Lynch’s women ultimately signify a marvellous beauty while they are also branded by the blue-black corruption which festers behind charming and conventional (contemporary and post-war) America. Of course, this is not a new theme in Lynch’s work. Such perceptions are richly painted in Blue Velvet. Yet in Mulholland Drive, Lynch not only sustains but deepens his dualistic poetic vision in his portrait of Hollywood. Lynch’s Hollywood women are profoundly ambivalently portrayed.

Lynch’s Mulholland Drive is an ambiguous and often amusing satire of the lies and pretensions of Hollywood. Simultaneously, it is a prose poem in love with Hollywood’s mastery of illusion as it is fascinated by its repellent underbelly and monstrous capacity to engender myths. Before they journey to the apartment of Diane Selwyn, Betty has her promising Hollywood audition playing a young, under-aged girl involved with a friend of her father. It is one of Mulholland Drive’s finest scenes. The audition reveals Betty as a gifted actress capable of inhabiting the transformation of an exploited innocent into a powerful, sensual seductress and represents the peak of Naomi Watts’s extraordinarily altering, multi-layered performance. Betty naturally loves being someone else. Intertextually, the stunning audition prefigures her own curve from light to darkness, namely her transformation from a positive, loving actress into a self-hating, homicidal failure. The audition scene also amusing critiques the absurd pretensions of Hollywood and the eternal objectification of younger women by older men within both the system and storylines. The older actor who plays Betty’s character’s lover is a aged, sun-burnt Lothario played by Chad Everett. Entrapping Betty in his arms, he urges her : “We’ll play this nice and close... Just like in the movies”. The acting coach evaluates the actors’ performances with the divertingly ponderous and phony : “It was forced, maybe, but still... humanistic”. Additionally, Lynch pointedly mythifies and satirises Hollywood in anachronistically depicting a film industry in thrall to the studio system.

Leaving the audition, Betty’s excited, radiant blue eyes meet the intent gaze of the young director Adam who is lip servicing an audition for a young blonde actress called Camilla Rhodes chosen against his will by the Mafia. Significantly, they are auditioning for a fifties doowop musical picture. We also see Adam auditioning a famous actress for a musical scene where she mimes Connie Stevens’s hit Sixteen Reasons. The studio actress, Camilla Rhodes, in blonde bob and pink lipstick, then lip-synch’s Linda Scott’s Every Little Star. Lynch seems to adore the girlie bubble gum music of the post-war years. As in Blue Velvet, early pop music is given a subversive coating. Expressing Lynch’s dualistic poetic vision, they provide the soundtrack to corruption. Initially incongruous, the sounds of innocence are yet they are surreally bound to the terrible and perverse. Lynch’s nostalgia is always sweet and sinister. Moreover, in Mulholland Drive, bright and swooning girlie songs are made sexually subversive. Their lyrics which express a teenage girl’s chaste love for a boy are coloured and wryly transformed by Mulholland’s sapphic romance, eroticism and violence.

Adam is distracted by Betty’s gaze. It is a look of yearning and promise, expressing both sexual and professional interest but Betty, we will see, will never work for the director. In previous sequences within the dream narrative of Diane, we follow the events which lead to Adam’s disempowerment as his creative control is usurped by the Mafia and his dignity robbed by his adulterous wife. His movie is pulled and he is bizarrely made bankrupt. At the studio meeting watched by the dwarf mogul in a mausoleum room, Adam is not only relegated by the criminal fraternity but forced to endure their sinister pushiness and their absurd vagaries. The demands of the bizarre Hollywood elite apparently extend to an absolutely anal search for the right kind of espresso. The bizarre meeting is held up for a testing of the coffee which turns out to be wholly inadequate. Adam ultimately watches in amazement as a Mafioso executive spurts the offending cup of coffee. Lynch’s satire of Hollywood power is markedly absurdist. The faking, fawning and flaying are wonderfully exhibited.