“It's no longer your Film”

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Notes

notes

1.  I do not mean to suggest that reading Mulholland Drive in terms of the dream-work is the only way to make sense of it. Martha Nochimson dismisses the dream angle altogether as a “misunderstanding” (180) and instead takes the film for a fable about the way the film industry putrefies the creative spirit. Todd McGowan reads the two parts of the film in terms of a split between “the general structure of fantasy” and “reality” as the “general structure of desire” (86) but never mentions the dream-work specifically. Heather Love occasionally mentions dream but, like McGowan, dwells more frequently on fantasy. N. Katherine Hayles and Nicholas Gessler do recognize the function of dream in relation to narrative in the film and meticulously chart the film's time sequencing in a reading that is fundamentally congruent with what I offer here, but because they are not as concerned as I am with the specific play of condensation and displacement in the film, they do not account for some of its most perplexing and crucial images.

2.  For more about abjection in relation to “scatontological” anxiety – I confess to having myself devised this wretched neologism – see my Male Matters.

3.  Lacan: “Man's desire finds its meaning in the other's desire, not so much because the other holds the keys to the desired object, as because his first object(ive) is to be recognized by the other” (Écrits 58).

4.  Heather Love writes:

• Diane reaches the depths of abjection in the masturbation scene, when on the couch she touches herself, tears rolling down her face. As Diane stares at the stony surface of the fireplace opposite, the rough variegated surface of the chimney blurs in and out of focus. Lynch uses this technique several times during the film, and in this case it seems particularly closely tied to Diane's point of view. As her tears repeatedly blur this irregular surface into a smooth screen, it seems that Diane is willing herself into fantasy. But in this scene, her powerful fantasy-machine is run down; she manages for an instant, but the same stony reality keeps returning. (128)

I like Love's description, but would offer that the blurry in–out focus technique is “closely tied to Diane's point of view” here because the entire film is Diane's point of view, and that the masturbation scene gains more poignancy if we let the light-blur connect it to its reversed counterpart in the jitterbug glory sequence. In my reading, in Diane's actual life-history, her masturbation, presented near the end of the film, actually precedes the dreamed jitterbug sequence with which the film opens, even though the actual jitterbug contest happened before the masturbation.

5.  Though Lacan sometimes translates “Trieb” as “pulsion,” in Seminar XX, he states that he prefers “la dérive to translate Trieb, the drift of jouissance” (112). The translator, Bruce Fink, comments in a note that “dérive literally means ‘drift,’ but is very close in spelling to the English term for Trieb, ‘drive’” (112).

6.  In The Ego and the Id, Freud admits that Eros and the death drive are “fused, blended, and alloyed with each other … regularly and very extensively” (The Standard Edition 19 41). However, in his introduction to the new English translation of Civilization and Its Discontents, Leo Bersani writes:

• It should at once be said that this blurring of distinctions is by no means what Freud the rational thinker wants. Indeed the opposition advanced in Beyond the Pleasure Principle between Eros and Thanatos … might even be thought of as an anticipatory theoretical defence against the collapse of that very dualism into a nearly inconceivable sameness.” (xx)

7.  See http://www.lynchnet.com/mdrive/mdscript.html. See also Lynch's discussion of his adventures in the Denny's on Sunset in Rodley 277.

8.  Slavoj Žižek's discussions of “fundamental fantasies” are pertinent to the question of Diane's fantasized suicide. Žižek writes that fundamental fantasies involve the subject's preposterous ability to witness moments of pre-origin or of post-demise. Thus, in fundamental fantasy, “the subject is miraculously present as a pure gaze observing his own non-existence” (Indivisible Remainder 19). Žižek writes that

• when one indulges in fantasies about one's own death, one always imagines oneself as miraculously surviving it and being present at one's own funeral in the guise of a pure gaze which observes the universe from which one is already absent, relishing the imagined pathetic reactions of relatives, and so on. We are thereby again at the fundamental time-loop of the fantasy. (Indivisible Remainder 22)

In Diane's dream, we see the fantasized result of her suicide – the rotting corpse that Betty and Rita discover on the bed in Diane Selwyn's apartment – before we see the fantasized event of her shooting herself on that same bed. But note also the aggression against Camilla enacted here, for while what we see is Betty comforting a horrified Rita, the actual pay-off or money-shot for the dreamer is Diane's aggressive relishing of Camilla's “imagined pathetic reaction” to the sight of her (Diane's) dead body. One is reminded of the lyrics of the old Police suicide anthem “I Can't Stand Losing You”: “You’ll be sorry when I’m dead/All this guilt will be on your head.” My thanks to Adrian Johnston, for helpful insights and leads on these matters.

9.  Sinnerbrook makes this point in an unpublished essay called “Silencio.” See his “Cinematic Ideas.”

10.  I provide this information in case you were wondering why the fake tear leaking from Rebekah Del Rio's right ocular orifice in the Club Silencio sequence looks so solid and brown. Tears are after all a form of abjection, as Bataille himself lets fall in a book called, appropriately enough, Guilty, where he writes of the “tears in [his] eyes at this idea of being waste” (69).

11.  I take the word “(be)hindsight” from Lee Edelman's Homographesis.

12.  As Doris McIlwain suggested to me in correspondence.

13.  Bataille notes that “in the unconscious, jewels, like excrement, are cursed matter that flows from a wound; they are a part of oneself destined for open sacrifice (they serve, in fact, as sumptuous gifts charged with sexual love)” (Visions 119).

14.  In other words, the flickering light is not just a trademark piece of creepy Lynchiana: like all the other eerie or outré shots in the film, it actually serves a functional role in the film's meticulous formal narrative design. Paradoxically, for a film so concerned with waste, and in which apparently “anything goes,” Mulholland Drive actually wastes very little.

15.  See Love for an extensive treatment of the difference between the two sex scenes, and for an interesting reply to those “disturbed by Lynch's representation of lesbians as objects of ‘male fantasy’” (121).

16.  Faire l’amourir is “a Lacanianism derived from the combination of faire l’amour (to make love) and faire mourir (to make die)” (Harari 209 n1).

17.  For another few layers of condensation and reversal, note that when we cut from the dinner party to the diner scene, we see the waitress offer coffee refills to Diane and the hit-man. Diane accepts, but the hit-man refuses the refill with a subtle wave of the hand. The real hit-man, a slacker slob, contrasts nicely with his natty dream-gangster analog, just as his subtle refusal reverses the gangster's extreme expulsion, and just as the (presumably) shitty Winkie's java converts into the dream's “finest espresso in the world.”

18.  I refer here to Irigaray's This Sex Which Is Not One, which contains a chapter called “When Our Lips Speak Together.”

19.  Emphases added. In this regard, let me note that Lynch himself says that “Mulholland Drive is about more than Hollywood” (Rodley 274). If this excessive “more” at all concerns symbolic nihilation, “the profound relationship uniting the notion of the death instinct to the problems of speech” (Écrits 99), or the idea that “the symbol first manifests itself as the killing of the thing” (Écrits 101), as I am arguing here that it does, then when Chris Rodley gives the following as part of the historical context of Lynch's film – “It seems like only yesterday (1932) that bit-part actress Peg Entwistle hanged herself from the Hollywood sign when she failed to get a studio contract” (268) – we can respond that perhaps it seems like only yesterday because this self-sacrifice on a symbol and to the symbolic order is a constitutive moment of everybody's “contractual” history: in other words, every speaking subject has hanged itself from “the sign.”

20.  Here I allude to a line from Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper) in Blue Velvet: “Do you know what a love letter is, fucker? It's a bullet from a fucking gun!”