New Hollywood’s Dismantling of the American Dream

The 1960s marked the end of the once-booming “Classical Hollywood” era, built on a vertically integrated monopoly that had controlled all facets of American cinema since the 1920s. For decades, the “Big Five” studios managed everything from story inception to distribution, creating an empire fueled by profit. Top studios produced highly censored narratives that displayed moral clarity, conservative values, and social optimism to embody the “American Dream.” Yet by mid-century, social unrest and cultural upheaval exposed cracks in the system and led to the collapse of idealized Hollywood. The polished productions of the Classical Hollywood era felt out of touch, no longer reflecting the everyday American experience or resonating with audiences. The rise of the Civil Rights and feminist movements and the televised brutalities of the Vietnam War shattered the nation’s sense of self. American youth, more educated, radical, politically active, and disillusioned, began to challenge conservative ideologies. Thus emerged the era of “New Hollywood” (1966–1980), in which a generation of film school educated creatives confronted themes of sexuality, violence, mental illness, and social alienation long considered taboo.

David Lynch, in Mulholland Drive (2001), manipulates narrative structure and character development by splitting the protagonist into two identities and blurring dream and reality to expose Hollywood’s obsession with fame, beauty standards, and success. This obsession results in the erasure of both star and audience identity as a form of social violence. The film uses experimental techniques characteristic of the New Hollywood era, including framing, character perspective, and narrative distortion, to dismantle the illusion of the American Dream and force viewers to confront its destructive nature

Hollywood as Commodity and Ideological Machine

The act of painting over reality echoes Hollywood’s demand that women erase trauma and individuality in favor of consumable glamour.

Lynch’s Mulholland Drive exposes forms of social violence born from America’s myth of idealized success and conformity to homogenized expectations, revealing how the promise of the American Dream, whether as cinematic fantasy or social aspiration, operates as a cycle of illusion, erasure, and ideological control over both Hollywood stars and their audiences. New Hollywood’s portrayal of such violence diverges from Classical Hollywood’s polished optimism by locating cruelty not in overt brutality but within systems of representation themselves. As Thomas Schatz observes, film of this era must be understood “as always and simultaneously text and commodity, interest and product line” (1993, 18). This dual purpose dismantles the perception of entertainment as innocent. Depictions of Western beauty, heteronormative romance, and unrealistic standards of perfection are integral to Hollywood’s success precisely because they operate as commodities, shaping collective desire while enforcing conformity to specific ideals. The so-called Dream Machine sustains social violence by transforming human identity into consumable spectacle, an illusion of purity and control that erases imperfection, instability, and individuality.

Diane’s physical deterioration transforms the body into evidence, exposing the psychological toll of striving to meet Hollywood’s impossible standards.

Through the manipulation of narrative structure, mise-en-scène, and intentional character development, Mulholland Drive splits its protagonist into two distinct identities, Betty and Diane, creating a disorienting, nonlinear fusion between a fabricated, idealized dream world and the harsh reality beneath it. This fractured narrative structure mirrors Diane’s psychological disintegration, her unstable mental state a byproduct of her attempt to fit within Hollywood’s image-making machine and its consequent destruction of self. The scene in which Diane stands over her kitchen sink, pale and trembling, captures the aftermath of this collapse. Once filled with ambition, she now appears as a hollow shell, her body physically deteriorated, her face drained of color, her gestures slow and fragmented. She relies on drugs to numb herself, consumed by jealousy toward her former lover and rival, Camilla Rhodes, who has secured the role and status Diane long desired. In this inversion of the Hollywood fantasy, Diane becomes the discarded product of the system she once idolized, a woman devoured and then expelled by the very dream she chased. The relentless demand to sustain glamour, beauty, and flawless performance becomes the mechanism of her unraveling. Through Diane, Lynch exposes how Hollywood destroys those who cannot keep up with its cruel, competitive rhythm, rendering them invisible once they fail to meet its impossible expectations.

The pink paint scene, echoing the iconography of Marilyn Monroe, literalizes this transformation of woman into spectacle. The act of painting over reality becomes a ritual of erasure that conceals trauma beneath gloss. Roger F. Cook observes that “Lynch’s film consists almost exclusively of an extensive look into the mental world of its central character, an aspiring actress who has been destroyed by the Hollywood Dream Factory” (Cook 2011, 370). The Dream Factory, which Diane so desperately sought to enter, becomes both the setting and mechanism of her destruction, a cultural system that converts individuality into a marketable illusion. As Deborah Shostak argues, “the fantasies that are the stock in trade of the classic Hollywood cinema offer Diane translation into pleasurable self-images” (Shostak 2008, 3). The phrase “stock in trade” exposes these fantasies as economic tools, desires deliberately manufactured and circulated for consumption. Diane’s attempt to translate herself into these fantasies dramatizes the social violence inherent in Hollywood’s structure. It seduces with promises of beauty and fame while demanding the total erasure of authenticity and individuality.

When sound continues without the body, performance is revealed as hollow labor, a metaphor for an industry that consumes performers long after authenticity disappears.

Lynch’s construction of scenes saturated with mirrors and doubles, as well as his rapid, fragmented, and discontinuous editing, visualizes this psychological collapse. The merging of Betty into Diane does not signal self-discovery but rather the annihilation of identity, a loss of self to an unattainable, fictional image of purity. The Club Silencio sequence crystallizes this revelation. As a singer collapses onstage yet her voice continues, Lynch separates sound from body, dissolving the illusion of authenticity. Performance persists without presence, exposing enjoyment as hollow and labor as exhausting. The image of the singer’s body dropping to the floor while her voice echoes through the theater becomes a haunting metaphor for the entertainment industry’s exploitation, an endless cycle of performance that consumes its subjects until nothing real remains.

The film’s fractured narrative and dreamlike editing thus operate as both aesthetic and ideological critique. The fragmentation of story mirrors the fragmentation of the self under capitalism’s demand for constant production and perfection. Ultimately, Lynch’s manipulation of narrative structure, character doubling, and dream reality blurring exposes Hollywood’s all-consuming obsession with fame, beauty, and financial success as a system of social violence that commodifies desire, colonizes subjectivity, and disguises exploitation as aspiration.