And that's it...third-person triumphant!

Forget about not being able to tell "you" what you've always wanted to say...these two candidates for "wholeness" never even meet. As Derrida would say, no letter (especially not a love letter) ever reaches its destination. Each of us spends our entire lives trying to reduce that third person by one--and ramming our heads into "the girl" or "the boy" of our dreams. You can't tell the "whole truth" to a person that you aren't directly addressing, and no one has ever found that Northwest passage to "you".  The "shortcuts" (like the one that Camilla unveils to Diane after pulling her from the limo on Mulholland Dr.) aren't even paved with good intentions, but they do lead straight to Hell (which, Sartre to the contrary, is most definitely not "other people".) 

And that brings me back to the twin fantasies of pure communion (in love and in hate) that the film offers us--the first in Betty's impossibly poignant declaration "I'm in love with you" (the very expression of which exposes the unreality of her story and her supposed interlocutor) and the second in the consummation of Diane's plot to kill the (sublime) object of her desire... After each of these events, there is only Silencio--and the stark emptiness of a  box that isn't a box, but an airlock, sealed against the vacuum of radical otherness. There isn't anyone that wouldn't give their lives to be sucked up into that space--to address those emotions, at long last, to the appropriate place--but the words die still-born in a void. That's why "I" haven't told "you"--and maybe it's a lucky thing too!
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Paul:
What do you think of Lost Highway? Much of what you say in regards to Mulhullond Drive is even more true of Lynch's prior film. LH for me is all a dream with no reality, but most importantly it is the viewer's dream, not any character's, and the movie demands of you "WHY are you having this dream? What does it mean to you?"
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Charles Reece:
I've been watching oeuvres lately and right now I'm going through Lang's (reading Gunning's great book as I go along). But, I'm going to MH again tonight, just to refresh my memory. I'll say that I remain skeptical of any view which doesn't acknowledge what's in a film, namely MH's 2 levels of reality. The first 2/3 is not the same diegesis as the final 1/3 and has tons of linking elements that set up the latter as a ground for the former. But I'll be back.

LH is precursor to MH, in which Lynch borrows a good bit to work out problems of having a pilot that he needs to turn into a feature film. My own theory is that Pullman is being electrocuted at the end after losing his identity in his own personal film, a dream of death.