Becoming is neither an imitation, nor an experienced sympathy, nor even an imaginary identification. It is not resemblance, although there is a resemblance. But it is only produced resemblance. Rather, becoming is an extreme contiguity of two sensations without resemblance.
~~ Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, "What is Philosophy?"

Sensation operates as the beyond of subjectivity, through "becoming". Its being lies in the beyond of any fixed subjective positionality. If film is an art form which resonates as experience, as a pure form of "becoming", then Deleuze's ideas on art and the aesthetic, in terms of the concept "sensation", are a significant development in thinking about the cinematic impact through affect. That enables us to conceptualise a theory of aesthetics, which is outside representation, and is premised upon the intensity of sensation. "Sensation" says Deleuze, "is not realized in the material without the material passing completely into the sensation, into the percept or affect." So long as the material lasts, the sensation enjoys an eternity in those very moments. The artist/film-maker takes a specific type of material, which has energetic elements, and synthesises the disparate elements in such a way that the form captures these intensities.

The concepts of Friedrich Nietzsche resonate throughout Deleuze's work, and frame the origins of the ideas of the beyond of affect and becoming.

Within our "real" experiences Nietzsche proffers an acceptance of the sheer vitality, force, movement and dynamic "becoming". All that we ever experience in life is the vitality, force and movement of transient existence, a belief in the sheer natural force of existence, of life's intransigence. This is a primordial sense of what "it is" to be in the world and has important consequences for understanding how "becoming" is used as a phrase to articulate the "forces" of "life".

The concept of "becoming" is what exists as the "real" for Nietzsche: sometimes referred to as multiciplity, change, world, life or flux, "becoming" exemplifies a continuum, a constant process of movement and changing volatilities and dynamisms. "Becoming is restless primordial indetermination." "Becoming" is expressed through a sense of "immanence" or a processual continuum of movement and flux. "Becoming" is a process of immanence.

Beyond figuration and representation, sensation comes from a pure power that overflows all domains and traverses them. This power is that of rhythm, which is deeper than vision.

5. "Route 666."

It's a dangerous thing to say what a picture is. If things get too specific, the dream stops. There are things that happen sometimes that open a door that lets you soar out and feel a bigger thing. Like when the mind gets involved in a mystery. It's a thrilling feeling.
~~ David Lynch

Lynch puts his trust in images and sounds as opposed to words, knowing that all will be clearer when Mulholland Drive is experienced.

"This other plane [of immanence] knows only relations of movement and rest, of speed and slowness, between unformed, or relatively unformed, elements, molecules or particles borne away by fluxes."
~~ Gilles Deleuze

Deleuzian philosophy premised on Nietzschean belief in primordial indetermination and "life" lived outside the exigencies of subjectivities, and self-other relationals equates "becoming" with physical/energy of life. The free mind, he argues, is built upon an autonomous and autopoietic realm, outside of any self-other relational. Life, rather, is experienced differently at each moment and each individual's becoming in the world is connected with his or her volitions with the natural world.

"All of my movies", said Lynch, "are about strange worlds that you can't go into unless you build them and film them. That's what's so important about film to me. I just like going into strange worlds."

Betty volunteers to help Rita, whose handbag contains a lot of money and a blue key, find out who she is.

Adam has a midnight rendezvous with a strange figure called the "Cowboy" who scares him into going along with the backers.

6. "History Repeats Itself."

Mulholland Drive's visual and sound leitmotivs and its system of alternating plots delays the emergence of something substantial so far that it never arrives. However, one may feel that the subject of the film lies precisely in the chasm, which is opened up by that very delaying mechanism.

It is through style, through elements such as consonance, dissonance, and harmonies of tone, line, light, colour, sound and rhythm that sensation is manifested. Visual and aural effects, in a film, involve a certain style, through which sensation is accommodated. As Deleuze indicates, "We are not in the world, but we become with the world, we become by contemplating it. Everything is vision, becoming. We become universes. Becoming plant, animal, molecular, becoming zero."

Deleuze offers a system, concerned less with significance or distinct elements, tan with tonalities, rhythms, shifts of force and energy, movement and the materialism of a cinematic body that exists as matter. In this model, a "becoming" of the cinematic, where sensation is predominant, the image can "vibrate" with layers of intensity, since image is not a single unit, but a graded richness, resolute with modulations across a time scale from past, present and future. Film can be seen to impact as an aesthetic form.

It follows from these ideas that Deleuze presents an aesthetics of sensation which is premised upon a pedagogy of the image, but a pedagogy which is formulated on movement, and process, on machinic connections of film as assemblage, an assemblage of new formulations and new vocabularies. This pedagogy of the image pares down the representation into sensation. Consequently, the flickering, luminous, vibrational elements behind the image produce vibration, and rhythm, a stage beyond movement. This determines the formation of the "image" defined by "molecularity", not only by visual configuration. Sensation is accommodated through such molecularity.

7. "Sex is Violent."

Rita seems to remember the name Diane Selwyn and Betty arranges to accompany her to the woman's last listedaddress, but first takes an audition at the studio where Adam is working. She is taken to the audition, where she is impressive, to the set where Adam is casting. The director notices Betty but casts Camilla Rhodes. Betty leaves to keep her appointment with Rita. They find Diane's corpse and, unsettled by the experience, draw closer, sleeping together. Rita wakes up and is compelled to go, along with Betty, to a theatre called Silencio, where they find a blue box that matches the key.