The Decomposition of Diane Selwyn in Mulholland Drive
“This is the Girl” by Sam Gilbey (Spoke Art)
“This is the girl.”
Four simple words comprise a key refrain that echoes throughout MULHOLLAND DRIVE, a statement as ambiguously malleable as the film itself. It is the obsessive manifesto of enigmatic executives and an imprisoner of creative agency. This is the girl -- a pointed finger commanding fateful omniscience and the most prophetic motif within the film’s fabric. This lone, laconic phrase is the very thing that bridges reality and the make-believe. It avows identity with thundering decisiveness, one of the few communal utterances to populate both fantasy and verity unshrouded by an equivocality that blankets the film like the thick smog over Los Angeles.
This unshakeable truism is the essential affirmation for which Diane Selwyn pines. She knows she’s not The Girl, but she yearns to be. A gnawing dissatisfaction propels her to abscond into the final frontier of her deepest desires. With all hope depleted and her heart asunder, she capitulates to illusion and thus death: for Hollywood has stripped her of all sense of self. But what happens when the illusion breaks? When the golden wall reveals itself to be but a gilded imitation, cracking as blackness pours and pools? Diane Selwyn knows she can never be or have The Girl, and takes to escapism in a futile bid to surmount and subvert the destiny she’s carved out for herself. While fantasy can grant a temporary reprieve, it cannot reverse or rewrite mistakes and their lingering consequences. It, too, will succumb to the absolution of death, and with it the dreams and aspirations of Diane Selwyn.
Image Credit: Studiocanal
The Girl in question is none other than Camilla Rhodes, a highly accomplished actress who is the object of Diane’s aspirational and sexual desires. A sadist, she luxuriates in whimsical rendesvous with aspiring starlets before disposing of them without another thought. Diane is devastated to learn that she is just another notch on a belt of meaningless conquests, having naively assumed that her feelings were reciprocated. Bereft of a lover and an identity, she disappears into the wreckage in search of one final escape. Two separate women emerge in her place, greeted not by ashes but instead a fruitful dreamscape. A cursory examination reveals them to be perfect doppelgangers of Camilla and Diane, a mirage that will perpetuate until it is no longer able. The final vestiges of Diane’s identity -- namely guilt and destruction -- will only grow in size, expanding to conquer the barren, forlorn shadows left behind. Only then will she realize both personae are of her own making, engendering an irrevocable sequence of death and destruction.
In blonde Betty Elms we find Diane’s physical doppelganger, whose sunny demeanor is disarmingly opposite Diane’s own. Betty is daft and ebullient, vesting unyielding faith in fame and fortune. Guarded by a comical naivete, she believes that ambition alone is enough fuel to propel her forth. Like Hollywood itself, Betty is part of the illusion; and because of this she can play unbothered in its glittery playscape, weightless and thus unable to penetrate its illusory surface. Her ignorance is an extension of Diane’s own, evident in the way she indulgently perceives Camilla’s advances as indication of an equally reciprocated romance. Betty’s freedom, however, is as fabricated as her surroundings -- and just as art imitates life, ignorance will precipitate her downfall as it will Diane’s.
Image Credit: Studiocanal
The heart and soul of Diane’s insecurities materialize in the persona of Rita, a helpless and fearful amnesiac who bears an intentional resemblance to Camilla. This particular attribute is a synecdotal glimpse into Diane’s tortured conscience, epitomizing the collective strife, fear, and envy she feels toward her ex lover. In Rita, Diane has successfully achieved the impossible by espousing her opposing desires to both be and have her lover in one, but the end result is a sinister glance into the schism unraveling her psyche. Recalling the past, Diane adopts a willful blindness that allows her to comprehend the situation as she chooses, affording her a one dimensional understanding that conveniently eschews everything but the underlying dread of her subconscious intent.
Rita’s arrival distracts from Betty’s initial ambitions, but does not entirely dispel them. A promising audition emerges as a potential star-making opportunity and Betty attacks it with vigor. The part she’s given is supremely racy and at odds with her own temperament, and the audition demands voracious sexuality on full display. To everyone’s surprise and subsequent delight, Betty effortlessly embodies the role. She is the actress Diane will never be, chameleonic and untethered by emotional baggage. Bolstered by generous accolades, Betty sets out to vicariously land the role of Diane’s dreams and attempts to become The Girl. She’s confident until she shares a knowing glance with the director, Adam, who is Camilla’s real life partner. A deeper recognition triggers a bout of psychosomatic terror, driving Betty to flee. Adam acquiesces to the demands of his financiers, crowning their preferred candidate, Camilla, as The Girl in question. She unmistakably boasts the same visage as the real Camilla’s current paramour, a nameless blonde who has taken Diane’s rightful place. Thus, it becomes impossible for Diane to achieve her aspirations of being The Girl in either context, revealing the hitherto concealed limitations of her pipe dream. In order to cope, Betty deserts her ambitions all together and instead chooses to exclusively focus on helping Rita, turning to the one remaining place where her illusion of agency still exists.
Diane can no longer consciously keep Rita and Betty apart in order to sustain her rosy, chimeric world. As the two personae further bleed into one another so do fantasy and actuality, rendering consequences null and void. Diane’s sanity begins to paradoxically spiral out of control. Her illusion can no longer contain itself, having evolved into a potently credible pseudo-reality convincing enough to fully blur the pre-existing margins between both realms. It baits ruin by promising the intangible, whispering deceitfully that her corporeality is the true imposter. The growing synergy between Rita and Betty poses a significant threat to Diane’s phantasmic safe haven. No longer is flirtation enough to satisfy the demands of their relationship. The physical intimacy that they crave cannot be realized without invoking destruction. With careless and desperate abandon, Diane regresses to an ignorance she has not known since her arrival in Tinseltown. A quiet acceptance permeates her slumbering conscience, a gentle whisper of defeat. No longer is she able to suppress the mounting inundations of violent guilt. All that remains of Diane Selwyn are the spiteful fragments of her new reality. Myopia and apathy grant her the freedom to exploit her masochism. She willfully indulges in her moribound reverie, pushing the boundaries as far as she can before the facade can no longer withstand it.
Image Credit: Studiocanal
Conversations between Betty and Rita reveal the layers comprising the illusion, spliced from Diane’s unrelenting internal monologue. “It’ll be just like in the movies,” Betty squeals, her words echoing the same dualistic dimension attributed to all their exchanges. Another statement is far more telling: “I don’t know who I am,” Rita laments to Betty -- a not-so-veiled reworking of the internal duress eating away at Diane’s conscience. Yet Betty is determined to help Rita find herself -- a sublimation of Diane’s own obsessive yearning for Camilla coupled with the stirring, repressed culpability of having ordered a hit on her life. The foundation has fractured, and Diane must flee the ensuing wreckage. As Rita and Betty are nothing more than meta-textual stand-ins, their actions hold real repercussions. In the end, they’re unable to uncover the “real” Rita, just as Diane is ultimately unable to recover herself.
A burgeoning self-awareness by way of Rita helps Diane to faintly recall own name within the fantasy, coaxing both women into sleuthing for answers. Fantasy and reality collide when their search for Diane Selwyn leads them to a rotting and unclaimed corpse. Though she fails to comprehend the portent, it nonetheless leaves her irrevocably singed. Terrified and with nowhere to turn, Rita and Betty have sex, consummating the union of both personae. Rita forsakes her brown locks in favor of a platinum blonde wig, leading the two women to recognize their likeness for the very first time. A hypnotic intuition guides them to a desolate theatre in the still of the night, and it is here they -- and illusion -- will perish. Inside, they find themselves suspended in a space of liminal transition. The moribund dreamscape recedes to invoke a sense of cruel derision. Bereft of her protective framework, Diane must accept the deaths of Betty and Rita, knowing that hers is both imminent and inevitable. Like a boomerang, her escapism rebounds to derisively lambast her: the idealized Betty persona will never secure her part, nor will she be crowned The Girl. Diane may have lost her identity, but she cannot escape the festered blackness left in its place, nor its now rubbled foundation of her former lover. Everything will be swallowed whole in one final collapse of self, until only shapeless reveries remain -- the vestiges of a dream that imploded into itself.
Diane’s final dalliance with reality is difficult to stomach, even in spite of her heinous and unforgivable actions. She is haggard and restless, too consumed by anxiety and doom to do anything else but fester miserably in her shoddy apartment building. She has destroyed the very thing she was denied, mortally wounding herself in the process. Without Camilla, Diane is nobody and has nobody. Betty and Rita have come and gone, and with them the escape from having to finally confront the repercussions of her actions. Diane Selwyn is a dead woman walking, aimless and haunted by the memory of who she used to be: a dutiful and parasitic lover to the one woman who gave her purpose and substance. By avenging Camilla through a self-inflicted suicide, Diane condemns herself to an eternal cycle of being lost and found, doomed to repeat itself in an infinite loop of illusion. She will join her lover in death, as she tried in life, content to lose herself once more in prevailing fantasy.
MULHOLLAND DRIVE is, at heart, an exhaustive meta-textual deconstruction of psyche and persona. The rococo allure of its weaving narratives present a devastating excavation of a woman who lost herself in search of fame and its irresistible allure. Its dichotomous adherence to theme provides an examination of LA as thorough and titillating as it is terrifying, capturing that magnificent breadth of chance that will continue to reign undeterred. What is LA if not an escape in itself, equally amenable to both success and misfortune? Those who arrive in hopes of being found instead become lost and aimless, remedied only by embracing the fantasy until it either conquers them or is conquered. Just as artifice and reality intermingle, so do life and death. One must dream to survive, even if doing so will cost them their life.
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