It certainly seems like it. This is highlighted by the fact that the Cowboy is rarely in the same shot with another character. "It's weird to be calling myself," Rita says as the pair call Diane. Camilla makes sure that Diane can watch, which she does, glowering. Betty and Rita go the theatre, where a make-up streaked, exhausted woman sings an acapella Spanish version of Roy Orbison’s Crying. Indeed, Diane herself is someone who deals with personal rejection by hiring an assassin. Same with the mysterious blue key. They seem to be about to announce their engagement. But note that the director of that movie is Paul Bruckner -- the milquetoasty guy at her audition. the film director who is in the driver's seat, take you for the ride of Mulholland Drive. She died in a car accident. Wait, go back to the Diane and Rita stuff. Right? She notices a blue key on her coffee table. But of course, in the end she's doing the same thing a Hollywood movie normally does to a Camilla -- imagining that she's an empty object that she can possess. It may be his tribute specifically to the miracle of character imaginings like Diane's and, by extension, to the creation of self in our subconscious and the many selves we don't know. In the end, "Mulholland Drive" is Lynch's most sympathetic film, particularly to women. In that episode all is going fine and Betsy is happily waking up. The two women follow clues to the apartment of another young woman, Diane. She questions Diane with a look of disapproval on her face. Thematically, Lynch seems to be working out a number of things: the enticing but empty imagery of the movie screen; the accompanying imagery that is used as stardust to cover up the unpleasantries of the movie-making process; the imagery that the ambitious use to reimagine and remake themselves; and the imagery and imagination actors put to work to create their characters. Not being that guy entails, in the words of the Cowboy, thinking as opposed to being a smart aleck. Diane fetishizes it, and it turns up in an odd place in the dream. All, he seems at pains to point out, are ultimately in the business of dream fulfillment, which is why we as consumers go to the films as well. She christens herself Rita, after seeing Rita Hayworth's name on a movie poster; the pair find $50,000 and a mysterious blue key in Rita's pocketbook. Again, Naomi Watts, the actress, should be given credit for balancing the many levels of control needed to convincingly act the part of a ground-down starlet imagining herself as a chipper and idealistic young thing who then can convincingly deliver a unexpectedly searing audition performance -- and then have the levels of the conceptions make emotional sense to viewers at the end of the film. Who is the long-haired guy he murders? Everything you were afraid to ask about "Mulholland Drive" Revised and updated: The scary cowboy! And she's just part of the film's dense milieu. That takes her into the downward spiral that produces the hallucinogenic first part of the movie and then her decision to shoot herself. The movie's most problematic conceit is Diane's hallucination of the mad powers behind the scenes in Hollywood. Lynch's longtime composer, Angelo Badalamenti, plays the espresso-drinking movie exec at the beginning of the film, incidentally. She drags them to the club, which is called Silencio. This is especially the case with David Lynch's motion pictures which are not of the crowd-pleasing, focus-group-engineered-entertainment variety, but works of philosophy in their own right with, in my opinion, a high degree of what the German-Jewish thinker, I am not necessarily suggesting that this meta-reading of the cowboy scene was a deliberate ploy by David Lynch to guide or tease, in a concealed way, the film's viewing audience, but I think it is clear, especially with as vocally inarticulate yet artistically evocative a man as Lynch, that he is one for, , Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben states that ', Everything in us that is impersonal is genial,', including all aspects of our intimate physiological life, ', in which what is most one's own is also strange and impersonal,'. For aficionados, there are red herrings that will maintain many a debate, but others will suspect that Lynch is finally coming out and telling us what he's all about. Camilla says, "We shouldn't do this any more.". While he points out that the network had approved the script before he filmed it, it's hard to believe any sane person would expect broadcast television to air a movie anything remotely like this. We answer all … But she runs home to Rita. He's playing explicitly with how Hollywood uses women predominantly as sex objects -- except he's turning the formula on its head, making the women's world a closed one, at least in Diane's fantasy of it. He reassembled the cast, filmed some more and created the feature version out now. The mysterious box! This all leaves a number of questions. You can't help noticing that no one comes off very well in this fetid world. Rita makes a pass and the pair find comfort in each other's arms. nius is our life in so far as it does not belong to us', and, for Agamben, the antithesis of Genius is Ego, with the effect that there is a tension to be juggled between the impersonal (genius) and the individual (ego), and ', the life that maintains the tension between the personal and the impersonal, between Ego and Genius, is called poetic. But that woman was blond and much shorter -- an entirely different woman. Fine: "So it was all just a dream." The character of Adam the director seems a mocking version of himself. The camera pans out into the back lot of the diner, where we see the monster again. Even if Betty's dream is an extended apologia for a terrible crime, the density of her character, the expansiveness of her dreams and desires, and the catch-all giddiness of her imagination all make her something close the one the thing she always wanted to be: the ultimate movie heroine. It's possible Lynch sees consumers of popular Hollywood fare as unable to work out their grievances in their real lives, so they resort to fantasies of revenge. Diane is a haggard, dirty-blond with a nervous twitch and a beaten-down look. This time I will talk about the Cowboy, one of the most mysterious characters of Mulholland Drive. We know that it's not going to help him find Rita, but he doesn't know that. And what about those diner waitresses? It's on the same ominous trip up Mulholland Drive, too. As a reader points out in a letter to the editor, Lynch even slips in a wry joke. Lynch apparently tried to slice off the last 40 minutes, but the network didn't like that either. Readers note that "The Wizard of Oz" is in there too, as well as a strange pattern of parallels to "Pulp Fiction.". I want to have goblins around me, for I am courageous. We could read that as a serendipitous comment on film audiences—represented by Adam—who, in. Then he shoots the janitor's vacuum cleaner and starts a fire, which sets off alarms and sprinklers. Even if he is talking with somebody he looks alone, close to speak directly to the camera. Then we see washed-out superimposed footage of a young woman with a sort of beatific homecoming queen smile on her face. Anyway, as with much else in the film, this scene has struck me as working on a meta-level (. So since you agree I guess you could be a. person who does not care about the good life. But Lynch seems rather ambivalent about the lost Hollywood, which by analogy undermines Diane's dream vision, too. Without explanation, she finds a glistening blue box in her purse. Syme was an actress who appeared in "Lost Highway." (Maybe that's why the hitman laughs when Diane asks what the key opens.) "Mulholland Drive" is a movie along those lines, though its filmic palette is broader, its setting (Hollywood and the film industry) more portentous, and its themes plainer. Who's that? It is interesting to note that the advice is being given to a character who is a film director. Betty stumbles on the bruised woman hiding out in the shower! Now they are shrieking and horrific. He is somehow a cryptic storyteller of this dark tale. It can be understood as an artistic representation of “the mind” choosing materialism and giving up control to the power of “desire” …a materialistic “Mulholland drive” for physical world cravings. It certainly does explain the exaggerated gestures, heightened emotions and odd plot turns in the first part of the movie. She even gets the girl! Diane's fantasy is a number of things. Betty helps Rita turn herself into a blond, a rough doppelganger of Betty, à la "Vertigo." In terms of David Lynch's body of work, the character of the Cowboy in Mulholland Drive is somewhat reminiscent of the Mystery Man in Lost Highway, who is a similarly misleading and menacing character (both for the audience and one of the film's antagonists). They chase Diane around her apartment in a phalanx of terror. Beyond that, the narrative is intricate and playfully surreal rather than opaque and frustrating. Betty is a bushy-tailed, almost painfully chipper young woman just arrived in Los Angeles to make her fortune as an actress. Also, speaking of "Blue Velvet," Dorothy Vallens lived in the Deep River apartments. Let's talk about the 50 grand. What does he have to complain about? The director did what he was told. Later we see Diane masturbating in an unhappy frenzy. So stop reading now if you haven't yet seen the film. Indeed, the 'cowboy' can be interpreted as voicing the director David Lynch's advice to the audience of the film, including potential critics: don't be smart alecks, fix your attitudes, use your brains, and let me, the buggy driver, i.e. The multiplicity of meanings fits in well with the film's texture. Betty is staying in the vacant apartment of her aunt, in a building run by an older woman who calls herself Coco. In the end we see he's just a homeless man, a reminder of the grimy Hollywood Diane came to know after her jitterbug-queen optimism got beaten out of her. Seen as dream motions, Betty's hokey "I'm goink to be a stah, darlink" schtick makes more sense. The monster, who hides behind the diner where Diane contracted the killing, seems to be the demon Diane metaphorically begins dealing with when she decides to have her girlfriend knocked off. be it blood circulation, sleeping cycles, urination, digestion, defecation, sexual arousal, orgasm, pregnancy, labour, and so on. She flees to her bedroom and shoots herself in the head. They speak to Diane's neighbor, then break into her apartment and find her dead and decayed in her bed! "Mulholland Drive," the latest feature from director David Lynch, is exhilarating -- two hours and 25 minutes of macabre thrills, highly charged erotica and indelible images. Then a casting agent walks Betty over to the director's movie set. After which point the cowboy speaks more threateningly in terms of the wrongs that have been and will be done to Adam if he persists in refusing to comply with the casting wishes of the aforedescribed Hollywood mob. If you look closely, you see they're the same actress.