Thus, paradoxically, Lynch employs camp and cruel Hollywood iconography to humanise the tragedy of the actress. Nostalgia, pastiche and the play of references enhance his tragic portrait of Hollywood. Lynch’s focus on unceasing role play, artificiality and self-invention underscore his understanding of the power of Hollywood as constituting the most seductive form of ideology. Equally, grotesque, mythic and surreal imagery humanise the actress’s career. Can we therefore say that Mulholland Drive’s depiction of marvellous femininity is an unambiguous portrait of the masculine imagination ? Is his portrait of female desire a product of the masculine imagination too ? Lynch’s portrayal of lesbian desire is also dark and ambiguous while it is invested with sensuality and humanity. It is particularly to love and eroticism that I now turn.


Transgressive Modern and Surreal Modern Love and Female Homosexual Desire

The portrayal of lesbian love in popular culture has become conventional although female homosexual love denotes a unique eroticism. The ubiquity of lesbian love in soft pornography and the eroticised imagery of female homosexual figures in blockbusters such as Basic Instinct (1991) vision testifies to its fashionability. Ignited perhaps by Madonna’s amused, post-modern role-playing in the nineties, lesbianism has enjoyed a chic status in the popular and masculine imagination. This has undoubtedly been denied to the male homosexual in mainstream culture. Manifestly, the vision of two beautiful women making love only intensifies male pleasure. Although her love is homosexual, the figure of the lesbian serves male heterosexuality. It is a stolen figure which is also corrupted. Popular culture depicts the lesbian as erotically extreme and violent. An icon of modern cinema, a certain Catherine Trammel in Basic Instinct has famously illustrated this popular bind between lesbianism and violence. Catherine, played by Sharon Stone in her breakthrough role, is a glacial but golden figure who beds both men and women. She is the principal suspect in a murder investigation. In Mulholland Drive, David Lynch alludes to the popular, cinematic stereotype of the homicidal lesbian. As we have seen, Diane is sexually aggressive. Following her rejection by Camilla, she forces her movie-star lover to have sex with her. Further to her rejection, Diane masturbates violently in teary despair, literally abuses her sex. As we have also noted, Diane ultimately arranges the murder of her lover. However, as argued above in relation to his depiction of the homicidal femme fatale, Lynch’s portrayal, I suggest, ultimately critiques the popular and psychoanalytical misogynous image of the homicidal lesbian as exhibited in Basic Instinct. David Lynch’s version of lesbian love is more complex and ambiguous. It is more romantic and poetic.

In the poetic imagination, lesbianism has been savoured for its absolute romantic character and its extraordinary sensuality. Baudelaire tenderly describes Lesbos a “terre des nuits chaudes et langoureuses” (8) [“land of hot and languorous nights”]. In this strange but sensual land, the kisses of the lover are both “languissant et joyeux”[“full of longing and joy”] (9). Such love expresses a unique emotional potency :

“Lesbos, où les baisers sont comme les cascades
Qui se jettent sans peur dans les gouffres sans fonds
Et courent, sanglotant et gloussant par saccades,
Orageux et secrets, fourmillants et profonds ;
Lesbos, où les baisers sont somme les cascades”

[“Lesbos, where the kisses are like cascades
Which fearlessly flow into the bottomless abyss
And run, weeping and clucking by cascades
Stormy and secret, swarming and deep
Lesbos, where the kisses are like cascades”] (10)