The film is so elegant in its depiction of the frequently disruptive fact that, behind that face, every person you will ever meet possesses their own fully-intact kernel of subjectivity, same as you, and it’s forever and completely out of your reach. It helps quite a bit that in the first section Laura Elena Harring’s face looks like some beautiful ceramic mask: despite the fact that in that first section her identity is completely unknown and in fact the structuring mystery, it’s the second part, where, to Diane, Camilla is supposedly a fully-known entity, that Rita-Camilla’s eyes really start to contain secrets. In Diane’s fantasy, Rita is of course not a subject but a flattened functionary. Her position and role are neat and tidy and fully accounted for in the fantasy’s structure, even if that position is as unknown-mystery-woman. On leaving the world of fantasy for the plane of the social, Camilla the subject will never cleanly fit Diane’s structure, and in fact can only rupture it ad infinitum. On the deepest level, we cannot possess other people— subjectivity is not something you can domesticate. Every fantasy you ever construct is always run to failure, because you will never get your hands on that irretrievably elusive kernel, the very seat of our status as subject— you cannot retrieve or apprehend the contents of a split. There’s no “solving” this film, like there’s no solving the dark unaccountables in our relationship to other people. Really, once you situate yourself in the First-Part-Fantasy-Second-Part-Social architecture of the film, the mysteries only grow infinitely deeper. Because, again, these mysteries— of desire, of cruelty, of guilt… of subjectivity— remain insurmountable. Any notion of “solving” Mulholland Drive is a protective fantasy of its own. Don’t fall for it.