How Society Destroys a Person: An Examination of David Lynch’s Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive

Decided to randomly post this thrown-together essay thingy about Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive because I'm pretty sure it's not very cohesive, especially if you haven't seen both movies, but I was asked to put it together for the Philosophy journal based on two posts I wrote for the a class's blog last spring, and I'm kinda on a David Lynch-high right now.

         Since Eraserhead debuted in 1977, David Lynch has made a name for himself as a filmmaker specializing in the disconcerting. This is so much the case that the word “Lynchian” has been added to the vocabulary of most film analysts, as it is the only word suitable to describe the surreal, often violent, usually disturbing, and always mystifying style that pervades most, if not all, of Lynch’s films. Often referring to them as “puzzles” or “mysteries,” Lynch’ seems to invite in-depth analysis of his works through his enigmatic style of filmmaking. For example, by applying Lacanian, Hegelian, Žižekian, and Freudian concepts to Lynch’s Lost Highway (1997) and Mulholland Drive (2001), one can arrive at the conclusion that the films are about society’s destruction of a man and of a woman, respectively.

In a scene from Slavoj Žižek’s 2006 documentary, The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema, which analyzes various iconic movies from Duck Soup (1933) to The Matrix (1999), Žižek looks at Lost Highway. His argument centers around the main character (played by Bill Pullman) Fred’s simultaneous fear of and fascination with his enigmatic wife, Renée (played by Patricia Arquette). Looking at the scene where the two have sex, particularly Renée’s “patronizing” pat on the back after Fred fails to satisfy her, Žižek argues that Fred kills Renée because Renée doesn’t respond to him properly. Žižek also argues that when Fred is arrested, locked in a jail cell, and transformed into Pete, he is entering into a fantasy world where his wife (now blonde “Alice,” still played by Patricia Arquette) praises him and does what he wants because he transformed into a different person (0ne that goes by the name “Pete”) who commands more authority over women. Thus, Žižek believes that because of the societal pressure on Fred, shown in the form of his failed sexual exploit with his wife, Fred is mentally destroyed and snaps, murdering his wife and then escaping reality by entering into a fantasy world where life is the way the he wants it to be.

Though Žižek’s argument suggests that Lost Highway is about the destruction of a man, I disagreed with his interpretation but arrive at the same conclusion through different means. I find flaws in the argument that the fantasy world that Fred enters after he’s arrested for killing his wife serves as an escape from Fred’s humiliation. The blonde “fantasy” version of Fred’s wife, Alice, aggressively goes out of her way to humiliate Pete/Fred and asserts more power over him, whereas his “real” wife, the brunette Renée, is passive, never giving Fred orders and generally only speaking when spoken to. In the first half of the movie, Renée is almost never referred to by her name. Renée’s name does not come up until Fred watches the third videotape and sees her mutilated corpse, which causes him to scream out her name.

Alice’s behavior is quite different. Having never been introduced, Alice and Pete exchange sultry glances in the garage where Pete is employed when Alice shows up with one of Pete’s clients. Alice leaves with the client, never saying a word to Pete but later daringly returns to the garage alone, and says to Pete, “I’m Alice Wakefield. How’d you like to take me to dinner?” She immediately states her name and makes a bold request. Renée is never bold. She is typically passive, quiet, and frigid. She does what Fred/Pete asks her to do and never puts up a fight, though she never seems emotionally invested in anything she does, especially not during the sex scene.

Alice, on the other hand, is constantly aggressive and passionate, though perhaps not genuinely passionate, as it is revealed that she has a double-life as a porn actress and clearly has experience in counterfeiting passion for personal gain, which is I think what she does with Pete/Fred. I don’t think that Alice works as Pete/Fred’s fantasy because she humiliates him and holds power over him (especially sexual power) much like Renée does. Alice manipulates Pete so that he kills Andy and steals from him (Pete: “We killed him.” Alice: “No, you killed him.”), and then she pulls a gun on him. Pete clearly thinks that Alice is going to kill him, but instead she laughs it off and hands him the gun, making a remark about him not trusting her (attempting to frighten Pete, reminding him of her power over him, and then making him feel guilty) (Lost Highway). When Pete walks into Andy’s house, a pornographic film, of which Alice seems to be the star, is playing on a large projector. Pete is forced to watch Alice have sex with someone else and is then led to assume that she was engaging in some sort of sexual activity with Andy when she comes down stairs in her underwear. This is as least as humiliating and emotionally painful for Pete/Fred as (if not much, much more humiliating than) Renée “patronizingly” patting Fred on the back. When Pete and Alice have sex in front of Andy’s car, Alice literally leaves Pete in the dust, tauntingly saying, “You’ll never have me.” So, if Alice is Pete/Fred’s fantasy version of Renée, his fantasy clearly fails, leaving him faced with the reality that he will never have Alice or Renée (Lost Highway).

In Lacanian terms, one might say that Alice/Renée represents the objet petite a for Pete/Fred. I thought that the relationship(s) between Alice/Renée and Pete/Fred almost perfectly exemplified Žižek’s point about the overlap between objet petite a and obsessive love in 2.2 of Enjoy your Symptom!: “In short, the object of love cannot give me what I demand of him since he doesn’t possess it, since it is an excess in its very heart” (Žižek 124). Pete/Fred is clearly in love with Alice/Renée. He is simultaneously fascinated with and terrified of her enigmatic nature, almost to the point of being obsessed with her. Fred seems frustrated with and even hurt by Renée’s passivity and lack of emotion, but when he meets her again as Alice and she’s aggressive and passionate, he’s still frustrated with and hurt by her because his suffering is not really about her, who she is or how she acts. It’s a feeling within Pete/Fred, something unattainable. Alice blatantly states this when she and Pete have sex on the ground in front of the car they stole from Andy. Pete says, “I want you,” to which she responds, “You’ll never have me,” then getting up and walking away from Pete, leaving him naked and alone on the ground (Lost Highway).

There are also several dialectical relationships at play the movie. Almost all of the major elements in the movie appeared to be in stark contrast with other major elements until eventually the lines became blurred and what originally seemed to be an opposite started to look like more of the same (blonde/brunette, light/dark, master/slave, dominant/passive, parent/child). For instance, Renée is brunette, passive, and emotionally cold, and Alice is blonde, aggressive, and passionate, but they are ultimately the same person. For example, the Mystery Man tells Fred/Pete, “Her name is Renée, if she told you her name is Alice, she’s lying” (Lost Highway). Also, when Fred/Pete finds a photograph of Alice and Renée together at Andy’s house, Alice disappears from the photograph and only Renée is left. Both Alice and Renée are manifestations of something unattainable, the objet petite a, for Pete/Fred. In another example, Fred seems to be dominant over Renée’s passive personality, but because of her passivity, Renée seems to hold more power over Fred than he holds over her because her passivity makes her mysterious to Fred, which makes him more attracted to her, and which causes him to be hurt by her even more when she behaves dispassionately toward him.

Ultimately, both Fred’s relationship with Renée and Pete’s relationship with Alice show the destruction of a man by two different means. In the first scenario, where the man seems to play the more dominant role and the woman the more passive, the man is driven insane by his wife’s passivity and coldness toward him, but when the roles are reversed in the second scenario and the woman is in the dominant role, the man still finds himself humiliated and driven to kill. This suggests that the man’s destruction is inevitable, regardless of the woman he is with, perhaps indicating that the destruction is an unavoidable circumstance of the society of which the man is a part. 

In Mulholland Drive, David Lynch plays with similar themes but instead shows the destruction of a woman. Though the genders of the ruined individuals differ, in both Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive the destroyed character is in love with a woman (In Lost Highway, Fred/Pete is in love with Renée/Alice, and in Mulholland Drive, Diane/Betty is in love with Camilla/Rita.), and both keep with the theme that the ideal woman does not exist. Mulholland Drive is also similar to Lost Highway in that the destroyed character enters into a fantasy world when s/he is unable to cope with reality. Where Fred the jazz musician fantasizes that he is Pete the mechanic after killing his wife, Diane the washed up actress fantasizes that she is an innocent young actress from a small town who’s just come to Los Angeles named Betty. In Fred’s fantasy, his passive wife Renée turns into the aggressive Alice, whereas in Diane’s fantasy, the conniving, manipulative Camilla, whom Diane is both in love with and jealous of in reality, becomes Rita, a vulnerable amnesiac. In the real world, Diane and Camilla are both actresses competing for roles in movies despite their passionate relationship. It makes sense that Rita, Diane’s fantasy version of Camilla, has no memories, no known life of her own, and no distinctive personality because almost everything about the real Camilla’s life and personality has been damaging to Diane. The real Camilla both damages Diane’s professional life by using her sexual prowess to convince Hollywood big shots to choose her for parts over Diane and in sleeping with these big shots betrays Diane’s trust and breaks her heart, since Camilla lets Diane believe that they are in love. Thus, in Diane’s fantasy she turns Camilla into a blank slate, leaving behind only Camilla’s physical appearance and her love for Diane. Diane also makes Camilla vulnerable in her fantasy; she has no choice but to rely on Diane/Betty’s hospitality because she cannot remember who she is.

For me, Mulholland Drive was even more interesting than Lost Highway because it illustrated a complicated aspect of the lesbian relationship: While Diane is in love with Camilla, she is also jealous of her because the two are in direct competition for acting jobs. It is implied that Diane feels that she is the more talented actress of the two, as shown through the references to The Sylvia North Story, the movie that Diane and Camilla acted in together. The first time The Sylvia North Story is mentioned, Betty/Diane is auditioning for the lead and gives an extraordinary performance. At the end of Mulholland Drive, at Adam’s dinner party, Diane says that she met Camilla on the set of The Sylvia North Story; Camilla was given the lead, though Diane had really wanted the part. It is strongly suggested that Camilla got the lead role by sleeping with the director, though Diane was the better actress of the two. This reveal makes sense of the Camilla Rhodes conspiracy within Diane’s fantasy.  In the fantasy, a mafia-esque group pre-selects an actress named Camilla Rhodes to get the part that Diane/Betty auditions for, despite the fact that the director seems to think that Diane/Betty would be a better fit for the role. This parallel shows that Diane feels that her performance was not the reason that she did not land the lead in The Sylvia North Story (as Diane explains at the dinner party, “The director, he didn’t think so much of me.”) (Mulholland Drive). Also, the woman who Diane/Betty sees as “Camilla Rhodes” in her fantasy later kisses Camilla/Rita at the director’s dinner party, further linking the Camilla Rhodes conspiracy in Diane’s fantasy to the real Camilla. It is possible that woman who Diane sees as Camilla Rhodes in her fantasy could be a stand-in for Diane to take her resentment toward Camilla/Rita out on. Diane obviously resents Camilla and the woman Camilla kisses at the dinner party, but she also loves Camilla. Thus, in Diane’s fantasy, the fantasy version of Camilla Rhodes becomes a somewhat harmless receptacle for Diane’s ill feelings toward Camilla/Rita, and the Camilla Rhodes conspiracy becomes the reason Betty/Diane does not get the role (rather than Betty/Diane’s acting or something intrinsic to her being to blame).

Like Fred/Pete with Renée/Alice in Lost Highway, Diane is attracted to/in love with Camilla because of the objet petite a; Diane believes that she sees some appealing, intangible aura in Camilla that she herself wants to possess. Diane’s desire to possess the objet petite a in Camilla works on two levels because Diane is both in love with Camilla/wants Camilla as her romantic/sexual partner and is jealous of Camilla and wishes that she possessed Camilla’s charisma and seductive qualities or even Camilla’s luck or acting skills so that she could land movie roles with the apparent ease that Camilla is able to.

In Betty/Diane’s fantasy, she creates the ideal woman by casting Rita/Camilla as an amnesiac, essentially eliminating the “real” Camilla’s undesirable qualities (her attachment to the director and to woman Camilla kisses at his party, her career as an actress who is likely sleeping her way to the top/is in competition with Diane, her betrayal of Diane, etc.), which leaves Camilla/Rita as a woman with no identity but who Betty/Diane is nonetheless attracted to/in love with. Thus, in Diane’s fantasy, Camilla/Rita still contains the objet petite a that Diane is so attracted to but without any of the real Camilla’s negative qualities and without any of the painful memories associated with the real Camilla. The “ideal woman” guise is revealed and thus destroyed when Diane’s fantasy is realized. The more Diane/Betty remembers about her real relationship with Camilla, the less ideal and less attainable Camilla becomes: First, Camilla is shown telling Diane “We can’t do this anymore,” when the two are making out on Diane’s couch, then Camilla is shown making out with the director in the movie Camilla and Diane are in, next Camilla and the director announce that they’re getting married, and finally Camilla is murdered by an assassin that Diane hires.

Diane’s fantasy of the life of Betty and Rita occurs only after Camilla is dead, thus illustrating Žižek’s idea that the best kind of woman is a dead woman (in this case because it makes Camilla so easy to fantasize about without Camilla’s real personality/actions getting in the way). The “only good woman is a dead woman” theme is carried out even further when Diane kills herself at the end of the film, and the fantasy at the “No hay banda” orchestra seems to live on with the blue woman saying, “Silencio,” after Diane’s death (Mulholland Drive). Fred/Pete’s killing of his wife in Lost Highway seems to express the same theme because no matter what personality Fred/Pete imagines his wife to have, she drives him to murder.

“The only good woman is a dead woman” theme can be tied back into the theme that the ideal woman does not exist and cannot be sustained even within fantasies. This is also related to the concept of objet petite a. These themes indicate a problem with the way that society views women because traits that the “ideal” woman should possess are paradoxical and therefore impossible to uphold, which results in disaster both for those who desire ideal women and for women attempting to live up to this impossible paradigm. In Lost Highway, Fred/Pete destroys himself attempting to possess this “ideal woman.” In chasing the ideal woman, his fantasy falls apart on two separate occasions, causing him to break down and leaving him with the knowledge that the ideal woman is neither passive nor aggressive, blonde nor brunette, frigid nor passionate and, most emphatically, that he will never have her. Diane in Mulholland Drive experiences the same type of destruction at the hand of society’s “ideal woman” paradigm, though her suffering is amplified even more because she both fails to possess the ideal woman in the form of Camilla/Rita and fails to become the ideal woman herself. 

Though many feminist writers have criticized David Lynch’s films for portraying violence against woman and have deemed him “anti-feminist,” his exposition of how the impossible “ideal woman” paradigm is devastating to both men and women shows Lynch’s stern criticism of today’s patriarchal society. Rather than choosing to gloss over the stereotypes about women that pervade many Hollywood blockbusters, Lynch chooses to employ said stereotypes in his own films to an extreme, turning what could be a tame look at an unhappy marriage or at a competitive friendship between two rising stars into something horrific and nightmarish. Within his films, Lynch exposes the darkest, most desperate places to which a person might go if s/he fails to make her/his dreams into reality.