Such a reading, however, does not acknowledge Mulholland Drive’s ambivalence and self-reflexivity as it does not recognise Lynch’s humanism. Mulholland Drive is a tragedy. Diane is a victim. She is warped and destroyed by a Hollywood primarily characterised as masculinist. Women are demonised by Hollywood and pathological femininity is formed culturally. Lynch is acutely aware of Hollywood iconography and narratives which fashion the bodies, dress and destinies of its actresses. Thus, Mulholland Drive can be enjoyed as a post-modern, feminist comment upon the wonderful and twisted career of women in the city of Angels. Lynch humanises the Hollywood murderess. Firstly, superficially, Betty/Diane does not look like a classic film noir anti-heroine. It is Rita/Camilla - Diane’s victim - who looks more like the real thing. Betty’s dress, her neatly cut blue-grey skirt and jacket which she wears when trespassing Diane Selwyn’s apartment and her probing manner manifest Lynch’s interest in Hitchcockian heroines (such as the kind played be Tippy Hedren and Eva Marie Saint in The Birds (1963) and North by North West (1959) respectively). Diane’s style and manner do not denote a pure homage to Hitchcock. Lynch perhaps alludes to Hitchcock’s misogyny and recognises Hollywood’s textual violence against women. In Mulholland, Betty is punished for her transgression. Entering the apartment, she discovers her own corpse, the corpse of course of Diane. For Lynch, Diane is ultimately a tragic character destroyed by her Hollywood dream like an abused starlet of old. Women in Lynch’s Hollywood mutate and fragment. Their identities are dangerously fluid. Their images are prostituted. A diversity of female faces are given the same name. The likenesses of actresses, prostitutes and waitresses allude to multi-narratives of exploitation. Although he celebrates the power of performance and the wonder of self-invention, Lynch’s Hollywood manifest the awful interchangeability of the actress as it highlights its reduction of women to her sexual exchange value. The actress is the artificial product par excellence as her body, hair, nose, breasts are transmogrified. Her sexuality may be bought and sold. Camilla’s promiscuity is only characteristic of this soul-less market of luxuriant bodies. Diane’s decline is due to her lack of sexual and professional desirability. Women in Lynch’s Hollywood are of often fearful of each other. Louise Bonner and Coco believe Rita to be trouble. Older women patronise younger women. Finally, his female lovers are estranged from each other. It is Hollywood which is the source of female alienation. The mental and physical decline of Diane therefore mirrors a particular culturally-constructed female suffering. The blackest image of Mulholland is the freakish, hallucinatory portend of the tramp. I suggest that the monstrous tramp is perhaps for Diane a nightmarish image of herself. Prefiguring absolute degradation and death itself, the creature is a hellish, mythic double of herself. The ingenue, the Girl from Deep River, Ontario dreams of becoming the monstrous bag lady. The tramp is apparently of indeterminate sex and has been identified by many as male. Yet it is a surreal possibility that a woman dehumanised by Hollywood is unsexed by her decline. The tramp is played by a woman (Bonnie Aarons) and she surreally haunts the diner of the archetypal cast-off actress. The tramp is a monstrous and feminine figure. What further identifies the creature as a woman is the witch-like face. For the surrealists, the medieval figure of the witch is essentially feminine. The surrealists may associate her with transgression but the witch, undoubtedly is a regressive image. She is imprinted with immanence and evil. Lynch, however, transforms this surreal image. The awful figure represents tragic femininity. In Hollywood, an aspiring actress may negotiate a hellish downward dream-like spiral from waitress to junkie prostitute to grotesque vagrant. The surreal links are tragic. The solitary, corpse-like woman of Silencio who closes Mulholland Drive is also a camp and surreal figure who also haunts the tragic Diane. A ghastly apparition, she too signifies female degeneration.