This Was Not the Girl

“What if everything around you isn’t quite as it seems? What if all the world you think you know is an elaborate dream?” —Nine Inch Nails

Mulholland Drive doesn’t make conventional sense; it's a descent into the subconscious, where meaning dissolves into dream logic. David Lynch’s movie is built not on narrative logic but on the slow disintegration of mental structure. He guides the viewer through a hall of projections where dreams decay into delusions, identities fracture, and love becomes an autopsy of desire.​ Similar breakdown—of desire; of the wound it dresses in wanting—extends beyond the cinema screen. It emerges in certain music tracks, and few cut as deep as Nine Inch Nails’ “Closer.” The '90s and marked a raw, golden age for grunge and industrial art. Nine Inch Nails was industrial rock at its rawest in the early ’90s. “Closer,” released in 1994 on The Downward Spiral, wasn’t about desire in any romantic sense. Trent Reznor, the band’s architect and their lead singer, didn’t sing about longing—he exposed it as something defensive and broken.​

What Nine Inch Nails channelled in their track was desire shaped by violence—not as metaphor but as psychic structure. Melanie Klein, a post-Freudian who built her theory on the foundation of the death instinct — similarly to Lynch and Reznor — saw desire not as a lovey-dovey pull toward what we long for, but as something fatally bound up with envy, rage, and the urge to possess and destroy. “Closer” is not provocative just for an effect. It's diagnostic in psychoanalytic terms; obscene language wired to control the mental split. An internal split projected out and made real and alive through structure and performance.​ The most infamous line from the track does not need an introduction: “I wanna fuck you like an animal.” At first, it slaps like pure provocation, a filthy hook. But if lean in, and hear it closely, it reveals itself as something else entirely. It's a containment strategy; a lyric so explicit it feels like release, and so what you’re really hearing is repression, made audible.​ Looking back at that grungy footage of Nine Inch Nails performing "Closer" at Woodstock ’94, you don’t get the sense that Reznor is losing control. He’s staging the phantasy so he can hold it at bay. Even the lyrics themselves don’t come out of his mouth impulsively, and his voice is almost suppressed, contained within a structured track. Almost like a psychic defence mechanism that intellectualizes the urge, and locks it in form. The opposite of acting out—violence, wrapped in syntax.​

So, the track isn’t just about sex. “Closer” digs into the space where attraction meets self-erasure. The erotic impulse fuses with aggression not just in a romantic sense, but in psychoanalytic terms: libido tangled with the death drive. Not meaning the death literally, but losing yourself in "fucking", and coming, just to fall back into uncontained stillness.​ Both Mulholland Drive and “Closer” unravel the same mental landscape, which, according to Klein, is organically structured by internal objects. Much of Mulholland Drive can be understood as Diane’s dream—a psychic construction that holds her desires, defences, and disintegrating sense of self. The movie opens with a car crash. The impact isn’t just narrative; it’s symbolic. The crash embodies Diane’s unconscious wish to destroy Camilla, to wipe her out even before the thought about her begins. Rita survives, but the real person behind her (Camilla) doesn’t. Her memory erases, leaving behind a hollow vessel—a canvas for projected desires and disavowed fears. Rita, in the dream, isn’t a person but an imago: a psychic hologram shaped by memory, and phantasy. Designed to be loved, needed, and above all, controlled. In this view, Diane's dream is not just about connection, but more about control, about keeping the self on the edge of collapse. The phantasy turns against itself when the unconscious refuses to cooperate. The envy comes not from rejection itself, but from the illusion of perfection. When something inside can’t be faced, it starts to come out in destructive ways. Similarly, Freud in describing melancholia, noted how the lost object can be turned inward—how love, once internalized, can become a site of self-punishment. Rita gives Diane everything she longs for, but as an internal object she also becomes a reflection of everything Diane lacks. What begins as idealization eventually sets into envy.

This is revealed in Diane’s dream when the story slips from her grip. She’s no longer its author, but another player, displaced as the story reconfigures itself. Lynch doesn’t just depict narrative collapse—he reveals how the unconscious overwhelms the ego. If the ego tries to steer the unconscious, it’s like the tail trying to wag the dog. Adam, though a man, stands in for Diane’s ego; he’s the director, the one who should be in control. But it’s the unconscious making the choices, not just through the Castigliane brothers, but through the silent, unreachable force behind them. In the film, Adam is told who the girl is. He can disagree, but it doesn’t matter. Just as in real life, we may think we choose—but often it’s just rehearsal for what’s already decided. Like those who fall into the same dysfunctional relationships, with the same kind of people, hoping for a different outcome. Or who join the gym every January, only to pay for a few unused months. Klein’s theory doesn’t merely decode the film—it maps the inner mechanics of psychic life. Desire doesn’t begin with another person—it begins with absence, with a gap inside.

Diane’s absence may be twofold—perhaps rooted in a past we never see, or simply the shape of her life now. She came to Hollywood to become someone. Camilla did. She didn’t. That gap—between who she wanted to be and who she is—breaks her. When she senses Camilla pulling away, it’s not just rejection. It’s erasure. She loses everything trying to hold it together. With no stable self, she invents one - Diane splits and that's how Betty is created. Klein never romanticized wholeness. It wasn’t a happy ending, but the capacity to hold love and hate without collapsing. Integration was always a struggle—envy came first, before trust. The infant doesn’t just crave the good object; it resents it, wants to devour or destroy it. That’s the current running beneath Betty and Rita’s bond. At times, it plays like a love story, but it’s really a defence—a structure to hold the self together, not a bridge to the other. The blue box opens, and the dream implodes. Diane wakes up—not just metaphorically but is waking back from the dream into the real world, where she is alone in her apartment, while Camilla is living the Hollywood dream.​ She can’t bear the rejection, but more so, the realization that love was never pure. To love someone not just when they love you back, but to stay with the wanting even when it hurts—that’s the real test. In other words, to be capable of holding contradiction without collapse.

In Club Silencio, the magician says, “No hay banda.” There is no band. Yet the music keeps playing. Through Klein, we see a psychic stage where internal objects continue to perform, even in absence. But this is originally the world of Freud—where the repressed never stays buried, and what should be gone returns, warped and persistent. The looks, the voices, the betrayals—they loop in the unconscious, indifferent to will. The tape keeps rolling whether we like it or not. We don’t need the other to be present, to feel their presence. Diane carries Camilla as part of a split self. The psyche writes its own soundtrack, just like Rebecca del Rio in Club Silencio, singing a song that doesn’t come from her, but through her. And when the illusion breaks, there’s no release—only collapse. The show was never real; only the attachment was, so when the music stops, what’s left is just the void. Later, in a moment stripped of illusion, Diane masturbates. The scene is not erotic, it’s mechanical. It’s one of the rawest scenes in the film, because it shows what desire becomes when it’s severed from phantasy. Just a body running on compulsion—desire flooding in with nowhere to go, twisting into self-loathing, and desire not in pleasure, but in mental breakdown.

When splitting fails, when projection fails, when the object can’t be held or expelled without destroying the self—there’s nothing left to organize the inner world. Diane’s suicide isn’t a dramatic end. It’s the collapse of every last defence. The gunshot isn’t the sound of violence—it’s the echo of a soul lost in a world without structure. “J’ai une âme solitaire” — I am a lonely soul — were in fact the words Harold Smith left behind on his suicide note in another of Lynch’s worlds Twin Peaks, but the line might as well belong to Diane. This is where Mulholland Drive and “Closer” converge—not in subject, but in tone. Both trace the fallout of a failed merger, where erotic intensity veils psychic fracture.​

Blue Velvet

I was almost exactly one year old when Blue Velvet first came on the screen in October 1986. Maybe that’s why, on some subconscious level, I want to see it now through the lens of early infant development, especially as Melanie Klein understood it. Or maybe it’s just a coincidence, and I’m trying to find a smart way to start this post? Either way, Klein believed that at the very beginning, the world is seen either black or white. In the infant’s mind, love and hate are utterly divided and are projected onto the mother’s breast, which splits into either a nurturing presence or a rejecting one. This essential duality of human nature seems to find its uncanny reflection in the world of Blue Velvet, a film that begins with an image of perfection that quickly cracks.

Building on that, one may assume that the film opens with a lie: sunny suburbia where nothing bad can ever happen is only a curtain, and it’s about to be torn down. Jeffrey’s father's collapse in a way shatters the illusion. The scene in which he falls to the ground while watering the lawn does more than foreshadow a personal crisis—it signals the breakdown of the adult world’s control and the illusion that held it together. What begins as a crack in external reality forces Jeffrey into contact with unconscious forces that surface in the face of chaos. Perhaps he’s pulled toward what he senses lay beyond his father’s reach—things too dark to have been acknowledged.

Into the breach between truth and illusion, two women appear. Jeffrey meets Sandy, the blonde essence of innocence, and Dorothy, the bruised and broken singer. The contrast is clear: light and darkness. Yet it also becomes clear that, for Jeffrey, the split isn’t so clean. He is not simply attracted to Dorothy, but to what she represents: an object of both desire and suffering, where love is inseparable from threat. From a Kleinian perspective, their relationship reflects the internal conflict between love and aggression. The two women become stages on which he rehearses versions of himself, each shaped by desire, repression, and—above all—inner conflict. What at first seems clearly separated—Sandy being good and Dorothy as the corrupted one—soon falls apart. As Jeffrey begins to act on his desires, he also begins to deceive Sandy. The caring and rejecting figures are no longer separate but come as one fractured experience of love, power, guilt, and longing, just as Klein describes. The reality takes on a darker shape in his relationship with Dorothy. When she asks him to hurt her, he hesitates only for a moment. There’s something compelling about her suffering—something that makes him feel powerful. This moral fall is not the loss of innocence, but a slow unmasking of a desire that is twofold: he doesn’t just want Dorothy; he wants to control something that reflects the darkness within himself.

The film externalizes this psychological threat in the form of Frank Booth, who comes as a figure of excess—a grotesque embodiment of what lies beneath repression. He is a caricature of the Kleinian infant. Jeffrey fears him, but Frank also represents something dangerously familiar. In a sense, Frank is only a few repressions away from Jeffrey himself. Lynch doesn’t cast evil as a stranger but reveals it as the flip side of desire, stripped of its mask—something that could hurt us if we ever dared to come too close.

Freud’s idea that civilization suppresses primal drives is reflected in the film’s opening and the images of neat lawns and a perfect blue sky. But Lynch moves beyond Freud’s distinctions into the more complex world of primal phantasy that Melanie Klein explored—where love and hate are not opposites but deeply connected from the beginning. In that sense, Jeffrey doesn’t simply discover darkness; he discovers that his longing for love is inseparable from the parts of himself he was, until now, trained not to see.

What he experiences with Dorothy is not a typical love story but a confrontation with the hidden infantile self that Klein described as envious, split, and desperate to control the source of pleasure it depends on. So, Frank is not just a monster, but a symbol of the internal evil Jeffrey is forced to face—an embodiment of the raw death drive that lives within him. Frank screams, sucks, devours; he is what wanting looks like when stripped of inhibition. Jeffrey doesn’t want to be like Frank, but the deeper he’s pulled into Dorothy’s world, the more he believes that only someone as violent as Frank could satisfy her—and truly belong to her world. And in a sense, he’s right, which only means that his own desire has already been infected by trauma. The two don’t fall for themselves; they fall into a tainted love, where something is at stake for both of them: for Dorothy, it’s a connection that might bring her closer to the child taken from her; for Jeffrey, it’s a way to confront—and to master—the darkness he’s beginning to recognize in himself. The more Jeffrey sees, the more the contrast between good and evil dissolves. For Klein, psychological health isn’t about choosing sides but recognizing that love and hate live in the same place. Jeffrey’s attraction to both Dorothy and Sandy is not so much about who they are, but more about what they awaken in him.

Ultimately, what Lynch offers is not resolution, but recognition: that desire is rarely clean, and intimacy can only be real when we stop pretending. At the end, the illusion returns. The sky is sunny, and the robins sing again. Only now, we know what lies beneath. Lynch doesn’t seem particularly interested in answers or healing—but instead leaves us with the unsettling sense of what we might see if we dared to look inward with our eyes open too wide.

"Mulholland Drive"

Mulholland Drive begins like an American dream: an aspiring actress arrives in Hollywood, ready to take on the world. Yet from the start, something feels off—like a smile held too long, or a scene that lingers past its welcome. That scene of the elderly couple in the taxi, laughing maniacally? Those things creep right under your skin. It’s strangely unsettling and leaves you without explanation. Just like much of the film, where the surreal vibe seems not to be a glitch but the design. The movie doesn’t follow a conventional plot but unfolds in fragmented moments—much like dreams, or the unconscious itself, where nothing is what it seems.

And I think that’s exactly what Mulholland Drive is—a dream on the screen. On the surface, it’s a dream about dreams coming true, but this quickly turns into a nightmare. When I watched Mulholland Drive recently, I thought about Melanie Klein and the way she understood envy. She spent a lot of time studying infants and analysing children. Eventually she came to see envy not as just a feeling, but as something deeper—almost structural, a foundation of the self. And it was something we deal with right from the moment we take the first breath. If we’re innately fractured by envious hatred, maybe that explains why we are so often not satisfied. Envy doesn’t just make us crave what someone else has—it spoils desire itself. The more we envy, the more impossible it becomes to get what we want, because envy feeds on absence rather than satisfaction.

This ties into another of Klein’s theories, object relations—the idea that we don’t just interact with people, but rather we carry versions of them inside us. Every relationship is shaped by the ghosts of the ones that came before, especially the very first one. Eventually, we just cast new people into old roles, hoping for a different ending.

From this perspective, Mulholland Drive becomes a stage where Diane Selwyn is acting out her psychic breakdown. Her dream is not just a wish-fulfilment in Freud’s traditional sense—it’s a play unfolding on the unconscious stage, where internal objects come to life. Diane’s self splits to cope with unbearable envy toward Camilla, who is everything that Diane ever wanted to be. In her dream, Diane becomes Betty—an idealized version of herself. Rita, on the other hand, is a version of Camilla stripped of everything Diane took for herself.

The scene in the theatre is the moment when the dream falls to pieces. Diane cannot reconcile the hatred and longing within her. No hay banda. There is no band. It’s a revelation that exposes how one’s emotions—hatred, envy, or love—may unconsciously be tied to internal objects of one’s own making. Seeing other people in our dreams is no different from seeing them in real life—it’s just the tape. The music without the band is the music played by unconscious phantasy; it’s what fundamentally shapes our perception of reality. Emotions and past experiences live within us and shape our feelings and thoughts.

Once the dream ends—after the blue box is opened—Diane wakes up. Her face is tense and dull, her expressions reveal pain. The emotions buried in her dream are real, yet her face can only reveal so much. The tape keeps playing, but now it’s a music only she can hear. This isolation shows at its rawest in the scene when she masturbates—desperate and stripped of illusion—where desire and self-loathing collapse into one. When her feelings become too overwhelming, they not only destroy the object (Camilla), but also attack the self.

According to Klein, if the first relationship fails—and if we don’t build a good internal object early on—we may never find peace within ourselves. Instead, we’re left exposed to the kind of paranoid anxiety that casts a shadow over Diane, embodied by the old couple, grinning at first but inevitably haunting her to death. Without a stable inner object to hold onto, the spectre of paranoia drags her down. And the suicide is not just an escape from guilt, but the result of envy turned inward—so powerful it not only destroys the object of desire, but the one who desires.