For in a patriarchal culture, “Elle n’est ni une ni deux (...) Elle résiste à toute définition adéquate. Elle n’a d’ailleurs pas de de nom propre”. [“She is neither one nor two (...) She resists all adequate definition. Further, she has no proper name”] (35) Lynch’s woman equally cannot be easily grasped. She does not cohere. Her character is enigmatic and her language is often strange. For Irigaray, woman desires differently : “Le désir de la femme ne parlerait pas la même langue que celui de l’homme, et il aurait été recouvert par la logique qui domine l’Occident depuis les Grecs”. [“Woman’s desire would not be expected to speak the same language as man’s ; woman’s desire has undoubtedly been submerged by the logic that has dominated the West since the time of the Greeks”] (36). In Irigaray’s poetic polemics, the kind of strangeness and incoherence which surrealism associates with women is positively transformed. These qualities are given a genuine subjective power. Women are released from a patriarchal order and discourse to powerfully and wonderfully desire each other. It is a unique love.

As we have seen, Lynch’s lesbian lover is influenced by surreal and modern images and notions of lesbian love. She is thus granted a sensual and transgressive power. She is morally complex. We have also seen how he references, plays with and transforms those concepts and images. Lynch’s women are not merely exotic objects of a masculine, avant-garde elite. Although Betty’s love is deformed and she is disputably transformed into a phallic, murderous figure, the depiction of lesbian love in Mulholland Drive may be interpreted as a form of poetic resistance to a phallic, patriarchal order. It exists a-temporally and flowers outside the space of Hollywood, released from its masculine corruption and its capacity to warp the feminine. The richly post-modern play of modernist, surreal and Hollywood concepts and images unmask the artificiality of the lesbian and expose the masculinist desire to control, exploit and rupture the feminine. Love is authentic in Mulholland whether tender or pathological. It is not fraudulent. The sapphic heroines’ love breaks with artificiality. In the land of artificiality, of artificial woman and artificial breasts, the breast paradoxically signifies truth. Love in Mulholland Drive is bathed in an luscious romanticism. The love scenes in Mulholland Drive engender desire and melancholic yearning. Like all great romances, the love story in Mulholland Drive inhabits an autonomous, atemporal utopian space. Love by its nature is absolute. Love exists despite Hollywood. The most powerful romantic scene in Mulholland is when Betty and Rita witness the crying woman’s Rebekah Del Rio’s rendition of LLorando at the after hours club Silencio. Exceeding the strange narrative of Mulholland, transcending its time and space, the song captures Betty’s obsession for Rita as a perfect embodiment of desire and melancholic yearning. It is the apex of Betty and Rita’s love ; in IIorando, love is absolute. Nevertheless, as has been noted, the llorana is a figure of tragedy who anticipates tragedy. Great love is always invariably doomed. Despite the voyeurism it provides a heterosexual male audience, Mulholland’s lesbianism signifies desire and love for one’s own. Poetically and erotically, the women are perfect lovers. The pretty, gamine short-haired blonde enraptured by the classic Latin beauty. Psychically and sexually, the women provide each other and the audience narcissistic female pleasure. In a traditionally male-dominated Hollywood, the figure of the lesbian becomes a radical romantic figure as she is sexually subversive and ruptures traditional gender identifications. Lynch’s transgressive heroine is simultaneously a figure of identification and desire for both men and women. Ultimately, Mulholland Drive reminds us that films are all about desire. This desire is often genuinely revolutionary.