LYNCHIANNOIR:

FILM NOIR AS THE LANGUAGE OF TRAUMA

A Thesis submitted to the faculty o f

San Francisco State University
Z£ 1 1 In partial fulfillment of
e m u the requirements for
the Degree

Master o f Arts

In

English: Literature

by

Nikolas Paul Bunton

San Francisco, California

August 2019
 Copyright by
Nikolas Paul Bunton
2019
 CERTIFICA TIO N OF APPROVAL
f

I certify that I have read Lynchian Noir: Film N oir as the Language o f Traum a by

Nikolas Paul Bunton, and that in m y opinion this work meet§ tfie criteria for approving a

thesis subm itted in partial fulfillm ent o f the requirem ent for the degree M aster o f Arts in

English: Literature at San Francisco State University.

■fox

Geoffrey Green, Ph.D.

Professor

; Hr- lOa'i-Leu/T*
— V lO o I -

W ai-Leung Kwok, Ph.D.

Associate Professor
 LYNCHIAN NOIR: FILM NOIR AS THE LANGUAGE OF TRAUMA

Nikolas Paul Bunton

San Francisco, California
2019

The aim o f this thesis is to explore and analyze David Lynch’s films noir through a
psychoanalytic lens, predominantly employing Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalytic
theories to dissect and explicate these films. This thesis defines and explores what I call
“Lynchian noir”; that is, I make the case that Lynch’s films noir carve out a distinct and
idiosyncratic niche in the film noir canon and aesthetic. I make the claim that Lynch’s
films noir are a particular offshoot o f what some scholars have termed postmodern neo-
noir and meta-noir, and that the Lynchian manifestations of postmodern neo- and meta-
noir deftly translate the psychological processes o f the unconscious mind into powerfully
unsettling cinematic experiences. In particular, Lynch’s films noir are cinematic
reflections o f the unconscious as it attempts to fantasmatically cope with psychic trauma,
the distressing enigma of human desire, and the alienating illusion o f identity.

I certify that the Abstract is a correct representation o f the content o f this thesis.

Chair, Thesis Committee Date

 PREFACE AND/OR ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am grateful to all o f those with whom I have had the pleasure to work during this
project and throughout my graduate school experience. Each o f the graduate professors I
studied under has provided me extensive personal and professional guidance and taught
me a great deal about both literature and life in general. I would especially like to express
the deepest appreciation to the chair o f my committee, Professor Geoffrey Green, who
actively encouraged me to pursue my academic goals and served as a steady and spirited
source o f insight. Without his guidance and persistent help, this thesis would not have
been possible.

Nobody has been more important to me in the pursuit o f this project than the members of
my family. I would like to thank my parents, Paul and Robin Bunton, whose love and
guidance are with me in whatever I pursue. They are the ultimate role models. Most
importantly, I wish to thank my loving and supportive wife, Danella Bunton, who
provides unending inspiration, fortitude, and passion.

v
 TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction..................................... 1

The Foundations of Film N o ir.......................................................................................3

Lynch’s Cinematic M ethod......................................................................................... 10

The Psychoanalytic Bedrock o f Lynchian Noir .......................................................18

Chapter 1...................................................................................................................................... 24

Fantasizing Oedipal Trauma in Blue Velvet .................................................................

Chapter I I .................................................................................................................................... 55

Navigating Psychic Trauma in Lost Highway: Repressing Neuroses o f Identity

and Desire in Noir Fantasy ..........................................................................................................

Chapter III...................................................................................................................................72

Circumventing Existential and Psychic Trauma Through a Hollywood Noir

Fantasy in Mulholland Drive .....................................................................................................

Conclusion................................................................................................................................ 117

Bibliography.............................................................................................................................122
 1

Introduction

Perhaps the most radically innovative yet polarizing American auteur since Orson

Welles, David Lynch’s singularly original and boldly experimental films breathe life into

a tonally consistent cinematic vision that constitutes a universe o f its own: the Lynchian

universe. His films throw traditional narrative logic to the wind in lieu o f emotionally

and psychologically evocative spectacles, labyrinthine plots, convoluted structures,

outlandish characters, sensual, often disturbing eroticism, and absurd, fantasmatic, and

nightmarish visions of contemporary America. Blending the numbingly banal with the

excessively grotesque, the hypemormal with the perturbingly bizarre, his vision is

nothing less than surreal, tapping into the deepest recesses o f human consciousness to

express the uncanny and the ineffable—the Lacanian “Real.”

Above all, most o f Lynch’s films are peculiarly redolent with film noir aesthetics

and themes that, once wrung through his idiosyncratic cinematic method, become

hyperbolized and heightened to vertiginous degrees. Further, if the essence o f film noir

lies more in the disorienting mood it creates than the form and content which houses that

emotional valence, the majority of Lynch’s films are fundamentally noir. Expressionistic

in style, the Lynchian universe is replete with sadism, perverse violence and sex, the dark

recesses o f American locales, auras of sinister mystery, and cold, polarized worlds where

the mundane and the bizarre coexist; its bevy o f characters are often alienated, ensnared
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in delusion and paranoia, hopelessly grasping for a stable identity yet inescapably

fractured and haunted by existential dread. In typical neo-noir fashion, Lynch’s three

most explicitly noir films— Blue Velvet (1986), Lost Highway (1997), and Mulholland

Drive (2001)— plumb the depths o f the human psyche to expose the primal anxiety,

ontological confusion, and epistemic obscurity o f desire and identity which beset modem

man. Not only does Lynchian noir explore such themes, it also likens the mechanisms o f

the unconscious mind—both deep-seated desires and encroaching fears— to that o f film

noir itself. As such, one central component o f Lynchian noir is a neo-noir narrative

technique that expressionistically depicts the protagonists’ attempts to repress their

traumatic desire and neuroses by unconsciously compartmentalizing the burden o f their

psychopathy into the coded, semiotic language o f classic film noir tropes. Added to this,

Lynchian noir is demarcated from other contemporary postmodern films noir by its

complete immersion in the surrealist dream-logic that has come to define Lynch’s

cinematic method as a whole.

Given this, in order to fully appreciate Lynchian noir as a distinct offshoot of

postmodern noir, an understanding o f both the evolution o f film noir and Lynch’s specific

cinematic approach to film in general must be accounted for. With regard to the former,

without the context o f film noir discourse, from its inception on through its neo-noir

progressions, the metatextual facets o f Lynchian noir would be lost, relegated to empty,

floating signifiers. That is, in the absence o f the preconceived, culturally entrenched

notions that have come to define the noir aesthetic and its essential tropes— i.e., the
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language o f noir—Lynchian noir loses its potency and dips into the dreaded void of

“weird for weird’s sake.” Moreover, although Lynchian noir magnifies, distorts, and

subverts traditional film noir in order to manipulate and perturb viewer expectations, it

nonetheless fundamentally inhabits the core aesthetic tone o f classic noir.

The Foundations o f Film Noir

Much like Lynch’s films, the advent o f the first great films noir in the early 1940s

marked a radical break from the standard approach to popular filmmaking, a watershed

moment in mainstream Hollywood cinema that garnered surprising commercial success

given the films’ pessimistic, despairing tones, bleak plots, and unorthodox narrative

structures. As film critic Paul Schrader observes, “Never before had films dared to take

such a harsh and uncomplimentaiy look at American life” (53). Ever since French film

critics and cineastes in the late ‘40s and early ‘50s retroactively described film noir as a

distinct classification o f American cinema, a clear-cut definition o f film noir has been the

topic o f an ongoing debate amongst academic circles, one that has never fully reached a

precise consensus; no two noir scholars will give exactly the same definition. The

nebulous nature o f noir is largely due to the breadth o f its subject matter: a hardboiled

detective film (The Maltese Falcon [1941], Kiss Me Deadly [1955], The Big Sleep

[1946], etc.) can inhabit the noir aesthetic just as much as a gritty boxer film (The Set-Up
 4

[1949]), a grim melodrama depicting the catastrophic downfall o f a hapless Everyman

(Scarlet Street [1945], Double Indemnity [1944], D.O.A. [1949], etc.), or a depraved tale

about Hollywood culture itself (In a Lonely Place [1950], The Lost Weekend [1945],

Sunset Boulevard [1950], The Big Knife [1955], etc.). Ultimately, film noir is more o f an

affect and style than a categorical genre, and it’s because o f this amorphous quality that a

wide scope o f films can inhabit the noir spectrum to varying degrees. “Like its

protagonists,” Schrader notes, “film noir is more interested in style than theme” (63). We

instantly know a western or gangster film when we see it; the genres are much more fixed

to specific sets o f easily definable cliches, tropes, and iconographies. Film noir, on the

other hand, is definitively more problematic.

Granted this, a general description o f the foundational components o f film noir

can nonetheless be outlined. As mentioned, the form of noir adheres to a more

identifiable style than its content, the latter o f which traverses a wide and nuanced range

o f themes and subject matter. Visually, the classic noir aesthetic consists o f chiaroscuro

lighting that evokes the tenebrous world the noir antihero inhabits and the murky nature

o f humanity: radically high, low, and canted camera angles that disorient the viewer’s

perception; frantic, angst-y camera movements and close-ups that accentuate a person’s

facial expressions, often to grotesque effect; and claustrophobia-inducing mise-en-scene

that externally express neuroses, paranoia, mania, and other psychological affects.

Critics Janey Place and Lowell Peterson describe the visual motifs o f film noir as

producing an “unstable environment in which no character has a firm or moral base from
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which he can confidently operate. All attempts to find safety or security are undercut by

the antitraditional cinematography and mise-en-scene. Right and wrong become relative,

subject to the same disorientations and disruptions created in the lighting and camera

work” (69). The visual style of classic noir, perhaps its most consistent and instantly

discernible element, contains and determines the thematic facets o f the films and takes

significant precedent over their narrative content.

The conventional troop of characters who inhabit classic films noir are dead-eyed

Pis, treacherous femmes fatale, prim aesthetes, sadists and psychos, murderous lovers,

avaricious crime bosses and their gunsel henchmen, corrupt businessmen and cops,

enigmatic tycoons, and bourgeois middle-class men caught up in fatalistic downward

spirals. “The word ‘hero’ never seems to fit the noir protagonist,” Robert G. Porfirio

explains, “for his world is devoid of the moral framework necessary to produce the

traditional hero. He has been wrenched from familiar moorings, and is a hero only in the

modem sense in which that word has been progressively redefined to fit the existential

basis o f contemporary fiction... [he is] the anti-hero; the rebel hero; the non-hero” (84).

The noir anti-hero meanders through dark city streets— sometimes crowded with

indifferent faces and other times empty save a grey, wet fog— , through night clubs and

dive bars, hotels and offices, gang hideaways, warehouses, lavish mansions, industrial

wastelands— all of which are suffused with an air of impersonality and panic. Here, in

the repressed underbelly of American society, the noir anti-hero struts and frets his way

throughout the rain-drenched streets and coldly lit corridors of existence.

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The psychological implications of WWII and postwar American society— of

mechanized warfare, mass destruction and genocide, shifted gender roles, paranoia about

the atomic bomb and Cold War politics—are latent in films noir, films that refused to

abide by facile pre-war notions of good and bad, right and wrong. Like a grey fog, a

collective trauma had set in that was being repressed by America’s economic postwar

boom and the mass consumer culture it engendered. Outwardly, everything was utopian,

and everyone was expected to slap a toothy grin on their faces; inwardly, everything had

become terrifyingly uncertain, alienated, unhinged from what had previously provided

psychic stability.

It’s not surprising, then, that film noir took on a level o f complexity that matched

the uncertain outw ard social circumstances o f postwar America as well as the unstable

internal psychological neuroses experienced by the general public. Film noir didn’t

depict the simple heroes or weak and sentimental women who inhabited pre-war films

(adventure films, cloying melodramas, hokey musicals, buoyant comedies, etc.); rather,

the protagonists were morally complex and flawed and the women were strong-willed

and deceptive, luring men to their demise. The movies took a turn down a drab and cold

alleyway, arguably never to fully return to their pre-war innocence. Regular middle-class

men were arbitrarily subjected to absurd and sadistic turns of fate, implying that even the

most ordinary o f people could be destroyed at any moment through some minor but

overwhelmingly devastating event. Like the collective American past, noir protagonists’

pasts were never over, always hovering over them like a dark cloud, a miasma of despair.
And like the American public, the typical film noir protagonist was deeply alienated,

estranged, defamiliarized and left to deal with the absurd iniquities and profound

uncertainties o f modem life. The world was disconcerting and rotten all over, and film

noir expressed that sentiment in potent and visceral ways.

So while the visual style o f classic film noir prevails over their plots and themes,

the most significant and foundational feature o f noir is mood—that unnerving malaise

stirred up in the unconscious by the cinematic fusion o f form and content; that potent

miasma o f dread, angst, and uncertainty that exudes implicitly from the enigmatic viscera

of film noir visions. In their seminal text, A Panorama o f American Film Noir, French

film critics Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton classify the primary tonal motifs of

noir as '‘oneiric, strange, erotic, ambivalent, and cruel” (2). In their various permutations,

these qualities form the rapidly beating heart o f noir and the distinctive mood it induces.

Characters’ actions are cruel and duplicitous, marked by a disturbing unpredictability and

punctuated by acts o f brutal violence; their motives are indeterminate, erratic, and

psychologically complex; and their moral constitutions are ambiguous, prone to inhabit

both compassion and antagonism, love and hate, sadism and masochism, sincerity and

treachery, eroticism and violence, etc. Traditional narrative structures were perverted and

undermined by fragmentations, non-linear detours, unpredictable juxtapositions, jumps in

time, and/or subjective flashbacks, all of which undermined the audience’s sense of

stability in time and space.

In this sense, film noir, reflecting the collectively repressed trauma o f the era,
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problematized the normative perception o f people and society as being essentially

reasonable and understandable, leaving contemporary audiences insecure, strained, and

distressed. As Borde and Chaumeton put it, noir exhibits “a consistency of an emotional

sort; namely, the state o f tension created in the spectators by the disappearance of their

psychological bearings” (13). Indeed, the emotional valence o f noir unmoors spectators

from the causal logic o f old and thrusts them into a dreamlike state in which one’s very

existence was as tenuous and volatile as the screen’s flickering interplay o f light and

shadow.

Decades later, David Lynch would induce this same psychological state of mind,

constructing surrealist films seething with the tonal undercurrents o f classic noir.

Lynchian noir is at its core “oneiric, strange, erotic, ambivalent, and cruel,” intensifying

these noir elements as a means of exploring the dark complexities of the human psyche.

While maintaining the noir mood in a distilled form, Lynch uses the style, tropes, and

themes of classic film noir as vehicles through which to express the mysteries o f the

unconscious mind: identity, trauma, desire, fantasy, the sexual and death drives, etc. As

such, Lynchian noir is more interested in delving headlong into the psychological

abstractions presented in classic films noir than reflecting any sociocultural Zeitgeist, and

yet it does so by hijacking the language o f noir and conflating it with the unconscious

mind in a state o f trauma.

As a particular manifestation o f film noir in its contemporary state, Lynchian noir

is a distinct branch o f the neo-noir films o f the post-classic era, specifically postmodern
 9

neo- and meta-noirs. Andrew Spicer defines postmodern neo-noirs as explorations of

“the nature o f desire, the fallibility o f memory, and the fragility of identity” and meta-

noirs as “films that radically revise and reconstruct the elements o f film noir in order to

pose deeper questions about the nature o f existence” (55, 61). Lynchian noir certainly

experiments with the conventions o f film noir, implicitly conflating the filmic language

o f noir as the language o f the protagonist’s unconscious mind; that is, his unconscious

fantasy assumes the semiotic form o f a tradit ional film noir narrative in which his desires

and fears are both condensed and displaced onto noir topoi. If, as Lacan famously

declared, “the unconscious is structured like a language,” then Lynch cinematically

expresses the unconscious using the language o f film and, more specifically, film noir

(Bailly 25). As a whole, Lynchian noir differs from classic noir in that everything is

turned inward to the psyche; that is, “everything takes place in relation to the self: the self

is the detective, the self is the villain, and all the clues exist solely within his own mind”

(Abrams 9). The Lynchian anti-hero, psychologically fractured, roams the realm o f his

own distorted consciousness in search o f some stable sense o f identity. Time and space

are subjective, fluid, and unreliable; truth is forever decentered and self-realization

relentlessly beyond grasp.

Throughout his career, Lynch has increasingly pushed the boundaries o f film noir

in this manner, delving inward and exploring the human psyche as the ultimate noir

landscape. But the question remains: what distinguishes Lynch's films noir as distinct

from other incarnations o f postmodern neo- and meta-noir films (notable examples
 10

include Point Blank [1967] and Memento [2000])? That is, what does it mean to be

“Lynchian”? How does Lynch’s approach to film carve out a significant niche in the noir

canon in ways that warrant the term “Lynchian noir”? Answering these questions means

delving headlong into Lynch’s peculiar cinematic method as it pertains to his oeuvre and

its relation to the cinematic medium and art in general.

L ynch’s Cinematic M ethod

More than any other aesthetic medium, film requires the spectators to

momentarily hoist their emotional and psychological white flags in surrender so that their

subjective perceptions, their sense o f reality, can be manipulated, distorted, and sculpted

by the artist. At the same time, once this capitulation is accepted, it asks spectators to

actively engage in the filmic universe being projected onto the screen, to consciously

immerse themselves in the film’s unreality and to dynamically experience that unreality

as temporarily real. Upon submitting themselves to this pact and crossing the

phenomenological threshold o f the artist’s vision, the spectators, just as in their real lives,

are prompted to understand and make sense o f this new reality and its underlying logic, to

make sense o f it all and to wrap it in concrete meaning. As ostensibly rational beings, we

are driven by an intense desire to map out and define exactly what and why something is

happening, and the more this desire goes on unfulfilled, the more it gnaws at us with
 11

interminable ferocity. As such, the conventional cinematic approach to narrative and

character development aims to scratch this existential itch, regardless o f the particular

logic underlying these cinematic universes. Whether the aesthetic premise is anchored to

a vision o f reality or not, whether the inherent unreality o f a film approaches the medium

through the verisimilitude o f realist cinema or the quixotic reveries o f sci-fi/fantasy or the

explosion-intensive worlds o f action flicks, traditional films are structured to eventually

land within some comforting degree o f comprehension wherein meaning can be vaguely

ascertained. Even film noir, with all its psychological complexities and narrative

experimentation, leaves the spectator in a reasonably grounded realm o f cause and effect

logic.

This, however, is decidedly not the case with Lynchian noir. Interpreting a

Lynchian noir film can be like trying to map the coordinates o f a fever dream: the

spectator, steeped in a fragmented semiotic chain o f vivid imagery that defies

signification, is left as disoriented as the typical Lynchian protagonist. On a rational

level, Lynch leaves the itch unscratched, opting instead to elicit meaning through purely

intuitive and visceral means. Traditional cinematic logic is undermined, warped, and

altogether turned on its head, jarring spectators out o f their entrenched normative

assumptions about narrative and character development and leaving them utterly

destabilized—gripped by a creepy combination o f hysteria and gloom. Once

expectations are subverted and causality thwarted, Lynch then proceeds to manipulate the

unmoored spectators to achieve his desired effect: anxiety, uneasiness, dread, and, above
 12

all, a looming, oppressive sense o f uncertainty about both the world and the self—all of

which, o f course, are decidedly noirish psychological states. As critic Ronie Parciack

states, the Lynchian universe “confronts spectators with radical perceptions o f reality,

actively arousing a sensation o f disorientation in them. From this perspective, Lynch’s

phenomenal world is a disvenlure (sic) filling the audience with a tangible sensation of

uneasiness, depriving it of any terra firma” (89). Far from Godard’s famous adage, a

Lynch film is uncertainty twenty-four times per second.

The very peculiarity o f the Lynchian universe emerges from the way in which it

both deconstructs and reverentially takes part in mainstream Hollywood films. Neither

retreating from Hollywood traditions altogether (like the avant-garde films o f Maya

Deren, utterly untethered from mainstream Hollywood methods), nor alienating his

spectators from cinematic fantasies through Brechtian flourishes (as Godard’s films do,

constantly signaling their own artificiality), Lynch is an avant-garde filmmaker who

perversely accepts and delves headlong into mainstream Hollywood fantasies to a radical,

often grotesque extent. As Todd McGowan puts it, “By taking up mainstream

Hollywood wholeheartedly, he reveals the radicality and perversity o f the mainstream

itself. He is too mainstream for the mainstream” (12). At the same time, however,

Lynch’s extremist flight into Hollywood fancy disrupts and reconfigures Hollywood

norms and the cliched expectations they entail. That is, his aesthetic gaze divorces

conventional cinematic signifiers from their culturally entrenched signified meanings (or

master signifiers) and then reconceptualizes these signifiers around a new

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epistemological fulcrum. Oftentimes, having dissolved the culturally constructed bond

between signifier and signified, Lynch will use the dry husks o f these stereotyped images

and narrative tropes to toy with the spectators’ expectations o f what they are seeing, only

to pull the rug out from beneath them and leave them baffled, disoriented, and in a state

o f existential uncertainty.

This uncertainty becomes essentially Lynchian when it gives rise to an eerie

feeling o f unfamiliarity in that which was once ordinary. That is, Lynch’s films jolt us

out o f complacency by exposing us to the alienating strangeness underlying the

commonplace banalities o f normal life. David Foster Wallace defines Lynchian as “a

particular kind o f irony where the very macabre and the very mundane combine in such a

way as to reveal the former’s perpetual containment within the latter” (161). The all too

familiar elements o f small town America depicted in Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks—white

picket fenced suburban homes lined with red roses and plush grass, sunny soda fountain

diners, innocent school children and wholesome Happy Days-Qsque high schoolers,

smiling firemen and their plucky Dalmatian companions, etc.— are revealed to be thin,

illusory veneers covering and inherently containing an unfamiliar seedy and dark world

of perverse sadomasochistic sex, brutal violence and murder, deception, incest,

psychosis, etc. A man s own wife is at once herself'and not herself; i.e.. an enigma

embodied in the ostensibly known. The outward security o f the family household evinces

a disturbing melange o f sexual depravation and grotesque violence. The once familiar

cliches and archetypes of Hollywood give way to sinister and mysterious significations.
 14

Normal facial expressions or gesticulations, when held out of context or for inordinate

amounts of time, belie an ineffable class o f horror, which exudes from the very core of

uncertainty.

This aspect of Lynch’s cinema evokes a jarring sense of terror: nothing is more

disturbing than experiencing uncertainty in that which we once knew. Freud called this

feeling the “uncanny” or the “unhomelike,” a psychological affect wielded by the

Lynchian aesthetic to produce that creepy, dreamlike sense o f indecipherable anxiety.

“The uncanny,” Freud writes, “is that species of the frightening that goes back to what

was once well known and had long been familiar” (The Uncanny 124). In psychoanalytic

terms, the uncanny thrusts the individual into a state of cognitive dissonance wherein

repressed desires and fears resurface in the conscious mind. One experiences the

uncanny when “something familiar [‘homely’, ‘homey’] that has been repressed

reappears,” manifesting itself in neurotic symptoms and/or dreams (152). As the

reemergence o f repressed impulses, emotions, and memories, the uncanny invades our

normal perception o f the world and plunges us into a vague and unpleasant confrontation

with those undesirable aspects of the unconscious. Whether in character development or

narrative, Lynch’s films abound with and are structured around the uncanny, lending

them that nightmarish atmosphere so distinct to his films. Spectators, expecting

characters to act “normally” and the narrative to follow “normal” causal relations within

time and space, are shoved into the ambiguous realm of the unconscious and abrasively

cut off from these expectations o f normalcy; they are forced to confront the irrational,
 15

absurd, and often grotesque facets of the Lynchian protagonists’ repressed fears, desires,

and impulses as they pop to the surface of these characters’ minds via the films’ semiotic

sights and sounds. In Lynchian noir, the characters’ psychoanalytic processes, their

subjective perceptions, are rendered external for all to see, impelling spectators to face

the uncanny juxtaposition between familiarity and uncertainty.

Part o f what makes Lynch so capable of capturing the logic o f the unconscious

stems from his creative approach to filmmaking. He delves within his own psyche,

allows raw and fragmented images and thoughts to surface from the icy depths of his

unconscious, and then consciously follows those splintered images and thoughts, filling

them in and molding them into actualized cinematic visions that nonetheless maintain the

integrity of the original unconscious material. In his book, Catching the Big Fish:

Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity, Lynch describes this creative process:

An idea is a thought. It’s a thought that holds more than you think it does when

you receive it. But in that first moment there is a spark...It would be great if the

entire film came all at once. But it comes, for me, in fragments. That first

fragment is like the Rosetta stone. It’s the piece of the puzzle that indicates the

rest...In Blue Velvet, it was red lips, green lawns, and the song— Bobby Vinton’s

version o f ‘Blue Velvet’. The next thing was an ear lying in a field. And that was

it. You fall in love with the first idea, that little tiny piece. And once you’ve got it,

the rest will come in time. (23)

Though unconventional, particularly for a filmmaker working with one foot in the
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mainstream Hollywood industry, Lynch’s artistic fixation on the unconscious mind as a

vast reservoir o f raw creativity and his tenacious dedication to consciously following the

lines of thought catalyzed by these morsels o f previously latent psychic material are

essentially in line with the key tenets o f surrealism.

So while Lynch is of course not a formal surrealist, his creative approach to

cinema harkens back to the surrealists of the early 20th century who fetishized latent

psychic material as a powerful artistic source through which the ineffable, the mysterious,

and the essentially human can be expressed. As Robert C. Hobbs notes:

Although they sought to discover thought before it became rational, the surrealists

were rarely content to leave inchoate scribblings in their finished poems or

mindless doodles and puddles of paint in their completed paintings; rather they

felt compelled to exercise the constraints o f the conscious analytic mind on these

unbridled outbursts and to force them into culturally prescribed areas in order to

make the mysterious comprehensible. (299)

In the same vein, Lynch’s films are conscious elaborations on the original “fragments”

gleaned from his unconscious. There is a more consciously involved method to his

madness that moves beyond merely laying bare the raw products o f the unconscious mind

or, even worse, creating films that are just “weird for weird’s sake.” In other words,

Lynch’s cinematic approach is, like the formal surrealists, both an unconscious and

conscious effort.
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One hallmark o f Lynch’s films that lends itself to both surrealist and noir

sensibilities is their oneiric, often nightmarish ambience: viewing a Lynch film feels like

catching a voyeuristic glimpse into the dark recesses of someone’s unconscious mind

and/or dreams. Lynch’s films authenticate cinema as the most effective aesthetic

medium through which the mysteries of the unconscious psyche can be replicated.

According to Thomas Elsaesser, cinema’s powerful capacity to “simulate in its textual

effects the psychic apparatus as a desiring machine” makes it the most effective medium

through which psychological mechanisms can be expressed and “mapped onto the

perceptual system” (26). As with Lynch, the formal surrealists “saw in filmic processes a

way of representing the relation of psychoanalysis to matter, mediated through rhetoric

and figuration” (Elsaesser 26). Through various juxtapositions o f sounds and images, by

using cinema’s ability to render time and space fluid, Lynch blends the rational and

irrational, reality and fantasy, beyond recognition, efficiently recreating something akin

to the unconscious mind in both its dream manifestations and its intrusions into our

conscious, waking lives. In doing so, he exposes and explores the psychological

apparatus at work, externalizing its processes onto the screen, making them knowable in

an intuitive and sensory manner but ultimately revealing and reveling in its inherent

uncertainty. As Michael Richardson points out:

What the dream offered the surrealists more than anything was an experience of

otherness. For them the unconscious did not simply contain the detritus of

eveiyday life, nor was it principally the realm of repressed memory. For all their
 18

interest in Freud, they were not concerned to rationalize the dream or the

unconscious in this way. Dream was also— and perhaps principally— an arena of

unknown experience, one that was contained within the individual, but was also

projected onto the collective. (9)

Similarly, although Lynch’s films project simulacra o f dreams and the unconscious onto

the screen’s external reality and into the light o f waking consciousness, they cannot be

completely dissected or rationalized. More important than that, they evoke the sublime

mystery o f the unconscious and the uncanny nature o f the repressed drives, emotions, and

memories it enigmatically contains.

The Psychoanalytic Bedrock o f Lynchian Noir

“Film has a great way o f giving shape to the subconscious. It’s a great language for that.”

-Lynch (Rodley 140).

Respecting surrealism’s accentuation o f the unconscious mind’s mystical,

fetishized uncertainty, a psychoanalytic exploration o f Lynch’s films can nonetheless be

undertaken. Indeed, as aesthetic reconstructions o f unconscious material, Lynch’s films

noir can best be unraveled and appreciated through the psychoanalytic lens. Moreover,

as integral features o f Lynch’s cinematic method, surrealism and noir are overlapping
 19

aesthetics that converge in their shared proclivity toward the complex and often

mysterious realm o f human psychology. According to James Naremore, the surrealist

movement “had always been crucial to the reception of any art described as

‘noir’... [surrealists] particularly relished the cinema because it was so productive o f the

‘marvelous’ and so like a waking dream” (x-xi). As with the waking dreams o f Lynchian

noir, Freud asserts that the unconscious mind “makes use o f a particular symbolism,

especially for representing sexual complexes,...[that] seems to coincide with the

symbolism which, as we suspect, underlies our myths and fairy tales” (Five Lectures 37).

In the more meta-noir qualities o f his films, Lynch uses the symbolism o f classic noir—

the noir mythology that has by now become imbedded in the collective American

psyche—to cinematically represent and examine the inner human experience in states of

psychic trauma. His films depict these inner conflicts and disturbances by projecting

them outward so that they become symbolically interwoven with the protagonists’

external reality. That is, the protagonists’ unconscious operations and their effects on

their conscious perceptions and experiences o f reality are visually and aurally conveyed.

By portraying events through the protagonists’ subjective perspectives, Lynch allows

spectators to witness the psychic apparatus at work.

As the surrealists recognized, this inversion o f the psyche from an inward

experience to an outward one is made possible by the medium o f film and its unique

capacity to express such abstractions through the use o f cameras, sound, music, mise-en-

sc&ie, lighting, editing, etc. “Cinema is a language,” Lynch avows, “It can say things—
 20

big, abstract things...You have so many tools. And so you can express a feeling and a

thought that can’t be conveyed any other way. It’s a magical medium” (17). This echoes

the early surrealist filmmakers who understood cinema and its distinctive set o f tools as

powerfully effective means o f “exploring the conjunctions, the points o f contact, between

different realms o f existence”; i.e., between the realms o f unconscious fantasies (or

dreams) and conscious, waking reality (Richardson 3). For Lynch and other surrealist

filmmakers, cinema by its very nature invokes a dream state or, more broadly, the

unconscious: just as Freud makes the “distinction between manifest dream-material and

latent dream-thoughts,” a film consists o f the outward vision and its underlying

subtextual meaning {An Outline o f Psychoanalysis 48). Surrealist filmmakers like Lynch

actively take advantage o f the inherently oneiric nature o f cinema to explore,

problematize, separate and/or blur the boundaries between dreams and waking reality, the

unconscious and conscious psyche, trauma and fantasy.

Lynchian noir is particularly preoccupied with expressing the psychological

schism between the realms o f fantasy and social reality in relation to the psychic trauma

instigated by the enigma o f desire and the intrinsic impossibility o f satiating it. Freud

defines the psychological trauma induced by desire as an experience that “presents the

mind with an increase o f stimulus too powerful to be worked off in the normal way, and

this results in permanent disturbances o f the manner in which the energy operates”

(Laplanche 466). Haunted by the traumatic pull o f unknowable, unquenchable desire and

attempting to psychologically reconceptualize and cope with the powerful “increase of

 21

stimulus” precipitated by this traumatic desire, Lynch’s protagonists shift between these

psychic realms, unconsciously escaping into their fantasy constructs when unable to

satisfy this traumatic desire in reality. “We humans,” Freud theorizes, “with the high

standards o f our civilization and under the pressure of our internal repressions, find

reality unsatisfying quite generally, and for that reason entertain a life o f phantasy in

which we like to make up for the insufficiencies o f reality by the production o f wish-

fulfillments” (Five Lectures 55). In the same way, the troubled protagonists o f Lynchian

noir flee from the intrusions o f the repressed psychic trauma—their enigmatic desires and

deep-seated neuroses— into the gloaming depths o f their unconscious minds, into

fantasmatic dimensions in which their identities are ostensibly stable and their desires

fleetingly accessible.

Although Lynch plunges spectators entirely into fantasies wherein desire is

attainable and, therefore, momentarily ceases to be traumatic, these fantasies are shown

to be wish-fulfilling self-deceptions that are ultimately crushed by the overwhelming

trauma o f this primal desire. In the end, fantasy can never achieve its impossible aims

because once the object o f desire is attained, the fantasy, sustained by the very lack

created by desire, ceases to exist. In order for fantasy to exist, the desire that structures it

must perpetually be deferred. Thus, fantasmatically satiated desire disrupts the

mollifying fantasy and throws the subject back into the repressed trauma that was

induced by desire in the first place. Quite paradoxically, then, it is in these escapist

fantasies that the Lynchian anti-heroes’ repressed traumas emerge most forcefully,
 22

confronting them in their raw, naked, and horrifically grotesque forms and compelling

them fatalistically toward the very psychological anguish which they sought to evade.

Trauma in this unconscious root form is what Lacan called the “Real,” a term he coined

to describe primal, unimaginable, and fundamentally ineffable psychological experiences.

Real traumatic encounters “are not fully grasped as they occur, but return later in

repeated flashbacks, nightmares, and other repetitive phenomena” (Caruth 91). Unable to

grasp or cope with the Real trauma incurred by the impossibility o f desire, Lynch’s

protagonists use collective cliches, archetypes, and tropes drawn from myth and mass

media, notably Hollywood, to psychologically reconstruct their lives in such a way as to

circumvent and negate that trauma.

However, these fantasies are revealed to be recursive, merely repeating their

traumatic encounters in different sets o f circumstances that lead them right back to the

repressed. The assuaging Hollywood narratives they unconsciously construe inevitably

rehash their traumatic encounters, quickly turning their would-be ideal wish-fulfilling

fantasies into bleak and disorienting noir narratives that reflect the violent reemergence of

trauma in its Real manifestation. In other words, as Lynch’s protagonists unconsciously

employ the culturally entrenched language o f cinema to construct fantasies that relieve

them of social reality’s burdensome desire, their repressed Real traumas become distorted

and intrude into these fantasies as film noir topoi. The dark and pessimistic aspects of

film noir problematize and defile these idealized fantasies in the same way that film noir

itself problematizes and defiles conventional Hollywood cinema. This reemergence of

 23

repressed trauma in new forms accounts for the uncanny aura so distinct to Lynchian

noir: the familiar archetypes and cliches implemented in the protagonists’ unconscious

fantasies are shown to contain the unfamiliar, disturbing trauma they sought to escape.

Just as the classic film noir anti-hero typically starts out in a good place and quickly

spiral into degradation, violence, and dread, the Lynchian noir anti-hero unconsciously

enters into a placating fantasy that inevitably devolves into chaos and despair as his/her

trauma erupts in its Real form, subverting the very purpose o f the fantasy itself.

As we shall see, Lynch’s distinct cinematic method in tandem with his

metatextual and postmodern implementation of film noir topoi coalesce into lucid visual

translations o f the unconscious mind in all its sublime, horrific, and above all mysterious

complexities. Unlike any other films noir to date, Lynchian noir experientially replicates

the intrusions o f repressed trauma and eruptions o f the ineffable Real, forcing spectators

to actively and viscerally undergo the very psychological states and traumatic encounters

that the perplexed and acutely troubled protagonists come up against.

 24

Chapter I:

Fantasizing Oedipal Trauma in Blue Velvet

Largely considered a landmark o f American surrealism, Lynch’s first excursion

into the shadows of film noir, Blue Velvet, laid the foundation for Lynchian noir and

audaciously pushed the boundaries o f what film noir (and film in general) could

accomplish vis-a-vis visual evocations o f human psychology. Vaguely described by

Lynch himself as a “story of love and mystery,” Blue Velvet symbolically expresses these

themes in their most intense manifestations, bifurcating love into the grotesque and the

sublime while infusing ‘normal’ American life with an acutely weird aura o f nightmarish

uncertainty (Chion 79). The first o f Lynch’s films to exude that strange confluence o f

banal Americana and horrifically bizarre violence that would become synonymous with

his name, Blue Velvet combines this aesthetic with classic noir sensibilities and tropes to

create something completely original and utterly uncanny. Wielding this idiosyncratic

cinematic style, the film coalesces into a psychologically complex and hermeneutically

overdetermined postmodern neo- and meta-noir that masterfully explores the mechanisms

of the human psyche in a state o f trauma.

Despite its relatively linear narrative structure, Blue Velvet rigorously resists any

coherent logical understanding wherein one interpretation does not conflict with or fail to
 25

account for another. On an intuitive level, the film can be rather simply understood; but

upon closer examination, it becomes something like a filmic arabesque, a work of

cinematic cubism in which its multifaceted constituent perspectives can never come to a

logically unified whole. On the surface, the film covers well-trodden noir territory: a

normal bourgeois protagonist is thrust by desire into a fatalistic downward spiral that

ushers him through the dark underbelly o f society and awakens his most base human

instincts along the way. More specifically, the film follows Jeffrey Beaumont, a naive

young man turned amateur detective whose curiosity and attraction to a mystery plunges

him into a depraved criminal world o f sadistic violence, sadomasochistic sex, and

obscene criminal activities. As Jeffrey confronts the seedy and perverse spectrum of

society and human nature, he is forced to contend with his own repressed libidinal

desires.

Beneath the surface o f this rather conventional noir narrative, however, Blue

Velvet is a film that is overtly concerned with surfaces themselves, particularly the

surfaces which separate the two worlds contained in the film: the bright, idyllic world of

innocence and love portrayed in the film’s opening and closing sequences attempt to

conceal the diametrically opposed world o f desperation, sexual perversion, violent crime,

and cruel exploitation. Whatever interpretive significance spectators apply to this

division, it is thoroughly palpable: the former realm is buoyant, full o f gleeful music, and

brimming with oversaturated color, while the latter is hollow, dingy, and intensely

obscene. Lynch creates these two completely disparate filmic universes, each with its
 26

own polarized tone and style, positions them side by side, and then uses Jeffrey’s

character as a vehicle through which to explore this juxtaposition. This tangible divide in

Blue Velvet often lends itself to the general interpretation o f the film as a narrative

concerned with the fundamental duality o f human nature, in which the world is split into

the binary oppositions of good/evil—and naturally, there is truth to this interpretive

claim. As Lynch himself has stated, “I learned that just beneath the surface there’s

another world, and still different worlds as you dig deeper...There is goodness in blue

skies and flowers, but another force—a wild pain and decay— also accompanies

everything” (Rodley 8). Taking Lynch at his word, let’s “dig deeper” to find the “still

different worlds” beneath the surface of this initial good/evil interpretation. In doing so,

the bizarre aura and enigmatic occurrences which set this film apart as utterly distinctive

and unsettling can be understood in more psychologically precise ways.

Approaching a more psychologically realistic understanding o f the film, the two

patently contrasting worlds Lynch presents his audience with can be understood as the

conscious mind’s perceptions o f social reality and the unconscious forces which structure

and distort these perceptions. Entering the psychoanalytic puzzle of Blue Velvet through

this basic premise, the campy, hyper-idealistic, and fundamentally knowable side of

small-town Lumberton represents the conscious psyche, while its extreme counterpart—

the morally deranged, bleak, and fundamentally unknowable industrial underside

inhabited by sexually deviant Frank and his cohort o f goons, drug dealers, pimps, corrupt

cops, etc.— represents the unconscious psyche. Within this symbolic binary opposition,
 27

the narrative journey that Jeffrey undergoes throughout Blue Velvet corresponds with and

reflects the psychic processes of the conscious mind, or the ego, as it fails to repress the

unconscious desires o f the id. As Lacan writes in The Ethics o f Psychoanalysis, “The

frightening unknown on the other side o f the line is that which in man we call the

unconscious, that is to say the memory of those things he forgets. And the things he

forgets are those things in connection with which eveiything is arranged so that he

doesn’t think about them, i.e. stench and corruption that always yawn like an abyss. For

life after all is rottenness” (231-2). This certainly corresponds with Lumberton, a town

that is explicitly divided by Lincoln Street—“the line”—which separates the known,

familiar, and benign suburban realm from the “other side” of town, full o f “stench and

corruption.”

Using this elementary schism as a foundational platform on which to plant our

interpretive feet, the relationship depicted in Blue Velvet between the conscious and

unconscious psyche vis-a-vis subjective perceptions of social reality can be probed with

greater depth. If the sunny suburban side of Lumberton seen in the film’s opening

sequence signifies the conscious mind’s construal o f social reality, the very strangeness

which radiates from the somehow too normal, too rigid depiction o f this psychic realm

must be accounted for. Lynch is not interested in portraying objective reality; rather, the

outward reality he envisions is one that is filtered through and constructed by the

subjective psychic apparatus. Psychological experience is translated into cinematic

vision: Lynch’s forte. As signaled by the film’s opening shot o f the titular blue velvet
 28

curtain fading into the pure blue sky of Lumberton’s ideal surface, Lynch’s vision intends

to expose the raw psychological processes which lie beneath our conscious sense of

reality.

The absurdly hyper-realistic opening sequence of Lumberton, for instance, reveals

how Jeffrey’s conscious perception o f reality is sustained and colored by fantasmatic

distortions. As McGowan states, “we construct our reality through a fantasy structure

that strips away the mystery inhering in our quotidian experience” (179). Or, as

psychoanalytic philosopher Slavoj Zi2ek puts it, fantasy is “the support that gives

consistency to what we call ‘reality’” (The Sublime Object o f Ideology 44). Part of what

makes this film assume its surreal quality is Lynch’s hyperbolic emphasis on the fantasy

dimension that supports Jeffrey's perceived reality and sense of normality. By

foregrounding the blatant unreality the ‘normal’ world—as experienced by Jeffrey—

Lynch visually communicates how the conscious mind relies on fantasy to structure and

bind together external experiences into a cohesive and coherent external reality. In the

same sense that something colloquially described as surreal is in many ways more real

than our typical conception of reality, Lynch’s depiction of the real world in Blue Velvet

is psychologically more realistic than how we consciously perceive it in our waking lives.

It is this amplified emphasis on fantasy as an inextricable function of our conscious

perceptive faculties that gives rise to the unsettling, rigid, and somehow unreal aura

captured in the opening sequence.

Before moving on to further dissect the psychoanalytic implications of

 29

Lumberton’s “other side,” it would be remiss not to mention the ideological commentary

inherent in Lynch’s portrayal o f the fantasmatic distortions which sustain the ‘normal’

American reality of Lumberton’s better half. In particular, the eerily chipper opening

sequence of quotidian Lumberton is noticeably steeped in archetypal images typically

associated with the so-called American Dream: a tree-lined suburban utopia replete with

white picket fences, bright red roses, and clear blue skies; backpacked school children

being safely ushered across the street by a dutiful crossing guard; a gleaming red firetruck

complete with a cordially waving fireman and his trusted Dalmatian, etc. This famous

sequence of cliched Americana is often viewed through the cynical gaze o f postmodern

irony; i.e., Lynch is making fun o f the American Dream by revealing its blatant

artificiality and gaudiness. However, given the aforementioned psychoanalytic

interpretation o f fantasy as underlying and filling in reality, this sequence can be

understood as a more realistic portrayal of how the American Dream ethos actually

structures how Americans like Jeffrey perceive the world. In other words, perhaps

Lynch is not prodding the American Dream with a coldly ironic, tongue-in-cheek

critique, but is instead offering a sincere vision of its true nature by signaling its

fantasmatic, literally dream-like quality. Jeffrey, a good old American boy, is immersed

in the collective American ideology and, as such, his perception of the world is filtered

through this ideological framework. Lynch merely captures and distills this ideological

fantasy— the American mythos— and presents it in its naked form.

If the beaming, idyllic side of Lumberton represents a distilled vision o f the

 30

stabilizing fantasy underlying consciously perceived reality, the town’s seedy underbelly

comes to represent not merely the shadowy depths of the unconscious psyche, but more

precisely the destabilizing obverse fantasy it constructs. The fantasy o f safety, happiness,

and order in the American Dream emerges from and is inherently structured around its

obverse fantasy o f danger, despair, and chaos; like two sides of a coin, the former could

not exist without the latter. Lynch, however, uses cinema to separate these fantasmatic

spheres and place them side by side in their autonomous, disconnected forms. As Zizek

notes, “Both poles o f the Blue Velvet universe are thus denounced as fantasmatic: in

them, we encounter the fantasy in its two poles, in its pacifying aspect (the idyllic family

life) as well as in its destructive/obscene/excessive aspect” (The Art o f the Ridiculous

Sublime 49). For every positive, idealized figure, there exists its obscene underside, its

dark double or uncanny doppelgSnger: Sandy is the ideal object o f desire while Dorothy

is the obscene object of desire; Detective Williams represents the ideal law while the

Yellow Man represents the obscene, corrupted law; Tom Beaumont represents the ideal

father while Frank Booth represents the obscene father. More than any other Lynch film,

Blue Velvet accentuates these two poles o f fantasy, disentangling them and holding them

at arm’s length to explore each respective fantasy dimension in their isolated states—

hence, the film feels like two different worlds.

Lynch’s vision o f Lumberton’s idyllic side functions as a hyperbolic device which

accentuates the divide originally seen in classic films noir like Shadow o f a Doubt (1943)

and The Stranger (1946), in which the pacifying fantasy o f innocent, wholesome small-
 31

town America is juxtaposed with its opposing fantasy aspects of immorality, baseness,

violence, etc. The tonally polarized fantasy worlds in Blue Velvet function in much the

same way as chiaroscuro lighting does in these classic films noir; both cinematic

techniques visually signal a complex collision between two moral and psychological

spheres. Lynch, however, takes this a step further by radically separating and

exaggerating these two extremes to the point o f absurdity and disorientation. For its time,

classic film noir was innovative in its exploration o f both fantasmatic extremes.

However, despite inhabiting both poles o f fantasy, film noir never completely severed the

ties between the two dimensions to the extent seen in Blue Velvet. In Hitchcock’s

Shadow o f a Doubt, for example, the murderous Uncle Charlie—the embodiment o f the

excessive, obscene fantasy dimension—threatens the peaceful backdrop o f innocent

small-town Santa Rosa—the ideal fantasy. Despite Hitchcock’s novel depiction o f both

poles of fantasy, they nonetheless remain stitched together; i.e., stylistically intertwined

and cohabiting the same narrative in an interrelated way. In Blue Velvet, on the other

hand, the obscene fantasy dimension in which Frank Booth exists is completely separated

from the pacifying fantasy dimension of suburban Lumberton, both narratively and

stylistically. Jeffrey may traverse both fantasy dimensions, but the two sides remain

completely cut-off from one another.

As Jeffrey traverses from the wholly ideal fantasy dimension into the wholly

obscene one, he is forced to confront the de-sublimated primal fears and traumatic desires

that were repressed in his unconscious. The shift from positive to negative fantasy occurs
 32

early in the film when, in the opening sequence, Jeffrey’s father, Tom Beaumont, suffers

a debilitating stroke. The collapse of Jeffrey’s father—the stable, ideal paternal

authority— triggers the collapse of the stabilizing ideal fantasy that thrusts Jeffrey into an

obscene Oedipal fantasy in which his repressed libidinal desires resurface in their most

perverse manifestations. In this sense, Blue Velvet can be understood as a neo-noir

reimagining o f the Oedipal narrative that radically juxtaposes the positive and negative

valences o f fantasy in order to probe the mysterious and potentially destructive nature of

human desire underlying them.

In order to fully flesh out both the cause of Jeffrey’s regression to the obscene

Oedipal fantasy and the psychological effects it has on him throughout much o f the

narrative, a general understanding o f Lacan’s post-Freudian theory of the Oedipus

complex vis-i-vis his three postulated psychic orders—the Imaginary, the Symbolic, and

the Real— must be taken into account. Conveniently, the film’s opening montage is a

heavily symbolic display of the Oedipus complex as it relates to this psychic triad. The

establishing shots o f the ideal fantasy dimension described above depict the inextricable

confluence o f the Imaginary order—the psychic “realm o f illusion” through which the

subject constructs his/her inherently false and ultimately alienating sense o f identity, the

“ideal ego or Ideal-I”—and the Symbolic order—which “is manifest in language, law,

and social structures” and refers to the “(often fantasmatic/fictional) ideas o f anonymous

authoritative power and/or knowledge” (Bailly; Johnston). The Imaginary order in the

ideal fantasy is Jeffrey’s illusory image o f Lumberton, a place he sees as psychologically

 33

defining and embodying his identity. That is, his image of Lumberton here is his ideal

ego’s narcissistic projection of his desires onto the town. Ideologically, this imaginary

conception of Lumberton as an idyll attests to a larger collective (false) conception of the

postwar, Eisenhower-era American mythos that Jeffrey has, like many during the Reagan

era, bought into. At the same time, Jeffrey’s idealized conception o f Lumberton is

structured by the Symbolic order. This is visually signaled by the presence of

Lumberton’s social structures and the symbols of authority: the fireman, the school, and,

most importantly, Jeffrey’s father. Narratively, the rigid nature of the sequence

emphasizes the Symbolic order’s stabilizing presence within the ideal fantasy.

Intertwined, the Imaginary and Symbolic orders function together to structure Jeffrey’s

fantasmatic perception o f Lumberton as a knowable, lawful, and wholesome locale.

It’s only when Jeffrey’s father succumbs to a stroke and keels over that Lynch

gives us a glimpse of the Real: a psychic state entirely “ineffable and unimaginable” that

Lacan links with trauma. “Trauma, which Freud situated within the framework o f the

death drive, Lacan conceptualized as the impossible-to-symbolize Real” (“The Real”).

With the pacifying, ideal paternal authority immobilized, the camera slowly moves into

the ground below Tom Beaumont’s supine body, penetrating the plush grass to reveal a

grotesque, squirming mass of bugs lurking below Lumberton’s pleasant surface; as this

happens, Bobby Vinton’s cloyingly cheery rendition of “Blue Velvet” gives way to the

cacophonous diegetic drone o f the writhing bugs. Juxtaposed with Tom Beaumont’s

sudden affliction, the disorienting shot of the squalid, bug-infested earth represents
 34

psychological trauma— the intrusion o f the ineffable Lacanian Real protruding from the

rupture in the Symbolic and Imaginary Orders. Moreover, as he lies incapacitated on the

lawn, Tom Beaumont holds the gushing garden hose near his groin in a phallic manner as

a dog voraciously bites the stream, suggesting Tom’s symbolic castration by a base,

animalistic force. As the condensed representation o f both Lumberton and Jeffrey’s

imagined security and symbolic authority, Tom’s collapse is immensely destabilizing.

The traumatic breakdown and symbolic castration o f Jeffrey’s healthy paternal

figure in the opening sequence is further echoed when Jeffrey visits him in the hospital.

Upon seeing his father— who is completely immobilized by a bulky medical contraption

and unable to speak save a quiet, pathetic whimper—Jeffrey looks utterly traumatized.

Clearly, his father’s palpable mortality and symbolic impotence is devastating to Jeffrey.

“The nonsensical, traumatic status o f this event stems from the idealized father’s role in

the fantasy,” McGowan states, “[His] collapse from a stroke creates an opening between

the idealized world and its underside where Frank Booth dominates. Whereas the stable

father figure keeps this underside hidden, his frailty renders it accessible” (95). Indeed,

the collapse and figurative castration o f the stable paternal figure sets Jeffrey off on a

dark journey into the obscene/destructive/excessive Oedipal fantasy in which he comes

face to face with the traumatic Real o f his repressed libidinal desires.

To better grasp why Tom Beaumont’s sudden absence releases Jeffrey from his

Oedipal constraints, a more detailed psychoanalytic understanding o f the Oedipal phase

must be taken into account. An integral step in the healthy resolution o f the Freudian
 35

Oedipal crisis comes when the male infant, upon seeing his father’s phallus and his

mother’s lack thereof, experiences what’s called ‘castration anxiety’, whereupon he

represses his hatred for the father and comes to identify with him. “The effects of the

threat o f castration are many and incalculable,” Freud posits, “they affect the whole o f a

boy’s relations with his father and mother and subsequently with men and women in

general... He falls into a passive attitude toward his father, o f a kind such as he ascribes to

his mother” (An Outline o f Psychoanalysis 66). For Lacan, this process is purely

symbolic: upon entering the Symbolic order, the subject becomes symbolically castrated

and, as such, loses access to the “immediate, undiluted jouissance in its raw, unmitigated

intensities” (Johnston). In other words, the subject ceases to (libidinally) desire his/her

maternal figure and learns to redirect his/her desire around the desire of the Symbolic

order, also known as the Other; i.e., desire is reoriented around what one imagines is the

general desire o f society. The father’s role in enforcing Symbolic authority over the child

is what Lacan calls the Name-of-the-Father. “The Name-of-the-Father,” Lacanian

psychoanalyst Lionel Bailly writes, “comes to represent the Other where previously there

was only [the mother’s] mysterious desire.” Within the film’s semiotic language, the

collapse and figurative castration o f Jeffrey’s father terminates the threat o f castration,

removes the paternal prohibition of desire (or Name-of-the-Father), and resituates Jeffrey

within the Oedipal crisis, thereby unleashing his primal libidinal drives and unrestrained

perverse desires.

While the Symbolic and Imaginary orders persist in the obverse fantasy, the
 36

former is degraded to the debauched authority which structures Lumberton’s underworld

(namely, Frank), while the latter reorients Jeffrey’s perception o f himself (his ideal ego)

around the distressing, base, and morally obscure desires that increasingly beset him

within the destructive/obscene/excessive Oedipal fantasy. Just as the Symbolic and

Imaginary orders that structure the ideal fantasy take on the ideological language of the

American Dream, the Symbolic and Imaginary orders that structure the obverse fantasy

assume the cinematic language o f film noir. As evocations o f the collective fears that

afflicted American society during the ‘40s and ‘50s, classic films noir envisioned the

American Dream’s obverse, dark underbelly. That is, if the American Dream expresses

the ideal fantasy, film noir expresses the opposition that threatens it. Lynch appears to

understand this distinctly American manifestation of fantasy in both its positive and

negative valences: as such, his vision of the obscene fantasy dimension in Blue Velvet

assumes the form o f a noir dreamscape. This pole o f fantasy tonally, stylistically, and

narratively reflects noir sensibilities and tropes in a way that—as typically happens to the

victims o f classic film noir—disorients Jeffrey’s sense of social and moral order,

obscures and perverts his desires, and destabilizes his identity.

After visiting his hospitalized father, Jeffrey finds a dismembered ear in a nearby

field. Rotting and covered in bugs reminiscent o f the bugs under Tom Beaumont’s lawn,

the ear is in many ways the most significant symbol in the film: it appears just after his

traumatic encounter with his father and serves as a figurative portal into the obscene

fantasy in which the noir narrative takes place. Lynch’s decision to have Jeffrey discover
 37

an ear was a conscious decision on his part because, as he stated in an interview, “It’s an

opening. An ear is wide and, as it narrows, you can go down into it. It goes somewhere

vast...” (Rodley 136). Indeed, Jeffrey’s discoveiy of the severed ear leads him down into

a vast mysteiy, a psychologically disturbing nightmare world steeped in uncertainty that

both entices and traumatizes him. On his way to talk to Detective Williams about the

incident that night, Lynch cuts to an eerie shot of the decaying ear; the camera slowly

moves into the ear, entering the canal until the screen is immersed in its darkness. As

film critic Michel Chion states, “The ear functions here as a passageway, the symbol of

communication between two worlds” (92). This symbolic shot not only indicates the

film’s transition into the noir mysteiy and the dark fantasy, but also signals Jeffrey’s

psychological shift into a more unconscious register o f his mind in which his repressed

libidinal desires and unresolved Oedipal complex violently accost him. The camera’s

move into the depths of the grotesque ear is symptomatic o f Jeffrey’s move into what

Lynch likens to “a dream of strange desires wrapped inside a mysteiy stoiy” (Rodley

138). And seeing as the ear makes its appearance directly after his father is incapacitated

and rendered symbolically impotent and castrated, Jeffrey’s voyage through this “dream

o f strange desires” is explicitly instigated by the breakdown o f the stable paternal

authority.

Jeffrey’s discovery o f the severed ear initially rouses only a vague desire: to solve

the mystery of where it came from. His naive, seemingly innocent infatuation with the

mysterious circumstances surrounding the ear leads him, with the help o f Detective
 38

William’s equally naive daughter Sandy— a veritable ingenue and perhaps the

embodiment o f innocence—to investigate a darkly enigmatic, thoroughly noirish lounge

singer named Dorothy Vallens. As they drink sodas in a kitschy American diner straight

out o f the ‘50s, wide-eyed Jeffrey, hoping to “gain knowledge and experience,” briefs

Sandy on his comically elaborate yet mildly perverted plan to investigate Dorothy:

“Sneak in, hide, and observe.” Sandy responds hesitantly to his Hardy Boys-esque

concoction, saying, “It sounds like a good daydream but actually doing it’s too weird.”

But Jeffrey, persistent, manages to convince her into carrying out their juvenile

investigation by stating, “No one would think two people like us would be crazy enough

to do something like this.” This scene is significant in that it conveys Jeffrey’s unleashed

desire; as he relates his jejune scheme to Sandy, he’s practically frothing at the mouth

with it. His desire is harmless at this point, but his eager demeanor and extravagantly

devised plan reveal traces of a deeper, more transgressive grade o f desire. Sandy, a

product o f the ideal fantasy, imagines and wishes to remain in “a good daydream,” but

Jeffrey, lacking the Name-of-the-Father, is driven by his swelling unconscious impulses

toward a nightmare. Like Lumberton in the opening sequence, Jeffrey’s good-natured

exterior and the innocent rationale he gives for intruding into Dorothy’s apartment belie a

more deep-seated and perverse urge.

What at first sounds like a campy teen detective melodrama quickly escalates into

a hellish, weird, and sexually disturbed turn o f events. When Dorothy comes home early

as Jeffrey is snooping around her apartment in search o f clues, he hides inside her closet
 39

to avoid being exposed. Peering voyeuristically through the closet shutters, he watches

Dorothy undress and overhears a distressing phone call intimating that someone named

Frank has kidnapped her husband and child. Dorothy soon discovers him, forces him at

knifepoint to undress, and, still brandishing the knife, begins to sensually touch and

fellate him. When someone knocks on the door, Dorothy, visibly flustered, makes

Jeffrey go back into the closet, where he bears witness to one of the most disturbing and

creepy sexual encounters in film history. This controversial scene, infamous for its

graphic depiction o f bizarre sadomasochistic sex, is the most evasive and hermeneutically

overdetermined scene in the film. Frank’s violently irrational demeanor, his absurd

sexual preferences and methods, in tandem with Dorothy’s puzzlingly passive, almost

ecstatic reaction to him, congest the scene with potential meaning. Moreover, the scene

takes on different meanings depending on whose perspective is considered; that is, if we

analyze it from Frank’s perspective, a different meaning can be gleaned than if we

analyze it through Jeffrey’s or Dorothy’s. Just as a dream can never be irrefutably

solved, one interpretation of this scene— or of the film as a whole, for that matter—never

fully sticks. However, therein lies the beauty of Lynchian noir: never has a filmmaker so

masterfully captured the dream state or unconscious. So in spite o f its highly elusive

quality and defiance o f rational explication, this scene can be interpreted in much the

same way as manifest dream-material churned out by the unconscious psyche.

Given this, seeing as the film’s central character is Jeffrey, he is the most

appropriate character through which to interpret this scene. After all, Lynch places the
 40

spectator in Jeffrey’s exact position, peering through the slotted closet door at the

obscene spectacle Frank and Dorothy perform. With Hitchcockian flourish, Lynch

implies that just like Jeffrey, we as spectators are voyeurs; like him, we are at once

perversely captivated and deeply disturbed by what is happening before our very eyes. If

the absurdly debauched spectacle that plays out before Jeffrey’s eyes is akin to manifest

dream-material, then Frank and Dorothy must be understood as distorted characters

whose outward actions and motives signal to the deeper realities o f Jeffrey’s psychic life;

i.e., latent dream-thoughts. Jeffrey’s unconscious warps the repressed impulses o f his

latent dream-thoughts and wraps them in the language o f film noir. Frank assumes the

role o f the psychotic gang leader, embodying the noir archetype with great panache,

while Dorothy takes the role o f classic femme fatale, the archetypal woman in trouble

who leads the desiring protagonist to his bleak downfall.

Keenly aware o f the psychological inflections collectively affiliated with film

noir, Lynch uses these noir archetypes as vehicles through which Jeffrey’s unconscious

processes take shape. Within Jeffrey's fantasmatic noir reimagining o f his Oedipal crisis,

Frank assumes the role of the loathsome father figure while Dorothy assumes the role o f

the coveted mother figure. The latent signification o f this nightmarish Oedipal situation

is distorted and projected onto noir topoi as a defense mechanism; manifested as such,

Jeffrey can cope with and confront the situation without actually having to see his real

father and mother. By fantasizing his resurfaced Oedipal crisis as a noirish scenario

involving a perverse, psychotic gangster (the father figure) who violently extorts and
 41

abuses a woman in trouble (the mother figure), Jeffrey’s unconscious mind sublimates

the Oedipal situation into a more socially acceptable one— one that he can morally and

rationally act upon. At the same time, Lynch reveals the very Oedipal nature that

structures film noir.

As the Oedipal mother figure shrouded in the femme fatale convention, Dorothy,

like all Lynchian femmes fatale, does not intentionally deceive and devastate the

protagonist; it is only her status as an object of desire that makes her dangerous and

traumatic. This grade of femme fatale is appropriate, however, because it coincides with

the Oedipal mother figure’s psychic function as the forbidden object o f desire. Like the

standard femme fatale, if actually attained, the Oedipal mother figure induces trauma.

We see this later on when Jeffrey begins to have sadomasochistic sex with Dorothy, a

liaison that triggering a nightmarish chain o f events that leads him to the fetid depths of

the obscene fantasy and threatens to rupture the ideal fantasy— but more of this later. For

now, while Jeffrey is watching Frank and Dorothy engage in their strange sexual ritual,

Dorothy embodies the forbidden object of desire who, due to her dire circumstances as

Frank’s extorted sex slave, is traumatieally lacking. That is, stripped o f her free will and

family, Jeffrey sees Dorothy in much the same way as an infant would see his mother: as

lacking the phallus (or power) and, thus, as a symbol of the threat o f castration (or

powerlessness) that Frank (the father figure) could potentially impose upon Jeffrey (the

infant figure). In this way, Lynch hijacks the characteristics conventionally associated

with the femme fatale to symbolize the castrated forbidden object o f desire that both
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tempts and traumatizes Jeffrey.

Frank’s over-the-top persona often leads spectators to view him as a two-

dimensional caricature o f the noir villain or the embodiment of all things bad. In more

psychologically inclined readings of the film, Frank’s wild and hedonistic tendencies are

often correlated to the id. For our purposes, none o f these explanations o f Frank are

necessarily incorrect, particularly the latter; but even if Frank represents the id, he is a

more nuanced and distinct manifestation of that psychic force. Beneath his absurdly

apoplectic and self-aggrandizing exterior, Frank is arguably the most complex character

next to Jeffrey, inhabiting a number of different psychological roles within Jeffrey’s

obscene noir fantasy. With regard to the dream-logic in which the film engages, Frank’s

multilayered character aligns with Freud’s concept o f condensation, whereby “a single

element o f the manifest dream often stands for a whole number of latent dream-thoughts

as though it were a combined allusion to all of them” (An Outline o f Psychoanalysis 41-

2). As a thoroughly condensed figure, Frank represents Jeffrey’s obscene father figure,

his unhinged Oedipal crisis, his repressed libidinal desires, his Real trauma, his frenetic

id, the looming threat to Lumberton’s ideal side, etc. All o f this is condensed into Frank

as the archetypal noir villain.

To parse out this condensation, let’s first turn to Frank as the obscene father

figure, a role he occupies with gusto: by kidnapping Dorothy’s family, sexual extorting

her, and basically turning her into his sex slave, he exerts his atrocious power over her.

Unwittingly, he puts on an excessive spectacle in front o f Jeffrey that displays the power
 43

he has over Dorothy; he subjects her to total physical, sexual, and emotional domination.

During the bizarre sex scene, he orders her around—yelling “Where’s my bourbon!” and

“Spread your legs”— and obsessively, almost rhythmically, screams, “Don’t you fucking

look at me!” Afraid for her captive husband and child and at the mercy o f Frank’s

volatile proclivity for violence, she passively obeys his every command. At one point in

this scene, Frank whips out a pair of scissors and menacingly snips them around

Dorothy’s genital region, suggesting the threat o f castration by which the Oedipal father

figure exerts power. In every sense o f the word, Frank is the primal father, or the “Real

Urvater,” which Lacan describes as “a fantasy-construct generated in and by the Oedipus

complex, with the child imagining an obscene, dark, jouissance-saturated underbelly

behind the Symbolic facade o f paternal authority and its rules” (Johnston). As Jeffrey's

Real Urvater, Frank’s function is not to replace the Name-of-the-Father or to enforce his

own depraved Symbolic order; rather, his function within the negative valence of

Jeffrey’s fantasy is to embody and display everything that Jeffrey’s real father prohibits:

sexual deviance, destructive cruelty, excessive desire, etc.

Accompanying his role as Jeffrey’s primal father, Frank’s fantasmatic persona

takes on another more acutely uncanny layer: he is the hyperbolic projection o f Jeffrey’s

untethered Oedipal complex. Jeffrey condenses his resurfaced Oedipal crisis and the

perverse libidinal desires associated with it onto Frank. During his sexual encounter with

Dorothy, Frank exhibits some psychologically strange and sexually aberrant tendencies,

the most abnormal o f which is his sexual fragmentation and oscillation between the role
 44

of desiring “baby” and imposing “daddy.” Tied in with this is his peculiar use of a

canister and breathing mask, which he uses as a sexual stimulant. Although Lynch left

the substance inhaled by Frank ambiguous in the film, the script specifies that “the

canister is filled with helium, which makes Frank’s voice very high and strange

sounding.” The implicatipn here is that the helium canister and mask allow Frank to talk

like an infant; thus, he can more convincingly regress and recall his transgressive

infantile Oedipal desires. Before inhaling the helium, however, he demands to be called

“daddy” and assumes an enraged, domineering temperament:

DOROTHY: Hello, baby.

FRANK: [annoyed, condescending] Shut up! It’s daddy you shithead! Where’s my

bourbon!?

DOROTHY: Hello, daddy.

Seated in front o f Dorothy, who wears her blue velvet robe, Frank commands her to

“spread [her] legs wide,” then pensively stares at her genitals with lewd intensity before

grotesquely huffing the helium from his mask. The helium patently changes Frank’s

disposition from the incensed “daddy” to the whimpering yet agitated “baby.”

Repeatedly shouting “Mommy!” and “Baby wants to fuck!” directly into her genitals, he

heaves her onto the floor, forcefully punches her, stuffs her blue velvet chord into his

mouth, muffles “Daddy’s coming home,” and frantically humps her body until he

climaxes in his pants.

 45

Frank’s twisted sexual act is symptomatic o f his unresolved Oedipal complex. He

acts out the Oedipal crisis as both the “baby,” whose libidinal desire for his “mommy”

has not been barred, and the threatening, abusive “daddy,” who viciously tries to prohibit

the “baby” from the mother by claiming her as his own. Psychologically stuck in the

Oedipal crisis, Frank’s inner drives are profoundly conflicted. He cannot repress his

infantile desire to sexually love his mother, which he arouses by inhaling the helium; at

the very same time, he defers to and plays the part of the overbearing father as he

attempts to dominate the mother and intimidate the baby through hostile force. He is

sexually divided and radically at odds with himself, causing him great psychic confusion

and distress; after he climaxes, the script describes him as “stifling sobs from deep within

him.” Dorothy, enslaved, is the sexual object through which he can enact his distorted

sexuality and cathartically release his inner turmoil. Moreover, Frank’s sexual

enslavement o f Dorothy is a radically perverse manifestation of the infant’s desire to

have the mother’s love all to himself. One strongly suspects that the sole motive behind

Frank’s abduction o f Dorothy’s family is to make her endure his abnormal sexual

complex, since no one in their right mind would suffer this without brute coercion. As

evinced by his inability to handle Dorothy’s gaze during the sexual act, which he averts

by shouting “Don’t you fucking look at me!”, Frank is deeply ashamed of his sexual

complex; her feminine gaze disrupts his fantasy, emasculates him, and makes him unable

to sexually perform. As Lynch puts it, Dorothy’s gaze makes Frank “come face to face

with his sickness” (Rodley 145).

 46

Unbeknownst to Frank, Jeffrey sees this whole sexual episode, and while he

appears visibly shaken by it, during the act he is captivated— he cannot pry his eyes off

the sordid erotic spectacle. He is ambivalent in this moment, passively watching what he

both loathes and desires. The implications of this emerge more vividly later in the film

when Jeffrey actually interacts with Frank; however, it is in this initial encounter that,

much to his dismay, Jeffrey’s base unconscious desires begin to bubble up in his

conscious mind. When Frank leaves, Dorothy, all shook up, seduces and titillates Jeffrey,

who reciprocates until she asks him to hit her. He resists, although he looks conflicted, as

if some impulse deep down inside him wants to comply and engage in Frank-like

sadomasochistic sex. His repressed libidinal desire to sexually conquer the mother figure

in the same manner as the father figure has resurfaced, and it’s not long before he acts on

this impulse.

After he leaves Dorothy’s apartment that night, Jeffrey has a nightmare that

symbolizes his inner conflict with these de-sublimated libidinal desires. The dream

sequence begins with a heavily distorted image o f Tom Beaumont’s face, signifying the

breakdown o f the stabilizing father figure and his perversion into the obscene father,

Frank. This is substantiated by the next image, which juxtaposes Tom’s warped face

with Frank, who is shown bellowing furiously in slow motion, letting out a howl of

excessive pleasure, or jouissance. A close-up of a candle being blown out in slow motion

is shown, almost as if Frank’s scream from the previous shot extinguishes it, and then we

hear Frank’s voice declare, “Now it’s dark.” The indication here is that the obscene
 47

fantasy has eclipsed the ideal; Jeffrey’s desires are now subject to the dark realm of the

unconscious psyche and all its repressed impulses. Moreover, the candle’s light

represents an orienting force that illuminates, directs, and stabilizes, but now that Frank’s

jouissance has blown it out, Jeffrey’s desire is dark, lost, disoriented, and directionless.

Next we see Dorothy's rouged lips mouthing “Hit me,” followed by a shot of Frank, from

Dorothy’s perspective, slamming a punch into her/the spectator’s face, thus waking

Jeffrey up from his night terror. This last bit implies that Jeffrey’s desire is already

beginning to merge with Frank’s, particularly his desire to dominate Dorothy, the mother

figure, with obscene pleasure or joiussance. “Something familiar that has been repressed

[in Jeffrey] reappears”— namely, his Oedipal desires—plunging him into the very depths

of the uncanny (The Uncanny 152). Indeed, as his thoroughly uncanny dream reveals,

Jeffrey’s dark and deep-seated impulses have now fully intruded into his conscious mind.

Although Jeffrey still dips in and out of each valence of fantasy at this point, his

psyche is now anchored to the obscene one. He may still be able to inhabit the idealized

side o f Lumberton, but he is ultimately captivated and drawn into its dark underbelly by

the perverse desire it stimulated. “That is the subject of Blue Velvet,” Lynch commented

in an interview, “You apprehend things, and when you try to see what it’s all about, you

have to live with it” (Rodley 139). Having drudged up his Oedipal desires, Jeffrey can’t

go back to the idealized fantasy until he’s seen “what it’s all about” and resolved it. So

even after Sandy tells him her starry-eyed dream about the dark world which will be

redeemed by the robins’ “blinding light o f love,” Jeffrey cannot resist the fierce pull of
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obscene desire that now subsumes him. The return of the repressed cannot merely be

shrugged off.

Thus, overwhelmed with and unable to resist these uncanny desires, Jeffrey

returns to the repressed by going back to Dorothy’s apartment and engaging in rough,

sadomasochistic sex. During the sexual act, which Lynch depicts in a slow motion frenzy

overlaid with distorted animalistic grunts, Jeffrey gives in to her request to hit her and

behaves like Frank. O f course, Jeffrey doesn’t whip out a helium tank or go through the

bizarre Oedipal ritual quite like Frank. However, while Jeffrey’s violent encounter with

Dorothy may be more subdued and internal than Frank’s hyperbolic and externalized

display o f the Oedipal crisis, they nonetheless both act upon the same obscene Oedipal

desire. As Lacan would put it, both have accessed the jouissance o f transgressive

pleasure. Indeed, as the film progresses, Frank and Jeffrey come to be seen as parallel

characters, although when we are first introduced to him he seems to be diametrically

opposed to our young protagonist.

After Jeffrey and Dorothy have sex, Frank and his goons appear almost as if

summoned by Jeffrey’s transgression. Having violently acted upon his Oedipal desire,

Jeffrey must now come face to face with the concentrated, hyperbolic version o f his de­

sublimated obscene desire: Frank. Their convergence in Dorothy’s apartment— the zone

of transgression— is tense and triggers Jeffrey’s encounter with the traumatic Real. Frank

strong-arms Jeffrey into joining him and his gang “for a ride” through the artery of

Lumberton’s dark underbelly, setting into motion a nightlong escapade during which
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Jeffrey is plunged into the destructive/excessive/obscene fantasy dimension that, like the

insects squirming beneath Tom Beaumont’s greener-than-green lawn, lurks beneath the

pacifying surface to which Jeffrey is accustomed. And like the grubby insects, the

netherworld of crime and excess that Frank shepherds him through ultimately leads him

to the Real trauma that lies at the crux o f Jeffrey’s dark fantasy: the realization that a part

of him— his obscene desire— is like Frank. “You’re like me,” Frank mutters to him as

they sit in a car at the end of their nightmarish journey. Unable to cope with this

affirmation o f the traumatic Real, Jeffrey slugs Frank in the face. Enraged, Frank orders

his goons to drag Jeffrey out of the car, puts red lipstick on, and aggressively kisses

Jeffrey while Roy Orbison’s “In Dreams” plays from the car stereo. This grotesque kiss

symbolically links Jeffrey to Frank, affirming their connection vis-a-vis obscene libidinal

desire. This is reinforced when Frank sinisterly repeats the lyrics o f “In Dreams” as he

glares at Jeffrey: “In dreams I walk with you. In dreams I talk to you. In dreams you’re

mine all the time. Forever, in dreams.” This signifies that “in dreams,” or in the

unconscious, the excessive/destructive/obscene Oedipal desire that Frank embodies will

“forever” exist in Jeffrey, even after he once again represses it.

In the same moment, Frank asserts his power as the primal father, cryptically

threatening Jeffrey with love inextricably bound with death:

FRANK:

Don't be a good neighbor to her or I'll

send you a love letter. Straight

 50

from my heart, fucker! You know what a

love letter is? It's a bullet. Straight

from my gun, fucker! You receive a love

letter from me, you're fucked forever!

Understand, Fuck?

In a perverse rendition o f the typical Oedipal episode in which the loving father displays

his power over the infant and symbolically threatens castration, Frank warns Jeffrey not

to “be a good neighbor to [Dorothy]” or he’ll send him “a love letter” with his gun. This

is a veiled, demented injunction to end his sexual liaison with Dorothy (the mother

figure) and repress his Oedipal desire, lest he be symbolically castrated by the primal

father’s perverse love: “a bullet straight from [his] gun.” He then flexes his biceps,

makes Jeffrey feel them (“Feel my muscles, you like that?”), and proceeds to brutally

beat Jeffrey unconscious. Frank is overtly displaying his power and dominance over

Jeffrey with a violent and abusive love, laying down the obscene Oedipal law and barring

him from Dorothy, the primal object o f desire. In a sense, the confluence o f love and

death in Frank’s Oedipal threat is emotionally akin to what the infant feels and fantasizes

when the father figure obstructs his/her libidinal desire for the mother figure. It makes

sense then that Frank, whose own unresolved Oedipal complex teeters between the

amorous “baby” and the aggressive “Daddy,” would conflate love and death; his psyche

is in constant conflict between the two and he cannot express one without invoking the

other. As the primal father, Frank embodies this conflict and thrusts it onto Jeffrey.
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When Jeffrey conies to the next morning, all battered and bruised, the whole

weight o f the situation dawns on him. He sits on his bed and sobs deeply as the camera

cuts to various shots o f him hitting Dorothy during their sadomasochistic sex the night

before. Significantly, Jeffrey isn’t dwelling on the brutal beating he received or the

strange encounter he had with Frank; rather, he is recalling the truly traumatic event: his

Oedipal transgression. He acted on his obscene desire and gave in to the dark and violent

impulse to sexually dominate the mother figure. He is indeed like Frank, and as he

reflects back on the previous night’s events, he becomes deeply ashamed o f himself and

the perverse desire he gave into. Jeffrey is gripped by the uncanny feeling that he is not

as different from Frank as he thought he was; his memory o f himself behaving like Frank

does not cognitively match his perceived identity as a decent, wholesome young man—

his ideal ego.

Having acted on his de-sublimated Oedipal desire and come face to face with the

traumatic Real, Jeffrey tries to turn away from the obscene fantasy, to repress it and set

things straight again. Turning back to the ideal fantasy, he confesses everything he

uncovered to the law, Detective Williams, and pursues the ideal object o f desire, Sandy,

with a renewed passion. His attempts to break away from the dark desire he aroused and

the Real trauma it gave rise to are unsuccessful, however, and he soon finds the obscene

fantasy encroaching on the ideal. During a date with Sandy, Dorothy, completely naked

and covered in bruises, appears out o f nowhere like some sort o f wraith. She seems to be

in a state o f shock, and when Jeffrey takes her to the Williams household to get help, she
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clings to him and reveals their intimate relationship in front o f a visibly horrified Sandy.

In this thoroughly uncanny moment, Jeffrey’s obscene object o f desire intrudes into the

ideal fantasy and comes into contact with his ideal objects o f desire. Clearly, the dark

Oedipal desire that Jeffrey opened up and engaged in cannot simply be ignored; he must

resolve this crisis by facing it head-on, lest the unhinged pull o f depraved desire draw

him back and forever alienate him from the ideal fantasy.

With this in mind, he rushes back to Dorothy’s apartment to confront the bleak

chaos that he’s become tangled up in. What he finds there is a strange and unsettling

scene: Dorothy’s husband is there, tied up and slumped over dead, and the Yellow Man,

somehow still standing, has had his brains blown out all over the kitchen. Some bloody

altercation has taken place there, and despite his absence, there’s no doubt that Frank is

the perpetrator. Frank soon arrives and Jeffrey, grabbing the Yellow M an’s gun, once

again hides in the closet, returning to the site of trauma. This time, however, Jeffrey is

less ambivalent and more prepared to deal with Frank in a resolute and forceful manner.

Frank searches the apartment for Jeffrey, titillated by the prospect o f murder as he

aggressively huffs gas from his mask, but he underestimates Jeffrey, who blows his

brains out point blank. With this, Jeffrey has killed the primal father and the embodiment

of his perverse libidinal desire, violently resolved his Oedipal complex, repressed the

obscene fantasy, and restored the ideal one. The psychological conflict and the noir

mystery have been solved.

This is reinforced by the scene immediately following this, which begins with a
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shot o f the camera moving out o f Jeffrey’s ear canal to reveal Jeffrey lounging blithely in

his color-saturated suburban backyard. The shot receding from the ear mirrors the

previous ear shot and signals the psychic shift out of the unconscious nightmare fantasy

back into the waking, pacifying fantasy realm. Jeffrey’s father Tom has been restored to

good health, indicating that the stabilizing Symbolic order—the Name-of-the-Father—

has been reimposed. Likewise, as Jeffrey’s serene and chipper demeanor suggests, the

Imaginary order has been resuscitated back to its proper state; i.e., his perception of

himself has been restored and once again corresponds with his ideal ego. Jeffrey and

Sandy, happily together now, see a robin chewing on one o f the grotesque bugs that crawl

beneath Lumberton’s ideal surface, indicating that the wish fulfillment o f Sandy’s

mawkish dream about love (the robins) conquering the darkness o f the world (the bugs)

has been actualized. “It’s a strange world,” Jeffrey casually remarks, summing up his

bizarre experiences with a hackneyed, banal understatement. The final shots o f the film

repeat the opening sequence o f Lumberton’s ideal fantasy and the middle class suburban

security it sustains. As Lynch visually conveys, the stabilizing facade that represses

transgressive impulses and veils the disconcerting uncertainty o f reality has been

reinstated. The dark, unknowable depths of humanity are once again wrapped in a

knowable, mollifying illusion.

With the conclusion o f Blue Velvet, Lynch leaves his spectators whiplashed with

emotional intensity and manages to lend a whole new aura o f uncanny horror to the

everyday American experience. What was once harmless and normal has been imbued
 54

with an impending sense of dread and uncertainty; the sights and sounds associated with

ordinary mundane life take on a heightened quality o f trepidation that destabilizes even

the most commonplace o f occurrences. In a thoroughly noirish manner, Blue Velvet

suggests that nothing is what it seems and that everything contains the possibility for

chaos. At any moment, the bourgeois suburbs could give way to the most macabre

displays o f sadistic psychopathy and/or grotesque social corruption; indeed, these

possibilities are inherently contained in the ostensibly stable world. More than anything,

Lynch envisions the human mind as an immense enigma laden with dark, hidden

impulses and chaotic, potentially destructive desires. Blue Velvet may be overtly

concerned with the mystery surrounding Dorothy Vallens and Frank Booth, but more

than anything Lynch implicitly tackles the mysteries of human psychology: what drives

people to act as they do? So while Blue Velvet is wrapped in a seemingly conventional

noir narrative, Lynch, in typical surrealist fashion, uses the film’s central noir mystery to

cinematically express and symbolically explore the peculiar mechanisms o f the

unconscious mind: our inscrutable and often frenetic desires, the fantasies we construct to

cope with and chase these desires, and the psychic drives that impel us toward love,

death, and insanity. Harnessing and subverting film noir, Lynch delves headlong into the

dark and fetid depths of the human psyche and emerges with a truly original cinematic

experience, one that would establish many o f his most recognizable leitmotifs and pave

the way for what would be known as distinctly Lynchian.

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Chapter II:

Navigating Psychic Trauma in Lost H ighway: Repressing Neuroses

o f Identity and Desire in Noir Fantasy

In the years between Blue Velvet and his next major film noir, Lost Highway,

Lynch continued to dabble in and subvert noir sensibilities, although in much more

subsidiaiy and hybrid ways. While most o f Lynch's endeavors in this interim period,

because o f his distinct cinematic method, inherently contain that crucial noir element—

disorienting uncertainty— it would be an academic faux pas and a disservice to the noir

canon to place these Lynchian works on the noir spectrum. His groundbreaking,

serpentine television series Twin Peaks (1990-1991) and its audaciously disturbing,

commercially unsuccessful prequel film Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992) certainly

toy with noir themes, tropes, and aesthetics; however, the Twin Peaks universe is an

elaborately genre-bending vision that incorporates and deconstructs elements o f science

fiction, psychodrama, horror, American soap operas, hammy police procedurals, toothy

sitcoms, and cloying teen melodramas. Likewise, Wild at Heart (1990), Lynch’s most

campy and ironic film, is an intertextual medley of what Lynch himself describes as “a

strange blend o f...a road picture, a love story, a psychological drama and a violent

comedy” (Rodley 193). So despite peripherally dipping into noir sensibilities, these
 56

Lynchian works are outliers to the noir canon that don’t fully inhabit the aesthetic— both

in form and content—quite like his more overt films noir.

Over a decade after Blue Velvet's release, Lynch finally returned full bore to film

noir, delving back into the cinematic aesthetic with his most bleak and hellish noir vision

to date: Lost Highway. If Blue Velvet established the uncanny tone and surrealistic style

of Lynchian noir, Lost Highway would aggressively experiment with narrative form to

further challenge the limits o f film noir and heighten the aesthetic’s disorienting quality

beyond traditional cinematic conceptions of space, time, and causal logic. Aptly

described in the script by Lynch and co-writer Barry Gifford as “a 21st century noir

horror film,” Lost Highway's irreducibly labyrinthine plot, recursive narrative structure,

macabre subject matter and untethered transpositional character development all

coalesce into a thoroughly destabilizing cinematic evocation o f noir sentiments.

Moreover, contained within and intensified by this radically unorthodox and thoroughly

Lynchian cinematic form are the central themes o f postmodern neo- and meta-noir: the

film appropriates the “oneiric, strange, erotic, ambivalent, and cruel” motifs of classic

film noir to explore the unstable, mutable nature o f identity, the evasive unreliability of

memoiy and subjective experience, the traumatic enigma o f desire, and the psychic

function o f fantasy.

Trapped in an interior nightmare, the fragmented neo-no ir antihero o f Lost

Highway, Fred Madison, struggles to find some semblance o f his ideal ego— “an image

of ourselves as we want to be”—through the internal mechanisms o f his unconscious

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psyche, running away from the bleak outward reality o f his trauma and shattered identity

through a fantasmatic reconfiguration o f his circumstances (McGowan 166). Developing

the techniques he established in Blue Velvet, Lynch emphasizes psychological experience

and presents us with a decidedly subjective vantage to Fred’s murderous exploits rather

than merely relating them as objective, external events. As such, the film symbolically

expresses Fred’s distorted mind as it attempts to cope with his alienated and fractured

sense of self. Its narrative structure, fluid and non-linear, reflects the phenomenology of

his consciousness and memory. As Foster Hirsch puts it, “space and time are made to

perform elaborate charades; with a battery of flash-forwards and repetitions, the narrative

circles around itself’ (313-4). Indeed, not only is its form spatially and temporally

discontinuous, it is also circular, folding in on itself ad infinitum like a recursive

traumatic memory. That is, the film is a visual manifestation of Fred’s failed attempts to

repress and reimagine the traumatic memories leading up to and amplified by his

homicidal actions.

In this respect, Lost Highway is a three-act film that can be split into three

corresponding psychic phases: Fred’s initial trauma, his attempt to repress the traumatic

memory by reconstructing it as fantasy, and the inevitable collapse of this fantasmatic

construct and subsequent return to the initial trauma. In the first phase, we are introduced

to Fred, a bourgeois American saxophonist who becomes disturbed to the point of

obsession by his inability to please and ultimately understand his distant wife, Renee,

whose mysterious past and suspected infidelities plague Fred to the point o f murder. In
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the second phase, Fred, on death row and tormented by the guilt o f his homicidal actions,

disassociates from his identity and, in what Lynch himself calls a “psychogenic fugue,”

reinvents himself in a noir fantasy as Pete Dayton, a young and virile teenager living in

an absurdly cliche, 1950s’esque American suburb (Lynch on Lynch 238-9). In the third

and most uncanny phase, Fred’s fantasy disintegrates as the traumatic memory reasserts

itself.

In the first two phases. Lynch presents us with the film’s core psychological

duality: reality/fantasy. As Fred says in the first psychic phase, he “likes to remember

things [his] own way...How [he] remembered them. Not necessarily the way they

happened.” Indeed, this perspective sets up how the majority o f Lost Highway plays out.

As Pete, Fred’s internal inadequacies and conflicts become externalized in his imagined

world. Decent and sexually potent, Pete is a guiltless youth with a faithful girlfriend

(who, significantly, resembles Renee), stable greaser-type parents, and a markedly noirish

job as a local mechanic. In other words, Fred morally and psychologically cleanses

himself and gains sexual potency through his psychic reincarnation as Pete in the noir

fantasy. As Slavoj Zizek aptly puts it:

In this displacement from reality to fantasized noir universe, the status of

the obstacle changes: while in the first part, the obstacle/failure is inherent

(the sexual relationship simply doesn’t work), in the second part, this

inherent impossibility is externalized into the positive obstacle which from

the outside prevents its actualization (Eddy). Isn’t this move from inherent
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impossibility to external obstacle the very definition o f fantasy, o f the

fantasmatic object in which the inherent deadlock acquires positive

existence, with the implication that, with this obstacle cancelled, the

relationship will run smoothly. (Zi2ek 20)

The reality o f Fred’s impotency is reversed in Pete, who engages in passionate sex

throughout the fantasy, at first with his girlfriend and later more significantly, with

Alice, Fred’s fantasy manifestation o f Renee, whom he imagines in classic femme

fatale form as a blonde-haired gun moll.

In the same vein, Fred externalizes his sexual incapacity as something outside

himself and beyond his control. He does this by fabricating Mr. Eddy, an absurdly

excessive and impulsively violent gangster archetype— similar to Blue Velvet's Frank

Booth—who claims dominance over Alice. In the fantasy, Fred’s inability to sexually

please Renee is displaced onto Mr. Eddy as an outer inhibiting agent who obstructs

Pete/Fred from having sex with Alice/Renee. Otherwise put, Mr. Eddy is the embodiment

of Fred’s sexual impotence; he is, in Freudian terms, the classic Oedipal father-figure—

the symbolic phallus— preventing intercourse with the mother-figure—Alice/Renee.

“The phallus gets in the way o f Pete’s enjoyment o f Alice,” McGowan asserts, “Whereas

Fred could not enjoy Renee because he had no idea what she wanted, Pete cannot enjoy

Alice because Mr. Eddy stands in the way and has expressly prohibited Pete from

enjoying her” (169). Fred’s perception o f Renee— distant, impassive, enigmatic, sexually

cold and unfaithful to Fred—is inverted in his reimagining o f her as Alice, who is sultry,
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sexually available, and immediately enamored by Pete with red-blooded eroticism. She

lustfully pursues Pete with excessive infatuation and, despite the threat o f Mr. Eddy, they

soon begin a series of explicitly fantasized sexual escapades that are diametrically

opposed to the failed sexual exchange between Fred and Renee at the start o f the film. In

reality, however, he cannot fulfill his desire to decipher Renee’s desire. As McGowan

puts it, “In attempting to interpret Renee’s desire, Fred constitutes himself as

desiring... The endlessness of desire and its perpetual question make it unbearable and

nearly impossible to sustain” (159). By creating a fantasmatic stand-in for Alice, Fred (as

Pete) can finally grasp this endlessly decentered desire. Fred’s fantasy relieves him of

the burden o f desire and allows him to enjoy Renee.

In the reality of Fred’s circumstances, he cannot sexually satisfy Renee, who

remains aloof and expressionless throughout their intercourse. Although it’s not clear,

Fred either prematurely ejaculates or fails to maintain an erection. Either way, he is

clearly frustrated and confused afterwards, feelings which Renee intensifies when she

gently pats him on the back, whispering, “It’s okay,” in a maternal and unintentionally

condescending manner. Experiencing this humiliation, Fred’s face expresses deep-seated

horror and frustration. He does not know how to satisfy his wife’s desires, sexual or

otherwise, and he cannot grasp any true understanding of her. The obsessive despair he

feels at this realization taps into what Freud posited to be the repressed traumatic Oedipal

experience, the primal anxiety and confusion a young boy feels when he first observes his

mother’s lack o f a phallus and the subsequent fear o f castration this encounter indelibly
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instills in the unconscious mind. In this central moment, the boy, seeing his mother as

‘other,’ as inherently different and fundamentally lacking, becomes psychologically

divorced from her and femininity in general. Femininity becomes an insoluble enigma

that, eventually repressed, affects the boy and his interpersonal relations with women, to

varying degrees, for the rest o f his life. Moreover, because the mother is the original

object o f desire, this Oedipal divorce from the mother signals a greater symbolic divorce

from all other objects o f desire. With this in mind, Fred cannot understand or satiate

Renee’s sexual desire: he feels inadequate as a male, as if he were symbolically castrated

and indirectly deprived of his maleness by Renee and her lack of sexual reciprocation.

Elusive, forbidden, and ultimately unattainable, Renee/Alice, like Blue Velvet's Dorothy

Vallens, represents the Oedipal mother figure, the mysterious object of desire, and the

source o f primal trauma—all of which are overtly condensed into the Lynchian femme

fatale.

It is also significant that, as revealed in the third act/phase,. Renee was having an

affair with a man named Dick Laurent (who looks exactly like Mr. Eddy, Fred’s fantasy

rendition o f Laurent) and that, before she met and married Fred, she used to work for

Laurent making smutty pornographic films. Not only is Renee’s already obscured desire

further problematized by her sexual desire for Laurent, she is also obscured by her

enigmatic past. In every sense o f the word, she is unknowable to Fred. Thus, as

McGowan maintains, “The transformation o f Renee into Alice allows Fred (as Pete

Dayton) to solve the deadlock of Renee’s desire and conceive, on the level of fantasy, of
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a way of enjoying her. Whereas Renee’s past and her desire remained a mystery to Fred,

Pete is able to enjoy Alice because he knows what she wants” (McGowan 168). Indeed,

Fred’s fantasy allows him to ostensibly understand Renee: he can finally decipher and

fulfill her desire, and he can come to terms with her ambiguous past. His angst over her

enigma is, for the time, allayed.

As a projection of Fred’s latent Oedipal crisis and neurotic need to achieve

impossible desire, Alice appropriately assumes the form o f the archetypal femme fatale—

the very embodiment o f desire and its traumatic pull. Transposing Renee’s inscrutable

desire onto the stock femme fatale construct allows Fred’s psyche to comprehend her

mystery, to strip it o f its insidious implications, and to demystify her enigma by wrapping

it in the culturally familiar myth of the gun moll vamp. Just as the femme fatale of

classic film noir seduces and manipulates spellbound men to their fatalistic demise, Alice,

using her sexual prowess, lures Pete into a web of deception that puts him in mortal

danger with Mr. Eddy and drives him to assault, rob, and accidentally kill Andy, an

associate o f Mr. Eddy/Dick Laurent. Thus, another facet o f Fred’s reimagining o f

Renee/Alice as a femme fatale is to set up a defense mechanism against the unbearable

guilt o f murdering his wife. In the fantasy, Fred/Pete is the victim of both of his actual

victims: Renee and Dick Laurent. Alice exploits and endangers Pete in order to escape

from Mr. Eddy, and Mr. Eddy, feeling betrayed, wants to murder Pete. In reality, Renee

worked for Laurent as a pornographic actress o f her own volition, while in Fred’s fantasy

Alice is coerced into the industry by brute force. Fred, unable to cope with Renee’s
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seedy past—that is, her choice to be a pom actress—would rather believe that she was

driven into the sex industry by external forces beyond her control. Similarly, as his

fantasy implies, Fred would rather believe that Renee/Alice was forced to have an affair

with Dick Laurent/Mr. Eddy than cope with the reality o f Renee’s affair and the

disintegration o f their marriage. This is powerfully conveyed when Alice tells Pete about

how she was introduced to Mr. Eddy at his mansion, where she was forced to strip while

one of his cronies held a gun to her head. In Fred’s construal, she didn’t choose to have

sex with Dick Laurent/Mr. Eddy; rather, she was forced into the sexual act by the threat

of violence. Furthermore, in his fantasy rendition, Fred/Pete is the one who is having the

affair with Renee/Alice. Unable to deal with reality, where Fred is cuckolded by Dick

Laurent and Renee, Fred imagines a reversed situation in which he is the one cuckolding

Dick Laurent/Mr. Eddy. Similarly, as Pete, Fred cheats on his girlfriend (who highly

resembles Renee), inverting the reality o f his circumstances— now he is the one cheating

on Renee.

In the third and most unsettling act/phase o f Lost Highway, the fantasmatic

reconstruction o f Fred’s psychic trauma is, paradoxically, shown to be just as traumatic,

if not more so, than the initial trauma Fred incurs. Toward the end o f the second

act/phase, the very fantasy Fred’s psyche devises to suppress the trauma o f his alienated

identity and unrealized desire begins to reassume its original form, albeit in a different,

more nightmarish manner. That is, Fred’s attempt to escape his psychosis by delving

inward into his unconscious mind was, in a sort o f fatalistic way, bound to bring him
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even closer to his raw psychological distress. His repressed trauma is inescapable; it will

invariably rear its foul head into his conscious mind until he either confronts it sensibly

or goes insane. As the dark and bizarre third act/phase portrays, Fred is doomed to the

latter.

A deeper psychoanalytic understanding o f this return to an even more

concentrated form o f the traumatic memory can be gleaned from Jacques Lacan’s

interpretation o f Freud’s “‘Father, can’t you see I ’m burning” dream (Zi2ek 20). In this

dream, “the dreamer is awakened when the Real o f the horror encountered in the dream

(the dead son’s reproach) is more horrible than the awakened reality itself, so that the

dreamer escapes into reality in order to escape the Real encountered in the dream” (20).

Similarly, Fred’s escape into his fantasy world, despite temporarily mitigating distress,

eventually leads him to the a bsolute heart o f his psychic trauma—“the Real”— first in his

disturbing encounter at Andy’s house and, shortly thereafter, his ethereal yet ultimately

catastrophic sexual encounter with Alice in the desert. These final moments o f the

fantasy, when Fred (as Pete) confronts the traumatic “Real,” disrupt and unravel his

fantasy, transforming him back into Fred’s corporeal figure and thrusting him back into

his trauma, where he relives the traumatic memory he so desperately tried to repress. As

in film noir, the past is never over, inescapably haunting Fred’s present and future with

its miasma o f hopeless despair.

The first major indication o f the fantasmatic collapse occurs when Pete, prodded

by Alice into assaulting and robbing Andy so they can escape Mr. Eddy’s perverse
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control, enters Andy’s house and sees a pornographic film o f Renee projected onto a

screen. Pete is visibly perturbed by the sight of it, particularly because it is actually

Renee, not her fantasy manifestation Alice, who is on the screen engaged in rough sexual

intercourse. The scene is rendered particularly uncanny by the ominous, almost satanic

chanting music that accompanies the pom film. After accidentally killing Andy here (in

a grotesque death via coffee table), “Pete sees a picture of Mr. Eddy, Andy, Renee, and

Alice, a picture that indicates the breakdown of the barrier between fantasy and social

reality” (McGowan 170). Renee is slowly slipping into Fred’s fantasy, causing it to come

apart at the seams. After seeing the picture containing both Renee and Alice, Pete

suddenly succumbs to a throbbing headache and bloody nose. At this point, Pete goes

upstairs in Andy’s house, which inexplicably turns into a distorted hotel hallway full of

disorienting flashes o f light. Opening up room 26, Pete sees a visually warped Renee

having sex with an unknown man (who we later find out is Dick Laurent), the two of

them drenched in saturated red. Renee, still engaged in the sexual act, jeeringly asks,

“Did you want to talk to me? Did you want to ask w hyT\ referring to her infidelity and

prodding Fred’s deepest insecurities about Renee’s enigmatic desire. Opening the door

to room 26 opens the door to Fred’s traumatic Real, plunging him momentarily into the

twisted vision o f his most potent fears, anxieties, and psychological disturbances. During

this brief nightmare encounter with the horrific Real, German heavy metal band

Rammstein blasts from room 26, expressing what Slavoj li te k , using Lacanian

terminology, calls “the utmost jouissance”; that is, obscene pleasure, or as Lacan once
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described it, “backhanded enjoyment” (2izek 24; Lacan 112). Tinged with the jarring

sound o f “jouissance,” the scene takes on a deranged quality, expressing Fred’s horror in

the face of his wife’s fulfilled sexual desire, which, unable to fulfill it himself, he views

as obscene, backhanded sexual pleasure.

The final blow to Fred's fantasy—his sexual encounter with Alice in the desert—

throws him back into the reality o f his repressed memory, where he relives the psychic

trauma that he has been avoiding throughout most o f the film. Having driven to the

desert to ostensibly sell the stolen goods from Andy’s house, Pete and Alice, celestially

overexposed by the bright headlights o f their car, have sex on the ground. Their

passionate lovemaking, aptly set to the unearthly sound of This Mortal Coil’s rendition of

“Song to the Siren,” is at once euphoric and devastating— euphoric because it is the

closest Fred/Pete ever gets to truly fulfilling Renee’s/Alice’s desire, and devastating

because when they finish, Alice firmly whispers “You will never have me” into Pete’s

ear. At this point, Alice disappears forever into a nearby cabin and Fred reemerges in his

original corporeal form (although he is still sporting Pete’s clothing). Fantasy is by

nature false and illusive, so it is precisely when Pete/Fred comes closest to actualizing his

desire— eliminating Mr. Eddy, the obstruction between him and his object o f desire, and

fulfilling Alice’s/Renee’s sexual desire— that the fantasy abruptly ends. “Getting too

close to ‘having’ the fantasy object,” McGowan states, “triggers the dissolution of the

fantasy. Pete can only ‘have’ Alice insofar as he doesn’t, insofar as Mr. Eddy’s

prohibition bars him from completely enjoying her himself. This is a crucial scene in the
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film because it reveals so clearly the limitations o f fantasy” (172). Moreover, having

exceeded the restraints o f fantasy, Alice’s statement severs Fred from his fantasy because

it embodies the core trauma that haunts him: he will never truly know Renee’s desire. He

is forever severed from the deepest object o f his desire, by extension alienated from his

own desire, and, as a result, wholly alienated from his own sense o f self.

Inside the desert cabin that Alice enters at the end o f the fantasy phase, Fred finds

what the film’s credits call the “Mystery Man”—a devilish, Lynchian grotesque with no

eyebrows (implying a lack of expression and, therefore, mystery), a deathly white face,

slicked back black hair parted down the middle, wide prying eyes, and an aura o f

absolute evil. The Mystery Man is the only consistent character in the film, appearing in

all three o f Fred’s psychic phases at various times. Although it is easy to interpret him as

the personification o f pure evil (and on one level, he certainly is), within the context of

this analysis he embodies a much more specific psychological abstraction: that o f Fred’s

Real psychic trauma. As such, he is a part o f Fred’s psyche, embodying the horrific

effects o f obscure (and mysterious) desire that both shatters Fred’s sense of self and at the

same time relentlessly reminds him o f his profoundly fracturcd and alienated identity.

Somewhat like the troubling experiences Pete faces toward the end o f Fred’s fantasy, the

Mystery M an’s appearances are scattered manifestations o f the Real, o f Fred’s

inescapable traumatic scars. The Mystery Man, then, is also the materialization of noir

fatalism, propelling Fred toward the ultimate doom o f his repressed trauma.

In the first psychic phase, he sends (and, as later inferred, records) increasingly
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invasive and disturbing videotapes to the Madison household, the final tape showing Fred

wallowing in psychotic distress over Renee’s dismembered body. Although purely

symbolic, the Mystery Man s videotapes evoke his central function: to remind Fred of his

horrific Real trauma. The second time we see him is after Fred fails to sexually please

Renee; Fred, distraught over his failure to satiate or even understand his wife’s desire,

briefly sees the Mystery Man’s ghastly face superimposed over Renee’s and suffers a

paroxysm o f fear and panic. The final and most memorable encounter with the Mystery

Man in the first psychic phase occurs at Andy’s party, where he approaches Fred,

claiming that they have “met before” and that he is at Fred’s house at that very moment

because Fred welcomed him in. “It is not my custom to go where I am not wanted,” the

Mystery Man says from both the party and over the phone at Fred’s house. Lynch aurally

signals that we are in Fred's mind by muting all other sounds around them during this

exchange; when the Mystery Man walks off, the sound returns. The implication here is

that Fred has already “met” his Real psychic trauma after he failed to satisfy Renee’s

sexual desire (and saw the Mystery M an’s face superimposed over Renee’s), and that

Fred “invited” his neuroses and self-alienation into their house (and his psyche) when he

first experienced the traumatic obscurity o f Renee’s desire.

The Mystery Man only appears once in Fred’s second psychic phase, when he (as

Pete) receives an excessive, almost laughably passive-aggressive phone call from Mr.

Eddy. Handing the phone to the Mystery Man, the grotesque repeats to Pete what he said

to Fred at the party: “We’ve met before, haven’t w e?...At your house. Don’t you
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remember?” Fred’s Real psychic trauma resurfaces again with these echoed words, not

only confronting him with his disturbed psychological condition but also setting into

motion the dissolution o f his fantasy as Pete. It is precisely at this point in the film that

Fred’s fantasmatic reimagining o f himself begins to break down.

The Mysteiy M an’s function becomes more dynamic and apparent in the film’s

third psychic phase, when Fred circles back to the realm o f the repressed memories

surrounding his psychotic break. After Alice disappears into the desert cabin, Fred,

finding the Mystery Man in her place, asks “Where’s Alice?”, to which the Mystery Man

replies: “Alice who? Her name is Renee. I f she told you her name is Alice she’s lying.

And your name— what the fuck is your name!” While Fred desperately attempts to

sustain his failed fantasy, the Mystery Man vigorously imposes the reality o f Fred’s

circumstances onto him by outright denying the existence o f Alice, reinforcing Renee’s

existence, and demanding that Fred give up his fantasy and come to terms with his

alienated, disturbed self. The Mysteiy Man forces Fred to face the Real horrors of his

psychic trauma, chasing him away with a video camera—the ultimate weapon of

objectivity that negates Fred’s attempts to flee into the subjective realm o f fantasy.

No longer able to repress the reality o f his past, Fred is foisted back into his

trauma, where he navigates through the deranged memories leading up to his psychotic

break. He finds himself back in the hotel hallway where, as Pete, he inexplicably found

himself after seeing the picture o f both Alice and Renee. This time around, however, the

hotel is not spatially contorted, reeling, or steeped in flashing lights; instead, it is seen
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realistically as a memory o f Fred’s past—a past which occurred just before the opening

o f the film. Fred is reliving the memory in which he followed Renee to the hotel, found

out she was having sex with Dick Laurent in room 26, and, after she left the hotel,

savagely beat Laurent, stuck him in the trunk o f his car, drove out into the desert, and

murdered him. As we are still in Fred’s psyche, however, we perceive these resuscitated

traumatic memories with certain expressionistic flourishes; that is, we experience these

events as Fred remembers them, as he experienced them in his mind.

This accounts for the Mystery Man’s complicity in the murder o f Laurent, who

hands Fred the knife he uses to slit Laurent’s throat, shows the dying man a video o f him

(Laurent) and Renee fondling each other in Andy’s house while watching a snuff-porno

film, and then shoots Laurent’s brains out. When we see Fred standing above the corpse,

the Mystery Man is no longer there, again signaling that the Mystery Man is in fact part

o f Fred: his Real psychic trauma. The video the Mystery Man shows Laurent before

summarily executing him symbolically represents Fred’s paranoid vision o f what Renee’s

life might have been like when she was involved in Laurent's pornography business.

That is, the hyperbolically obscene vision evokes Fred’s delusional mania and neurotic

fixation on what Renee’s mysterious past could have been at its worst, not necessarily as

it actually was. It is appropriate, then, that the Mystery Man, as a stand-in for Fred’s

psychic trauma, expresses this paranoid delusion to Laurent and kills him. It is Fred’s

psychic trauma, his inability to know Renee’s desire or please her as Laurent can, which

drives him to murder the old man. The morning after this incident— the actual incident,
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that is, not the memory of it— is the start of the film. In this manner, the film circles back

on itself, moving from trauma to fantasy and, inevitably, back to the repressed trauma.

Like most o f Lynch’s films, Lost Highway is deliberately labyrinthine and

hermeneutically evasive, preventing any one interpretation from staking claim to the end-

all and be-all solution to his cinematic riddles. In postmodern fashion, what matters for

Lynch is not finding the ‘true’ meaning and intent o f the film but rather interpreting the

film subjectively and carving out individual meaning from the semiotic maze he presents.

However, by analyzing Lost Highway as a film noir expression o f how the mind copes

with severe psychological trauma by unconsciously repressing and reimagining it as

fantasy, the film addresses the psyche’s resemblance to the film medium itself. Fred’s

fantasmatic reconstruction o f his dire mental and emotional circumstances—his acute

neurotic crisis o f oblique desire and unstable identity— likens the unconscious mind’s

complex inner workings to that o f cinematic constructs, particularly that o f film noir. His

deepest fears and desires are displaced onto the fantasy world of noir, and as he navigates

the internal dreamscape of this world he encounters those same fears and desires

manifested in different noir forms and archetypes, ostensibly distinct and separate from

himself. As the Lynchian paradox goes, the uncanny recesses of our unconscious minds,

exposed naked and raw, emerge from the culturally banal.

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Chapter III:

Circumventing Existential and Psychic Trauma Through a

Hollywood Noir Fantasy in M ulholland D rive

Widely lauded as Lynch’s magnum opus and a masterpiece o f 21st century

American cinema, Mulholland Drive is a visually stunning and tonally unsettling

postmodern neo- and meta-noir that contains all o f the central elements o f Lynchian noir:

a convoluted, multilayered narrative rife with symbolism, a looming sense o f dread and

uncertainty, an uncanny confluence o f the hyper-banal and the ultra-bizarre, a doomed

protagonist in the throes o f an identity crisis and caught in a web o f traumatic desire, a

labyrinthine plot at once sublime and macabre that spirals inexorably out o f control,

departures from traditional causality and logical expectations, and a postmodern, meta-

textual implementation o f classic film noir tropes and themes that he both eulogizes and

subverts. Given the glitzy and facile tagline “A love story in the city o f dreams,” the film

is also a corrosive meta-Hollywood experience that comments on the nature o f film, the

delusive trappings of the LA studio system, and the intoxicating desire for fame and

stardom that gives rise to all sorts o f crazy fantasies in those desperately hoping to make

it big in Tinseltown. As the film explores, the lofty hopes and starry-eyed dreams

enkindled by the promise of Hollywood prestige can quickly devolve into disillusioning
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nightmares that push people flailing over the edge into acute melancholia, existential

despair, insanity, murder, and suicide. Like Blue Velvet and Lost Highway, Mulholland

Drive masterfully translates and symbolically expresses the unconscious psyche and the

psychic mechanisms it employs to cope with trauma into a wildly moving, breathtakingly

shot, and utterly haunting cinematic experience that finds Lynch not only at his most

postmodern, but at his best.

The origins of Mulholland Drive are a testament to Lynch’s surrealist approach to

cinema and brilliant creative ability to follow his intuition, to trust the ideas that emerge

from his unconscious and organically pursue them until they are consummately

actualized. Originally filmed as a TV pilot that network executives ended up rejecting,

Lynch significantly expanded the pilot into a feature-length film, turning an open-ended

story into a closed yet hermeneutically ripe and elusive narrative that somehow comes

together perfectly. Densely layered and intricately designed, the film in no way feels like

it was salvaged from a canned pilot; rather, it feels like the film was always intended to

develop into what it would eventually become. O f this process, Lynch stated, “One

night, I sat down, the ideas came in, and it was a most beautiful experience. Everything

was seen from a different angle. Everything was then restructured, and we did additional

shooting. Now, looking back, I see that [the film] always wanted to be this way. It just

took this strange beginning to cause it to be what it is” (Macaulay). Borne of a few

fragmented images that leapt from deep within and jostled their way into his conscious

mind—“a sign at night, headlights on the sign and a trip up a road”— Lynch grapples
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with these images and follows their latent significations with an almost spiritual devotion

(Rodley 270). “[They] make me dream,” Lynch asserts, “and these images are like

magnets and they pull other ideas to them” until the composite o f his reveries coalesce

into a fully real ized vision. “Like a string of pearls,” he says, “the ideas came” (Catching

the Big Fish 114). This meditative navigation from the bottom up, this total creative

surrender to the derivative residue of the sphinxlike unconscious and its rapt visions— all

of this culminates in the film’s dreamlike tonality and aesthetic frisson o f ineffable awe,

saturnine angst, and biting pathos.

Much like Fred Madison in Lost Highway, the protagonist in MulhollandDrive,

Diane Selwyn, is a thoroughly broken and disillusioned individual whose thwarted

desires lead to a traumatic cognitive dissonance between her real identity and the

fantasized identity she so desperately dreams to be— her ideal ego. Unable to cope with

her devastating failure as an aspiring Hollywood starlet and the bitter, ultimately

homicidal dissolution of her love affair with Camilla Rhodes, a sultry femme fatale,

Diane finds herself in an existential and psychological crisis that shatters her perception

of herself and her social reality. “Diane sees things she wants but she can’t get them,”

Lynch stated in an interview, “It’s all there— the party— but she’s not invited. And it gets

to her” (Rodley 271). Embittered by her impossible desire to have Camilla’s love and

successful acting career, she orders a hit man to murder her. Jilted and racked with guilt

and despair, her unconscious psyche constructs a noir fantasy to protect her fragile,

maladaptive ego from her bleak outer circumstances, the trauma o f unfulfilled desire, and
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her oppressive conscience. Diane’s tragic and pathetic downfall is as poignantly

beautiful as it is uncompromisingly dark and disturbing, and Angelo Badalamenti’s

hypnotic score, somehow both haunting and sublime, suffuses the film and cathartically

washes over spectators like a fleeting gust of wind howling through an ineffably sinister

LA back alley.

Within her fantasy, Diane— like Jeffery Beaumont and Fred Madison— imagines

herself as her ideal ego: a spunky, sunshiny, good-natured, and fundamentally innocent

woman, Betty Elms, whose consummate acting skills promises her a fruitful career as an

up-and-coming Hollywood starlet. As Betty, Diane’s unconscious psyche reconstructs

the circumstances o f her life to rationalize her failures, justify her murderous act, assuage

her pangs o f conscience with wish-fulfillments, and finally attain the desires she was

unable to fulfill in reality. Camilla, Diane’s central object of desire, is repurposed as

Rita, an amnesiac woman who, despite not knowing who she is, is somehow wrapped in a

noir mystery involving a botched execution, a bag loaded with cash, a strange blue key,

and a dark conspiracy that reaches all the way up to the top echelons o f Hollywood

society. Betty/Diane and Rita/Camilla embark on a Nancy Drew-like investigation to

unravel the enigma o f Rita’s identity and get to the bottom o f the sinister situation in

which she’s somehow immersed—a key trope in Lynchian noir. Throughout the fantasy,

Lynch alludes to classic films noir like Sunset Boulevard (1950), Vertigo (1958), and

Gilda (1946), appropriating and subverting film noir topoi to explore how the

unconscious psyche distorts repressed trauma by wringing it through the familiar

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cinematic language o f noir. Thus, what is ostensibly a straightforward and benign

investigation spirals unsparingly downward until the noir fantasy cannot sustain itself

against the repressed trauma which relentlessly asserts itself. The closer they come to

unveiling the mysteiy surrounding Rita and the more Diane’s desires are actualized

through Betty, the closer she comes to encountering the trauma that her fantasy tries but

ultimately fails to circumvent.

Despite its baffling narrative contortions and serpentine plot line peppered with

seemingly unrelated vignettes, Mulholland Drive is generally structured in the same mold

as Lost Highway: it is a three-act film that corresponds with the three respective psychic

phases that Diane undergoes. This is reinforced by Lynch himself, whose

characteristically enigmatic synopsis reads as follows: “Part one: she found herself inside

the perfect mystery. Part two: a sad illusion. Part three: love” (Rodley 266). The first and

longest act/phase presents Diane’s fantasmatic reimagining o f her identity and trauma;

the second act/phase depicts her encounter with the Real as her trauma intrudes into her

crumbling fantasy; and the third act/phase reveals her bleak outer reality and the

traumatic encounters that triggered her psychological break and subsequent escape into

fantasy.

Significantly, these three acts/phases are preceded by a short but symbolically

crucial opening shot: the jitterbug dance sequence. In musical parlance, this sequence is

the film’s motif: it sets the tone, is bloated with signification that runs throughout the

narrative, and proves vital to the film’s central concerns. It’s worth noting that this
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sequence serves a similar purpose as the opening sequences in Blue Velvet and Lost

Highway, both o f which are also highly symbolic microcosms of the films’ themes and

the thematic concerns of Lynchian noir as a whole. In Mulholland Drive, lively swing

music plays as a bevy o f dancers dressed in vintage 1950s apparel twirl about in pairs,

capering in and out of the shot as they gyrate to the jubilant tune. Superimposed over a

lurid purple background, they drift across the screen, overlap, fade in and abruptly cut out

as they dance the jitterbug with a frenetic dynamism that defies spatial and temporal

logic. Some pairs are enlarged and silhouetted completely black as if cut from the purple

backdrop, and in these silhouettes more dancers sway and whirl frantically in and out of

the cut-out dancers. On one level, this signifies a fluid ontological perspective and

unstable sense o f identity; as they swing to and fro, they inhabit and oscillate between

different corporeal outlines. As film critic Martha P. Nochimson claims, the doubling

and tripling of the dancing couples creates “a doppelganger effect that prefigures the

film’s later development” (167). On another level, the unreal exposition of this

anachronistic sequence is chaotic, visually overwhelming, and overtly fantastical, all of

which foreshadow Diane's ensuing flight into unconscious fantasy.

The sequence ends with a superimposed, overexposed image o f Betty (Diane’s

idealized self) beaming with sheer delight as she stands victorious between an equally

elated elderly couple. Disembodied voices chant “Betty!” and boisterously applaud as

the superimposed image of Betty and the elderly couple blur in and out, filling the screen

until it blows out in a flash of blinding white light. This elderly couple figures
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prominently in two other scenes in the film, but suffice it to say that in this moment they

represent Diane’s/Betty’s innocence and desire for success. She seems to have won a

jitterbug contest and, as the elderly couple crown her, she’s visibly proud as can be. As

later intimated, this sequence represents Diane’s fantasmatically distorted memory o f her

adolescent jitterbug feat, an event that gave her a taste o f glory, established her deep-

seated desire to become a performer, and eventually inspired her to moVe from her small

hometown to Hollywood in search of celebrity stardom.

Before any lucid explication of Diane’s fantasy can be properly explicated, a

more specific understanding of her trauma and the incidents leading up to and

precipitating it must be ascertained. That is, a comprehensive analytic grasp o f the first

and second acts/phases necessitates a meticulous examination o f the third act/phase.

Unlike Lost Highway, which at least partially reveals the protagonist’s outer reality and

source o f trauma in the beginning, Lynch does not give any indication o f what is real and

what is fantasized in Mulholland Drive until around two hours into the film; spectators

are left completely adrift in a delirious dreamlike realm devoid of any grounding

signposts or epistemological fulcrum from which to decipher the unfolding events. This

unorthodox narrative structure may be thoroughly transgressive, but for this very reason

it packs an acutely disorienting punch: with our investment in Betty’s character

development and Rita’s mystery built up to a vibratory crescendo, Lynch provocatively

yanks the rug out from beneath us to reveal that nothing is what it seemed, jarring us out

of our entrenched expectations and leaving us utterly taken aback. Everything is

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subverted and the world we were so thoroughly immersed in is turned on its head: the

tone abruptly shifts, identities change, the narrative becomes fragmented and mercurial,

plotlines are nonchalantly dropped, and Diane’s memory of her traumatic encounters

rearf ts ugly head.

If the third act/phase exposes Diane’s raw, palpitating trauma, it does so by

harshly emphasizing her severe cognitive dissonance between the deep-seated desire

established in the jitterbug sequence— her past—and the series o f emotional catastrophes,

interpersonal failures, and existential disillusionments we witness in her present life.

Moreover, the ambiguity of the jitterbug sequence as a symbolic expression o f Diane’s

intense psychic desire is fleshed out in this portion of the film, further accentuating the

incongruity between her tragically unsuccessful reality and the life she so desperately

wishes to have. When her fantasy finally comes apart at the seams and collapses, a

haggard looking Diane wakes up in her bedroom, walks out into her sparsely furnished

apartment, and broods on the scarring events that led to the wretched existence she now

lives. Although this portion of the film is Diane’s reality, it is filtered through her

subjective faculties; that is, as she shuffles about her apartment looking like the

embodiment o f melancholia, the fractured narrative fluctuates restlessly through her

traumatic memories.

Piecing together these memories, a coherent story emerges that sheds light on the

jitterbug sequence and, more importantly, the fantasy she unconsciously constructs to

achieve her thwarted desires and escape her trauma. While they’re having sex on Diane’s
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couch, Camilla says “You drive me wild” and then, in a sadistic and femme fatale’ish

about-face, pushes Diane away and coldly states, “We shouldn’t do this anymore.” Quite

literally in the heat o f their erotic affair, Camilla abandons Diane in a cold-blooded,

almost taunting manner. We then flash to a movie studio; Camilla and Diane are both

actors in a film being directed by Adam Kesher. a hip young filmmaker who has the hots

for Camilla. H e’s given her the lead role and relegated Diane to a minor bit part. As

they’re shooting a love scene, Kesher ‘directs’ Camilla how to kiss, clearly making the

moves on her; he clears the set before kissing her, although Camilla requests that Diane

stay and watch, which, much to her dismay, she does. As Camilla kisses Kesher, she

makes knowing eye contact with Diane, who returns the glance with a glowering

expression o f utter miseiy and humiliation. Once again, Camilla is subtly yet viciously

taunting Diane, whetting her desire for her while rubbing in her face that she can no

longer have her. Moreover, Camilla’s acting career is a success while Diane’s is

mediocre, partly because Camilla, unlike Diane, is willing and able to use her sensuality

to advance her career. The studio scene is juxtaposed with a shot o f Diane in severe

emotional anguish as she aggressively masturbates while sobbing on the same couch that

Camilla callously broke up with her on. The axis around which all o f these memories

revolve is desire and the inherent lack it creates in the subject; as the embodiment of

Diane’s desire and traumatic lack, Camilla is central to every scene in the third psychic

phase. It’s no wonder, then, that Lynch tersely labeled the final act “love”—the most

potent manifestation o f desire.

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While these encounters are most definitely traumatic, they all coalesce when

Diane receives a phone call from Camilla inviting her to a posh party at Adam Kesher’s

house on Mulholland Drive. As she’s on route in the back o f a limo that Camilla sent for

her, Diane looks confused but expectant; the invitation gives her a glimmer o f hope that

perhaps Camilla regrets breaking up with her and wants to continue their love affair.

When the limo stops abruptly alongside Mulholland Drive, Diane says with

consternation, “ What are you doing? We don’t stop here.” As we will see, this line and

the shot’s composition proves significant in Diane’s fantasmatic reimagining of her

traumatic circumstances. Here, however, the limo stops before arriving at its destination

because Camilla is waiting in the woods lining the road. She holds Diane’s hand and

seductively guides her through a mystically wooded shortcut to Kesher’s house, both

women flirtatiously smiling as Badalamenti’s score plays ethereal, ecstatic strings—

Diane is visibly on cloud nine. For a brief moment, it looks as if her troubles are over;

she appears to have regained Camilla’s love and resolved the traumatic lack— the

impossibility o f achieving her desire—that Camilla’s cold shoulder represents.

However, when they arrive at the party Kesher, champagne flutes in hand,

approaches the two women and quickly disillusions Diane o f her consolatory hope.

“Well, here’s to love,” Kesher softly says to Camilla as the two clink glasses, making it

instantly clear to Diane that she’s the pitiful third wheel in the trio. Camilla literally and

figuratively led her up the garden path. Just as her dreams were beginning to realign, to

well back up as the devastating loss o f her object o f desire seemed to be once again
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within reach, she is thrust discordantly back into the harrowing nightmare of

abandonment and failure— of lack. Diane’s fleeting wish-fulfillment, the sudden yet

short-lived liberation from her trauma immediately followed by its gut-wrenching

reemergence, leaves her psychologically and emotionally whiplashed. What follows over

the course o f that night only exacerbates this distressing experience and jars to the surface

the traumatic dissonance between Diane’s imagined perception o f herself and her

inability to achieve the desire o f the symbolic Other, or the desire dictated by

(Hollywood) society. The violently abrupt clash between Diane’s swelling desire as she

walks up the path with Camilla and the harsh reality that greets her once they get to the

party results in the collapse o f her ideal ego in the shadow o f her failure to fulfill the

desire o f the Other: to have love and societal success, or, in a word, to be (impossibly)

whole.

At Kesher’s dinner party, which is crowded with the Hollywood elite, we learn

Diane’s backstory and witness her total humiliation. Meek and lacking confidence,

Diane tells Kesher’s mother Coco and the rest o f the table that she came to Hollywood

from a small town, Deep River, after winning a Jitterbug contest. “That sort o f led to

acting,” she nervously tells Coco, “Or, you know, wanting to act.” When her aunt died

and left her some money she moved down to LA to pursue this desire and met Camilla on

the set o f a (fictional) film called The Sylvia North Story. O f this film, Diane says, “I

wanted the lead so bad. Anyway, Camilla got the part. The director, Bob Brooker, he

didn’t think so much o f me. Anyway, that’s when we became friends. She helped me,
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getting some parts in some o f her films.” Clearly, Diane’L career has not turned out as

she imagined it would be; Hollywood execs like Brooker don’t see her as the gloriously

shining star that she sees herself as in the Jitterbug sequence. By the look on her face and

her demeanor, it’s almost as if she’s realizing how pathetic she sounds as these words

leave her lips, a feeling that’s heightened by Coco’s condescending reactions and visage

as well as the pregnant silence of everyone else at the table. “I see,” Coco says as she

patronizingly pats Diane’s hand as if to say, ‘I’ve heard this pitiful story a million times

from a million different would-be actresses; you’re nothing special.’ It’s hard not to

cringe with fremdschiimen as Diane’s deepest dreams are crushed in front of the veiy

social milieu o f which she so desperately wishes to be a part.

Diane’s humiliation is aggravated by Camilla, who seems to take particular

pleasure in hurting her. Throughout the dinner party scene, Camilla coquettishly dotes on

Kesher and shoots knowing, deprecating glances at Diane that both pique and rebuff her

desire. This is reinforced when a modish blonde woman approaches Camilla, they

whisper something to each other, derisively look at Diane, and then kiss. Immediately

after this, Kesher and Camilla announce that they are engaged. It’s as if Camilla is

gaslighting Diane, performing a ridiculing spectacle o f desire, enjoyment, and passive-

aggressive sexual rejection in front of her. As this scene painfully evokes, “Diane

remains within the deadlock o f desire: she cannot attain the elusive enjoyment that her

objects seems to embody, and she cannot cast the object aside” (McGowan 204). As

Diane’s object of desire, Camilla is appropriately enigmatic: desire is inherently uncertain

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and impossible to achieve. Whatever her motive, Camilla visibly gets to Diane, who

stifles back tears of disappointment, grief, and ignominy. Given her obscure sensual

deceit and sadistic schadenfreude, it’s no wonder Diane casts Camilla in the role of

mysterious femme fatale in her fantasy.

Following this traumatic encounter, we see Diane in Winky’s diner hiring an

unkempt hit man to execute Camilla. She gives him a black leather purse full of cash for

his services, which he tells her will be completed when he gives her a blue key.

However, even Camilla’s death is not enough to negate her trauma; indeed, it’s no

coincidence that Diane’s psychological breakdown and fantasmatic flight into the depths

of her unconscious mind occur precisely when she finds out that Camilla has successfully

been killed. Her death fails to deliver Diane from her psychic anguish because Camilla

was only a symptomatic symbol, an arbitrary signifier signaling a more abstract and

deeply-rooted psychological referent: the unrelenting pull o f desire and the trauma it

induces in the intrinsically lacking subject. Regardless of eliminating the psychic

signifier, her trauma and repressed neuroses—the signified— remain firmly intact in her

unconscious mind and ultimately manifest in more raw hallucinatory forms that impel her

to take her own life.

Having ascertained the circumstances and traumatic encounters precipitating

Diane’s escape inward, we may return to the beginning o f the film— to the first

act/psychic phase— and elaborate on the unconscious mechanisms that Diane’s

psychic apparatus employs to reimagine and circumvent her trauma. The shot
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immediately following the vibrant and spirited jitterbug sequence is diametrically

opposed in tone: the swing music and jovial clapping fade and give way to a

hollow silence punctuated by tense and distressed heavy breathing. This brief

scene is shot from the perspective o f the person breathing, Diane, as she peers

fearfully around her darkened bedroom and drops into her blood-red pillow.

Many critics and spectators point to this shot as a major indication that film’s

following two hours—the first and second acts/phases— are a prolonged dream

sequence that takes place in Diane’s sleeping mind— and they are not wrong.

However, if the relationship between dreams and fantasies is not fleshed out, this

interpretive approach risks being simplistic if not mildly reductive to the loaded

signification o f this section of the film. In his essay “The Creative Writer and

Daydreaming,” Freud considers “the relation between fantasies and dreams”:

At night we are visited by desires that we are ashamed of and must

conceal from ourselves, that have for this very reason been repressed,

pushed into the unconscious. Such repressed desires and their derivatives

can be allowed to express themselves only in a grossly distorted form.

When one scientific research had succeeded in clarifying the phenomenon

o f dream distortion there was no longer any difficulty in recognizing that

night-dreams were wish-fulfillments, just like our daydreams, the fantasies

so familiar to us all. (29-30)

With this in mind, it is immaterial whether Diane can be said to be explicitly dreaming.
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What’s more important here is that the pillow shot signals a shift into an unconscious

register o f Diane’s mind in which her repressed impulses become distorted, reimagined,

and repurposed around her wish-fulfilling fantasy. In other words, it doesn’t really

matter whether we as spectators are experiencing Diane’s night-dream or her wish-

fulfilling fantasy. What ultimately matters is that they both express the same thing: her

unconscious psyche’s attempts to reconstruct the traumatic circumstances o f her outward

reality in order to fulfill her desires and evade her fears, neuroses, and guilt. Given this,

the pillow shot symbolically communicates a shift into a dreamlike state (not necessarily

an overt dream) in which the spectator is privy to Diane’s subjective psychological

perspective.

Moving into the dreamlike and thoroughly noirish fantasy realm o f the first

act/phase, Diane’s pillow dissolves into the pitch black nighl as a lone limousine weaves

its way through the eerie LA hills, the glare of its headlights engulfed in a vast and

oppressive darkness as Badalamenti’s foreboding overture plays. As if moving forward

into the unknown depths of Diane’s psyche, the limousine is meandering its way through

the titular Mulholland Drive, an old route that Lynch describes as “a mysterious road

with many curves in it” (Rodley 269). It is befitting, then, that the film is named after

such a road. Rita, looking chic and dispassionate, sits alone in the back o f the limousine

as she pensively stares out the window; it seems she’s going somewhere important, and

as we later find out, she’s carrying a black purse full o f cash, although we never find out

where she was headed, why she was going there, where she got the money, or what
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potentially shady dealings she was involved with. In fact, at this point in the fantasy we

don’t even know her real name; only later, when she loses her identity, does she assume

the name Rita after seeing a poster of Rita Hayworth in Gilda. Ultimately, however, her

true identity in the fantasy is immaterial, as Diane wants her to be a helpless enigma, a

woman in trouble who desperately needs her support, assistance, comfort, and most

importantly, love.

To achieve this result, Diane incorporates the amnesia device into her fantasy—a

well-known trope in the film noir lexicon. Pulling over on a particularly windy stretch of

Mulholland Drive, the chauffeur whips out a pistol, points it at Rita, and just as he is

about to assassinate her, two drag-racing cars full o f shrieking teenagers crash into the

limo. Rita is the only survivor, though she’s suffered head trauma and has amnesia. Far

from banal, Lynch embraces the hackneyed amnesia cliche in postmodern fashion,

reconceptualizing the cinematic device as a vehicle through which to explore how the

unconscious psyche appropriates the language o f myth and popular culture, in this case

film noir, into its fantasmatic constructs. As Freud opines, fantasized material “has its

origin in the popular treasury of myth, legend, and fairy tale” and “correspond[s] to the

distorted remains o f the wishful fantasies o f whole nations” (“The Creative Writer” 32).

As an American woman, Diane’s unconscious mind has been molded around and fixed to

the “wishful fantasies” o f America and American culture, of which Hollywood cinema

and film noir has contributed a great deal. Moreover, as an aspiring actress, she is

particularly steeped in the “popular treasury” of myths and legends that have come out of
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Hollywood, whether in famous films or the lore surrounding the LA studio system during

the Golden Age o f Hollywood. Diane’s fantasy reflects this as it distorts her repressed

desires and fears into more manageable forms by appropriating all manner o f topoi and

archetypes from the film noir canon as well as the broader Hollywood repertoire.

This is most apparent in Diane’s fantasmatic manifestation of Rita/Camilla, whom

she reimagines as an amalgamation o f the enigmatic femine fatale (a la Rita Hayworth in

Gilda) and the amnesiac whose condition veils a sinister secret. Within the fantasy,

Rita’s secret remains a mystery; given the context o f reality, however, Rita’s secret— her

identity— represents Diane’s repressed identity and trauma: her torturous desire,

oppressive guilt, and the scarring memories o f her existential failures. The first

indication of this is imbedded in the botched assassination and car crash scene that

induces Rita’s amnesia and initiates the noir fantasy. The dark tone and oblique

circumstances surrounding pre-amnesia Rita—her obscure intentions, her purse full of

money, and most o f all the motives behind her attempted execution— anchor her to the

femme fatale archetype and swathe her soon-to-be-obliterated identity in a vaguely

ominous aura o f danger and menace. Diane is inverting all of the negative associations

she has with Camilla, including the severe guilt she has over her successful assassination,

into external causes and dark forces outside of her control. The trauma surrounding Rita

is projected outward as a vast underground network o f noirish conspirators, assassins, and

hidden entities. Thus, within this paranoiac vision Diane can cast aside all culpability

and vindicate herself of her wrongdoings.

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The car crash fulfills two impulses: it absolves Diane o f the guilt attached to her

hired assassination and renders her impossible object o f desire powerless, helplessly

available, and completely dependent on Betty/Diane. If the failed assassination o f Rita is

the wish-fulfillment o f Diane’s guilty conscience, the car crash accomplishes what she

was hoping the hit on Camilla would fulfill but failed to do so; i.e., allay the fiercely

traumatic pull o f desire. Rita/CamilJa is turned into a blank slate onto which Betty/Diane

can project her desire, and because Rita/Camilla cannot rebuff her in this state,

Betty/Diane can have complete control over her without any of the negative mnemonic

associations linked to her. “The attractiveness of fantasy,” McGowan opines, “stems

from the ability to del iver the goods—to provide the subject with a narrative in which she

can access the inaccessible object-cause o f desire” (205). Indeed, in a manner by now

distinctive to Lynchian noir, Diane l’antasmatically rewrites the narrative o f her life, most

notably her traumatic encounters, to gain access to “the goods” she could not attain in

reality— her desire for love and social success.

Rita’s limo ride down Mulholland Drive, for instance, is a shot-for-shot revision

of Diane’s trip down Mulholland Drive on her way to Adam Kesher’s party, a traumatic

incident that directly led to her psychic breakdown. Rita even repeats what Diane said

when the limo prematurely stopped: “What are you doing? We don’t stop here.” Not

only does Diane’s fantasy reconstruct this scenario so that Rita/Camilla is the victim of

the trauma, it also externalizes the trauma, re-envisioning the explosive, devastating

emotional anguish that Diane felt that night as an explosive, devastating car crash. In
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other words, in typical Lynchian noir fashion, Diane’s fantasy implements dream-logic

and assumes the cinematic language o f noir to symbolically express her psychic trauma.

In dreams and fantasies alike, shattering heartbreak is readily transposed into a fiery car

accident. The car crash, then, signals Diane’s return to the repressed, although this time

she reconceptualizes the repressed trauma as something completely detached from her

own emotions and actions.

After Rita leaves the crash wreckage and wanders down to Sunset Boulevard in a

disoriented haze, Lynch cuts to a seemingly unrelated vignette o f two men sitting in

Winky’s diner during the day. One of the men, Dan, is nervously telling his friend (or

potentially his therapist). Herb, about a recurring nightmare he’s been having in which

he’s sitting in the same diner booth they’re currently sitting in. As he describes his

nightmare, the camera floats disconcertingly between the two:

It’s kind o f half-night, but it looks just like this, except for the light, and

I ’m scared like 1 can’t tell you. O f all people, you’re standing right over

there, by that counter. You’re in both dreams, and you’re scared. I get

even more frightened when I see how afraid you are and...then I realize

what it is. There’s a man in back o f this place. He’s the one who’s doing

it. I can see him through the wall. I can see his face. I hope that I never see

that face ever outside of a dream.

After hearing this, Herb decides it’s time to do some reality testing. He goes up to the

counter to pay, inadvertently mimicking Dan’s description o f him in the dream; Dan
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looks over his shoulder at him standing there looking perturbed, and in a thoroughly

uncanny moment we see a horrified expression come across Dan’s face: his nightmare

has become a reality. Herb takes Dan out back behind the restaurant to face his fears, and

just as they are approaching the dumpster, a grotesque, ghoulish bum appears.

Confronted with the “man in back o f this place.. .outside o f a dream,” Dan is literally

scared to death.

While not overtly related to the plot, this horrific episode is thematically and

tonally consistent with Diane’s storyline and functions as a condensed metaphor for her

Real confrontation with her repressed trauma. The scene sets viewers on edge, rattles

them out of normative causality, and blurs the line between reality and dreams, waking

life and the dark fetid depths o f the unconscious mind. By presenting us with falsities,

Lynch implies that what we are seeing cannot be trusted, that the film’s other ostensible

realities can be shattered just as effortlessly as this one. What is in one moment a

supposed reality can easily be subverted and warped into artifice or fallacy, rendering

reality inherently fragile and unstable. Fully assuming the tone of film noir, reality itself

is haunted by an essential uncertainty. Just as Dan’s perception o f reality is quickly

problematized and transformed into the very nightmare he was attempting to dispel by

discussing it with Herb, Diane’s fantasmatically constructed ideal reality— i.e., her life as

Betty—becomes increasingly problematic and destabilized as her fantasy begins to

buckle under the weight of her trauma. Dan’s attempt to squelch his symptomatic dread

by recreating the scenario in what he believes to be reality only leads him closer to his
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repressed trauma; his efforts to escape this psychic trauma only bring him face to face

with it in its most intense and damaging manifestation. Likewise, the more Diane

attempts to fantasmatically repress and reimagine the fears and desires associated with

her trauma, the closer she comes to them in their most raw and psychologically harmful

forms.

This scene, then, is a vital microcosm o f Diane’s situation that represents the

inevitable failure o f repression and the inability to escape trauma through fantasy. Like

Frank in Blue Velvet or the Mysteiy Man in Lost Highway, the grotesque bum lurking

behind Winky’s diner symbolize Diane’s Real trauma: the ineffable root o f her repressed

fear, desire, and guilt in their primal psychic constitutions. In other words, the bum

stands in for her deep-seated fear o f failure and abandonment that is inextricably tied to

her desire for success and love, as well as the emptiness and anguish derived from her

attempt to eliminate the apparent source of her trauma. Given the nature her trauma, it’s

appropriate that her mind associates it with a grisly bum: the embodiment o f failure and

loss. The bum lives behind a dumpster in the back o f the diner, further anchoring the

figure to the concealed unconscious and signaling its function as a repressed, negative

psychic force. The bum will figure more prominently toward the end o f the film as

Diane’s fantasy crumbles and she encounters her trauma in the realm o f the Real.

If the bum represents Diane’s trauma, then Dan represents Diane as she attempts

to free herself from her trauma but in doing so finds herself inexorably impelled toward

it. As Dan says to Herb, he brought him to Winky’s “to get rid o f this godawful feeling”:
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the symptom induced by his root trauma. Ultimately, Dan encounters the source o f that

feeling, becomes overwhelmed by it, and dies as a result. His horrific encounter

symbolically foreshadows Diane's Real encounter with her repressed trauma and

subsequent death. It’s worth noting that the name Diane is only a couple o f letters

removed from Dan, linking the two characters and suggesting that Dan is a symbolic

stand-in for Diane within her fantasy. Moreover, Diane sees Dan in her waking reality

during a particularly traumatic moment: when she is hiring the hit man to kill Camilla.

Sitting in the same booth in which Dan sits in her fantasy, she sees him standing at the

cash register just as Herb does in Dan s dream. They make eye contact right as she’s

arranging to have her lover murdered, fixing him to her memory of that indelible, guilt­

laden moment. Just as Dan s nightmare becomes a reality when he sees Herb standing at

the cash register, Diane’s reality is irrevocably turned into a waking nightmare when she

sees Dan standing at the cash register. Thus, Diane’s unconscious draws Dan from this

traumatic memory and imbeds him within her fantasy as a man disturbed by the

“godawful feeling” embodied by the bum.

The following scene introduces us to another distinctly Lynchian figure, Mr.

Roque, a dysmorphic Hollywood mogul who dwells in a dark, windowless office. The

ominous music, perturbingly bleak mis-en-scene, and taciturn yet menacing aura

surrounding Mr. Roque suggest that he is a singularly powerful figure who controls

everything and eveiyone in Hollywood behind closed doors. He sits in almost total

isolation behind a glass wall in his vacuum-like office throughout the fantasy,
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symbolically associating him with the bum skulking behind Winky’s diner. Dan’s

description o f the bum applies just as well to Mr. Roque: “There’s a man in back o f this

place. He’s the one who’s doing it. I can see him through the wall.” Both figures are

remote, solitary, hidden, and yet they both exert an almost metaphysical authority over

people.

For all his cryptic malice, however, Mr. Roque holds a positive function within

Diane’s fantasy. By fabricating this absurd, thoroughly noirish conspiratorial Hollywood

magnate, Diane can externalize her existential failures—her moral, interpersonal, and

aspirational losses— as something outside o f herself and beyond her control. In the

fantasy, Diane’s failed acting career and the guilt she feels for having Camilla murdered

are projected outward onto Mr. Roque and his underground network o f mobsters,

assassins, corrupt executives, etc. It is Mr. Roque, not Diane, who is trying to kill

Rita/Camilla, just as it is Mr. Roque who extorts Adam Kesher to hire another lead

actress in his film. At the same time, in his efforts to assassinate Rita/Camilla, Mr.

Roque turns her into an amnesiac, eradicating her identity and free will and rendering her

helpless, imperiled, and dependent upon Betty/Diane. Under these precisely constructed

circumstances, Diane, as Betty, is completely innocent, purged of her guilt and

inadequacies, and Camilla, as Rita, is detached from her negative qualities and

transformed into a shell of herself, an object o f desire that is completely open to Diane.

Following the Winky’s diner scene, we see an enigmatic chain o f nefarious phone

calls that come from the top echelons o f society down to the bottom. Mr. Roque initiates
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the communique, phoning a middleman seated in a lavish hotel with the laconic message:

“The girl is still missing.” His message is then relayed to a hairy-armed man in a squalid

motel, who in turn calls a final mysterious telephone that sits under a red lampshade,

unanswered. In the lived reality of the third act/psychic phase, this mysterious final

phone is shot-for-shot the same phone that Diane answers when Camilla calls to invite

her to Kesher’s dinner party—her most scarring traumatic encounter. This visually

signals that the Roque chain call ends with reality attempting to intrude on Diane’s

fantasy by reminding her of both her trauma and her complicity in Camilla’s

assassination. The call between two realms remains unanswered, however, allowing

Diane to elude these harsh realities and remain comfortably in her fantasy. Unanswered,

the conspiratorial call keeps Diane’s paranoiac vision of Roque’s sinister machinations

intact; for now, dark outside forces are attempting to find the girl who’s “still missing”—

Camilla— so they can finish her off.

Having dodged that reality check, we are introduced to Diane’s pure and peppy

ideal ego, Betty, who enters the fantasy in a befitting manner: awestruck and open-

mouthed, she’s just arrived in LA and is leaving the airport with the smiling elderly

couple from the jitterbug sequence. As they usher her out of the airport and shower her

with high hopes and confidence in her acting career, the two-dimensionality of Betty’s

character, her almost comical lack o f internal depth or any affect other than flat optimism,

is made hyperbolically apparent. At this point, it would come as no surprise if Betty

burst into some cloyingly chipper musical ditty extolling Hollywood as a fertile
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dreamland. This is heightened by the campy, over-dubbed dialogue she has with the

elderly couple that further indicates the false and illusory nature of what we are

witnessing. Like in the jitterbug sequence, the elderly couple are a condensed

manifestation o f the pleasure she felt after winning the jitterbug contest and the

burdensome desire that the dance victory imbedded deep within her psyche.

Tethered to the root source o f her oppressive desire, the elderly couple function as

Lacan’s conception o f the superego and the Other: through them, Diane— much like Blue

Velvet's Jeffrey with his father or Lost Highway's Fred with Mr Eddy— has

unconsciously internalized the sociocultural norms and values that vigorously shape and

direct her desire. “Nothing forces anyone to enjoy except the superego,” Lacan opines,

“The superego is the imperative of jouissance— enjoy!” (On Feminine Sexuality 3).

Unpacking this statement, Zizek observes that ‘Lacan posited an equation between

jouissance and superego: to enjoy is not a matter o f following one’s spontaneous

tendencies; it is rather something we do as a kind o f weird and twisted ethical duty”

(Ziiek “Ego Ideal and the Superego”). Given the context of Diane’s reality, wherein her

fragile ego cannot properly deal with anything short of her naively idealized expectations,

her superego has clearly established an impractical, perverse, and ultimately destructive

desire in her—a tyrannical impulse to enjoy. Diane’s maladapted psyche cannot handle

the gaping disparity between her insatiable desire and dearth o f enjoyment. Only by

fabricating this ornate fantasy can Diane placate the obscene superego and achieve the

oppressive desire imposed on her by it.

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Within the fantasy, the superegoic elderly couple who guide Betty/Diane into

Hollywood and subtly demands that she enjoy— "Remember, I’ll be watching for you on

the big screen”— are appeased. They wish Betty luck (another indirect command to

enjoy) and depart in a limo, where they both sit with unsettling grins slapped on their

faces that quickly become rictuses o f the superego’s “weird and twisted ethical duty” to

achieve jouissance: their injunction to enjoy visually corresponds to their oddly rigid

smiles. Unnatural and held uncomfortably long, these smiles also suggest more insidious

motives behind their ostensibly good intentions. The woman gives the man a slap on the

knee as if they have just succeeded in hoodwinking Betty with false hope in a city o f

harsh realities. As the superegoic impetus o f Diane’s seemingly benevolent yet

ultimately traumatic desire, the elderly duo condemn her to a dissonant confrontation

with her ideal fantasy and bleak reality, a clash that exhumes the fantasmatically

repressed trauma that psychologically shatters her. Once Diane’s fantasy collapses, her

superego, in the form of the elderly couple, sadistically punishes her for failing to abide

by its impossible demands.

Until this impending confrontation, Diane’s wish-fulfilling fantasy represses the

true nature o f her traumatic desire and enables her to enjoy the idealized desire stipulated

by her superego. “The psychic apparatus is intolerant o f unpleasure,” Freud claims, “and

strives to ward it off at all costs and, if the perception of reality involves unpleasure, that

perception— i.e. the truth—must be sacrificed” (“Analysis Terminable and Interminable”

391). The truth of her unpleasant reality thus sacrificed, Betty/Diane is warmly
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welcomed into her idealized conception of Hollywood society, where she stays at the

opulent LA home o f her Aunt Ruth, who happens to be out o f town shooting a movie. In

reality, Diane’s Aunt Ruth is not an actress, does not live in LA, and is in fact dead, but

Diane’s fantasy distorts this truth with dream-logic to keep any negative emotional

associations at bay. From this we can glean a better understanding o f just how fragile

Diane’s psyche is: unable to cope with even the most common o f tragedies, her fantasy

warps her aunt’s death into an opportunity to satiate her desire for Hollywood glamor.

Betty is cordially greeted by the landlady, Coco, who in reality is Adam Kesher’s

judgmental mother from the dinner party. By converting Coco from the pitying, passive-

aggressively critical woman she met at Kesher’s party into a benign and hospitable host,

Betty/Diane gains her acceptance and, by proxy, the acceptance o f Hollywood society at

large; i.e., the Other o f Lacan’s Symbolic order that structures every assuaging fantasy in

Lynchian noir. This is reinforced throughout the first act/psychic phase as everyone

outside o f Mr. Roque’s cabal o f conspirators eagerly embraces Betty with open arms and

amiable smiles, particularly the authority figures she meets throughout her Hollywood

reverie. Betty/Diane can perceive and judge herself as worthy through her symbolic

identification with the ideal Other. In stark juxtaposition to her reality, the bevy of

characters which make up the Symbolic order in Diane’s fantasy are absolutely smitten

with her as both a person and an actress. Even the director who “didn’t think much o f ’

Diane, Bob Brooker—whom she conveniently construes as a scatterbrained and

incompetent man—praises Betty after her jaw-dropping audition. Unsurprisingly, Betty

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is oveijoyed.

With Hollywood society fully behind her. Betty/Diane “finds herself in the perfect

mysteiy”: she discovers Rita/Camilla, helpless and deprived o f her identity, inside her

aunt’s house. Diane’s fantasy splits Rita into two: amnesiac Rita is Diane’s projection o f

what she desires in Camilla—that is, how she wishes her to be— while Rita’s true identity

represents the traumatic uncertainty o f her desire and all o f the negative associations she

has o f Camilla, This emphasizes the function o f fantasy as it “attem pts] to deliver the

impossible object in a pure form, free o f any pathological taint” (McGowan 208). Thus,

Rita’s true identity is a dark enigma for Diane—a noir mystery—just as the oblique

identities o f Lost Highway's Alice/Renee and Blue Velvet's Dorothy Vallens function as

impossible objects o f desire through which the protagonists find themselves enmeshed in

their respective film noir labyrinths. The only vestige o f Rita’s true identity is a black

purse she has on her that contains a pile o f cash and a mysterious triangular blue key.

Although shaped differently, the blue key corresponds to the blue key that the hit man

gives Diane to indicate that Camilla has successfully been murdered. Thus, the

mystifying blue key they find in Rita’s purse links her mystery to the horrible truth of

Diane’s guilt. Likewise, the purse full o f cash is the same one Diane uses in reality to

pay the hit man, though in the fantasy it is ambiguously connected to Mr. Roque. Diane

is projecting her culpability outward and ideating her inner demons as external entities

whose enigmatic web o f criminal activities is quickly descending upon Rita for reasons

beyond her scope o f knowledge. As Betty, she is detached from this dark, noirish
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mystery and only becomes involved as a good Samaritan who courageously steps in to

help Rita rediscover who she is and what she’s caught up in. As McGowan points out,

“Envisioning oneself as the rescuer of one’s love object is, o f course, the ultimate fantasy

scenario; the rescue wins the love o f the love object by proving that the subject deserves

this love” (204). As Rita’s selfless savior, Betty/Diane reverses the power dynamic

between her and Camilla and gives ample grounds for her object o f desire to reciprocate.

O f course, Betty's investigation into Rita's true identity is actually an

investigation into her own identity as Diane; all the clues they uncover lead them closer

to the reality that Diane has repressed in order to avoid the traumatic unattainability of

her desire. When Betty muses on Rita’s mysterious circumstances— “I wonder where

you were going?”— she dislodges a meaningful puzzle piece from Rita’s memory:

“Mulholland Drive. That’s where I was going.” This is significant because Mulholland

Drive is precisely where Diane encountered the traumatic enigma of desire in its most

acute and disorienting manifestation; so although Rita’s recollected fragment

immediately harkens back to her attempted assassination and the near-fatal car crash that

saved her, buried beneath this fantasmatically distorted catastrophe is Diane’s repressed

trauma attempting to intrude into her fantasy. This is the first o f many instances o f this

happening, with each clue/intrusion chipping away at the fantasy’s durability until it,

along with Diane herself, eventually reaches its breaking point.

Her innocent curiosity piqued, Betty suggests they anonymously call the police to

inquire about a possible accident on Mulholland Drive. “Come on, it’ll be just like in the
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movies,” she says, all gung-ho, “We can pretend to be someone else.” A metatextual nod

to the artifice o f film, this densely layered dialogue conflates cinema with fantasy and

dreams, suggesting that movies communicate in the same semiotic language as the

unconscious mind. Just as movies tap into the unconscious reservoir to convey a surface

level narrative—manifest dream-material— imbedded with subtextual significations—

latent dream-thoughts— , the unconscious psyche at least partially draws from the

collective repository o f cinema—“the popular treasury o f myth, legend, and fairy tale”—

to evoke our primal fears and desires in the psychically distorted narratives of dreams and

fantasies. Cinema and the unconscious are symbiotic, Lynch suggests, both informing

and reflecting one another in their expressive mechanisms.

Accordingly, while Diane’s unconscious attempts to create a fairy tale fantasy of

Hollywood success and budding stardom, the repressed trauma incurred prior to and

precipitating her unconscious lam encroaches upon her fantasy and taints it with the

oppressive dread and inescapable uncertainty of film noir. By now a staple o f Lynchian

noir, a traditional film noir plot is framed within a larger neo-noir stoiy o f a disillusioned,

mentally disturbed protagonist, lending the film a more psychologically gritty texture that

plays with noir conventions to visually convey the human mind in the throes o f the noir

tonality. Following a familiar noir trope, the fantasy finds Betty and Rita investigating

the ominous mystery surrounding Rita s identity and past. Given the larger context in

which Diane represses her identity and, fantasmatically inhabiting another one— Betty,

her ideal ego— , unknowingly investigates her unconscious landscape in search of her
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own ego self, the film explores deeper questions about the unstable and delusory nature

o f identity.

As such, Betty and Rita’s investigation takes on a more abstract quality: their

investigation is one that delves into the complex depths o f ontological uncertainty. This

is evident in Betty’s eagerness to “pretend to be someone else,” a desire that mirrors

Diane’s fantasmatic masquerade and signals the fundamentally illusory nature o f identity

and the potential for one’s ontological perspective to become destabilized and unmoored

from the fictitious ego self. As Lacan emphasized, the subject is not the ego, not the

“someone” we experience ourselves to be; rather, the subject is a knotted bundle of

unconscious drives and impulses which become manifest by means o f the ego.

Otherwise put, “the Lacanian enunciating subject of the unconscious speaks through the

ego while remaining irreducibly distinct from it” (Johnston). As a false sense o f a unified

and knowable identity, the ego is formed in infancy during what Lacan called the Mirror

Stage: a baby (the subject) perceives itself in the mirror for the first time, sees itself as an

object outside o f itself, mentally identifies with the wholeness o f the reflected image, and

subsequently strives for the rest o f its life to psychically become this impossibly unified

whole— this fictionalized self or the ideal ego. This momentous experience is at once

self-actualizing and self-alienating: the subject ecstatically identifies with the image of

itself as a distinct being—an individual self—and at the very same time realizes that it is

not that image, that it is in fact self-divided, perpetually separated (or “castrated”) from

the reflected object staring back at them in the mirror. “While identifying itself in the
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mirror, the child also identifies with something from which it is separated: it is as an

‘other’ that the subject identifies and experiences itself...At the Mirror Stage, the

intellectual perception of oneself is an alienating experience and the beginning of a series

of untruths” (Bailey 30). A product o f the Imaginary order, the objectified ideal ego

creates a lack in the subject that throws him/her into a Sisyphus-like pursuit o f the

impossible wholeness perceived in the mirror.

As Diane’s ideal ego, Betty encapsulates the Mirror Stage experience. She is the

reflected object that captures everything Diane desires to be: talented, confident,

successful, beloved, happy, innocent, etc. She is what Diane both identifies with and is

alienated from: a knowable, idealized object self. Diane’s fantasy reflects this

experience: as Betty, she is simultaneously unified with and estranged from this fantasy

construct. When Rita remembers the name Diane Selwyn, she and Betty, hoping to

uncover Rita’s true identity, find the name in the phonebook and give the number a ring.

Betty says, “If it is Diane Selywn, maybe she could tell you who you are.” O f course,

Betty is Diane Selwyn, and yet even in reality she could never “tell [herself] who she is”

without defaulting to the false perception o f herself: her ego. Their search for Rita’s

identity, then, is an attempt to psychologically merge the ideal ego with the actual

subject—an impossible task that only leads to the traumatic realization that one can never

be whole or know oneself as a unified entity. Diane’s investigation o f the mystery

surrounding her, much like Jeffrey Beaumont's in Blue Velvet and Fred Madison’s in

Lost Highway, is a fatalistic quest inward to confront the primal trauma of castration and
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self-division.

As Betty and Rita continue their investigation by visiting the home address listed

under the name Diane Selwyn, the fantasy continues to play out like a classic film noir.

The address leads them to Diane’s actual apartment, where they find a rotten, faceless

corpse in her bed. Naturally, within the fantasy this shakes them both up quite a bit and

heightens the sense o f imminent danger attached to Rita’s mysteiy. The latent

signification o f this gruesome discoveiy indicates Diane’s unconscious desire for her own

death, or what Freud called the death drive. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud

writes, “The postulate of the self-preservative instincts we ascribe to eveiy living being

stands in remarkable contrast to the supposition that the whole life o f instinct serves the

one end o f bringing about death” (48). Given her pleasure-driven flight into fantasy, in

this moment Diane represents the tension between the pleasure-principle and the death

drive: she goes to great lengths to abide by the superegoic injunction to enjoy and yet at

the same time clearly has a death wish. The uncanny vision o f her rotten corpse

anticipates her eventual suicide, which she carries out in her bed during a hallucinatoiy

mental breakdown.

For the time being, Diane reconceptualizes this fatal moment, wrapping it in a

noir mysteiy in which a stranger tentatively connected to Rita has been murdered for

shady, enigmatic reasons outside of Betty’s/Diane’s control. This is Rita’s problem for

now, and being the flawless individual that Diane (as Betty) imagines herself to be, she

warmly takes care o f her, gives her a place to hide out, and in one o f the most significant
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moments in her fantasy, disguises Rita to look just like herself. Betty gazes triumphantly

at Rita’s reflection in the mirror as she puts a blonde wig on her and changes her into her

own clothes. Betty/Diane is molding Rita around her desire and subsuming Rita into her

own ideal ego. The image o f the two merging into one is a visual evocation o f the

fantasized reversal o f castration, in which the divided self is impossibly unified. This

scene gives a heavy nod to Hitchcock’s film noir masterpiece, Vertigo, particularly the

scene in which Scottie dresses up Judy, a brunette, to look like the blonde-haired

Madeleine, his object o f desire. In both films, the protagonists, consumed and

traumatized by desire, physically manipulate someone to achicve the unreal wholeness

promised by the objec t o f desire. By wrapping others in self-serving fictions, both

Scottie and Diane fantasmatically relieve themselves o f the trauma instigated by the

heavy burden o f desire.

As her unattainable object o f desire, Betty/Diane identifies Rita/Camilla as an

ideal part o f herself, projects the fantasies associated with her ideal ego onto her, and

attempts to merge with her to resolve the castration and inherent lack precipitated by the

Mirror Stage. In this context, the object of desire is “the image the baby recognizes as its

own in the mirror and with which it forms a powerful relationship o f identification.. .In

its identification with other human beings, the small others [or objects o f desire] come

into being in the child’s world, and become the objects onto which all kinds o f ideas and

fantasies may be affixed” (Bailly 128-9). The object of desire is a narcissistic projection

that ostensibly bridges the gap between the subject (Diane) and her ideal ego (Betty).
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Thus, it is the lack initiated by the Mirror Stage, rather than the actual object o f desire (a

mere symptom), that sparks the insatiable pull of desire; in the same vein, the desire for

the other is actually a primal desire for the illusory ontological wholeness seen reflected

in the mirror during infancy. By dressing Rita up to look like herself, Diane/Betty

displays this misguided attempt to achieve ontological wholeness by fusing with the

object o f desire. Like so many before her. Diane/Betty believes that Rita/Camilla will

complete her; this, however, is a psychologically impossible endeavor, an unattainable

dream that will not—that cannot—quench the relentless beckoning o f desire. As Lacan

posited, “Desire is lack in its very essence..,The fact is that there is no object that desire

is satisfied with” (‘T h e Logic o f Phantasy” 182). Desire is absolute, without end—

impossible. Attaining the object o f desire can never stop desire itself, which will

continue to exist in perpetuity. As Diane eventually finds out in Club Silencio, desire

continues to exist long after the object of desire is achieved (as in her fantasy) or

destroyed (as in her reality). “The girl is still missing” and will always be missing; i.e.,

the object o f desire (the girl, Rita) is forever displaced from desire itself.

This bitter realization and the subsequent collapse of Diane’s fantasy are triggered

by a major event: she sexually attains her object o f desire, consummating the very desire

that underpins her fantasy. As with the protagonists o f Blue Velvet and Lost Highway,

fantasy might allow Diane to temporarily escape her trauma, but in the end Lynch shows

how fantasy is unsustainable and doomed to failure; it may temporarily distort the

symptoms to make them more manageable, but the distorted symptoms ultimately emerge
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most traumatically within the very fantasy devised to bypass them. Once the desire

driving a fantasy is quenched, its ameliorative function disintegrates and backfires. By

declaring her love for Rita/Camilla—“I’m in love with you”—and sexually merging with

her, Diane/Betty comes too close to possessing the fantasized object o f desire and

subsequently pushes the fantasy to its breaking point. “We cannot 'get beyond' the

fantasy by giving up on the Cause [i.e., desire] that animates us,” asserts philosopher

Alenka Zupancic, “but, on the contrary, only by insisting on it until the end” (232).

Indeed, Betty doggedly insists on her desire until she moves beyond it into the uncanny

Real, which she will experience in Club Silencio. Although desire may be fleetingly

accessible in a fantasy, the imaginative act o f actually obtaining this fundamentally

impossible desire is subversive and eradicates the central impulse driving the fantasy.

Having her object o f desire does not satiate desire precisely because the cause o f desire is

distinct from the symptomatic object o f desire; rather, the cause of desire exists within

the shadowy depths o f our unconscious minds, a dormant product o f our infantile

experiences. Thus, upon finally possessing her object o f desire, Diane/Betty confronts

the impossibility o f desire and, in doing so, hits a dead end. Just as Fred Madison’s

fantasy ends directly after he sexually merges with his object o f desire, Diane’s fantasy

immediately goes into dissolution after she sexually fuses with Rita.

This sexual act initiates the second act/psychic phase (“a sad illusion”): the

uncanny dissolution o f Diane’s fantasy and horrific encounter with her trauma in its Real

manifestation. Waking up in a trance-like state, Rita rhythmically exclaims “silencio”

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and, in the dead o f night, guides Betty to a strange, otherworldly nightclub called Club

Silencio, where they witness a bizarre spectacle at once ethereal and chthonic. As the

two enter the club, the camera accelerates haphazardly, fatalistically into the door after

them as if inexorably drawn there, signaling the unavoidable confrontation with the Real

that lies at the very edge o f fantasy. The emcee, a well-dressed impish man, overtly

draws attention to the unreality o f Diane’s fantasy, shouting his monologue in a mixture

of English, Spanish, and French: “No hay banda! There is no band— and yet we hear a

band”; “This is all a tape recording”; “II n’y a pas d’orchestre”; and “It is all an illusion.”

Like the Mysteiy Man in Lost Highway, the emcee is a harbinger of Real trauma; both

figures force the deluded protagonists to face the bleak realities from which they are

fleeing through their fantasies. The emcee not only disillusions Diane, but also us as

spectators: as we abruptly find out after this scene, nothing is what it seems: our

perceptions and expectations o f time, space, causal logic, and identity are inverted and

warped as we realize that everything we’ve witnessed in the film thus far is the

unconscious fantasy product o f a traumatized woman in the midst o f a neurotic, guilt-

ridden mental breakdown.

Much like the Winky’s diner scene, what we experience alongside Betty/Diane at

Club Silencio violently subverts our assumptions about reality by exposing its unstable

nature and the delusory lure o f representations (viz. fantasies and cinema). A trumpet

player enters the stage, blows a twittering little number, and then removes the instrument

from his mouth as the music continues to play, revealing the disconnect between his
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instrument and the sound it seemingly creates. A woman sings a Spanish rendition of

Roy Orbison’s “Crying” before collapsing onto the ground while the disembodied voice

continues to sound. We are repeatedly presented with visual representations apparently

associated with the sounds we hear, and yet each time this happens we are shown the

fallacious nature o f our assumptions. Even after being pounded over the head with the

emcee’s lyrical declarations (“It is all an illusion”), we (like Betty/Diane) are quick to

forget this, to become absorbed in the illusion o f wholeness and unity, only to find

ourselves unexpectedly jarred out o f it by the disconnect between sight and sound. We

are naturally inclined to take the representations presented to us at face value and to

quickly, naively, becomc attached to and engrossed in our subjective perceptions o f the

world, causality, identity, etc. Psychologically, our minds desire order and, hoping to

make sense o f ourselves and the world, cling to patterns, conventions, expectations, and

anything that will ground us to the illusion o f an objective ontological reality.

Just as we see Diane/Betty become repeatedly immersed in and shaken out of the

illusions onstage, we undergo the same experience when watching the film. In this sense,

Lynch (akin to the emcee) is commenting on the analogous mechanisms o f cinema and

fantasies: despite their inherent unreality, they elicit real visceral and psychological

responses that draw us in and delude us in their fictions. According to film critic Anna

Katharina Schaffner, what we witness at Club Silencio “shows us openly how and why

both cinema and fantasy work by exposing their underlying structures and assumptions,

and yet, crucially, we are still enchanted by his cinematic illusionism, in spite o f seeing
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through its mechanics” (274). This natural tendency to become so absorbed in an unreal

representation o f reality is both remarkable and frighteningly dangerous: through

aesthetic representations, we can vicariously experience other often impossible facets of

the human experience, yet as with Diane, we run the risk of deluding ourselves from the

truth, neglecting healthy encounters with the often harsh realities o f existence, and

deceiving ourselves to the point o f becoming completely unmoored from all vestiges o f

reality.

Besides indicating the hypnotic unreality o f Diane’s fantasy and the illusory

nature o f subjective reality, the Club Silencio spectacle exhibits the mechanisms of

desire. Diane’s attempts to merge with her object o f desire, Rita, to become whole is an

impossible wish because desire is essentially a lack; the subject can never successfully

fill in this lack with an object because desire is a permanent, inward feature of the human

psyche. Diane believes there is a link between the object o f desire, visually represented

by the trumpet player and vocalist, and absolute desire itself, aurally represented by the

music and vocal sound. As we are shown, however, the sound (the signified) and the

image (the signifier) are detached; the connection we assume exists between the two is an

illusion—a fantasy. The object of desire, then, is not related to the primal pull of desire

itself; i.e., the object o f desire is not actually the solution to desire, but is merely a

symptom o f a more abstract, absolute, and interminable desire. The inherent lack created

by and intrinsic to this absolute desire is projected outward onto tangible objects which

we endlessly pursue in our desperate quest to fill in this lack. However, like the spectral
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sounds o f Club Silencio’s music and vocals, this desire is intangible, unattainable, and

fundamentally divorced from the objects with which we perceptually associate it. This is

further echoed by the emcee’s mixture of languages: just as three completely different

words, or signifiers, refer to the same signified meaning, different objects o f desire are all

signifiers that refer to the same signified primal desire.

If Club Silencio exists in the realm between fantasy and reality, the performance

there enacts the uncanny phenomenon experienced as the seams between these psychic

dimensions are tom apart to reveal the ineffable: that which relentlessly defies

signification, or the Real. As Lacan postulates, “There is no other entry for the subject

into the Real except the fantasy” (Cogito and the Unconscious 26). The Real is captured

by that jarring, indefinable sensation that we (together with Betty/Diane) feel when the

trumpet player removes the instrument from his lips while the music continues to play or

the singer keels over while her voice resonates on; the signifier is wrenched from the

signified, leaving an inexpressible, uncanny vibration reverberating in the chasm that

dances evasively on the outer periphery o f consciousness. Throughout the performance,

Betty/Diane is forced to confront the residual Real emerging from such slippages of her

unconscious fantasy’s structuring chain o f signification. The unconscious signifiers she

strings together to construct her fantasy become unhinged from their wish-fulfilling

signified meanings and chaotically muddled up with the deep-seated reality o f her

bottomless, despotic desire and indelible lack.

This psychological upheaval plunges her back into the trauma incurred by this
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impossible desire, although now, on the vertiginous cusp o f fantasy, this trauma emerges

in its Real manifestation. Like the father in Lacan’s reading o f Freud’s “Father, can’t you

see I’m burning’' dream, the horror o f Diane’s raw, undistorted, and ineffable trauma—

i.e., her Real trauma— is experienced only by means o f her unconscious fantasy, which

grants access to the repressed trauma without the typical dream distortion that occurs as it

surfaces into the conscious mind (The Art o f the Ridiculous Sublime 20). During the

encounter with her Real trauma in Club Silencio, Betty/Diane thrashes about in a

paroxysm o f dolor and, as the chanteuse sings “Llorando”— a maudlin song about the

emotional anguish o f unrequited love— , she sobs uncontrollably with Rita, lamenting the

loss o f her fantasy and the desire it was briefly, impossibly, able to satiate. Suspended in

the Real between ontological realms, between her ideal and waking egos, Diane’s

undiluted trauma— her woefully unbounded desire, gaping lack, and soul-gouging guilt—

washes over her with intensive sublimity and hysteria, and in that instant she can imbibe

the singular, impossible coming-together o f both valences o f desire: the traumatically

absent lack and the fantasmatically possessed jouissance.

As the Club Silencio scene climaxes, Betty discovers a mysterious blue metal box

in her purse that corresponds to the triangular blue key they found in Rita’s purse earlier

in the fantasy. Back at Betty’s place, they use the key to open this blue box and, once

opened, the camera is sucked into its dark opening. Immediately after this, we see the

blue box fall onto the carpeted floor, and as the camera pans around we realize that Betty

and Rita have disappeared. Because the blue box appears during the most intense
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moment o f the Club Silencio spectacle, it is a symbol o f Diane’s Real trauma; contained

within it is the truth o f Diane’s life: her failures, her traumatic desire and lack, and her

unendurable guilt. The triangular blue key corresponds to the ordinary blue key that the

hit man gives Diane in reality to signal the successful execution o f Camilla, thus linking

the mysterious blue key in the fantasy to the culmination o f Diane’s trauma: the murder

o f her object o f desire. Although Diane’s fantasy distorts the blue key as an enigma

intertwined with Rita and her mysterious past, it serves as an early indication o f Diane’s

trauma: it is the key to the dark reality awaiting Diane in her waking life. Thus, upon

opening the box with the key, the fantasy ends, Betty and Rita disappear, and we are

sucked into Diane’s reality, where we bear witness to the traumatic circumstances which

led to her unconscious escape into fantasy.

With the “sad illusion” o f the second act/phase over, the film’s third act/phase

depicts the memories o f Diane’s trauma and ends with her downward spiral into madness

and suicide. After coming to from her fantasy and reliving these haunting memories,

Diane buckles under the weight o f her traumatic desire and guilt. The fantasy has failed

to deliver her from the grim circumstances she faces; in fact, it has exacerbated her

trauma by exposing her to it in its unmitigated, acutely damaging Real form. Plagued by

these distressing memories and devoid o f any prospect o f fantasmatic consolation, she is

backed into a comer and mercilessly consumed by her psychological aguish.

Translating her psychic descent into a deeply perturbing set piece, Lynch cuts to a

shot o f the monstrous bum sitting behind the Winky’s diner dumpster bathed in an
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ominous flashing red light—a sign o f imminent danger. The bum drops a brown paper

bag containing the blue box—Diane’s Real trauma—which releases the elderly couple,

although this time they are miniature, maniacal, and supremely creepy. Diane, looking

deeply disturbed and strung out as she broods on the hit man s blue key in her apartment,

hears a pounding knock on her front door. This throws her into a panic, perhaps

indicating that the police are investigating Camilla’s death and have come to interrogate

or arrest Diane. Instead, she hallucinates the horrifying elderly couple sneaking under the

door, assuming their actual sizes and, in a truly nightmarish sequence, pursuing Diane

into her bedroom as she screeches in abject terror. The elderly couple smile grotesquely

with their arms outstretched, attempting to grasp Diane; cornered in her bedroom, she

pulls a gun out o f her nightstand and shoots herself in the head, putting an end to her

unendurably oppressive trauma.

This disturbing scene is highly symbolic and conveys Diane’s neurotic breakdown

and hallucinatory lapse into suicidal madness. Throughout the sequence, the apartment is

filled with a flashing blue light that, because o f its connection to the blue key and box,

visually indicates the onslaught o f D iant’s Real trauma. The elderly couple are

horrifying not merely because o f their eerie smiles and sinister motives, but more so

because they embody the uncanny in its most unsettling distillation. Aside from that odd

moment in the cab after they usher Betty into Hollywood and her fantasy, the elder

couple has been ostensibly benevolent throughout the film; their kindly outer appearances

and friendly demeanor violently clash with the ghastly mien, strange aura, and hostile
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actions exhibited here. This bizarre discordance is textbook uncanny, “that species o f the

frightening that goes back to what was once well known and had long been familiar”

(The Uncanny 124). This particular strain o f the uncanny is distinctly Lynchian: the

elderly couple are archetypal figures o f the home, o f warmth, geniality and mercy, so

when they assume this sadistic, wraithlike affect, we are tom from our safe assumptions

about the world, disoriented from the deep-rooted expectations that ground us to a stable

reality, and exposed to the egregious chaos latent in even the most common and

ostensibly innocuous facets of life. Their horrific facial expressions and enigmatically

fiendish purposes couldn’t be further from our normative presumptions o f a prim and

proper old couple of their ilk.

As outlined above, the elderly couple represent to Diane the superegoic

imperative o f jouissance: the injunction to enjoy that structures her desire. Having

established Diane’s burdensome desire, they demand that she satiate and enjoy it; it is her

duty to appease her superego by complying with this injunction. With their absurdly

perverse edict to fully enjoy or suffer, it is appropriate that the elderly couple take on the

uncanny mixture o f naive hope in horrific pursuit. When Diane fails to live up to this

rigid demand— to achieve her deep-seated desire for social success, stardom, and love—

she escapes into her wish-fulfilling psychic construct to assuage her superego by enjoying

everything she could not have in reality. Once Diane’s fantasy collapses, however, her

superego, in the form o f the elderly couple, sadistically punishes her for failing to abide

by their impossible demands. As originators o f her impractical desire, they are the root
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of her trauma; their inflexibly idealistic expectations and ironclad insistence to enjoy put

Diane in an absurd position in which she is doomed to suffer in the unbreachable chasm

between naive desire and bleak reality. This is why the elderly couple emerge from the

bum’s blue box: they are at the veiy center o f Diane’s Real trauma. As the seed o f her

traumatic desire, they set everything into a frenzied motion that ultimately overwhelms

her and impels her to self-destruction.

As the apogee o f Lynchian noir, Mulholland Drive distills and hyperbolizes the

“oneiric, strange, erotic, ambivalent, and cruel” motifs o f classic film noir and, by

pushing these affects to the extreme, plunges spectators into a deeply disorienting

experience that borders on the sublime. Hijacking the archetypes o f film noir and using

them as vehicles through which to explore the mechanisms o f the unconscious psyche,

Lynch presents spectators with a psychoanalytic examination o f Diane’s fantasmatic

coping mechanisms as they reinvent her hopeless and tragic outer reality yet inevitably

lead her right back to her repressed trauma in its most raw and agonizing form. If

fantasies function according to the same logic as cinema, then Mulholland Drive

demonstrates how the semiotic language o f film noir is distinctly capable o f visually

translating and expressing psychic trauma and, more specifically, the repression of

unabating guilt, the delusory and constructed nature o f identity, the traumatic lack created

by impossible desire, and the psychic function and limitations o f fantasy.

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Conclusion

With just a handful of films, Lynch has managed to radically experiment with and

reconceptualize the film noir genre in a truly unprecedented way. If film noir is to be

taken as a serious and legitimate aesthetic of cinema rather than just a one-note genre, the

form must be able to continually evolve beyond its initial manifestations. Otherwise,

film noir will be dismissed as a product of the immediate postwar era that echoed into the

late 20th and early 21st centuries with nostalgic, allusion-driven neo-noirs. And while

this certainly may be the case with many films in the canon (retro-noirs, for example),

there are plenty o f films that have revealed film noir’s potential to break new ground, to

develop with time and adapt with society—to move beyond the social circumstances that

spawned the aesthetic. As I’ve posited, Lynchian noir exemplifies this potential.

More than just a footnote in the film noir canon, Lynchian noir offers a unique

conceptual approach to the aesthetic that at once gleefully indulges in and sharply

subverts the genre. Generally speaking, Lynch is not alone here. The best films noir of

the post-classic era all self-consciously assume the culturally entrenched language of

classic film noir—from its usual narrative devices, thematic tropes, and archetypal stock

characters to its visual style, tonal texture, and easily recognizable iconography—to

expand upon established noir themes and riff on its sensibilities. Some neo-noirs like

Chinatown (1974) use the semiotics o f noir to address the social issues, moral systems,
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and collective concerns o f their respective eras. Others like Pulp Fiction (1994) revel in

pop culture through chic postmodern pastiche, paying homage to the genre with self-

reflexive allusions and stylistic throwbacks.

Yet by conflating the language o f noir with the language o f the unconscious,

Lynchian noir pivots radically inward not only to explore the mechanism o f

psychological trauma underlying the noir sensibility, but also to replicate the subjective

experience o f futilely fleeing this fatalistic trauma and the devastating failure to

accomplish this impossible feat. In doing so, Lynchian noir transcends the collective

social traumas o f the external, ostensibly objective world and moves beyond the surface-

level iconography and style o f noir without total ly tossing aside these elements. This

singular alternative approach to the aesthetic appropriates the encoded iconography and

semiotics o f classic film noir—in particular the psychoanalytic undercurrents latent in the

genre—to visually translate the labyrinthine complexities o f the psychic apparatus in the

throes o f trauma and investigate the broader themes o f identity, (ambiguous) desire,

ambivalence, ontological confusion, epistemological uncertainty, paranoia, existential

despair, sexuality' and eroticism. The psychoanalytic subtext o f classic film noir plays

out explicitly— or textually, on the surface—as the protagonists’ latent dream-thoughts

are manifested through the language of noir: its iconography, tonality, and narrative

tropes. In the indefatigable uncertainty o f Lynchian noir, the line blurs between text and

subtext, between manifest dream-material and latent dream-thoughts, internal and

external, logic and ambiguity, dreams and reality, signifier and signified— and from these
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ineffable gaps emerges the traumatic Real. Lynchian noir, then, in its preoccupation with

the liminal “between” spaces, is fundamentally concerned with these unsettling

confrontations with the Real.

The distraught protagonists of Lynchian noir attempt to fantasmatically

reconstruct their bleak and banal Edward Hopper-esque lives using the culturally

entrenched mythos o f mass media, in particular Hollywood cinema. However, these

fantasies are revealed to be recursive, merely repeating their traumatic encounters in a

different set o f circumstances that lead them right back to the repressed. The assuaging

Hollywood narratives that they unconsciously construe inevitably rehash their traumatic

encounters, quickly turning their would-be ideal wish-fulfilling fantasies into bleak and

disorienting noir narratives that reflect the violent reemergence of trauma in its Real

manifestations. As Lynch’s protagonists unconsciously employ the culturally entrenched

language o f cinema to construct the fantasies that relieve them o f social reality’s

burdensome desire, their repressed Real traumas become distorted and intrude into these

fantasies as film noir topoi. The dark and pessimistic aspects o f classic film noir

problematize and defile these idealized fantasies in the same way that film noir itself

problematizes and defiles conventional Hollywood cinema. This reemergence of

repressed trauma in new forms accounts for the uncanny aura so distinct to Lynchian

noir: the familiar archetypes and cliches implemented in the protagonists’ unconscious

fantasies are shown to contain the unfamiliar, disturbing trauma that they sought to

escape. Just as the classic film noir anti-hero typically starts out in a good place and
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quickly spiral into degradation, violence, and dread, the Lynchian noir anti-hero

unconsciously enters into a placating fantasy that inevitably devolves into chaos and

despair as his/her trauma erupts in its Real form, subverting the very purpose o f the

fantasy itself.

And yet, on the cusp o f trauma s harrowing reemergence, couched within the

fantasies thinly veiling our protagonists from their bleak realities and impending psychic

collapses, we experience the impossible sublime o f desire attained. In these fantasy

constructs, the subject is no longer self-divided, ceases to endure its castration or

alienation from its desire, instead becoming impossibly whole and united with this desire,

deflecting this alienation onto external circumstances—the darkly enigmatic world of

noir, circling the subject, stalking it, eventually striking, heaving the subject back into its

castration, into its fatalistic alienation from desire and self and society. In its exploration

of these liminal spaces, Lynchian noir captures and cinematically expresses the

psychological experience of desire in all its abstract and nuanced manifestations: how it

feels to dream of a better life, to become unwittingly impelled toward some enigmatic

inner pull, to desperately seek out the truth of whom exactly we are, to yearn for social

acceptance, love, sex, even death. O f course, with desire comes the inevitability of its

failure, the misery and angst that accompanies the real ization that it can in fact never be

attained, and the alienation and disillusionment that invariably results from this dark

epiphany.

Perhaps the most powerful aspect threaded throughout Lynchian noir, then, lies in
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its capacity to phenomenologically replicate the pernicious intrusion o f repressed trauma

into an incrementally crumbling fantasy, to recreate on screen the actual experience of

slowly coming to from a fantasy (or a dream) through a series o f disruptive, uncanny

revelations o f an unknown (because psychologically subdued) reality. These films draw

us into cinematic fantasies that are, within the films themselves, also the protagonists’

unconscious fantasies, so that when the third act revelations occur, we experience the

same acutely unsettling awakening. Framed as such, we are placed in the same

experiential position as Jeffrey, Fred, and Diane: like them, we become immersed in and

then horrifically jarred out of a fallacious plane of reality; like them, we are completely

floored by what was once ‘real’ but is now as the Club Silencio emcee proclaims, an

illusion. Throughout his particular class of film noir, Lynch enchants us with the

uncanny and the sublime, wrings us through cautionary tales of the risks o f becoming too

engrossed in fantasies, and offers experiential lessons in awakening from such fantasies

and false realities.

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