurant The coffee cup in the restaurant; the name brand of the waiter in the restaurant; the intersection of the characters in the dream and the real ones are all manifestations of disordered dreams.
And the conscious censorship of the subconscious didn't happen suddenly in the scene at the Silent Bar. In Aunt Louise's apartment, mad woman Louise is the conscious warning to the subconscious.
The whole movie is full of black, gloomy, weird and suspenseful style. And the dream was so long and detailed that it was difficult to tell which was a dream and which was reality. And also because the characters and symbols in the dream are too metaphorical to be too deliberate. So the formation of stylization still caused some defects.
For example, the handling of the owner of Room 12 is not very clever. It seems that her existence is only to make Betty take another detour, but it has caused unnecessary speculation in the movie. For another example, the passage of the stupid killer, it is difficult to say whether it is a dream or reality. Its existence seems to show the style of black humor, but it is not directly related to the narrative. And there are better ways to handle it.
However, any kind of stylistic establishment must make the director give up some other things, and how to obtain a balance among them is the problem that such directors with a remarkable style need to think about and grasp.
In this way, it is not very difficult to view the film with psychoanalytic theory. In the story, it was just that after Diane hired someone to kill his girlfriend, he couldn’t stand the condemnation of his conscience and couldn’t face the darkness in his heart and finally committed suicide.
Susan Sontag said in "On Photography": Humans are still immersed in Plato's cave, still intoxicated in images that are not reality itself but only reality. In this way, all human beings about reality and truth are actually only illusions of "reality" and "truth". The dream is the best analogy and symbol of this pair of "real" illusions.
But in the movie, that dream is shattered.
Having said that, Adam's story, which is also shown in the film at the expense of the purity of the dream, was placed on the director's ironic intentions. Hollywood is known as the biggest dream machine, but the story of Adam in the dream in the movie is a real truth, an unimaginable dark truth. Dreaming is a myth, an excuse for hegemony.
Not only Hollywood, but also the art of film itself is an art of dream-making, but since the art of dream-making came into being, there have been various theories to borrow this dream and point out the absurdity of this dream. Ideology, psychoanalysis, and feminism all expose the hypocrisy of this dream, wake people up from the movie dream, and let people see our miserable world and embarrassing situation reflected in this "dream". Movies sometimes use such self-sacrifice and self-disassembly to complete its final and most important meaning, for this society and for this world.
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