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This film has been lauded by critics as original and insightful, while at the same time accused by many of being incoherent and meaningless. In teasing out its complex narrative, most would agree that the first two-thirds of the film represent the dream of its central character—Diane Selwyn—with the last third representing her reality (e.g. Bulkeley, 2003). This recognition explains the more bizarre features of the film, their bizarreness being attributable to the primary process that drives any dream. Furthermore, various elements within the dream narrative may be related to a more overarching narrative structure simply as a form of day residue. This helps solve the ‘mystery’ established by the film's narrative. At best, however, this provides only a superficial understanding of the film, or rather the film's central story, namely the psychological conflict of its central character.
As Lentzner and Ross (2005) have discussed, Mulholland Drive is best understood within the framework of dream analysis, where dreams are seen as unfolding in accordance to their own language and logic. Mulholland Drive is open to the same psychological interpretation as any dream, with its manifest content serving to reveal its latent psychological meaning. To this end, Lentzner and Ross (2005), McDowell (2005), and Tang [internet] have approached Mulholland Drive from a traditional Freudian perspective. Lentzner and Ross (2005), for example, characterize Diane's dream as a compromise formation between her wish to destroy her competitor Camilla, and her guilt over the consequences of her murderous actions. McDowell (2005) emphasizes the role of unexplained oedipal conflicts in explaining Diane's sadomasochistic behavior, with Camilla acting as a surrogate mother-figure.
Given the rich illustration of themes of narcissism throughout the film, it is striking that no psychoanalytic review has explored its cinematic content from a Kohutian perspective. We present here an analysis