Lynch’s Hollywood is mythic and surreal. The monstrous is married to the absurd. Cruelty and silliness are coupled. This is particularly revealed in Mulholland’s surrealist influenced black, burlesque violence. I have noted that the violence of the car crash demonstrates the surreal role of chance. Furthermore, motivated violence is often ruptured by chance. In a sequence in Diane’s dream narrative, a seedy blonde man is talking to another seedy greasy-haired man who has been telling the hitman about an incredible but hilarious accident (“An accident like that...it’s unreal, right ?”). The accident appears to refer to Rita’s dramatic crash on Mulholland. The blonde man Joe kills his friend / business associate and picks up a little black book which appears to be related to Rita’s attempted murder. (As divulged by a later scene, we know Joe is after Rita. He asks a junkie prostitute in Pinks diner : “Any new girl on the street ? A brunette, maybe a little beat up ?”) The blonde man’s sudden killing of the greasy-haired man leads to an amusing and cruel chain reaction of random, violent acts. As Joe shoots the greasy-haired man, he accidentally wounds a fat woman in the next office. The hitman then fights the still very much alive woman and after attempting to strangle her, finally shoots her. He is then “forced” to kill a janitor who has witnessed the chaos. Shooting the janitor, Joe sets off the building’s alarm and sprinklers by also shooting the unfortunate man’s vacuum cleaner. True to surrealist violence, the murders become absurd accidents. They are irrational and profitless. The violent acts exhibited by Adam in his anger at the controlling moves of the Mafia can also be equated with surrealist violence in that they are sublimated and reveal a frustrated impotence. Forced to surrender casting choice of his lead actress, Adam smashes the movie mafioso’s car windows in with a golf club and flees. The unfortunate Adam is not only professionally humiliated but must endure the sight of his wife in bed with the mullet-haired pool-man. He responds to his wife’s adultery by opening up her jewellery box and pouring paint over her jewels. Such an act denotes a form of sublimated rape. In surrealist film, apparently wantonly foolish acts of violence are acts of sexual sublimation. In Bunuel’s other early surrealist classic L’Age d’Or (1930), the frustrated lover Modot kicks a dog, knocks over a blind man and slaps his lover’s mother for spilling wine on him. Thus, Lynchian violence, both funny and cruel and denoting thwarted male sexual passion, may be likened to such spontaneous, amusing and sexually confounded surrealist savagery.


Hollywood Imagery and Surreal Scenes and Objects : The Corpse, The Sex, The Club and the Blue Box

To return to her dream directly, Betty flees from the studio to meet Rita to help her in her quest to retrieve her identity. The two women go to Diane Selwyn’s apartment. The darkness to come is horrifically revealed by Betty and Rita’s discovery of a bloated, decaying corpse in the Diane’s bedroom. The face is unrecognisable but the hair appears to be blonde and she is wearing a slip dress. Who is the dead woman ? In a revelatory yet schizoid earlier moment when Betty and Rita attempt to discover the latter’s identity, Betty rings the aforesaid Diane’s apartment. Betty, in reference to Rita, tells her “Strange to be calling yourself” to which Rita responds “Maybe it’s not me”. We hear a woman’s voice on the message machine. Rita tells Betty : “That’s not me but I know her”. The woman’s voice is Betty’s. Betty we will see is Diane. She is ringing herself. The body discovered in Diane Selwyn’s apartment we will also see in the final “reality sequence” of Mulholland Drive is that of Diane. She will commit suicide after her rejection by her successful movie star lover Camilla (the Rita of this dream), and Hollywood itself. As most famously celebrated in the blue black image of the beautiful blonde Laura Palmer in Twin Peaks (1990), the corpse of a beautiful woman appears to be a favourite image of Lynch. Through such images, Lynch sustains the surreal bind between death and eroticism. Notably, it is shortly after their discovery of the corpse that Rita and Betty have sex.