Rita is particularly horrified
by their discovery of the body in the dream narrative, Betty
helps her disguise herself. The two women then share a bed and
make love. Although deeply romantic, the scene is self-consciously
cinematic. With references to the hallucinatory obsessive love
story in Hitchcock’s Vertigo’s (1958), Rita’s hair is
cut and covered by a peroxide blonde wig although removed before
she gets into Betty’s bed. Betty comforts Rita : “You
look like someone else”. Physical masks and transformations
also of course allude to the artificiality, plasticity and phantasmic
character of the actress. The double profile shot of the women
is also a knowing nod to Bergman’s Persona (1967) with
its erotic and weirdly symmetrical sisterly twinning. The love
scene moreover parodies female same-sex action in soft heterosexual
male pornography. Lynch’s erotic portrait thus incorporates
high and low cultural references. The particular focus on breasts
expresses both a surreal and Hollywood fixation. Lesbianism
even becomes a sexy joke as the young blonde Betty asks the
brunette amnesiac Rita “Have you ever done this before ?”
She responds “I don’t know...have you ?” However,
the first time the women make love they engage in warm, romantic
sex. Betty tells her : “I’m in love with you... I’m
in love with you.” It also, however, represents a dream
of erotic power which reproduces a masculinist Hollywood fantasy.
In the dream narrative, Rita becomes the yielding, responsive
lover of Betty. Her voluptuous, maternal body easily yields
to a fascinated, enamoured Betty. Betty is therefore herself
phallicised by Hollywood’s sexual fantasies and ideology.
 |
|
|
|
All will not be well for Betty, however.
Rita is, as the mad seer Louise Bonner noted in mythic and
film noirish speak, “trouble”. As they sleep together, following
their love-making, Rita murmurs Silencio several times
and awakens her lover. She persuades Betty to accompany her
to Silencio which we find is an after-hours club. At the club,
a strange music hall, a sinister impresario tells the audience
in Spanish, French and English that the music is all a recording.
He orchestrates instrumental sounds by illustration. He creates
thunder. He stares at and appears to hypnotise Betty who convulses.
The music hall is bathed in blue light. Finally smiling with
a Svengali malevolence, he suddenly disappears in a puff of
blue smoke. We see a bizarre, cadaverous woman with a vortex
of blue hair also watching the spectacle. Another man then
introduces Rebekah del Rio who is in real life a Los Angeles
based singer. The women then witness an extraordinary rendition
of Roy Orbison’s 1961 hit Crying in Spanish and a-cappella
ILorando. Crying is an archetypal Orbison ballad,
lush and tragic. The narrative origins of Crying resonate
with the love story of Mulholland Drive which is effectively
a tale of unrequited love. Orbison confessed that the song
was inspired by a real life love affair, specifically his
response to the sight of an old love lost-crying. Crying,
it seems, is a song which inspires extreme emotion. About
Crying, the singer Tori Amos has amusingly alleged :
“If I’m honest this track keeps me out of jail. I put the
steak knife down and pick up a hanky.” Thus it is a ballad
to pacify the homicidal woman ! The Silencio sequence
is indeed in Mulholland a powerful, romantic time space
which stops us in our tracks. This is largely provided by
Crying. It does nothing less than crystallise love.
Crying, moreover, is the stuff of dreams. As Tom Waits has
precisely eulogised : “Roy Orbison’s songs were not
so much about dreams as like dreams.” Mulholland’s
Crying is not only true to the tale of tragic love,
emotional intensity and the oneiric power of the original
but does more. Beautifully executed in pure and solitary a
capella, Crying’s dream is intensified in Ilorando
as it is adapted to a young woman’s singular and absolute
yearning for another. It is surreally visualised as the theme
of a magical place and dream. ILorando is not only
innocent and natural but associated with a singular eroticism.
The extremely emotional power of Crying and its role
as the theme of an occult place allows it to be linked portentously
to evil and death. Moreover, it is given more universal power
in translation as it bound to other tragic myths. With a painted
crimson tear under her eye, Rebekah del Rio sings as the mythic
figure Ilorana. She imitates a Mexican wailing woman
grieving in advance of tragedy. For the women, the song represents
the apex of their love although the tale is ultimately unrequited.
The response to Ilorando is crying.
|
