The dream narrative of Mulholland Drive begins with a raven-haired femme fatale type played by Laura Elena Harring being driven along the curvaceous Los Angeles artery Mulholland Drive by night. Instantaneously the target of a hit, she has a gun to her head when a wildly fortuitous car crash provides a means of escape. The traumatised woman is lured towards the endless city lights. Stumbling down iconic Sunset Boulevard in the early hours, she finds refuge in an empty apartment on Havenhurst after watching its owner, a red-haired middle-aged woman, leave in cab. We will know from a series of calls to several individuals by an unnamed mobster type that the woman is being pursued : “The girl is still missing”. Fleeing from the scene, bloody, bewildered and snow white in the moonlight, she reminds us of the black-haired Dorothy’s naked, bruised appearance to Jeffrey in Blue Velvet (1987) following her flight from the psychopath Frank. Road accidents appear to intrigue Lynch. In Wild At Heart (1990) too, a bloody young woman emerges from the wreckage of a car crash. Interestingly, road accidents occur in Luis Bunuel’s visionary surrealist classic Un Chien Andalou (1929). A young androgynous woman is killed by a car in one scene. In another, a young man falls bizarrely on the same road from his bicycle. Why road accidents ? Accidents and car crashes constitute a surreal event in that they perfectly capture the surrealist attribute of le hasard or le gratuit. (chance and the gratuitous). Accidents may rupture and disorient the narrative. They may also direct and engender narrative. As such, they possess a figurative power. The violent crash on Mulholland provides a weird, traumatic opening for Lynch’s tale and ultimately introduces the victim Rita to Betty in the dream narrative of Mulholland Drive. It sparks Mulholland’s mystery and love story. Lynch’s obsessive interest in car accidents also reveal his identification with surreal eroticism. In surrealism, violence is bound up with sex. In Un Chien Andalou, the killing of the beautiful androgynous woman directly feeds the sexual desire of the watching cyclist (the same cyclist who falls in the previous sequence) and his female partner. Accidents therefore provide an intense voyeuristic pleasure. In Mulholland, Lynch alludes to the surrealist binding of sex and violence which is also of course an eternal aesthetic fixation in Hollywood. Indeed, the often violent objectification of women in surrealism - manifested in fragmented and dismembered female body parts - is sustained in Hollywood. The vision of beautiful and distressed Laura Elena Harring in a black cocktail dress stumbling from the wreck is an image which evinces both a Hollywood necrophiliac fetish and Sadean surrealism. Through such imagery, Lynch’s Hollywood is identified a dark “dream place”. The industry of dreams surreally exhibits the accidental, strange and marvellous.