David Lynch's Mulholland Drive contends that the answer to the eternal struggle between what is real and what is fantasy comes
in the
form of a Keatsian confusion — it's the difference between Adam's dream and Eve rendered flesh, blurred
in the
mind of the creator and his audience.A film is a dream of the director made
tangible, a conceit familiar from the fourth wall - breaking
in Ingmar Bergman's Persona (banishing any mystery there might have been regarding the visual references to that film
in Lynch's piece), and a movie's characters therefore become projections of its maker's sublimated longing (clarifying too the auteur's use of wardrobe and colour schemes from Hitchcock's meditation on objectification, Vertigo, as well as those of his first collaboration with inamorata Tippi Hedren, The Birds).