Analysis of “Mulholland Drive” with a Freudian Perspective
The current article will discuss and analyze the movie “Mulholland Drive” from a Freudian perspective, with psychoanalytic subjects such as, id-ego-superego, consciousness, projection and dream analysis. Mulholland Drive is a film written and directed by David Lynch in 2001. The movie is about an actress named Betty who just arrived to Los Angeles to take her career into a next level, at this time period she becomes friend with an amnesiac woman named Rita and their friendship reveals traumas about Betty’s past and pushes her to face with the realities of her life, since the characters such as Rita and Betty are a product of Diane’s mind in the first place.
According to Freud, the mind divides into three different parts which are id, ego and superego (Freud, & Strachey, 1962), they are basic sources of our ideas and behaviors. Movie represents these three parts, their conflicts in a realistic manner. The id represents instincts, desires, impulses, ego represents the reality and superego represents the morality. In cases of traumas these three different components conflicts, for example, Diane’s ambition to become a star is controlled by her id, most of the time the needs of id satisfied in morally acceptable manner that fits into the norms of society which is the duty of ego balancing out the needs of id and superego. Diane’s parents are her superege, these attacks between id and superego creates these defense mechanisms in a way of only fantasy could resolve. Those three different systems are interconnected, shaped by drives, in Freudian perspective individuals have two drives that shapes their personality, these are sex and death instincts, these instincts are mostly controlled by id. While the component of sex instinct represents life itself, the death instinct comes out as aggression. These two are very clear in our main character, since most of her personality is resourced by her sex drive, her ambitions and her death drive with her aggression and wrong-doings.
There is another separation which is consciousness, unconsciousness and subconsciousness. The inner forces of individuals such as their biases, their repressed emotions, their drives are in the subconsciousness mind, where the awareness of the mind does not fully operating but still exist when we are triggered. Diane and Rita are two characters that was created by Betty’s subconscious, these characters were fed by her desires and ambitions (Barbera & Moller, 2007) revealing her desired future, traumatic past. Characters expresses different states of Betty’s mind, which explains why they are so different. While Diane knows what she wants in life, has a great ambition to become a successful actor, Rita on the other hand loses her memory, forgets who she is after a car crash which signifies the lost state of Betty. At the earlier parts of the film we see Diane in a more positive light showing Betty’s desired world that is filled with her fantasies, but even in this fantasy there is still negative thoughts, wrong-doings which points how the subconscious mind works, even in the world of fantasy the negative thoughts, traumas of the past still exists, try to get unleashed from the deep places of the mind.
In states of psychosis the reason behind some of the symptoms comes from the unleashed traumas of an individual, such that when a trauma is so hard to deal with our mind creates different realities by splitting the reality into different pieces in order to protect the individual. These different pieces are also seen in the movie, the scenes where Betty and Rita doesn’t exist, in comparison while the scenes where Betty and Rita are not present tells a bigger story and shows more about the Betty than the scenes where Betty and Rita are present. While their non-presence shows the protection of the mind while creating other individuals that are far away and almost not connected to Betty but still revealing her fears. As an example in the scene where characters created by Betty’s subconsciousness Dan and Herb eating in the diner and Dan tells Herb a dream that he had which becomes real and eventually ends with him seeing the monster, in these particular scene the monster represents Betty herself, she sees herself as the ugly monster and attaches her regrets, guilts and shames to what she had done earlier to the monster. Even though she tries to repressed those feelings, feelings such as guilt and shame takes another form and creates a persona that finds a way to confront her inevitably by monster popping up of out nowhere in scenes that looks not connected with her which is a creation of her subconsciousness, those feeling are following her everywhere.
The movie also includes ego-centric defense mechanisms, which arise with an earlier trauma of the individual, these can be in different shapes, forms such as repression, denial, projection. In the film “The Sylvia North Story” Betty choses blaming others rather than confronting herself, recognizing her inabilities. In her fantasy Camilla gets the role by sexualizing herself to Adam the director which makes her got the role and not Betty. These fantasy allows Betty to get rid of self-conflict and puts her in a state where there was nothing that she could do and the situation was out of her control. This is a projection of Betty’s mistakes into other personas that she has created (Akser, 2012). The Adam is punished in different ways physically and mentally. The projection is seen in the characters where she projects and reflects her negative parts into others.
With these in mind, the chronology of the movie becomes more logical. Just like our dreams and fantasies, movie doesn’t go with a chronological order, it goes in the order of triggers, desires and that’s why the order of the events seems so odd and disrupted just like in real life fantasies. In addition, there are pieces of different genres throughout the movie, comedy, romance, drama, western and horror which is an overall presentation of the Hollywood divided into different and small pieces just like psychosis. The ending of the movie may seem ambiguous, which makes it more realistic since the life and dreams are ambiguous too. The elements of the dreams are mostly unrealistic, distorted and ambiguous just like the movie itself. The movie not only uses dreams in specific scenes but uses it in an overall manner that is evenly distributed. In conclusion, the current paper discussed and analyzed important points of the movie from a Freudian perspective, due to the movie’s layered background story, it is inevitable to grasp the wider picture of the movie without mentioning Freud’s work (Metz, 1982) hence, those theories are crucial to understand the complexity of the Lycnh’s movies.
