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.​