Thanks to Sigmund Freud, there are means in the psychoanalytic techniques to break the resistance of one’s “I” and bring the unwelcome information to the consciousness. In fact, making the displaced information conscious is the very aim of a psychoanalytic session. I dare say that in Mulholland Drive, David Lynch managed to dramatize an almost “undramatizable” thing – namely, the moment of the displaced information approaching the state of the pre-conscious and then, finally, approaching the consciousness; all these stages are followed by the moment of realization and consequent wake-up. Speaking about such dramatization, I mean the scene in the Club Silencio, which is the culmination point of a very significant part of the film.
According to Freud, there is only one way how to make the displaced pre-conscious: in the course of analytic work, a chain of intermediary subconscious links should be created, which would let the consciousness remain where it is, and the unconscious – not rise up to the level of the conscious . Thus, the displaced information is passed over to the consciousness with the help of a peculiar stairway, every step of which is an association, an analogy, or a memory.
Club Silencio, with its performance, touches the innermost strings of Diane’s subconsciousness, offering her image by image, association by association, building the chain (or the stairs) proposed by Freud. “There is no band” (“non hay banda”) phrase pronounced persistently by the entertainer unmasks the illusory nature of everything that has been and is happening; some critics would say, the “non hay banda” idea is also Lynch’s vision of cinema as illusion. Following the entertainer, Rebekah del Rio comes on stage weeping over the miserable love (Diane’s and Camilla’s unhappy love story that ended in a murder), and her voice keeps sounding even after the singer has “died” – one more confirmation to the fact that everything is an illusion, “there is no band”, and, therefore, no one to act the story shaped in Diane’s dream, because the main heroine (Camilla/Rita) is already dead, and Diane/Betty herself is to commit a suicide soon after the wake-up.
Club Silencio makes Diane’s displaced information pre-conscious, and there is only one more step that should be made in order to make it conscious. Such step is opening the box Betty finds in her bag right after the Lloranda’s performance (the key to it was found in Rita’s bag earlier in the film). The box opened, the pre-conscious is turned into conscious, and this is the point at which the disintegration of Diane’s dream starts. Betty disappears, and Diane’s wake-up in her flat marks the beginning of the second part of the film – the retrospective account for events preceding the dream, and Diane’s wish for “silencio” (most probably, death) coming true through suicide that makes the voices of the consciousness and subconsciousness silent for ever.
The “real” part of the narrative is the key to the illusion the film starts with, and also the key to the distortions Diane’s “I’s” censorship has made to the information it wanted to get rid of. In both parts of Mulholland Drive, Lynch allows only one significant shift from Freud’s principles of dream interpretation: Lynch cannot avoid symbolism that Freud denies when speaking about dreams. Mulholland Drive abounds in symbols (stage, curtains, boxes, keys, etc.) whose assigned interpretation Freud considers to be a folk tradition, which is not applicable to a professional psychoanalytic session. There is, however, a chapter in The Interpretation of Dreams, in which Freud allows himself composing his own dictionary of dream symbols that have more or less permanent connotation. But, despite the existence of such a dictionary, Lynch’s symbols cannot be interpreted in accordance with Freud’s theory.