As Lynch is influenced by Baudelaire’s portraits of the lesbian lover, his depiction of love is also deeply inspired by the surrealist concept of love. As with his interpretation of the lesbian lover as a figure of modernity, Lynch is stimulated by surreal concepts and figures. While helping to sustain the legacy of surrealism, he also demonstrates a self-reflexivity and personal style which allude to, play with and sometimes transform the qualities of the surreal.

For the surrealists, woman is the surreal sex. Rupturing the bourgeois, linear narrative, women are more attuned to the unconscious. They speak wondrously and enigmatically. They are akin to the strange and accidental. Women in Mulholland Drive are arguably the most interesting and marvellous sex. They are identified with the surreal. In Mulholland Drive, Rita has lost her identity. She is indeed engendered by the accidental. Betty meets her by bizarre chance. When Betty wonders where the amnesiac Rita was going early in the primary dream narrative, she repeats in amazement : “Mulholland Drive. Mulholland Drive. That’s where I was going. Mulholland Drive”. Sexually provocative, Rita is surreally alluring and allows Betty to seduce her. (It could also be argued that it is Rita initiates their love-making). As a ravishing blank slate, she is a masculinist Hollywood fantasy. Further, we are led by Diane’s dreaming. She leads us to the strange after-hours club Silencio, that place beyond Hollywood time and space. It is Rita who introduces us to the unusual, occult club and strange and moving scene which ruptures Lynch’s narrative. As Camilla, she is unattainable. She remains an enigmatic body. Representing pure desire and mystery, she is also an essential, poetic surrealist figure. The more discursively dominant figure of Betty/Diane also manifests surreal attributes. The narcissistic Betty cannot be easily deciphered. Her real-life and professional role-playing give her a strange, dynamic mobility. She incorporates surreal qualities such as “un mépris du risque, un refus de composition” [“an absolute disdain for risk, a refusal of structure”] (28). Surreal women hallucinate, convulse and faint. Diane sees the spectre of her love and is finally tortured by tiny hobgoblin figures of the old couple who came with her to Hollywood. Apparently overcome by tragedy, the singer Rebekah Del Rio, the crying woman of Silencio faints before the recorded song ends. The altering, unfulfilled figures of Betty/ Diane and Rita/Camilla reveal a surreal understanding of character. In Manifeste du surréalisme, Breton identifies the romantic, marvellous conception of character as surreal. Particularly referring to the figurative character of Mathilda in Lewis’ The Monk, Breton writes : “C’est moins un personnage qu’une tentation continue” [“Less a character than a continous temptation”] (29). Likewise, women in Un Chien Andalou and L’Age d’Or possess a perambulatory quality. Moreover, surreal characters transform. In Mulholland Drive, Naomi Watts is transfigured. Betty and Diane appear entirely distinct. The bright blonde Betty is absolutely altered. She becomes a bloodless, spiritless other and finally dreams herself a grotesque vagrant. The sorcerous power of love and the mythic malevolence of Hollywood transfigure and mark her.