Lynch
is intrigued by surreal love and eroticism. The love story of
Mulholland Drive is an enigma as the lovers are strange
and marvellous. Betty/Diane’s passion is convention-less, a-temporal
and irrational. The young blonde woman is as pure and cruel
as a child. The dark-haired woman is impenetrable yet she is
the object which must be pursued and attained. It could be argued
that Lynch’s composite portrait of Betty/Diane reproduces regressive
surreal associations of woman with sickness. Lynch’s woman may
be generally likened to André Breton’s Nadja (1964).
Nadja is the archetypal surreal woman. She is enigmatic, marvellous
and bound to the supernatural. She is also mentally ill. I propose,
however, Lynch does more that depict surreal figures of femininity.
In merging attributes of the surreal feminine such as beauty,
indifference, strangeness and mystery to qualities of Hollywood
women such as beauty, passivity and changeability, he underscores
the fragmented character of surreal and Hollywood femininity.
Lynch highlights also the impossibility of love in such a world.
Thus, Lynch may convert images of surreal femininity. In such
a way, he may be commenting in poetic polemic fashion on the
seductive yet twisted role of women in Hollywood. For Lynch,
the women’s madness is culturally constructed. As noted above,
the witch-like monstrous vagrant is transformed from a medieval
surreal image of regressive feminine evil into a figure of tragedy.
His vision of surreal love is also transformed and radicalised
in its embrace of a closed female world. Betty/Diane’s love
is absolute and culturally dissident. The women are both Arcadian
and extra-moral figures. Lesbian love is at once romantic and
violent. They appear as such ideal figures of the movement.
Women are recognised as “la grande promesse” [“the
great promise”] of surrealism (31), “incarnant la plus
haute chance de l’homme” [“embodying the greatest opportunity
for men”] (32). A force of magic and madness, women in the
surrealist imagination complement men fantastically. However,
the marvellous, lesbian nature of Lynch’s heroines in fact subverts
surrealism. It indeed disturbs the surreal belief in woman as
the ideal complement of man. Female love was tolerated by the
surrealists more than male homosexuality yet it was not
an ideal of so-called radical surrealism. Lesbian love is a
poetically progressive force in Mulholland Drive.
It is humanised.
Lynch’s Poetic Vision of Feminine Rapture : A Conclusion
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Although doomed and destroyed, Rita and
Betty’s passion provides a glimpse into a kind of autonomous,
feminine space. Their love is painted in lyrical and mysterious
colours. Its feminine fluidity and sensuality expresses something
of the ideal of female eroticism promoted by Luce Irigarary.
Irigarary writes : “Se (re)trouver pour une femme
ne pourrait donc signifier que la possibilité de ne sacrifier
aucun de ses plaisirs à un autre, de ne s’identifier à aucun
en particulier, de n’être jamais simplement une”. [“(Re-)
discovering herself, for a woman... could only signify the
possibility of sacrificing no one of her pleasures to another,
of identifying herself with none of them in particular, of
never simply being one...”] (33). Is the desiring women
not multiple and is her desire auto-erotic yet boundless ?
A woman’s identity and sensuality, bound up with each other,
cannot be easily defined :
“Elle est indéfinitivement autre en elle-même. De là vient
sans doute qu’on la dit fantastique, incompréhensible, agitée,
capricieuse...Sans aller jusqu’à évoquer son language, où
elle part dans tous les sens sans qu’il y repère
la cohérence d’aucun sens (...) C’est que dans ses dires aussi
(...) la femme se (re) touche tout le temps.”
[“She is definitely other in herself. This is doubtless
why she is said to be whimsical, incomprehensible, agitated,
capricious... not to mention her language, in which she sets
off in all directions leaving him to discern the coherence
of any meaning... For in what she says too... woman is constantly
(re) touching herself”]. (34)
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