Camilla Rhodes IS the girl

“There’s sometimes a buggy. How many drivers does a buggy have?”.

I think we forget sometimes just how much the events of our days and nights, both the significant and the insignificant, seep into our dreams and mold themselves into the abstractions they become. This realization came to me a few months back when I dreamt about some people from high school, people I haven’t seen for years, and people I never even really spoke to at all. And every time this oddity seems to happen, the question we always find ourselves asking is, “why was this person in my dream last night?”. Why did The Cowboy and Angelo Badalamenti that Diane saw at the party and Mr Todd from Twin Peaks: The Return at Winky’s Diner take on such larger-than-life roles in the context of her dream? I don’t know, and I’m pretty sure she doesn’t know either, but what we do know is these insignificant people to her life, people whose face she’d only seen from afar and never spoken to in her life somehow found a way to seep into her subconscious. Its so easy to brush Mulholland Drive as a film that simply is just “all a dream and nothing more”, even though what we see in the film that constitutes the dream aspects reveal such profound, underlying depth to Diane Selwyn’s subconscious. Of her creating this world in her mind in the hope to mold this “happy ending” sequence of events, but you can only stay asleep for so long until you’re brought back to reality and forced to face and endure the consequences of what you’ve done, which you can either handle or can’t at all.

The execution of Mulholland Drive floors me every time. If this film were executed in any other way, in such a conventional way, I wouldn’t then come back to it as much as I do. Some of the best depiction of jealously and guilt I have ever seen and that disorienting disjointedness of it all is why it hits so hard when the pieces of the puzzle during the final quarter can start to be put together. Blue Velvet may be my favorite Lynch film and my favorite film of all time period, but if I’m preaching dogma here, this IS his best film, just as Camilla Rhodes IS the girl.