Mulholland Dr. (2001)

Analysis of postmodernist and “noir” films including techniques and stylistic devices such as avant-gardism of both visual images, sounds, themes, hyper-reality, disjointed narratives, blurring of boundaries and simulations enables to realize the objectives of the movement as an uprise against values of consumer society and popular culture. Boggs and Pollard analyze postmodernism as a cinematographic trend affecting the Hollywood industry between the 80s and 90s. The authors draw historical parallels between the movement and societal developments stimulated by the developments of technology, labour division, fractionalization of society, and its depolitization. A dark view of the human condition, images of chaos and random violence, death of the hero (the main character), emphasis on technique over the content, and dystopic views of the future have been identified as the characteristic features of postmodern cinema. Boggs and Pollard describe the impact of the social possess on the genre that mirrors general moods of anxiety, uncertainty, fear, and cynicism cause by the change of balance in the whole development of art along the “glamour decay.” The authors emphasize on the irreversible break between realism and formalism, conservative and progressive that postmodernism, film noir and avant-garde successfully take on.

Steven Anzovin analyzes peculiarities of postmodernism, its style and the way it influenced the digital images. For example, peculiar sense of humour, realized through a weird combination of objects from different fields as well as materials helped to create bizarre narratives. The Hollywood film industry has been marked by the impact of postmodernism. Imagery of David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive exemplifies the degree of this influence. The sequence of unrelated objects in the film allow for the effect of hyperreality, disjointedness, irrationality and unconsciousness — features that distinguish postmodernism as an artistic movement. This paper will examine and evaluate David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive feature film, as the blend of postmodernism, film noir and avant-garde genres, through the analysis of the content, medium, and film’s impact and effect on the audience. Mulholland Drive is based upon emotional themes that are at least partially obvious, while at the same time making use of David Lynch’s trademarks — narrative dysfunction, rich symbolism, as well as his use of hybrid sub-genres such as thriller, mystery, horror, slapstick, episodic film, gangster comedy, detective story, “mickey-mousing” parody and love tragedy.

Rich content and its dynamic nature mark the film from the very first episode of a car crash on Mulholland Drive above Los Angeles. The only survivor is a young dark-haired woman who has been threatened by two men just before the accident happened. Having lost her memory due to her head injury during the car accident, she goes to seek the refuge in an empty house that she finds while walking in despair. Simultaneously, a young blond woman, Betty, whose dream is to make a film career in Hollywood, arrives in Los Angeles. Full of excitement and optimism, she moves into her aunt’s Ruth house in which the dark-haired woman takes the refuge. The two women become friends. In search of the identity of the dark-haired woman, who calls herself Rita, they fall in love with each other. The story of the two is intertwined with different sub-plots that gradually fall in place into a main plot which then is twisted up again. An abrupt break in the story line makes Betty become Diane, a depressed woman who has failed in Hollywood film industry. Rita, now, impersonates Camilla, a successful actress as well as Diane’s former lover. She is now engaged to a famous movie director (Adam Kesher). Driven by jealousy, Diane hires a killer to murder Camilla. After her wish is accomplished, Diane then cannot carry a murder on her consciousness. The film ends with her committing a suicide.

What is more important than the fact that the movie’s plot turns out to be a dream is that besides the plot, the movie is a dream in itself. David Lynch, in his interview with Chris Rodley, stated: “When you sleep, you don’t control your dreams. I like to dive into a dream world I’ve made or disovered.” (Lynch and Rodley, 15) Literazing Hollywood as a dream factory, Lynch documents his archetypal film industry story as a journey into the realm where time collapses and nothing, not even the film itself, is what it at first seems to be. Furthermore, Mulholland Drive features many elements of classic film noir — or perhaps more properly fit into the category of blend of “neo-noir” film, avant-garde and postmodern. In his book Detours and Lost Highways, Foster Hirsch identifies these elements as “masquerade and multiple identities…a battle with an implacable destiny, an investigator on the trail of a killer…amnesia, characters haunted by traumatic events from the past…mischance, seduction and entrapment.” (Hirsch,312–313) “The significance of recurrent fragmented images” that are not revealed until the film’s denouement, a “Möbius strip universe of dissolving and doubled identities” where “time and space are unreliable,” resulting in a “self-enclosed puzzle” for which there are no easy answers. (Hirsch, 314)

Breaking down Mulholland Drive’s narrative, means to recognize that several events in the film are symbolic, hence not real. For example, the smoke that bellows out of the bed when Diane commits suicide in the final scene; the blue box that suddenly appears inside one of the girl’s handbags in the Club Silencio; and the miniature old people running out of a brown paper bag. It is this use of dream sequences, flashbacks and fantasies that gives Mulholland Drive its surreal structure. What Lynch does, is a mix the real with the imaginary and the past with present until the spectator can no loner tell the difference between the two, each of the parallel stories drifts in and out of various genres. For the main story of Betty and Rita, there are elements of mystery, romance, and even suspense thriller. For the thread involving the young director, there is situation comedy, relationship drama and even a mix of the supernatural Hollywood’s secretive shadow syndicate and its mysterious Cowboy figure. In the various other storylines, the viewer can spot action, crime, psychological mystery and at times, even glimmers of the musical with the opening jitterbug sequence, as well as the extended Club Silencio scene. All these are mashed together in order to drive members of the audience in predetermined directions and then do things to them that cannot be foreseen.

The strongest evidence that is found against the possibility of the film narrative being comprehensible is Lynch’s use of language in the original screenplay. At various points he uses metaphoric descriptions that would not be visually noticeable to the audience. For example, Lynch description of the car crash at the beginning of the film explains “The disastrous moving sculpture of the two cars wants to climb up the hill”. And a few scenes later, the detective looking across Hollywood from the crash site is described: “He slowly raises his gaze to the shining lights of Hollywood lying far below like a galaxy”. Here, Lynch plays off of the familiar conventions of film noir to present a surrealist vision running against the genre. The narrative structure is so unusual, the initial two thirds of the film is a dream, and very few viewers would perceive this from the limited given clues — the initial shot of a woman sleeping, the cowboy calling on Diane to wake up, and the supernatural occurrences in the second part of Diane’s dream. David Lynch made a film which very few people would understand even the basics on first viewing. His purpose is to set an intellectual challenge for its own sake, to create mystique, and perhaps a controversy. Lynch wanted to convey that illusions can seem very real — he wanted the audience to imagine they were seeing a story of an actress named Betty and her amnesic friend, then to realize, like the audience at Club Silencio, that it was actually a dream. Film’s narrative consists of dream sequences, flashbacks and fantasies and this is communicated both visually and through dialogue.

Mulholland Drive uses nonlinear narration. The last quarter of the film blend several different parts of the story. However, instead of placing the narrative out of sequence, the final sections of the film place the earlier narratives themselves in doubt. The timeframe of events is never clear, therefore it is impossible to deduce when the sequence occurs. In fact, various scenes do not seem to be occurring at different time, but on different levels of reality. Mulholland Drive has an arresting visual style, which reflects Lynch’s early training in the fine arts. In an interview, Lynch has compared the nonverbal aspects of painting and film-making in a way that aids us in understanding the emphasis on primary-process mentation in his dreamscapes: “There are things that can’t be said with words. And that’s sort of what painting is all about. And that’s what film-making, to me, is mostly about. There are words and there are stories, but there are things that can be said with films that you can’t say with words. It’s just the beautiful language of cinema. And it has to do with time and juxtapositions and all the rules of painting. Painting is the one thing that carries through everything else. (Lynch and Rodley, 26–27)

Scenes in Mulholland Drive — though coherent within themselves and, to a large extent, in chronological order — are sometimes so “unsystematic” that it is difficult to envision David Lynch explaining how the film will fit together to anyone but himself. Film’s plot seems to expand into the dozens of directions simultaneously; therefore, it is very difficult and almost impossible to retell the plot. Lynch does not present the film cinematically as a traditional dream sequence. He permanently rejects to let things happen how they would rationally. According to Martha Nochimson’s article, “the linkages are elliptical, shot through with a number of comic and grotesque subplots involving minor characters that emphasize both dreams and criminal violence.” (Nochimson, 40) Lynch goes into symbolic overdrive and weaves an incredibly complex story which, however, can still be explained if analyzed from the point of view of cinematographic language. Most of the units of film vocabulary such as autonomous segments, syntagmas, and sequences are easily identifiable in Mulholland Drive but the way they relate to each other and the way they tell the story is not standard.

The medium Lynch selected for the story of Mulholland Drive emphasizes the message: the dream-like sequence starts the movie with the spectator unaware that the narrative is a dream world. One may be aware of the film’s quirks, moments of highly staged play with stereotype and coincidence, or its perfect, color-saturated sets, but these are David Lynch’s usual distorted style. The use of vibrant primary colors is striking and frequent. For example, they feature in the scene where Adam (film director) discovers his wife in bed with the pool-man. There are pink deckchairs, a pink spray-painted pot plant and a pot of pink paint in which Adam dips his wife’s jewellery, and which then is daubed on Adam’s clothes. Betty arrives in Los Angeles wearing a glittering pink top. The female characters’ lipstick matches their tops, and in some cases the background, for example blonde Camilla’s audition for Sylvia North.

Floating cameras and jerky camera movements are in widespread use in Hollywood film. This freedom of camera has lead to even more extreme movements, such as shooting with a titled horizontal axis in Mulholland Drive. Since viewers constantly try to give spatial order to a scene, many nontraditional camera movements can cause breaks in the diegesis.

There is no real slow motion, but rather a gradual slowing of the whole film, untypical for the beginnings. Camera determines the speed of the film and creates surreal and dream-like atmosphere. Subjectivity of camera and selective focus are present when examining the film.

From each image, shot and scene in a film, a meaning can be (and probably should be) extracted. But the image, shot and scene are not there simply to provide a vehicle for meaning and connotation; they exist complementary to these psychological ideas, in other words, the camera work is precise.

Mulholland Drive calls attention to its use of handheld cameras. These handheld cameras are used during conversations at the diner scene at Winkie’s restaurant. The cameras use over-the-shoulder-shots, but smoothly move up and down and left and right as the conversations take place. The random smooth movements almost go behind the heads of the subjects and way above their eye line. In addition to its complex narrative structure, Mulholland Drive is also a technically mature film. It uses camera motion and technique to further the story and against popular practice, does so visibly rather than invisibly. Transitions fade from moving palm trees to crossed arms at similar angles, for example.

Despite its obscure meanings, the Silencio Club sequence is the most powerful sequence in Mulholland Drive. The scene is preceded by some very strange shots of Betty and Rita making their way to the theatre by taxi. The deliberately shaky camera movement could be thought of as a simple aesthetic to add a sense of discomfort, but one has to pay an attention to how the shot movements relate to the movements of Betty and Rita. As they are flagging the taxi they slowly walk forward then open the door and get in. The camera mimics this movement by first moving slowly forward then moving faster and panning to the right as the characters get into the taxi. As the taxi door shuts, the shot loses focus. And as the taxi begins moving, this shot becomes extremely shaky. Then camera cuts to viewpoints from inside the taxi of passing city streets and lights. The angles are tilted and shaky, and the focus is slightly off. When the taxi arrives at the theatre, the parallels between camera movement and the movements of Betty and Rita become more prominent. The handheld camera initially remains stable as the taxi stops, but as two characters exit the taxi and begin moving toward the door the camera wobbles prominently as if it has also just emerged from a taxi. It then rushes for the door as the characters enter and cuts as soon as the door is reached. These aesthetic parallels establish a fractal movie paradigm that continues throughout the whole theatre sequence. It is not just Betty and Rita who are going to the theatre. The viewer is going there too. It is also possible that these camera views are those of the homeless monster, outside of Winkie’s restaurant, who is after all, simply another manifestation and anxiety of Diane. Lynch’s use of different camera positions throughout the movie, such as hand-held points of view, makes the viewer “identify with the suspense of the character in his or her particular space” (Dillon, 100), but that Lynch at moments also “disconnects the camera from any particular point of view, thereby ungrounding a single or even a human perspective” (Dillon, 100), so that the multiple perspectives keep contexts from merging, significantly troubling “our sense of the individual and the human”. Andrew Hageman similarly notes that the camera work in the film “renders a very disturbing sense of place and presence” (Dillon, 100), such as the scene at Winkie’s restaurant where the “camera floats irregularly during the shot-reverse shot dialogue” by which the “spectator becomes aware that a set of normally objective shots have become disturbingly subjective.” (Dillon, 100) It results in a high flexibility of the pan shots, for example the showing of road signs, all point-of-view shots; and leads to an intimate closeness to the characters, such as the scared man at Winkie’s restaurant.

The avant-garde film was made prior to the wide use of computer effects; however, Mulholland Drive uses a special effect that does not rise to the level of believability. When Betty and Rita discover a corpse, they run out of the apartment. As they go through the door the scene is superimposed several times, with each superimposition slightly out of synch with the others, creating a “trailing” effect. However, Lynch uses computers to create a scene where an elderly couple crawl out of a paper bag, walk underneath a door and then grow back to their normal size.

There are several avant-garde techniques used in the film including lack of transitions, abrupt transitions, motion speed, computer-generated imagery, and nondiegetic images, nonlinear narration and intertextuality. The film gives its audience a cinematic approximation of this “lag,”this “fainting away,” as they attempt to keep up and make “sense” of Diane’s experiences even though they are not clearly dual, not two distinctly separate filters explicating her story. There is no voiceover, no narrative guide, just shadows, smoke, and mirrors. When Diane dies, for instance, the plume of fog from the Silencio Club rises behind her bed. Even though this is one of the closing scenes, the audience has seen her dead body, decomposing, couple of times before. All linear time is suspended, and, just as the audience seems to grasp the meaning of any given shot, it “faints” away, just as it seems to faint away for the disintegrating Diane.

While the lack of transitions in the avant-garde or postmodern films generally fall into the category of flashbacks in time, Mulholland Drive makes wide spread use of this technique. It unexpectedly drifts into what might be termed “surreal sequence.” For example, at one point Betty’s neighbor comes to her apartment and picks up an ashtray she had left. After the neighbor leaves, Betty goes back to the couch and the ashtray is still on the table. In another scene, Betty gets up to answer the door and is wearing a different dress when the door opens. These seemingly impossible occurrences take place as a part of the natural narrative, with no attempt to reconcile the discrepancies.

There is a dominance of long shots and sequences in Mulholland Drive. The cutting determines the films rhythm (for that reason, the few stretched shots define the slowness of the film). Many of the conversations proceed at a slow pace, and many shots are held far too long. Lynch’s montage, in other words editing techniques mentally block the audience from connecting locations by cuts or narrative techniques. There is no comprehension, not linkage between the scenes. The collision of shots confuses the spectator. For example, after an actor leaves the scene, the camera remains for a short moment in the same position while “running” before the fade-out, in other words, it remains “running” longer than traditional cinematic conventions demand. This action of “disappearing” is an unfinished and continual state.

In terms of motion speed, the Silencio Club scene shot begins from far away and quickly picks up the pace until it abruptly stops at the door as the characters enter the theatre.

Sound, too is used masterfully. The first two acts of the film take place in a dream and the sound subtly reflects this. Traffic is audible usually but not always. Minor details like ceiling fans, vacuums, the click of high-heels on the pavement and various other diegetic sounds are sometimes either inaudible or exaggerated. Lynch even draws direct attention to sound in the Silencio club scene. The characters find themselves at a club where singers lip-synch and the announcer makes reference to a tape in the background. “This is all a tape recording. It is an illusion,” he says. Some have offered the interpretation that the club represents the out-of-body experience actors goes through and that’s paralleled by the focus on sound over image in this one scene. Mulholland Drive continues the feeling of being unable to stop the music, as if it will continue on an endless playback loop regardless of whether anyone is there to hear it.

The sound track does not correspond, like the image, directly to ‘objective reality’ but rather to a secondary representation of it. And that would make sense in Lynch’s dreamscape. Lynch also infused subtle rumblings throughout portions of the film that reviewers noted added unsettling and creepy effects. There is also an identification of perpetual and uncanny ambient sound, this places a particular emphasis on the scene where the man collapses behind Winkie’s restaurant as normal sound is drowned out by a buzzing roar, noting that the noise “creates a dissonance and suspense that draws in the spectator as detective to place the sound and reestablish order.” (Hegeman) Sound spans across shots (telephones-ringing “from” one location to another), there is not given any hint on a reasonable connection between the sounds. Often the sound of one shot is echoing in the next shot. Guiding theme — same motive repeated and varied, through its slowness the whole movie becomes surreal and dream-like. According to Zettl, diegetic and nondiegetic in a wider sense, sounds without a visible source. The distinction of “real and artificial” sound becomes blurred in Mulholland Drive, the spectator is often threatened by deep growling sounds, which are sublimal sounds that have no reference in the scene, make whole situation uncertain and unsafe. Almost no “normal” environmental noises, characters seem to have a cocoon around them, also dreamlike. The audience is terrorized by power and volume of the sound which at times has no link with any images on-screen.

According to Heather Love’s article, many of the characters in Mulholland Drive are archetypes that can only be perceived as cliché: the new Hollywood hopeful, the femme fatale, the maverick director, and shady powerbrokers that Lynch never seems to explore fully. Lynch places these often hackneyed characters in dire situations, creating dream-like qualities. By using these characters in scenarios that have components and references to dreams, fantasies, and nightmares, viewers are left to decide, between the extremes, what is reality. For example, Lynch’s masterful creativity and selection of actors is present, as well as unusually hard to read performances. Actors seem stilted and overly stylized and then suddenly the performance locks into place at some point and becomes unexpectedly moving or clear. Betty’s/Diane’s story begins with everything it takes, such as blonde charm, talent and connections to “make it” to the film industry. As well she helps Rita in regaining Rita’s identity. When she leaves Adam Kesher’s film set and he does not call her back to be in his film, it is “the end of her life.” After quarter of the film she “re-emerges” from the blue box with a newly darkened destiny and has a different name which is Diane Selwyn. Diane, in the end of the film, ends up being drug addled, washed-out, scorned and vengeful. Rita’s/Camilla’s story begins with her (them) being a version of Betty. She (they) appear (s) as seducing blonde but also injured and vulnerable starlet. She may or may not be an actress, however she is pronounced by Adam Kesher the “it” girl. She ends up being as Camilla Rhodes, a dark, vampiric and manipulative diva, as well as a lesbian temptress. Adam Kesher’s, an active film director, identity remains stable throughout the film. There is a turning point of his self in the scene where he sees Betty and cannot cast her for his movie; this marks his decay. At the end of the film he is under total control of the film industry, he has lost his identity. Mr. Roque, is a character who is totally isolated, god-like positioned. The Cowboy is an archetypical character, metatron and riddler-like. The Castigliani Brothers are the Mafiosi prototypes. These figures are just like the characters from a creep show, represent the oppression of the “factory dream”.

In terms of screen time, the film aligns viewers with Betty more than any other character, and audiences are encouraged to ally themselves with her as a result of her strengths. This strong allegiance serves to heighten the audience’s negative emotional response in the film’s final act. Upon discovering Diane, viewers are initially confused. After having spent almost two hours watching Betty and Rita, the audience experiences a severe clash between expectations and (diegetic) reality. The physical differences between Betty and Diane are jarrings. Betty wears clean, light colors for much of the film, and her hair is immaculately groomed. This contrasts with Diane’s ratty clothes and disheveled hair. The placement of the dream in the film plays a key role in the viewers’ attitude toward Diane. Up until the dream ends, the audience has spent the entire film watching Betty overcome the obstacles facing her. Seeing the similarities between the dream characters and the actual ones, viewers’ transfer their hopes from the former to the latter. The audience wants to ally with Diane, just as they did with Betty. They want to believe that Diane can overcome her obstacles, but soon the audience discovers that Diane is neither a great actress nor a kind person. She is jealous, she is spiteful, and she hires Joe for a shady task which is to murder her ex-lover, Camilla Rhodes.

The actors’ performance is purposely obscure and vague: they do not reveal their characters’ inner thoughts or emotions. Rita becomes an amnesiac because of a car accident and loses her identity. Betty assumes a role of a detective to help Rita find herself. Adam acts the role of a film director as scripted by powerful movie moguls. Ironically, in the one scene where viewers might feel connected to the main character, Betty, is when she is reading for a part in a film. In the audition — a performance — Betty expresses more emotion than she does in the rest of the film. Lynch’s use of anti-realist acting, combined with a fragmented narrative that originates in one character’s dreams, forces viewers to pull away from the story and constantly to ask questions about the “reality” of the characters and events.

The concept of characters switching visual appearance is the first step in making sense of Mulholland Drive. For example, Betty is initially depicted to the viewer as an ambitious actress; however, in the last quarter of the film her persona completely changes and she is referred to as Diane. Rita is presented to the audience as an injured character who has lost her memory. After seeing herself in a mirror next to a reflection of the actress Rita Hayworth, she adopts the name Rita, but in the last third of the film she is referred to as Camilla. Three times in the film the viewer sees dead women laying down in near identical positions — the corpse found in apartment # 17, the singer who drops dead on a theatre stage, and the girl who commits suicide in the film’s climax. The waitress in the restaurant Winkie’s is shown wearing different name tags in different scenes. The first time we see her name tag is in the scene when Betty and Rita are having a coffee, her tag indicates Diane and the second time, towards the ending of the film, and her tag indicates Betty. Given these interchanging personas and names, the audience knows that they are dealing with an unconventional narrative. One must abandon formal narrative logic and accept that at least some of these characters are symbolic, rather than literal.

In regard to the film’s impact on the viewer, it is important to note that first and foremost, Mulholland Drive is intended as an artistic expression, for an intellectual, or for someone who is familiar with the technique and style of David Lynch. The audience must keep an “open mind” with any artistry that is following from something deep within the artist. It is also important to believe that the artist sincerely wants to communicate with his audience. One must look for this effort of communicating the message to the viewer. If the audience does this, they can realize that Lynch is guiding them through his art in order to better understand the way his film is structured and help the audience to perceive how he intertwines imagery that in fact is very accurate and full of sense.

Through Lynch’s juxtaposition of clichés and surreal, nightmares and fantasies, nonlinear story lines, camera work, sound, and lighting, he presents a film that challenges viewers to suspend belief of what they are experiencing. The audience struggles to make sense of the film.

Mulholland Drive taps into popular culture through the use of extreme stereotypes. An elderly couple and Betty, a small-town girl who comes to Hollywood to be a star, both overact their parts, drawing on common characters with which the audience is already familiar. Lynch also plays on the audience’s familiarity with his own work. When, for example, the main characters enter a theater, a woman on stage begins lip-synching Roy Orbison’s Llorando in Spanish. This is an implied reference to Lynch’s Blue Velvet, where one of the characters sings Orbison’s In Dreams; however, the audience must be aware of the earlier works of Lynch in order to comprehend this link. The film is most likely to leave the public with an uneasy feeling of having missed the crucial element that will put all questions to rest, “it gives its spectators the opportunity to encounter a certain inarticulable absence, to which side they are brought through the story about the potential effectiveness of fantasy.” (Oliver, 71)

The relationship between audience and the avant-garde, postmodern and film noir filmmaker like David Lynch is equally dissimilar to dominant cinema. David Lunch’s film is designed to be difficult to understand and it requires special knowledge to interpret the meanings of it. In this case, a narrative structure is not used; Lynch’s intention is to force the viewer to be an active participant in interpreting the film. This is a technique often called reflexivity. It is hard to grasp the meanings and connections in Lynch’s story without seeing the film more than once. But this is good in that even though the audience might not understand everything the first time through, at least they were using one hundred percent of their brain it trying to figure it out. It uses well-established cinematic devices to incite dream-like atmosphere in order to mislead the audience by making them believe that some events are actually taking place but in reality are only dreams.

It seems like David Lynch refuses to verify any particular interpretations of his more challenging films. His film leaves the audience to ponder, demands that the viewer earns the appreciation of his work by surrendering the familiar narrative expectations. And if the viewer is unwilling to do this then he has no qualms about leaving the audience frustrated and confused.

However, if there is a logical narrative in Mulholland Drive then one is only going to succeed in unraveling it through careful observation and cross-referencing. The viewer has already made a basic start by identifying that characters and events in the film are sometimes used symbolically, either as flashbacks, dream sequences or fantasies. Hence, in order to progress reliably, one’s immediate task is to separate out the real chronological events from the symbolic.

Mulholland Drive features other psychological themes that are not necessarily tied to the murder mystery narrative, but are representative of Hollywood life in general. One of those themes is the confusion between reality and the fictional worlds that Hollywood specializes in manufacturing. Combining the technical prowess of the sound-work, the plays on genre and the exploration of semiotic ideas, Mulholland Drive reinforces the argument behind medium specificity and reestablishes cinema as a unique artistic outlet. It is a trance-like experience, partly because it deals with the broken dreams of Hollywood, partly because the audience cannot bear to look away from the abstract art up on the screen, but also because David Lynch knows what Mulholland Drive is about even if the spectator does not. It is not a disconnected series of clips, but rather a wells-developed, well-directed, well-acted, utterly absorbing film which is as different from other films as cinema is from other art.

Bibliography

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Hersey, Curt (2002). “Diegetic Breaks and the Avant-Garde”, The Journal of Moving Image Studies, 1.

Love, Heather (2004). “Spectacular failure: the figure of the lesbian in Mulholland Drive”, New Literary History, 35 (1), p. 117–132.

Psychoanalysis, aesthetics, and politics in the work of Kristeva By Kelly Oliver

Orr, Christopher (1997). “Genre Theory in the Context of the Noir and Post-Noir Film.” Film Criticism, 1:22, 17–37.

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Dillon, Steven (2006). “The Solaris Effect: Art & Artifice in Contemporary American Film.” University of Texas.

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