The women’s love in Mulholland Drive is perfectly surreal in its absolute character, wonder and violence. Surreal eroticism particularly personifies cultural dissidence. Surrealist love repels the bourgeois sexual ideology of repression and reproduction. In L’Age d’Or, the amour fou of the lovers is constantly obstructed by a bizarre and corrupt bourgeois society. In Un Chien Andalou, the beautiful, young androgynous woman is punished and killed - by car accident - for expressing her erotic fascination with a severed hand. As seen throughout his films, Lynch also frequently portrays love as absolute, extreme and culturally dissident. The absolute, positive passion of Wild At Heart’s lovers oppose a corrupt, mad matriarch. Even the sadist Frank’s negative passion for Dorothy which expresses a perverse, dystopian desire for absolute maternal love is absolutely surreal. The love affairs of both the innocent and defiled are surreal as surrealism deals in mythic polarities of darkness and light and exalts absolute otherness.

Mulholland Drive identifies women with mad love and violence. Their love exists despite bizarre, corrupt Hollywood as it is also destroyed by its weird hegemony. In surrealism, it is primarily a young heroine however who embodies cultural dissidence. Idealising women as poetic and pathological, the surrealists particularly granted women the erotic, emancipatory power to subvert patriarchy. The Surrealists are indeed famed for celebrating female criminals such as Violette Nozière who murdered her father and the Papin sisters, two maids who murdered their employer. Female violence was particularly fetishised by the movement. Ultimately, sexuality is bound up with violence in the Surrealist imagination. In Mulholland Drive, the victim of love and Hollywood becomes the executioner of her beloved. Mulholland Drive’s extraordinary love affair expresses the surrealist philosophy of love where overpowering sexual desire invariably leads to the destruction and death of both lover and beloved. The vision of Diane’s rotting corpse surreally, and horrifically, exposes the disintegration of erotic desire.

As we have seen above, Baudelaire exalts in his ode to Lesbos the extra-moral quality of lesbian love, a love beyond good and evil. As André Breton indeed reminds us that “Baudelaire est surréaliste dans la morale” [“Baudelaire is morally surrealist”] (30) The erotic and marvellous quality of the lesbian lover in Mulholland Drive as well as her amoral or extra-moral quality thus mark her as both modernist and surrealist. Morally subversive eroticism and absolute romance dominate Mulholland Drive. Lynch’s dualist poetic vision also portrays lesbian love as both marvellous and dark. In both Lynch’s modern and surreal characterisation of lesbian love, the lovers experience absolute desire and destruction.