McGowan, Todd. “Navigating Mulholland Drive, David Lynch’s Panegyric to
Hollywood.” The Impossible David Lynch. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007. 194-219.

By combining sense with the texture of fantasy, Lynch uses the first part of Mulholland Drive to explore the role that fantasy has in rendering our experience coherent and meaningful.

The narrative coherence of the opening section becomes especially pronounced when we contrast it with what follows. The second part of the film is structured around the incessant dissatisfaction of desire: it denies Diane (Naomi Watts) and the spectator any experience of Camilla (Laura Harring), her love object—and it emphasizes this failure visually. The first part of the film, in contrast, produces a scenario in which Diane, appearing as Betty, can enjoy the object. As we’ve seen in other Lynch films, this separation between the experience of desire and that of fantasy accounts for—and is accomplished by—dramatic changes in mise-en-scene, editing, and the overall character of the shots between the first and second parts of the film. 195.

This kind of disruption of the shot/reverse-shot sequence (which does not occur in the first part of the film) indicates on the level of the editing that these worlds—the worlds of fantasy and desire—are ontologically distinct. 196

Mulholland Drive represents an advance on Lost Highway because it emphasizes not only that fantasy offers a solution to the deadlock of desire but also that fantasy provides a way of staging an encounter with trauma and an authentic experience of loss that would be impossible without it. The film celebrates the fantasmatic dimension of Hollywood—its commitment to the exploration of fantasy. Because of their formal similarities, one cannot come to terms with Mulholland Drive without looking at in light of Lost Highway. The two are companion films: Lost Highway explores the structure of fantasy and desire for male subjectivity, and Mulholland Drive does so for female subjectivity. One might even claim that Mulholland Drive is a feminist version of Lost Highway. 196

[p. 252, note 5]: The subject cannot isolate its object because this object is not the goal of desire but the cause. Desire does not come into being in response to an identifiable object; instead, it emerges as lack. As Joan Copjec points out, “Desire is produced not as a striving for something but only as a striving for something else or something more. It stems from the feeling of our having been duped by language, cheated of something, not from our having been presented with a determinate object or goal for which we can aim. Desire has no content—it is for nothing—because language can deliver to us no incontrovertible truth, no positive goal.”

By placing the spectator in the same position as the desiring subject on the screen—and by immersing both in total uncertainty—Lynch seems to set up the first part of Mulholland Drive as a world of desire. 198

One eliminates the anxiety that the enigma of the Other’s desire produces by fantasizing a resolution that enigma, and this is exactly what Mulholland Drive indicates that Rita does. After she wanders the streets, Lynch shows Rita falling asleep on the ground outside an apartment complex, and the next morning she wakes up to a world that has become far less mysterious. 198

If Rita falls asleep tormented by the mystery of the Other’s desire, she awakens into a world that is much friendlier. In the apartment complex, a woman is conveniently leaving her apartment for an extended trip, and Rita procures a place to stay by sneaking into the apartment. Betty, the niece of this woman, arrives in Los Angeles as a fledgling actress. Though Betty discovers Rita in the apartment and realizes that Rita doesn’t even know here aunt, she befriends Rita and assists her in the quest to discover her identity. These events clearly seem to dinciate that the film has entered the terrain of Rita’s fantasy: the open apartment and Betty’s arrival function as wish fulfillments for Rita as a desiring subject. 199

Throughout the first part of the film, Betty assists Rita in tracking down the details of the accident that triggered her amnesia and in following up on the memory framents that come to her. All of Betty’s efforts to help Rita—and her eventual declaration of love—suggest that she is nothing but a fantasy object for Rita, a way for Rita to put a stop to the anxiety of her own desire. But as the second part of the film unfolds, it becomes apparent that the entire first part of the film has not been structured around Rita’s desire but rather around a fantasmatic resolution of the desire of Diane Selwyn (who is also played by Naomi Watts). Whereas it initially seems that Betty arrives as a fantasy figure for Rita, helping her to solve the enigma of her desire, the second part of the film reveals that, in fact, Rita has all along played the central role in the elaboration of Diane’s fantasy and Betty is actually Diane’s own ideal ego in this fantasy. As a mysterious, unknown object, Rita provides a way for Diane/Betty to escape her unbearable desire.

The fantasy relation between Betty and Rita is a reimagining of Diane’s failed relation—which we see only in the second part of the film—with the movie star Camilla Rhodes (who is also played by Laura Harring). Though we usually associate mysteriousness and uncertainty with the difficulty of desire, the enigma of Rita is far more bearable for Diane than the impossibility that haunts her relationship with Camilla. Diane’s fantasy transforms Camilla Rhodes, the impossible object, into Rita, the mysterious object. This transformation offers Diane an escape from the impossibility of the object-cause of desire. 200

Mulholland Drive leads us (through the use of mise-en-scene and editing) toward the error of seeing Rita as a figure of desire not simply to toy with our expectations but to reveal the extent to which fantasy determines our experience. 201

The film reveals that the province of fantasy extends much further—and its power is much greater—than even Lynch’s previous films had envisioned. 201

The disappearance and reappearance of these objects does not indicate anything magical at work, but simply that this part of the film operates according to the atemporal logic of desire. 201

The classical Hollywood film hides fantasy’s role in producing temporality by not depicting any moments bereft of fantasy—no moments of desire as such, in which neither fantasy nor temporality operates. In Mulholland Drive, on the other hand, we see Diane’s experience of pure desire in the second part of the film. As a subject of desire without any fantasmatic supplement, Diane experiences only the repetition of the drive. As Betty, the fantasy figure who allows Diane to escape this repetition, she experiences temporality. The point here is that we do not employ fantasy to escape from the horrors of time, but that we employ fantasy to construct time as a respite from the horrors of repetition. As Slavoj Zizek notes, “fantasy is the primordial form of narrative, […and] narrative as such emerges in order to resolve some fundamental antagonism by rearranging its terms into a temporal succession. It is thus the very form of narrative which bears witness to some repressed antagonism.” By providing a narrative and temporal structure through which we can have experiences, fantasy delivers us from the timeless repetition of the drive. 202

This sentence presumably provides all the information that Diane has about the breakup. It exists for her—and for us as spectators—as just a fragment of sense, a fragment unconnected to any coherent narrative of the relationship between Adam and his wife. But in the first part of the film, we have already seen the events that Adam’s statement alludes to. Diane creates a fantasmatic scenario surrounding this fragment of knowledge that renders it completely sensible. 203

In this way, fantasy offers subjects respite from the incoherence that plagues their experience. 203

Throughout the second part of the film, Diane remains within the deadlock of desire: she can not attain the elusive enjoyment that her object seems to embody, and she cannot cast the object aside and begin to look elsewhere. 204

In Diane’s fantasy, Betty and Rita not only become lovers, but Betty is also able to come to Rita’s rescue. Envisioning oneself as the rescuer of one’s love object is, of course, the ultimate fantasy scenario; the rescue wins the love of the love object by proving that the subject deserves this love. This what we see in the case of Betty and Rita. In the world of desire, Camilla Rhodes occupies a position of desire relative to Diane. But when Betty discovers her, Rita has no idea who she is, not even her name, and adopts the name “Rita” from a Gilda movie poster. She is completely helpless, stripped of her mastery by Diane’s fantasy. The attractiveness of fantasy stems from this ability to deliver the goods—to provide the subject with a narrative in which she can access the inaccessible object-cause of desire. 205

As a result, Diane’s fantasy strips Adam of his position of power and forces him to succumb to various rituals of humiliation. 205

Thus, the fantasy transforms Adam from a figure of mastery into a victim and a pawn. It both punishes him for standing in the way of Diane’s acces to Camilla Rhodes and removes him as an obstacle. Through Adam’s transformation, Lynch reveals the power of fantasy to clear the way to the object. 205

Here, Betty completely defies the naivete she exhibited until this point, showing herself to be a sexually experienced being. As a fantasmatic figure, she accomplishes the impossible: she is innocent, yet sexual; she is naïve, yet aware of how the world works; she is hopeful, yet not easily duped. In short, Betty occupies subject positions that are contradictory and mutually exclusive. This is only possible because she represents a fantasized version of Diane. The distortion of the fantasy allows Betty to be all things—the perfect ideal ego for Diane. 207

The objet petit a is the reaminder that the process of signification leaves behind, and as such, it always escapes the province of the signifier (and the name). In the fantasy, the name “Camilla Rhodes” comes to signify corruption and undeserved success. We first see this name attached to a picture that two members of the mob, the Castigliane brothers, show Adam Kesher. They insist that Adam cast this woman in his film, telling him repeatedly, “This is the girl.” Through this gesture, the fantasy accomplishes a double move: it tarnishes the acting success of the actual Camilla Rhodes by suggesting that mob influence procured her big break, allowing her to overstep more talented actors, and it impugns the unnamed woman whom Diane sees kissing Camilla Rhodes at a party (because she is the woman in the mobster’s photograph identified as “Camilla Rhodes”). At the same time, the actor who plays Camilla Rhodes in the second part of the film, Laura Harring, appears in the first part in an entirely different guise, as “Rita” As Rita, the desirable part of Camilla Rhodes—embodies by the actor Harring herself—persists in the fantasy, minus the undesirable part of her now linked to the other Camilla Rhodes. Lynch uses the same actor to play Camilla Rhodes in the second part of the film and Rita in the first part, but changes the name in order to illustrate fantasy’s attempt to deliver the impossible object in a pure form, free of any pathological taint. 208

The essential quality of fantasy is not simply its ability to deliver wish fulfillment. Its fundamental function consists in its ability to address desire on the most important level, its ability to figure (the illusion of) a successful sexual relationship. According to Lacan, the sexual relationship—or more precisely, the failure of it—represent the primary stumbling block in human relations, a stumbling block that results from our insertion into language. 208

Lost Highway depicts the failure of the sexual relation through Fred Madison (Bill Pullman) and his wife Renee (Patricia Arquette). Despite Fred’s many efforts to approach Renee’s enjoyment in the first part of that film, this enjoyment continually eludes him, leaving him haunted by his own failure to enjoy and by his failure to relate successfully to Renee. But as the fantasmatic figure of Peter Dayton (Balthatzar Getty), Fred is able to construct a narrative in which he can enjoy Alice (also played by Patricia Arquette), a fantasized version of Renee. On the terrain of fantasy, within the narrative that it constructs, the impossible sexual relationship becomes possible. This is what leads Slavoj Zizek to insist that “fantasy is ultimately always the fantasy of a successful sexual relationship.”

Lynch uses film to create rigid boundaries, and their very rigidity allows us to see in relief what occurs at the point they come together. This structural logic manifests itself in Mulholland Drive as well. Because Lynch avoids blending together the levels of fantasy and desire, he is also able to join them together in a way that reveals the traumatic real that exists at their point of intersection. 211

The first time Mulholland Drive depicts the real of this intersection occurs when Betty and Rita investigate Diane Selwyn’s apartment and discover Diane’s dead body lying on her bed. Because they are within the fantasy and perceiving through its lens, they cannot recognize the body (nor can we as spectators). Nonetheless, the very narrative structure of the fantasy—its mystery story—leads them to the fantasy’s point of origin, which is a traumatic point of non-sense that does not fit within the fantasy structure. After seeing the body, Betty and Rita quickly flee the apartment, and the film depicts their exit in a way that suggests that this encounter with the real has traumatized them and even thrown them out of joint. As we see them running out the front door of the apartment, the film not only uses slow motion, but it also blurs the image of both characters. We see several images of them on each frame, and consequently it looks as if Betty and Rita temporarily exist outside of themselves, as if the encounter with the real has disrupted their existence relative to time. The conventional filmic techniques—slow motion and multiply-exposed framed—here play a precise role within the narrative structure, suggesting a disruptive encounter with the real because their place relative to the events of the narrative. But this disruption merely presages the more significant ones that follow the dissolution of Diane’s fantasy. 211

Fully embracing her fantasy leads Betty/Diane right into the path of the real as it appears in the form of an encounter with her own dead body. As this scene suggests, Mulholland Drive is a panegyric to the existential and political possibilities of fantasy. 212

This is why at the moment Peter Dayton would finally connect with Alice in Lost Highway, Alice abruptly withdraws from the sex act and tells Peter, “You’ll never have me.” Peter approaches the experience of enjoyment through the fantasy structure, but he never quite arrives at it. The male fantasy holds back; it refuses to give itself over entirely to the object. A female fantasy, on the other hand, goes too far. It is a fantasy of giving oneself entirely to the love object. Thus, it does not stop short; the female fantasy depicts the achievement of the successful sexual relation. 212

After Rita uses the key to open the blue box, the camera moves into the opening in the top of the box and is subsumed by darkness inside. The film forces us to experience briefly the void that exists between fantasy and desire, but quickly we are thrust into the world of desire in which the woman who owns this apartment—Betty’s “aunt” in the fantasy—walks in the apartment by herself, with no trace of either Rita or Betty. 215

The Cowboy here represents another version of the Mystery Man (Robert Blake), who appears in Lost Highway. 215

the Cowboy enacts a superegoic function. 215

The difference between the Mystery Man and the Cowboy attests to the association of Lost Highway with the structure of male subjectivity and Mulholland Drive with the structure of female subjectivity. For the female subject, the superego lacks the ferocity that it attains in the case of the male subject. As Freud infamously puts it, “I cannot evade the notion (though I hesitate to give it expression) that for women the level of what is ethically normal is different from what it is in men. Their super-ego is never so inexorable, so impersonal, so independent of its emotional origins as we require it to be in men.” 216

The object is the subject’s correlate. The ontological consistency of the subject’s world depends on the existence of the impossible object, the object that resists integration into that world and yet sustains it with this resistance. As a result, Diane’s world of desire finally breaks apart when she succeeds in destroying her love object. At the end of the film, a blue key appears on the coffee table of Diane’s apartment, signaling to Diane that the killer whom she hired to kill Camilla has completed the job.

With the death of Camilla, the barrier between the world of desire and the world of fantasy collapses, and Diane’s fantasy life begins to intrude into her life of desire. The intrusion occurs in the form of fantasy figures from the first part of the film. 217

The film’s final word is not Lynch’s warning to the spectator to abandon the illusions of fantasy. It is not a call for quiet after all the rumblings of Diane’s fantasy. On the contrary, Mulholland Drive makes clear that it is only by insisting on fantasy to the end that one arrives at the experience of silence. This is the silence that exists between fantasy and desire—the traumatic silence of the real that the noise of everyday life always obscures. 218

Most fantasies—and especially the mass-produced fantasies of Hollywood—fail to be fantasmatic enough because they refuse to follow their own logic to its end point. They thus never arrive at the experience of silence that concludes Mulholland Drive. This is precisely the shortcoming that drives Theodor Adorno’s critique of Hollywood film. As he says in Minima Moralia, “It is not because they turn their back on washed-out existence that escape-films are so repugnant, but because they do not do so energetically enough, because they are themselves just as washed-out, because the satisfactions they fake coincide with the ignominy of reality, of denial.” For Adorno, Hollywood films do not fail—they are not ideological—because they go too far in the direction of fantasy but because they do not go far enough. 219