They may have represented her grandparents - kind old people who approved of her, the thought of them realising she’s become a murderer is so shameful it drives her to suicide.
They were complete strangers in the beginning of the movie and they appear to be laughing at her when they're driving away.
shareIMHO they were representatives of her conscience. The sort of solid Midwestern people who she'd grown up with, whose approval she'd once craved, and whose values and way of life she desperately hoped to shed as she hit the big time in LA.
That's why they came for her at the end, she couldn't shed what she had been or what she'd believed in.
Good theory.
shareI get the feeling that David Lynch deliberately made this film an incoherent, jumbled mess and has been secretly laughing at all of the third rate armchair film connoisseurs, who for years have been analyzing all the "hidden meanings" & "Symbolism. Oh the symbolism!" behind all of the inoherent nonsense.
shareActually Mulholland Drive is one of Lynch’s most coherent films. Once you understand that the first 2/3rds are a dream it pretty much all falls into place.
shareThat's mostly true, but what about the bungling assassin in the office building? I've never figured out what the hell that's all about.
shareOnce you partition the film into Diane's reality and Diane's dream, things make a lot more sense.
Joe is presented to us as a pimp in the dream. This is shown when he is in front of the diner with the blonde prostitute. The scene cuts to the sign, which shows a picture of a hotdog and a sign that says, "made specifically for pink's." This is sexually referencing Diane, who arrived in Hollywood wearing pink (symbolizing naivety and innocence), alluding to what happens to innocent girls in Hollywood who wear pink. The audience is then able to infer that Diane only knows Joe because she worked for him as an escort or prostitute to supplement her income due to her lack of success in Hollywood.
The messy assassination attempt is Diane's subconscious attempting to create a coherent narrative around her cognitive dissonance. She feels guilty over what she had done, and the scene where Joe has to kill more than one person indicates that perhaps he was incompetent and was unsuccessful in completing the hit on Camilla, relieving Diane of some of that guilt.
Additionally, in Diane's reality where she sits in the diner with Joe to order the hit, she asks him about his black book, but does not receive any answers. As her mind attempts to create answers to her questions, this manifests in dream Joe taking the black book (same book Joe had in Diane's reality in the diner) from the long-haired man he killed in the office.
The old couple (Irene and her companion) were shown at the Jitterbug contest, which was what enabled Diane to pursue her aspirations in Hollywood. They are seen as the bearers to Hollywood, and are the first thing Diane sees as she embarks on her journey. They are her first taste of Hollywood and its superficiality, as they smile to Diane and wave her good bye, without providing her innocent nature the guidance necessary to survive. Much like those in Hollywood, they are morally bereft, and appear to gain some satisfaction in their knowledge that Diane will likely be destroyed, both spiritually, mentally, and physically.
We see that Diane views them as part and parcel of the Hollywood hellscape, and attributes an element of guilt to them for not warning her of the superficial danger present there. This is reified when we see the couple sit in the limousine as they snidely laugh once Diane departs. They know the dangers that await her, and in the end, those dangers lead to her untimely demise. She sees them taunt her before she commits suicide, marking her inability to overcome her mental anguish over her journey into the deepest pits of Hell.
Diane, in her pursuit of fame and success, loses her soul (the sign that reads "Hollywood is Hell draws parallels to this), only she is unable to fulfill the earthly pleasures of success, fame, and prosperity she desires. She dies temporally unfulfilled and spiritually empty.
The old couple are really Adam and Camilla in disguise. I know this because someone at another site posted a screenshot of the scene when they're grinning at each other inside of the limousine, and they look at each other in the exact same way that Adam and Camilla look at each other at their dinner party.
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