This article was downloaded by: [189.202.217.

117]
On: 10 October 2014, At: 12:55
Publisher: Routledge
Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered
office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

Quarterly Review of Film and Video

Publication details, including instructions for authors and
subscription information:
http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/gqrf20

Hollywood Narrative and the Play of

Fantasy: David Lynch's Mulholland Drive
Roger F. Cook
Published online: 15 Sep 2011.

To cite this article: Roger F. Cook (2011) Hollywood Narrative and the Play of Fantasy: David Lynch's
Mulholland Drive , Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 28:5, 369-381
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10509200902820647

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the
Content) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis,
our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as to
the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions
and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors,
and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content
should not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sources
of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims,
proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever or
howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arising
out of the use of the Content.
This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any
substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing,
systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms &
Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/termsand-conditions

Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 28: 369381, 2011

Copyright Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
ISSN: 1050-9208 print / 1543-5326 online
DOI: 10.1080/10509200902820647

Hollywood Narrative and the Play of Fantasy:

David Lynchs Mulholland Drive

Downloaded by [189.202.217.117] at 12:55 10 October 2014

ROGER F. COOK

In Mulholland Drive (2001) David Lynch intimates repeatedly that the viewer should take
a second look. He actually does more than merely suggest. At several points the viewer
shares a second look with one of the characters through a subjective camera shot. When
Betty arrives on the film set to audition for the lead in The Sylvia North Story the director
Adam Keshner turns around to look at her. Then he turns around again and takes a second
look. Betty, for whom this audition is her big chance to be discovered, becomes nervous and
leaves after the second lookapparently not wanting to be discovered after all. When
the cowboy in Diane Selwyns dream appears at her apartment to wake her up, we see her
in the same shot twice from his point of view. In a third shot just after he leaves slight
changes in the color of the clothes and setting signal the full and final shift from dream to
film reality.
The most obvious case of taking a second look occurs at what turns out to be a pivotal
moment in the film. In Ritas dream-within-Dianes-dream a man describes his own dream
about the fateful Sunset Boulevard Winkies restaurant. When his companion goes to pay
the bill at the cash register, he turns around twice to look at him, the second time with an
expression of dread on his face. Later, when the film returns to Dianes real life she is sitting
at the same booth and catches a glimpse of the man at the same cash register where his
companion had stood in the dream. When she looks at him she is sitting in the opposite seat
of the same booth and does not have to turn around to see him. Yet she does not glance his
way again. Once we are able to piece together her story, one thing becomes clear. Precisely
at that moment Diane should have taken a second, closer look.
The need to look again, more closely also applies to the viewer of Mulholland Drive, at
least the viewer who wants to make sense of the filmthat is, who wants to discern in the
diverse, seemingly disjunctive story lines a cohesive narrative. In this essay I analyze how
Mulholland Drive triggers this impulse in the viewer only then to frustrate it throughout
most of the film. By delaying the introduction of a baseline for a cohesive, realist narrative,
Lynch exposes the viewers investment in the film story to self-scrutiny. Clear and traceable
correlations abound between the dream scenes that comprise the first two hours of the
film and the episodes about Dianes real life that only begin after the dream sequence.
This structure prods the viewer to recall elements from the long first part of the film while
simultaneously watching for the denouement. The viewing subject itself, engaged in an
overwrought, last-ditch effort to find narrative cohesion, is revealed as part of the diegetic
process that Mulholland Drive puts on display. In this way the film dissects and questions
Roger F. Cook is Professor of German and Director of the Film Studies Program at the University
of Missouri. He has published widely on German film and literature, including Wim Wenders, New
German Cinema, and recent German film.

369

Downloaded by [189.202.217.117] at 12:55 10 October 2014

370

Roger F. Cook

the shared act, on the part of the Hollywood industry and its conditioned film spectator, of
piecing together a narratively constructed film world.
Lynchs 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. Its fantastic voyage into Dianes dream and fantasy world draws a fatal
connection between her pathological psychic state and mainstream film narrative. This
paper explores what Mulholland Drive reveals about the potentially destructive influence
of Hollywood cinema, and in particular about the power it wields against women. In the
first section I analyze how the elaborate configuration of the manifest and latent content of
Dianes dream offers a complex psychoanalytical assessment of her fantasy production. I
then explore how the film links Dianes abject obsession with the object(s) of desire to the
influence of Hollywood cinema, and more specifically to the control exerted by narrative. I
will argue that Mulholland Drive exposes its protagonists immersion in Hollywood film as
an instance of a larger cultural production that binds women to a spectral collective guilt.
And finally I ask to what extent Lynchs break with and critique of the cinema of narrative
integration situate the viewer in a different relationship to the conventions of mainstream
cinema. Does his self-reflexively postclassical film radically reconfigure the engagement
of desire and fantasy on the part of the viewer, and of the female viewer in particular?
Although Lynch avows that he has little familiarity with psychoanalytical theory (Lim),
Freudian dream analysis holds the key to piecing together the disjointed episodes and story
lines of Mulholland Drive into a cohesive narrative. This is not to imply that Lynch is
being disingenuous about his engagement with psychoanalysis. The elements of Freudian
dream interpretation in the film are widely known and surface in various forms in many
different cultural contexts. Nor does a detailed Freudian analysis of the dream logic lead
to much beyond a reconstruction of the narrativealbeit one that has been discomposed
almost beyond restoration.1 Still, psychoanalytical theory is indispensable for a critical
reading of this film that consists almost exclusively of the dreams, fantasies, daydreams,
and memories of a single character. The following account of how Freudian principles of
dream-work bind together different parts of the narrative serves then as a springboard to
more intricate questions about desire and the work of fantasy in Mulholland Drive.
Only during the final twenty minutes of the movie, when we first sees episodes from
Dianes real life (still depicted through the filter of Dianes, now waking, mental world),
can the viewer begin to link the manifold references in the dream scenes to Dianes real
life. The dreams latent content and its representation of a wish-fulfillment become evident
as we learn about her frustrating experiences trying to make it in Hollywood. In the scenes
depicting her memories of key events we learn that she had contracted to have her former
lover and fellow actor Camilla killed by a hit man. From these scenes we also know that
the blue metal key lying on her coffee table signifies that the murder has already happened.
Thus, on its most basic level her dream plays out the contrary-to-fact wish scenario that
she had not had Camilla killed. It also converts other aspects of her life surrounding the
decision to murder Camilla into success stories. In reality her acting career had been a flop
except for the small roles Camilla was able to secure for her. But in the dream her alter
ego Betty turns an awkward audition for a soap opera role into a tour de force performance
worthy of a starring role on the big screen. In front of the cast and crew she cleverly parries
the advances of the misogynist male lead, turning the tables so that he finds himself in
the degrading situation that young actresses often encounter. Not only does this fantasy
enact the desired success as actor, but it also enables Diane to thumb her nose at the
male-dominated Hollywood system where young actresses are often made or destroyed
depending on the favors they grant people of power in the industry. In doing so, she also

Downloaded by [189.202.217.117] at 12:55 10 October 2014

Hollywood Narrative and the Play of Fantasy

371

gets back at Camilla, who, at least from Dianes perspective, used her sexual charms to get
the leading role in the movie and then flaunted her success as she tossed bit parts Dianes
way.
In conjunction with the more overt function of providing pleasure and license the
dream also serves as a defense mechanism against memories that would disrupt Dianes
pleasurable fantasies. This function as a wish fulfillment that doubles as defense mechanism
is set against the demands of the superego that Diane be punished for what she had done
to Camilla. This corrective agency pushes against the concealing dream facade. As the
dream progresses the superego imposes itself with increasing success, interjecting double
meanings and innuendos that point to the horrifying reality that has been transformed into
wish fulfillment. Ultimately the superego wins out when Betty and Rita enter Dianes
apartment and see the rotting corpse lying on the bed in the same posture that her real body
will assume after the self-inflicted gunshot.
The tension between competing psychic forces produces a myriad of both playful and
ominous hints at the reality behind the dream. The ominous allusions to the dream facade
are for the most part diegetic. They represent Dianes unconscious breaking through the
manifest content of the dream with oblique references to the knowledge that lie behind
them. Early in the dream, for instance, the wheelchair-bound mafia film producer passes
on a mysterious film message to one of his lieutenants: The girl is still missing. In the
context of the dream narrative this refers to the actress he is forcing Adam to cast as the
lead in his film, but it is also a reminder to the dreamer that she has had Camilla killed.
The more playful references are generally working on an extra-diegetic plane, indicating to the viewer that the film scenes depict episodes from Dianes mental life. However,
they work simultaneously on the diegetic level, as instances of Witz breaking through the
psychical self-deception to disclose the truth behind it. For example, when Betty tells Rita
why she is there in her aunts apartment, she gushes, I just came here from Deep River, Ontario, and now I am in . . . [pause] . . . this dream place. The fictional name of the fast-food
restaurant where Diane arranges the contract murder also provides a playful suggestion that
this is only a dream. Winkies sounds like the name of a burger chain (such as Wendys or
Hardees), but it also suggests wink, wink, the signal that what I am saying is contrary
to what I know to be true. Here the concealed message to the dreamer is also informing
the viewer that these film scenes belong to a dream sequence.
Both the diegetic messages trying to break through to Dianes conscious thoughts and
the self-reflexive filmic clues go almost certainly unheeded by both the viewer and the
dreamer until Diane wakes up. The strange cowboy figure from a curious earlier scene
announces the end of the long dream sequence when he appears in the doorway to Dianes
bedroom and calls out, Hey pretty girl, time to wake up. The reappearance of the cowboy
recalls the warning issued to Adam in their puzzling and strangely comic meeting at an
equally mysterious corral. In a moment of dream transference, the admonition addressed to
Adam is actually a message emanating from Dianes unconscious that is meant for her: You
will see me one more time if you do good. You will see me two more times if you do bad.
As the timing of his two subsequent appearances indicates, this riddle goes to the core of
Dianes mental state. In his first return he assumes the role of Dianes superego (McGowan
8384), jarring her out of the dream fantasy. When he appears again in the background
at the engagement party at Adams house, in the same odd clothes as in the dream, he is
out of place among the other guests, who are all appropriately dressed for the occasion.
He is the lone figure who is transferred from the dream into her waking recollections of
real events and people. This second reappearance occurs in Dianes memories right at the
moment when she, suffering the humiliation of watching Adam announce his engagement

Downloaded by [189.202.217.117] at 12:55 10 October 2014

372

Roger F. Cook

to Camilla while she taunts Diane, makes the fateful decision to have Camilla killed. Indeed,
he seems to be the only fantasy figure to appear in any of the scenes from her real life. This
not only suggests the cowboys command role in her psychical life, but also corroborates
that his riddle was meant for her.
In his role as superego the cowboy seals Dianes fate, confirming that she has indeed
done bad. This does not refer only to her decision to murder Camilla. It alludes as well
to its root cause, the phantasmic identity of the desiring subject. As a mystery in which her
alter ego pursues and wins her own thinly veiled objects of desire, Dianes dream assumes
the structure that prevails in all her fantasies. The dream is then symptomatic of a fatal flaw
in her mental life. The dual wishes it fulfills are surface elements covering over a more basic
wish fulfillment that goes to the phantasmic kernel of her identity. The underlying fantasy
that never forces its way to the surface of Dianes dream corresponds to Lacans concept
zek, Ridiculous
of the Real as a core psychical reality (Laplanche and Pontalis 311; Zi
Sublime 4243). The operative wish being played out in the dream is that fantasy itself can
be sustained in order to stave off a catastrophic irruption of the Real. The devils logic of
the psyche at work here posits fantasy as the cure for the condition caused by fantasys
fundamental inadequacy to still desire.
The dream is a final, desperate attempt to revitalize the play of fantasy so that it can
keep her from confronting not only what she has done to Camilla, but also the truth about
the virus that has infected her fantasy production. With its obsessive fixation on attaining the
object of desire her fantasy life knows only the model of goal-oriented story lines limited to
zek, Ridiculous Sublime 37). Narratives of this kind structure desire
win-lose outcomes (Zi
in such a way that the individual subject becomes fixed over and against its objects in a
singular, dead position. We see this when the hit man asks her if she really wants to go
through with the murder. Her answerMore than anything in the worldindicates that
the obsession with Camilla is but one instance of a pathological fixation on the object of
desire.
As will be elaborated in the next section, Mulholland Drive attributes this pathological
condition to the hold Hollywood film has on Dianes internal fantasy production. In a
Lacanian reading of the film Todd McGowan writes this of the harm Hollywood has caused
Diane: The world of fantasy, which promises respite from the tortures of desire, always
comes back to haunt the subject (85). The lingering, scenic, unforced narrative flow Lynch
strives for in his films may serve as a therapeutic alternative to dominant cinema. It can
work to open up space in which fantasy can operate more freely. In this regard, I agree
with McGowan when he claims that Mulholland Drive calls us to fully immerse ourselves
in fantasy, to abandon ourselves to its logic. Only in this way can we experience fantasys
privileged path to the Real (86). However, in a matter key to my reading of Mulholland
Drive, I take issue with him. In his account of Lynchs critique of Hollywood cinema, the
mass-produced fantasies of Hollywood fail to be fantasmatic enough because they refuse to
follow their own logic to its endpoint. I think that for Lynch the problem is rather that they
do follow their logic consequently, with the result that it imposes itself on the fantasy of the
individual, as in the case of Diane. As long as single-path narratives resolved by win-loss
outcomes dominate, the spectator of cinema remains caught up in a Sysiphysian loopone
story ends and the next one begins with the subject enslaved to an obsessive form of desire.
This is what doomed Diane and plagues the captive audience of Hollywood cinema.
Resisting the pull of mainstream cinema, Mulholland Drive attempts to engage the viewer
in multiple and heterogeneous modes of fantasy that risk exposing the traumatic scene that
lurks beneath all symbolic and imaginary forms of representation. When fantasy disdains
the pursuit of a goal and remains in the here and now the trauma of the real may surface

Downloaded by [189.202.217.117] at 12:55 10 October 2014

Hollywood Narrative and the Play of Fantasy

373

without the kind of devastating effect seen in Dianes case. When the open play of fantasy
prevails the subject can embrace the desire to let fantasy begin again even as the story of
failed desire. In this way Lynchs film simulates the circular structure of psychoanalytic
therapy that leads the analysand through narrative patterns but always back to a beginning
point for a new fantasy that will tell the story of the Real in a fresh versioneven though
the narrative already contains the knowledge that is being pursued (MacCabe 18788).
We can now identify what Diane has realized when the cowboy appears a second
time in her recollections of the engagement party. It is her inability either to accept or
to forestall the repeated return of the traumatic scene that informs her desire. If he had
appeared only once more, at the dinner party, it would have signaled that she was able to
sustain a free, associative instantiation of desire. His two appearances signal however an
obsessive-compulsive relationship to the object of desire that leaves the subject incapable of
a recuperative play of fantasy that can shore up identity. Her bad ego is unable to provide
a healthy setting through which her fantasies can negotiate the impossibility of desire.
As she tries to make her Hollywood inspired dreams come true Dianes imagination
assimilates to the patterns of representational narrative cinema. As puzzling and at times
absurd as they may be, the scenes that make up the dream sequence conform to the basic
principles of cinematic realism. They contain many instances of displacement, condensation, and innuendo that mark them as a product of Dianes unconscious, but they lack the
bizarre scenarios typical of dreams. Almost paradoxically, Lynch breaks with the conventions of realist narrative most strongly when he presents the dream in this manner rather
than following the more common practice of using temporal and spatial distortion to simulate the pictorial representation of dreams. Also in its narrative structure Dianes dream
resembles more conscious fantasies, such as daydreams and imaginary stories of personal
exploits.
More than just exhibiting the style of realist narrative, the pastiche of scenes that make
up the long dream episode presents a sampling of excerpts from various Hollywood film
genres. As representative fragments of mainstream narrative cinema they highlight the way
Hollywood has been able to pass off prefabricated story lines as viable individual fantasies.
They also exhibit in the particulars how this form of culturally produced dreams ravished
Dianes mental world and contributed to her demise. In her case, the Hollywood dream
factory had taken over her imagination in such a way that it also undermined her ability
to negotiate the intricacies of desire. Her dream puts this damage on display and charts
the potentially destructive effects of Hollywood film on both conscious and unconscious
fantasies.
By presenting her dream as fragments from common film genres Lynch registers how
thoroughly Dianes unconscious has been colonized by the fictions of classical narrative.
The significant meeting with the cowboy in the strange corral at the end of a canyon road
is a bizarre parody of the Western. The figure of Betty, as she arrives in L.A. with her short
blonde hair and grey-blue dress suit in the style of a Doris Day romantic comedy, provides
a strange almost comic disjuncture with the opening scenes. In contrast to Betty, the darkhaired mysterious and sexy Rita evokes visions of the noir tradition. Other scenes are
take-offs on mob crime films of a slightly later period. Lynch freely mixes, both within and
between scenes, elements from various phases of Hollywood cinema. The dream-distorted
fragments of these genres reference not so much their more strictly classical forms. Rather
they represent Hollywood film from the post-World War II dissolution of the studio system
and classical cinema up to the present. More specifically, they hark back to the period
around 1950 as a time when classical Hollywood cinema had passed its zenith and was
beginning to be the target of self-reflective films that looked critically at their own genre.

374

Roger F. Cook

Downloaded by [189.202.217.117] at 12:55 10 October 2014

As the individual dream episodes imitate and parody various genres they also deconstruct them in a way that reveals their destructive power over the individual. Even as it
retraces the progression from the height of classical cinema to the revisionist and deconstructionist reworkings of its genres, Mulholland Drive shows how the dreams produced by
classical cinema still hold sway. Those parts of Dianes dream most closely associated with
her pursuit of Hollywood stardom exhibit traits of the classical era. These characteristics
dominate during the first part of the dream and then fade as the scenes grow increasingly
darker, unable to hold off the imminent return to reality. As the retro language in Bettys
parting exchange with the elderly couple at the airportaccompanied by melodramatic
orchestra musicsuggests, Mulholland Drive associates the dream of making it big in
Hollywood with the golden age of classical cinema:
Irene: Remember, Ill be watching for you on the big screen.
Betty: Okay, Irene. Wont that be the day.
[. . .]
Man: Betty, it was so nice to meet you. All the luck in the world.
Her aunts apartment is decorated with a reserved elegance and style that denotes a sense of
prosperity and contentment unscathed by the social unrest found in postclassical cinema.
In her dreams representation of a successful arrival in Hollywood Dianes alter-ego lands
in an apartment that recalls an idealized film world of a bygone era. Even the name of the
street in the address she gives to the taxi driver at the airport, Havenhurst, already marks it
as an idyllic location unfamiliar with the deconstructive perspectives found on Mulholland
Drive.
Another street plays prominently in Lynchs allusions to the passing of classical cinema.
The key scene where Dianes fate is sealed takes place not at just any Winkies restaurant,
but at the Winkies, Sunset Boulevard. Shots of this full name appear in both the real life
scene and in the two dream scenes that occur there, both on the large restaurant sign as
well as on the nametags of the two waitresses. The reference is not just to the street, but
more specifically to Billy Wilders 1950 film Sunset Boulevard, which like Lynchs film
takes the name of a well-known Hollywood street as its title. As Wilder had done in Sunset
Boulevard, Lynch also uses a shot of the street sign as the major establishing shot for the
film. In both films a tracking shot of the street sign appears twice and in each case establishes
the centrality of the boulevard or drive as a metaphor for Hollywood film. In Mulholland
Drive the same shot of the street sign, illuminated by the limousines headlights as it turns
onto the street, is used twice as an establishing shot. It appears first at the very beginning
of the dream sequence, just after the camera moves down toward Dianes pillowcase and
the screen goes black. It appears the second time after Diane has awakened and just as she
begins to recall actual events from her life.
While other scenes that play themselves out in her dream have primarily diegetic
significance with respect to Dianes psychic world, this shot of the street sign is a selfreferential marker that points to the films status as A Hollywood Story. Mulholland
Drive is the almost cliched film story of a hopeful actress who follows her dream of
stardom to LA only to have her life fall apart in the cutthroat world of the film industry.
However, like Sunset Boulevard, whose subtitle is A Hollywood Story, Mulholland Drive
is more than just the story of the tragic fall of an actress. On the level of meta-filmic
reflection it examines a paradigmatic shift in Hollywood cinema. Wilders film had done
this as well. Its point of reference was the beginning of film sound, after which the iconic
imagery of silent film became reworked within and subservient to the illusion of reality as

Downloaded by [189.202.217.117] at 12:55 10 October 2014

Hollywood Narrative and the Play of Fantasy

375

it was reinforced by synch-sound. Situated at the threshold to postclassical cinema, Sunset

Boulevard shows how the iconic stars of the silent era (Buster Keaton, Basil Rathbone, and
Gloria Swanson as the fictional Norma Desmond) had been tossed aside and left behind by
a new age of cinema.
As the lead-in for both the dream and the recollections from Dianes real life, the
establishing shot with the street sign suggests that the connection between collective fantasies and individual dreams of stardom has new coordinates in postclassical cinema. The
geographical location of Mulholland Drive represents this shift metaphorically. In contrast
to Sunset Boulevard that symbolizes Hollywood by running right through the heart of it,
as the avenue of dreams, so to speak, Mulholland Drive twists and turns its way into the
hills above. Several shots of the city below firmly establish this spatial relation and how it
represents the passage to a postclassical film narrative. Rather than following the course of
a conventional film story about crushed hopes and broken dreams, Mulholland Drive winds
its way both structurally and temporally above and beyond classical cinema. It explodes the
closed structure of representational narrative film even as it presents a familiar story about
the effects of those narratives.
Lynchs film does not imply that the Hollywood dreams of classical narrative cinema
have become archaic, simply supplanted by new or alternative ones. Rather it suggests how
the film-inspired identity formations from the earlier period are taken up and refashioned as
deconstructive film genres emerge. Rita, who does not remember her name, takes it from
a film poster she sees on the wall of the apartment. The poster features Rita Hayworth in
the starring role of a femme fatale in the 1946 noir thriller Gilda. By having Rita adopt her
name from the poster, Mulholland Drive signals that it is reconstituting the classic femme
fatale figure in the manner of a deconstructionist noir film. As a critique of a film industry
that colonizes the collective psyche with cliched dreams, Mulholland Drive also rips the
mask off the femme fatale of classical cinema to show the true siren: Hollywood itself. The
poster from which Rita takes her name clues us in to this. Its tagline for the film, There
NEVER was a woman like Gilda, points to the seductive fantasy world of characters and
adventures created by classical cinema. Dianes desireor rather her single-minded pursuit
of the desireto become a woman like the star Rita Hayworth is her undoing. The name
taken from the film poster suggests that Dianes mental life has been co-opted by empty film
narratives that continue to circulate with effect even as the original forms of identification
are demythologized or parodied.
Bettys pursuit of the femme fatale figure Rita not only reveals truths about Hollywoods
cooptation of individual desire, but it also gets at the nature of the trauma that drives Dianes
fantasy. Compensating for Dianes loss of identity, her dream alter ego Betty identifies with
a guileless femme fatale. In the dream Rita takes on the mask of the femme fatale innocently
out of necessity. This sets her off from the classical figure of Hollywood cinema. She does
not exude the mysterious allure of Woman in the conventional manner that causes the male
lead to lose moral direction and judgment. As such, she is the dream alternative to Camilla,
the real life object of Dianes Hollywood-generated desire. The dream signals a narcissistic
identification with Rita when Betty makes a wig of short blonde hair for her just before
they get into bed together. When they make love the mask falls off this guileless object of
Betty desire, revealing her to be only an empty placeholder that perpetuates an obsessive,
self-consuming fantasy.
After their love making Rita awakens at 2:00 AM repeating in a sleep-like trance
phrases that they will soon hear at Club SilencioSilencio, No hay banda, No hay
orquesta. She then takes Betty to the club, where an eerie impresario introduces the show
in a mixture of Spanish, French, and English, declaring Its all a tape recording. . . . its

Downloaded by [189.202.217.117] at 12:55 10 October 2014

376

Roger F. Cook

all illusion. A woman introduced as La Llorona de Los Angeles, Rebekah del Rio sings
Roy Orbisons Crying in Spanish. In the middle of the song she collapses, but the song
continues, as if she had been lip-synching. The name given to the singer, La Llorona (the
weeping woman), is the title of a Hispanic folk tale about a legendary woman who drowns
her two children after her husband had left her. Full of remorse, she cries every night until
she finally drowns herself as well, but her crying can still be heard at night.2
As Rebekah del Rio sings Betty and Rita begin crying, suggesting that Diane shares
the fate of La Llorona. On one level, she has committed a comparable act and is also beyond
redemption. When Rebekah del Rio collapses so too does the psychical facade that Dianes
dream had erected to protect her from the memory of what she has done. However, the
continuation of the song points to guilt on another level as well. It speaks to the trauma
shared not only by La Llorona, Rebekah del Rio, and Diane Selwyn, but also by all women.
The heavily made-up Rebekah del Rio has one brown artificial tear plastered to her cheek
that simulates the crying she is singing about. This reinforces the idea expressed in the song
and the folk tale of a universal sorrow borne by all women. The intermixing of languages
and cultures in the scene also points to a collective fate. Accordingly, when Betty convulses
as the impresario produces a sudden thunderclap it signals more than just the truth of her
individual guilt breaking through. The episode at Club Silencio reveals that rather than
searching for a secret from Dianes past that would account for her psychical failing, the
analytical focus should turn to forms of cultural production (here Hollywood film) that
perpetuate this mode of traumatic forgetting.
This scene also provides some insight into the historical evolution of the mainstream
narrative cinema that has captured and stunted Dianes mode of imagining. The impresarios
declaration that it is all an illusion announces the breakdown of the dream facade but
also of the diegetic illusion of reality that had sustained Dianes fantasy.3 The show at
Club Silencio also reverses the historical process by which the attractions of early cinema
were integrated and effaced by the development of the spatio-temporally unified diegesis
of classical cinema. The impresario assumes a role similar to that of the barker of early
cinema who had disciplined the rube who wanted to grasp the image or look behind the
screen to see what was being concealed. The impresario reveals the trick of classical
narrative that has staked its hold over Diane, and two generations of film spectators before
her. His lecture, presented as a stage version of an attraction of early cinema, warns
that the artifice of classical narrative produces a world much more penetrated by fantasy
(Brewster 324).
More pernicious than the momentary confusion of the film image for reality that
perplexed early film audiences, this illusion of reality implants itself in the fantasy world of
the unsophisticated viewer along with the belief that the imaginative fictions of cinema can
be reenacted in real life. Just as the rube wanted to become a part of the scenario unfolding
on the screen, the engrossed spectator of classical cinema seeks to take ownership of the
narrative through an act of obsessive and phantasmagoric possession (Elsaesser 215). The
fact that the sequences comprising Dianes dream resemble fragments of stock Hollywood
film stories suggests that the narrative structures of representational film dominate her
fantasy life.
The strange figure of the cowboy reflects Dianes obsession with Hollywood from
another angle. He invokes figures from the Hollywood Western, but is a dream-absurd
caricature of the archetypal screen character. He is wearing a plain plaid car coat, a red
bandana, and a grotesquely styled, oversized cowboy hat, which along with his unimposing
physical stature creates a comical appearance. He speaks in a whiny drawl that mimics
the rugged self-assuredness of the Western hero and is a humorous mismatch for the

Downloaded by [189.202.217.117] at 12:55 10 October 2014

Hollywood Narrative and the Play of Fantasy

377

Hollywood tough-guy language he uses, apparently unsuccessfully, to intimidate Adam.

As a representative figure for all those film characters and scenarios that work their way
into her dreams the cowboy embodies the hold Hollywood, with its power to suggest our
dreams can come true, has over Diane. In this regard he is also admonishing the viewer, the
spectator of cinema, to wake up and break the spell that the Hollywood dream factory
has cast over the production of individual fantasies.
As he provides this elaborate framework for critical analysis does Lynch also structure
the narrative so that the viewer can heed the Cowboys admonition about desire and snap
out of the spell cast by the Hollywood dream factory? The ability to read Mulholland
Drive as a critique of the film industry depends on a viewer who responds according to the
Hollywood-generated desire for narrative integration. Only after the viewer is able with the
advantage of hindsight to go back and reassemble the different points of view presented
in the film can an analysis of its message begin. It is difficult to determine a baseline
narrative reality on first viewing because the film does not clearly mark whether a sequence
is depicting real time scenes from the film story or one of the various forms of Dianes
imaginingsincluding dream episodes, daydreams that rework her past, hallucinations and
reveries, or waking recollections of her actual life in Hollywood. Only after viewing the
entire film, almost invariably more than once, can the viewer understand how the different
scenes coalesce into a coherent narrative. Once it has been performed, such a retroactive
reading produces a linear film story that covers a period of no more than a few hours of
narrated time. The length of the elapsed time depends on how long one figures Diane was
asleep while she was dreaming and how long she remained in the half-awake, dazed mental
state before she shot herself.
The long sequence of seemingly unconnected thwarts for an extended time the attempt
to piece together the narrative. To persevere demands more than an intellectual or critical
interest in the movie. It requires the desire for representational narrative and spectator
identification. This raises the question whether Mulholland Drive ultimately caters to the
affective need for realist fantasy that it condemns Hollywood for exploiting. That is, does
it provide the requisite verisimilitude that allows the viewer to assume that could happen
(to me), and thus fit the mold of classical narrative film that made Hollywood the site for
collective dreaming par excellence (Morin 166)? Does it simply substitute complexity for
a more liberating free play of fantasy and affect that might break out of this mold? Or does
the delayed, retroactive realization that the film can be patched back together as realist
narrative change the viewing experience in a fundamental way?
With its complex set of visual perspectives Mulholland Drive resembles a growing
number of contemporary films that rearrange the normal linear sequence of scenes, but also
provide the viewer enough information to reconstruct the story chronologically. Katherine
Hayles and Nicholas Gessler argue that the fragmented, non-chronological narrative of
Mulholland Drive is part of a broader paradigmatic shift in the technological flows of
media and information that has shaken the ontological and epistemological ground on
which consensus reality is built (497). They discuss it in tandem with Memento (2000)
and Run, Lola Run (1998) as three films that exemplify the new mode of disjointed narrative.
However, the recent explosion of films with nonlinear narratives, such as Kill Bill: Vol. 1
(2003) and Kill Bill: Vol. 2 (2004), 21 Grams (2003), Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless
Mind (2004), Crash (2004), and Babel (2006) among others, suggests that this mode of
storytelling has already been incorporated back into mainstream cinematic narrative. All
these films are predicated on the expectation that the viewer will attempt to reconstruct
the decomposed and shuffled linear narrative. And in each case it is possible to do so, if
not fully, at least to the point where any stray fragments are seen as such. While I agree

Downloaded by [189.202.217.117] at 12:55 10 October 2014

378

Roger F. Cook

with Hayles and Gesslers broader claim that this change in the structure of film narrative
contributes to a postmodern questioning of the ontological stability of the real world, I
question whether it necessarily challenges the viewers demand for narrative integration.
Even as the notion of what is real is thrown into doubt, the affective need for realist
fantasy, for narratives that provide verisimilitude, remains firmly entrenched.
In Mulholland Drive the diegetic process becomes integrally tied up with Dianes
unconscious dream work in a way that significantly alters the film experience, even if
the desire for realist narrative motivates the act of viewing. As the film progresses the
viewer collects and recalls visual snapshots and episodes in order to recast them into a
cohesive structure that forestalls the collapse of the dream facade. Until Diane wakes up
these efforts on the viewers part are directed at the dream narrative and thus coincide with
the work of fantasy that produces her dream. As reality increasingly gains ground in the
dream, the number of hints, allusions, and double entendres snowball. As they do, they also
accumulate in the mind of the viewer, at first perhaps only on a subconscious level. When
the film returns to an objective representation of Diane in her apartment the viewer is able
to recall these bits and pieces of visual information and dialogue and see them as signals
from her unconscious that fit into a narrative scheme for the film as a whole.
This shift in registers does not countermand the basic desire for verisimilitude, but it
does alter the viewing experience in significant ways, both on a reflective, thematic level
and in terms of subject position. Dianes dream provides multiple indices that reference
how the dominant mode of film production has colonized her fantasy. This is most obvious
in the way it turns her abject failure into spectacular success. As in her real-life obsession
with Camilla, Dianes desire is expressed in the dream through a single-path narrative that
doggedly pursues the object of desire toward a win-lose outcome. In the case of the dream
there is a catch. Even though it stages Dianes pursuit of Camilla in a wish-fulfillment
fantasy it also impedes progress toward that goal, because the denouement in the narrative
would expose the truth behind the dream illusion.
As a mystery aimed at the discovery of Ritas identity the narrative set-up of the dream
keeps the tension between wish fulfillment and the reality behind it within sustainable
bounds. As the viewer struggles to find narrative cohesion to the disjunctive sequence of
episodes, she becomes an unknowing participant in the dream-works efforts to maintain
the closure of the subject within its fantasy. Thus, in some ways Dianes dream functions
like the screen of cinema. It effects suture by engaging the spectator/dreamer in imaginary
identifications while the real world is barred from the theater/dream. It achieves this not only
by keeping the mystery open, but also in terms of its narrative structure. The collection of
diverse scenes are held together loosely, more through concealed and suggestive references
emanating from Dianes unconscious than by a cohesive story. A large part of the mystery
involves this disjointed composition. The question what kind of story is this? occupies
the viewer as much as the ostensible mystery of Ritas identity.
The hidden or repressed truth that the mystery story in the dream would reveal to the
dreamer is precisely that traumatic moment that fantasy is designed to hold at bay. As
the dream advances and Betty moves closer to discovering Ritas identity the story line
becomes streamlined and the horrifying truth behind the search imposes itself. Even though
Dianes fantasies eventually yield to a monstrous reality, her struggle to hold her world
together produces imaginative narrative strategies that orchestrate against the tendency to
reduce the film to a single-path reality-based narrative. Ritas dream-within-the-dream is
such a diversion that shifts the focus away from the effort to discern a cohesive network
of characters and events and onto the setting and an affect-laden constellation of displaced
meanings. We see the Winkies, Sunset Boulevard for the first time in Ritas dream, and

Hollywood Narrative and the Play of Fantasy

379

the people there seem to be extraneous to the story that is unfolding. Because the scene is
introduced as a dream (within Dianes yet undisclosed dream) the viewer is less compelled
to make sense of it in terms of the film narrative. The conversation takes on significance for
its own sake and reveals on the level of affect something about what kind of story this is.
Before the man and his analyst go to the back of the restaurant to see if the monster from
the mans dream is there they have this exchange:

Downloaded by [189.202.217.117] at 12:55 10 October 2014

Man: I hope that I never see that face ever outside the dream. Thats it.
Analyst: So you came here to see if hes out there.
Man: To get rid of this god-awful feeling.
Here the idea that we are watching a dream is conveyed through affect. The words of the
dreamer strike a chord with the eerie feeling emanating throughout Dianes dream. Only
later is the viewer able to identify the monster behind the restaurant as the traumatic image
the dream work is trying to ward off. And only then can we infer that as a dream-within-adream this scene is working doubly hard to deny the affects that inform the dream. In this
network of associations the monster attributed to the fictional dreamer at Winkies is the
god-awful feeling haunting Diane.
Heather Love has shown that Lynchs film associates these competing narrative tendencies with fantasy itself as the constitutive element of desire. She argues that the tension
between a forward-moving narrative and the pastiche of individual scenes mirrors a struggle
in Dianes mental life between desubjectivized fantasy and fantasy as wish fulfillment
(128). As an essential piece of identity formation, the raison detre of fantasy is not to
present an imaginary story of desire fulfilled. Rather when it functions effectively fantasy
constructs a setting that provides temporal integrity to desire. As this conflict plays itself out
Mulholland Drive probes whether fantasy in its expansive, scenic form may not be able to
zek, Plague 39), and specifically into film narrasurvive its translation into narrative (Zi
tive. To the extent that Dianes fantasy can sustain a more open structure the disruption of
narrative closure has a liberating sensual effect on the viewer. In this scenic form fantasy is
free to serve as the mise-en-sc`ene of desire, making itself adaptable to the contingencies of
changing characters, settings, props, and relationships. Over and against the forces pushing
the film forward toward narrative closure, Mulholland Drive is able to provide at least at
some intervals visual pleasure of this kind. One critic has described this effect in this way:
The languid seductive rhythms, the unresolved, circular, less-than-overbearing narrative,
the sexy actors all contribute to a kind of personal, open-ended fantasy, or pornography, of
yearning (Lopate 50).
Even though it is possible to reconstruct the narrative through a retroactive reading,
there is a remainder of magical imagery at the end of the film that reinforces those moments
in the film where a more open play of fantasy prevails. After Diane shoots herself the shot
of her bedroom is diffused with smoke. Transposed images of the monster that was behind
Winkies and of the stage at Club Silencio fade in and out of the smoke as the background
shifts from Dianes room to the established long shot of LA at night from Mulholland
Drive. The transposed image of the monster gives way to the same translucent white image
of Betty that had appeared at the beginning of the film transposed over the jitterbug contest.
She is joined this time not by the elderly couple from the opening scene, but rather by a
similar white image of Rita/Camilla. The camera then cuts to a final shot of the blue-haired
woman sitting in the balcony of Club Silencio who had appeared there only fleetingly
during the dream scene. The film ends as she whispers Silencio. This residue from both
Dianes initial waking fantasy about the jitterbug contest as well as her dream can not be

Downloaded by [189.202.217.117] at 12:55 10 October 2014

380

Roger F. Cook

incorporated back into a comprehensive reading that could otherwise encompass all the
diverse scenes of the film into a neatly ordered, consistent whole. It spurs in the viewer the
desire to let the expansive, scenic play of fantasy that had dominated throughout much of
the film continue.
McGowan reads the films final wordSilenciodifferently. He sees it as part of
an effort to push the illusions of fantasy to an endpoint, to the traumatic silence of the
Real (8586). I contend that this final, whispered decree is directed at the sound and
fury of Hollywood narrative. It urges that the free play of fantasy in Mulholland Drive be
continuednot only for its own sake, but also because it reveals and resists a particular
traumatic scenario, one sustained by the social and cultural oppression of women. In this
respect, the reappearance of elements from Dianes dream even after her death is analogous
to the continuation of the song after Rebekah del Rio had collapsed on stage. The shock
it produces touches an embodied memory, the cellular memory of a collective guilt
of women, the age-old story of the unequal and punishing sexual-cum-legal history of
women (Rose 5).
It is a cross-cultural, transgenerational haunting that does not go back to a particular
event in the life of an individual. It is a forgetting that does not lead back to a past event
and also has no conscious or even unconscious memory attached to it. As a forgetting
without an object it is sustained by the compulsively repeated expression of collective
dreams and desires that hold both Diane and Camilla under its sway. In conjunction with
the opening images of Betty and the elderly couple the transposed image of her with Rita
at the end serve as a frame for the film narrative that harks back to the jitterbug contest.
As such these image-overs signify that the memory of the jitterbug contest has been
repeatedly reworked in Dianes fantasies so that it no longer has a link back to the actual
event. Rather the opening scene of the jitterbug contest stands as a fragment of a traumatic
forgetting without memory that is not attached to Dianes past. It has been re-membered
into a collective unconscious according to the dictates of a trauma that is symptomolgy
substituting for what was never experienced as such (Clough 6).
The look into Dianes mental life in Mulholland Drive reveals that as individual
fantasy attempts to hold off the effects of this collective history it will be subject to a
controlling power of narrative that makes it impossible to identify the trauma as symptom.
The transposition of the closing frame over the long shot of Hollywood from Mulholland
Drive offers one last reference to the kind of film stories that exerted control over Dianes
fantasy. While in Mulholland Drive Lynch may not have made a clean break with this
form of narrative, the ending gestures promisingly to a new mode of telling film stories
that may divest itself even more of the demands of wish-fulfillment. Lynch attempts to
take this further step in Inland Empire (2006), a film that harks back self-reflexively to
Mulholland Drive as its forerunner. In anticipation of a more radically postnarrative cinema
the expansive, scenic form of fantasy that had prevailed throughout most of the film is
re-invoked at the end. But the films final word is reserved for the form of realist fantasy
that must be overcome. An anonymous everywoman grotesquely made up to exhibit the
effects of Hollywood film on women whispers Silencio. Her edict is directed at the film
production of which she is a symptom.

Notes
1. Jay Lentzner and Donald R. Ross offer precisely such an analysis of how Dianes dream
is elaborately constructed according to Freuds basic principles of psychoanalysis and dream
interpretation.

Hollywood Narrative and the Play of Fantasy

381

2. I am indebted to N. Katherine Hayles and Nicholas Gessler for the reference to the Hispanic folk
tale. In their interpretation of the scene they focus on the link to Dianes murder of Camilla rather
than on the aspect of collective guilt.
3. For a discussion that distinguishes between the illusion of reality created by some narrative film
and the impression of reality produced by diegetic film per se, see Metz and Guezzetti pp. 7980.

Downloaded by [189.202.217.117] at 12:55 10 October 2014

Works Cited
Brewster, Ben. A Scene at the Movies. Early Cinema: SpaceFrameNarrative. Ed. Thomas
Elsaesser and Adam Barker. London: BFI, 1990: 31425.
Clough, Patricia Ticineto. The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social. Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2007.
Elsaesser, Thomas. Discipline through Diegesis: The Rube Film between Attractions and Narrative Integration. The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded Ed. Wanda Strauven. Amsterdam:
Amsterdam University Press, 2006: 20523.
Hayles, N. Katherine, and Nicholas Gessler. The Slipstream of Mixed Reality: Unstable Ontologies
and Semiotic Markers in The Thirteenth Floor, Dark City, and Mulholland Drive. PMLA 119.3
(May 2004): 48299.
Laplanche, J. and J. B. Pontalis. The Language of Psychoanalysis. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith.
New York: Norton, 1974.
Lentzner, Jay, and Donald R. Ross. The Dreams That Blister Sleep: Latent Content and Cinematic
Form in Mulholland Drive. American Imago 62.1 (2005): 10123.
Lim, Dennis. Gone Fishin: David Lynch Casts a Line Into the City of Dreams. Village Voice 1016
Oct. 2001. <http://www1.villagevoice.com>. Accessed January 15, 2009.
Lopate, Philip. Welcome to L.A. Film Comment 37.5 (Sept./Oct. 2001): 4450.
Love, Heather K. Spectacular Failure: The Figure of the Lesbian in Mulholland Drive. New Literary
History: A Journal of Theory and Interpretation 35.1 (Winter 2004): 11732.
MacCabe, Colin. Theory and Film: Principles of Realism and Pleasure. Narrative, Apparatus,
Ideology: A Film Theory Reader. Ed. Philip Rosen. New York: Columbia University Press,
1996: 17997.
McGowan, Todd. Lost on Mulholland Drive: Navigating David Lynchs Panegyric to Hollywood.
Cinema Journal 43.2 (Winter 2004): 6789.
Metz, Christian, and Alfred Guezzetti, The Fiction Film and Its Spectator: A Metapsychological
Study. New Literary History 8.1 (1976): 75105.
Morin, Edgar. The Cinema, or, The Imaginary Man. Trans. Lorraine Mortimer. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005.
Rose, Jacqueline. States of Fantasy. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996.
zek, Slavoj. The Art of the Ridiculous Sublime: On David Lynchs Lost Highway. Seattle: The
Zi
Walter Chapin Simpson Center for the Humanities, 2000.
. The Plague of Fantasies. London: Verso, 1997.