Mulholland Drive begins like an American dream: an aspiring actress arrives in Hollywood, ready to take on the world. Yet from the start, something feels off—like a smile held too long, or a scene that lingers past its welcome. That scene of the elderly couple in the taxi, laughing maniacally? Those things creep right under your skin. It’s strangely unsettling and leaves you without explanation. Just like much of the film, where the surreal vibe seems not to be a glitch but the design. The movie doesn’t follow a conventional plot but unfolds in fragmented moments—much like dreams, or the unconscious itself, where nothing is what it seems.
And I think that’s exactly what Mulholland Drive is—a dream on the screen. On the surface, it’s a dream about dreams coming true, but this quickly turns into a nightmare. When I watched Mulholland Drive recently, I thought about Melanie Klein and the way she understood envy. She spent a lot of time studying infants and analysing children. Eventually she came to see envy not as just a feeling, but as something deeper—almost structural, a foundation of the self. And it was something we deal with right from the moment we take the first breath. If we’re innately fractured by envious hatred, maybe that explains why we are so often not satisfied. Envy doesn’t just make us crave what someone else has—it spoils desire itself. The more we envy, the more impossible it becomes to get what we want, because envy feeds on absence rather than satisfaction.
This ties into another of Klein’s theories, object relations—the idea that we don’t just interact with people, but rather we carry versions of them inside us. Every relationship is shaped by the ghosts of the ones that came before, especially the very first one. Eventually, we just cast new people into old roles, hoping for a different ending.
From this perspective, Mulholland Drive becomes a stage where Diane Selwyn is acting out her psychic breakdown. Her dream is not just a wish-fulfilment in Freud’s traditional sense—it’s a play unfolding on the unconscious stage, where internal objects come to life. Diane’s self splits to cope with unbearable envy toward Camilla, who is everything that Diane ever wanted to be. In her dream, Diane becomes Betty—an idealized version of herself. Rita, on the other hand, is a version of Camilla stripped of everything Diane took for herself.
The scene in the theatre is the moment when the dream falls to pieces. Diane cannot reconcile the hatred and longing within her. No hay banda. There is no band. It’s a revelation that exposes how one’s emotions—hatred, envy, or love—may unconsciously be tied to internal objects of one’s own making. Seeing other people in our dreams is no different from seeing them in real life—it’s just the tape. The music without the band is the music played by unconscious phantasy; it’s what fundamentally shapes our perception of reality. Emotions and past experiences live within us and shape our feelings and thoughts.
Once the dream ends—after the blue box is opened—Diane wakes up. Her face is tense and dull, her expressions reveal pain. The emotions buried in her dream are real, yet her face can only reveal so much. The tape keeps playing, but now it’s a music only she can hear. This isolation shows at its rawest in the scene when she masturbates—desperate and stripped of illusion—where desire and self-loathing collapse into one. When her feelings become too overwhelming, they not only destroy the object (Camilla), but also attack the self.
According to Klein, if the first relationship fails—and if we don’t build a good internal object early on—we may never find peace within ourselves. Instead, we’re left exposed to the kind of paranoid anxiety that casts a shadow over Diane, embodied by the old couple, grinning at first but inevitably haunting her to death. Without a stable inner object to hold onto, the spectre of paranoia drags her down. And the suicide is not just an escape from guilt, but the result of envy turned inward—so powerful it not only destroys the object of desire, but the one who desires.
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