LYNCHIANNOIR:

FILM NOIR AS THE LANGUAGE OF TRAUMA

A Thesis submitted to the faculty of San Francisco State University Z£11 In partial fulfillment of e m u the requirements for the Degree

Master of Arts

In

English: Literature

by

Nikolas Paul Bunton

San Francisco, California

August 2019 Copyright by Nikolas Paul Bunton 2019 CERTIFICATION OF APPROVAL f

I certify that I have read Lynchian Noir: Film Noir as the Language of Trauma by

Nikolas Paul Bunton, and that in my opinion this work meet§ tfie criteria for approving a thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the degree Master of Arts in

English: Literature at San Francisco State University.

■fox

Geoffrey Green, Ph.D. Professor ; Hr- lOa'i-Leu/T* — V lO o I-

Wai-Leung Kwok, Ph.D. Associate Professor LYNCHIAN NOIR: FILM NOIR AS THE LANGUAGE OF TRAUMA

Nikolas Paul Bunton San Francisco, California 2019

The aim of 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 of 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 of the unconscious mind into powerfully unsettling cinematic experiences. In particular, Lynch’s films noir are cinematic reflections of the unconscious as it attempts to fantasmatically cope with psychic trauma, the distressing enigma of human desire, and the alienating illusion of identity.

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

Chair, Thesis Committee Date PREFACE AND/OR ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am grateful to all of those with whom I have had the pleasure to work during this project and throughout my graduate school experience. Each of 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 of my committee, Professor Geoffrey Green, who actively encouraged me to pursue my academic goals and served as a steady and spirited source of insight. Without his guidance and persistent help, this thesis would not have been possible.

Nobody has been more important to me in the pursuit of 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 Noir...... 3

Lynch’s Cinematic Method...... 10

The Psychoanalytic Bedrock of Lynchian Noir ...... 18

Chapter 1...... 24

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

Chapter I I ...... 55

Navigating Psychic Trauma in Lost Highway: Repressing Neuroses of 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 of its own: the Lynchian universe. His films throw traditional narrative logic to the wind in lieu of 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 of human consciousness to express the uncanny and the ineffable—the Lacanian “Real.”

Above all, most of 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 of 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 of American locales, auras of sinister mystery, and cold, polarized worlds where the mundane and the bizarre coexist; its bevy of characters are often alienated, ensnared 2

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 of the human psyche to expose the primal anxiety, ontological confusion, and epistemic obscurity of desire and identity which beset modem man. Not only does Lynchian noir explore such themes, it also likens the mechanisms of the unconscious mind—both deep-seated desires and encroaching fears—to that of film noir itself. As such, one central component of 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 of their psychopathy into the coded, semiotic language of 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 of both the evolution of film noir and Lynch’s specific cinematic approach to film in general must be accounted for. With regard to the former, without the context of film noir discourse, from its inception on through its neo-noir progressions, the metatextual facets of Lynchian noir would be lost, relegated to empty, floating signifiers. That is, in the absence of the preconceived, culturally entrenched notions that have come to define the noir aesthetic and its essential tropes—i.e., the 3

language of 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 of classic noir.

The Foundations o f Film Noir

Much like Lynch’s films, the advent of 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 of American cinema, a clear-cut definition of film noir has been the topic of 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 of noir is largely due to the breadth of 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 of 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 of an affect and style than a categorical genre, and it’s because of this amorphous quality that a wide scope of 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 of easily definable cliches, tropes, and iconographies. Film noir, on the other hand, is definitively more problematic.

Granted this, a general description of the foundational components of film noir can nonetheless be outlined. As mentioned, the form of noir adheres to a more identifiable style than its content, the latter of which traverses a wide and nuanced range of themes and subject matter. Visually, the classic noir aesthetic consists of chiaroscuro lighting that evokes the tenebrous world the noir antihero inhabits and the murky nature of 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 of film noir as producing an “unstable environment in which no character has a firm or moral base from 5

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 of 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 of 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. 6

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 of complexity that matched the uncertain outw ard social circumstances of 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 of 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 of 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 of classic film noir prevails over their plots and themes, the most significant and foundational feature of noir is mood—that unnerving malaise stirred up in the unconscious by the cinematic fusion of form and content; that potent miasma of 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 of noir and the distinctive mood it induces.

Characters’ actions are cruel and duplicitous, marked by a disturbing unpredictability and punctuated by acts of 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 of the era, 8

problematized the normative perception of 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 of tension created in the spectators by the disappearance of their psychological bearings” (13). Indeed, the emotional valence of noir unmoors spectators from the causal logic of 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 of light and shadow.

Decades later, David Lynch would induce this same psychological state of mind, constructing surrealist films seething with the tonal undercurrents of 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 of 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 of noir and conflating it with the unconscious mind in a state of trauma.

As a particular manifestation of film noir in its contemporary state, Lynchian noir is a distinct branch of the neo-noir films of the post-classic era, specifically postmodern 9

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

“the nature of desire, the fallibility of memory, and the fragility of identity” and meta- noirs as “films that radically revise and reconstruct the elements of film noir in order to pose deeper questions about the nature of existence” (55, 61). Lynchian noir certainly experiments with the conventions of film noir, implicitly conflating the filmic language of noir as the language of the protagonist’s unconscious mind; that is, his unconscious fantasy assumes the semiotic form of 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 of 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 of his own distorted consciousness in search of some stable sense of 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 of 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 of 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.

Lynch’s Cinematic Method

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 of 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 of the artist’s vision, the spectators, just as in their real lives, are prompted to understand and make sense of this new reality and its underlying logic, to make sense of 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 of the particular logic underlying these cinematic universes. Whether the aesthetic premise is anchored to a vision of reality or not, whether the inherent unreality of a film approaches the medium through the verisimilitude of realist cinema or the quixotic reveries of sci-fi/fantasy or the explosion-intensive worlds of action flicks, traditional films are structured to eventually land within some comforting degree of 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 of 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 of a fever dream: the spectator, steeped in a fragmented semiotic chain of 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 of their entrenched normative assumptions about narrative and character development and leaving them utterly destabilized—gripped by a creepy combination of 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 of uncertainty about both the world and the self—all of which, of course, are decidedly noirish psychological states. As critic Ronie Parciack states, the Lynchian universe “confronts spectators with radical perceptions of reality, actively arousing a sensation of 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 of 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 of 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 of 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 13

epistemological fulcrum. Oftentimes, having dissolved the culturally constructed bond between signifier and signified, Lynch will use the dry husks of these stereotyped images and narrative tropes to toy with the spectators’ expectations of what they are seeing, only to pull the rug out from beneath them and leave them baffled, disoriented, and in a state of existential uncertainty.

This uncertainty becomes essentially Lynchian when it gives rise to an eerie feeling of unfamiliarity in that which was once ordinary. That is, Lynch’s films jolt us out of complacency by exposing us to the alienating strangeness underlying the commonplace banalities of normal life. David Foster Wallace defines Lynchian as “a particular kind of 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 of 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 of the family household evinces a disturbing melange of 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 of 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 of 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 of repressed impulses, emotions, and memories, the uncanny invades our normal perception of 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 of 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 of what makes Lynch so capable of capturing the logic of 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 of ‘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 16

mainstream Hollywood industry, Lynch’s artistic fixation on the unconscious mind as a vast reservoir of raw creativity and his tenacious dedication to consciously following the lines of thought catalyzed by these morsels of previously latent psychic material are essentially in line with the key tenets of 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 of 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 of 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. 17

One hallmark of 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 of 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 of dreams and the unconscious onto the screen’s external reality and into the light of waking consciousness, they cannot be completely dissected or rationalized. More important than that, they evoke the sublime mystery of the unconscious and the uncanny nature of the repressed drives, emotions, and memories it enigmatically contains.

The Psychoanalytic Bedrock of Lynchian Noir

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

-Lynch (Rodley 140).

Respecting surrealism’s accentuation of the unconscious mind’s mystical, fetishized uncertainty, a psychoanalytic exploration of Lynch’s films can nonetheless be undertaken. Indeed, as aesthetic reconstructions of unconscious material, Lynch’s films noir can best be unraveled and appreciated through the psychoanalytic lens. Moreover, as integral features of Lynch’s cinematic method, surrealism and noir are overlapping 19

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

‘marvelous’ and so like a waking dream” (x-xi). As with the waking dreams of Lynchian noir, Freud asserts that the unconscious mind “makes use of 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 of his films, Lynch uses the symbolism of 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 of 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 of the psyche from an inward experience to an outward one is made possible by the medium of film and its unique capacity to express such abstractions through the use of 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 of tools as powerfully effective means of “exploring the conjunctions, the points of contact, between different realms of existence”; i.e., between the realms of 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 of the outward vision and its underlying subtextual meaning {An Outline o f Psychoanalysis 48). Surrealist filmmakers like Lynch actively take advantage of the inherently oneiric nature of 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 of fantasy and social reality in relation to the psychic trauma instigated by the enigma of desire and the intrinsic impossibility of satiating it. Freud defines the psychological trauma induced by desire as an experience that “presents the mind with an increase of stimulus too powerful to be worked off in the normal way, and this results in permanent disturbances of the manner in which the energy operates”

(Laplanche 466). Haunted by the traumatic pull of 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 of our civilization and under the pressure of our internal repressions, find reality unsatisfying quite generally, and for that reason entertain a life of phantasy in which we like to make up for the insufficiencies of reality by the production of wish- fulfillments” (Five Lectures 55). In the same way, the troubled protagonists of Lynchian noir flee from the intrusions of the repressed psychic trauma—their enigmatic desires and deep-seated neuroses—into the gloaming depths of 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 of this primal desire. In the end, fantasy can never achieve its impossible aims because once the object of 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 of 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 of 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 of 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 of 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 of 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 of repressed trauma and eruptions of 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 of 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 of what film noir (and film in general) could accomplish vis-a-vis visual evocations of 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 of nightmarish uncertainty (Chion 79). The first of Lynch’s films to exude that strange confluence of 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 of 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 of 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 of 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 of 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 of 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 of 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 of the film as a narrative concerned with the fundamental duality of 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 of the film, the two patently contrasting worlds Lynch presents his audience with can be understood as the conscious mind’s perceptions of 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 of 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 of the id. As Lacan writes in The Ethics o f Psychoanalysis, “The frightening unknown on the other side of 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 of “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 of social reality, the very strangeness which radiates from the somehow too normal, too rigid depiction of 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 of 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 of 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 of 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 of postmodern irony; i.e., Lynch is making fun of the American Dream by revealing its blatant artificiality and gaudiness. However, given the aforementioned psychoanalytic interpretation of 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 of 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 of safety, happiness, and order in the American Dream emerges from and is inherently structured around its obverse fantasy of 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 of 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 of 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 of 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 of 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 of 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 of absurdity and disorientation. For its time, classic film noir was innovative in its exploration of both fantasmatic extremes.

However, despite inhabiting both poles of 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 of the excessive, obscene fantasy dimension—threatens the peaceful backdrop of innocent small-town Santa Rosa—the ideal fantasy. Despite Hitchcock’s novel depiction of 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 of the Oedipal narrative that radically juxtaposes the positive and negative valences of 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 of the narrative, a general understanding of 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 of the ideal fantasy dimension described above depict the inextricable confluence of the Imaginary order—the psychic “realm of illusion” through which the subject constructs his/her inherently false and ultimately alienating sense of 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 of anonymous authoritative power and/or knowledge” (Bailly; Johnston). The Imaginary order in the ideal fantasy is Jeffrey’s illusory image of 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 of 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 of 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 of 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 of 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 of 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 of both Lumberton and Jeffrey’s imagined security and symbolic authority, Tom’s collapse is immensely destabilizing.

The traumatic breakdown and symbolic castration of 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 of 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 of 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 of his repressed libidinal desires.

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

Oedipal constraints, a more detailed psychoanalytic understanding of the Oedipal phase must be taken into account. An integral step in the healthy resolution of 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 of castration are many and incalculable,” Freud posits, “they affect the whole of 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, of 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 of 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 of Jeffrey’s father terminates the threat of 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 of 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 of film noir. As evocations of 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 of a noir dreamscape. This pole of fantasy tonally, stylistically, and narratively reflects noir sensibilities and tropes in a way that—as typically happens to the victims of 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 of 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 of 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 of 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 of strange desires” is explicitly instigated by the breakdown of the stable paternal authority.

Jeffrey’s discovery of 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 of Detective 38

William’s equally naive daughter Sandy—a veritable ingenue and perhaps the embodiment of innocence—to investigate a darkly enigmatic, thoroughly noirish lounge singer named Dorothy Vallens. As they drink sodas in a kitschy American diner straight out of 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 of desire. Sandy, a product of 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 of events. When Dorothy comes home early as Jeffrey is snooping around her apartment in search of 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 of 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 of its highly elusive quality and defiance of 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 of Jeffrey’s psychic life; i.e., latent dream-thoughts. Jeffrey’s unconscious warps the repressed impulses of his latent dream-thoughts and wraps them in the language of film noir. Frank assumes the role of the psychotic gang leader, embodying the noir archetype with great panache, while Dorothy takes the role of classic femme fatale, the archetypal woman in trouble who leads the desiring protagonist to his bleak downfall.

Keenly aware of 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 of his Oedipal crisis,

Frank assumes the role of the loathsome father figure while Dorothy assumes the role of the coveted mother figure. The latent signification of 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 of 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 of 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 of 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 of 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 of desire that both 42

tempts and traumatizes Jeffrey.

Frank’s over-the-top persona often leads spectators to view him as a two- dimensional caricature of 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 of these explanations of 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 of condensation, whereby “a single element of 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 of 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 of 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 of 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 of castration by which the Oedipal father figure exerts power. In every sense of 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 of 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 of 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 of 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 of 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 of 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 of 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 of 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 of Tom Beaumont’s face, signifying the breakdown of 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 orjoiussance. “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 of 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 of love,” Jeffrey cannot resist the fierce pull of 48

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. Of 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 of the Oedipal crisis, they nonetheless both act upon the same obscene Oedipal

desire. As Lacan would put it, both have accessed the jouissance of 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 of 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 49

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 of 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 of 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 of “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 of 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 of desire. In a sense, the confluence of 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. 51

When Jeffrey conies to the next morning, all battered and bruised, the whole weight of the situation dawns on him. He sits on his bed and sobs deeply as the camera cuts to various shots of 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 of 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 of 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 of 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 of nowhere like some sort of wraith. She seems to be in a state of shock, and when Jeffrey takes her to the Williams household to get help, she 52

clings to him and reveals their intimate relationship in front of a visibly horrified Sandy.

In this thoroughly uncanny moment, Jeffrey’s obscene object of desire intrudes into the

ideal fantasy and comes into contact with his ideal objects of 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 of 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 Man’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 of 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 53

shot of the camera moving out of 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 of the grotesque bugs that crawl beneath Lumberton’s ideal surface, indicating that the wish fulfillment of Sandy’s mawkish dream about love (the robins) conquering the darkness of 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 of the film repeat the opening sequence of 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 of reality has been reinstated. The dark, unknowable depths of humanity are once again wrapped in a knowable, mollifying illusion.

With the conclusion of Blue Velvet, Lynch leaves his spectators whiplashed with emotional intensity and manages to lend a whole new aura of 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 of trepidation that destabilizes even the most commonplace of 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 of 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 of 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 of his most recognizable leitmotifs and pave the way for what would be known as distinctly Lynchian. 55

Chapter II:

Navigating Psychic Trauma in Lost Highway: Repressing Neuroses

of 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 of Lynch's endeavors in this interim period, because of 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 of 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 of...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 of 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 of noir sentiments.

Moreover, contained within and intensified by this radically unorthodox and thoroughly

Lynchian cinematic form are the central themes of 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 of identity, the evasive unreliability of memoiy and subjective experience, the traumatic enigma of desire, and the psychic function of fantasy.

Trapped in an interior nightmare, the fragmented neo-no ir antihero of Lost

Highway, Fred Madison, struggles to find some semblance of his ideal ego—“an image of ourselves as we want to be”—through the internal mechanisms of his unconscious 57

psyche, running away from the bleak outward reality of his trauma and shattered identity through a fantasmatic reconfiguration of 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 of murder. In 58

the second phase, Fred, on death row and tormented by the guilt of 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 of 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 59

impossibility to external obstacle the very definition of fantasy, of 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 of 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 of 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 of Pete’s enjoyment of 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 of Renee—distant, impassive, enigmatic, sexually cold and unfaithful to Fred—is inverted in his reimagining of her as Alice, who is sultry, 60

sexually available, and immediately enamored by Pete with red-blooded eroticism. She lustfully pursues Pete with excessive infatuation and, despite the threat of 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 of 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 of 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 of a phallus and the subsequent fear of castration this encounter indelibly 61

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 of his life. Moreover, because the mother is the original object of desire, this Oedipal divorce from the mother signals a greater symbolic divorce from all other objects of 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 of 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 of 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 of the word, she is unknowable to Fred. Thus, as

McGowan maintains, “The transformation of Renee into Alice allows Fred (as Pete

Dayton) to solve the deadlock of Renee’s desire and conceive, on the level of fantasy, of 62

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 of the archetypal femme fatale— the very embodiment of 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 of 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 of Mr. Eddy/Dick Laurent. Thus, another facet of Fred’s reimagining of

Renee/Alice as a femme fatale is to set up a defense mechanism against the unbearable guilt of 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 of her own volition, while in Fred’s fantasy

Alice is coerced into the industry by brute force. Fred, unable to cope with Renee’s 63

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 of Renee’s affair and the

disintegration of 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 of his circumstances—now he is the one cheating on Renee.

In the third and most unsettling act/phase of Lost Highway, the fantasmatic

reconstruction of 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 of the second

act/phase, the very fantasy Fred’s psyche devises to suppress the trauma of 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 of fatalistic way, bound to bring him 64

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 of this return to an even more concentrated form of the traumatic memory can be gleaned from Jacques Lacan’s interpretation of Freud’s “‘Father, can’t you see I’m burning” dream (Zi2ek 20). In this dream, “the dreamer is awakened when the Real of 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 of 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 of 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 of hopeless despair.

The first major indication of the fantasmatic collapse occurs when Pete, prodded by Alice into assaulting and robbing Andy so they can escape Mr. Eddy’s perverse 65

control, enters Andy’s house and sees a pornographic film of 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 of 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 whyT\ 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 of 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 lite k , using Lacanian terminology, calls “the utmost jouissance”; that is, obscene pleasure, or as Lacan once 66

described it, “backhanded enjoyment” (2izek 24; Lacan 112). Tinged with the jarring sound of “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 of his repressed memory, where he relives the psychic trauma that he has been avoiding throughout most of 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 of 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 of 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 67

film because it reveals so clearly the limitations of fantasy” (172). Moreover, having exceeded the restraints of 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 of his desire, by extension alienated from his own desire, and, as a result, wholly alienated from his own sense of self.

Inside the desert cabin that Alice enters at the end of 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 of absolute evil. The Mystery Man is the only consistent character in the film, appearing in all three of Fred’s psychic phases at various times. Although it is easy to interpret him as the personification of pure evil (and on one level, he certainly is), within the context of this analysis he embodies a much more specific psychological abstraction: that of Fred’s

Real psychic trauma. As such, he is a part of Fred’s psyche, embodying the horrific effects of obscure (and mysterious) desire that both shatters Fred’s sense of self and at the same time relentlessly reminds him of his profoundly fracturcd and alienated identity.

Somewhat like the troubling experiences Pete faces toward the end of Fred’s fantasy, the

Mystery Man’s appearances are scattered manifestations of the Real, of Fred’s inescapable traumatic scars. The Mystery Man, then, is also the materialization of noir fatalism, propelling Fred toward the ultimate doom of his repressed trauma.

In the first psychic phase, he sends (and, as later inferred, records) increasingly 68

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 of 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 Man’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 of 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 we?...At your house. Don’t you 69

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 of his fantasy as Pete. It is precisely at this point in the film that

Fred’s fantasmatic reimagining of himself begins to break down.

The Mysteiy Man’s function becomes more dynamic and apparent in the film’s third psychic phase, when Fred circles back to the realm of 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. If 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 of Fred’s circumstances onto him by outright denying the existence of 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 of fantasy.

No longer able to repress the reality of 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 of both Alice and Renee. This time around, however, the hotel is not spatially contorted, reeling, or steeped in flashing lights; instead, it is seen 70

realistically as a memory of Fred’s past—a past which occurred just before the opening of 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 of 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 of Laurent, who hands Fred the knife he uses to slit Laurent’s throat, shows the dying man a video of 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 of Fred: his Real psychic trauma. The video the Mystery Man shows Laurent before summarily executing him symbolically represents Fred’s paranoid vision of 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, 71

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 of 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 of 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 of 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 of his dire mental and emotional circumstances—his acute neurotic crisis of oblique desire and unstable identity—likens the unconscious mind’s complex inner workings to that of cinematic constructs, particularly that of 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. 72

Chapter III:

Circumventing Existential and Psychic Trauma Through a

Hollywood Noir Fantasy in Mulholland Drive

Widely lauded as Lynch’s magnum opus and a masterpiece of 21st century

American cinema, Mulholland Drive is a visually stunning and tonally unsettling postmodern neo- and meta-noir that contains all of the central elements of Lynchian noir:

a convoluted, multilayered narrative rife with symbolism, a looming sense of dread and uncertainty, an uncanny confluence of the hyper-banal and the ultra-bizarre, a doomed protagonist in the throes of an identity crisis and caught in a web of traumatic desire, a

labyrinthine plot at once sublime and macabre that spirals inexorably out of control, departures from traditional causality and logical expectations, and a postmodern, meta- textual implementation of classic film noir tropes and themes that he both eulogizes and

subverts. Given the glitzy and facile tagline “A love story in the city of dreams,” the film

is also a corrosive meta-Hollywood experience that comments on the nature of film, the delusive trappings of the LA studio system, and the intoxicating desire for fame and

stardom that gives rise to all sorts of 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 73

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. Of 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 74

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 of 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 of 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 of unfulfilled desire, and 75

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 of her life to rationalize her failures, justify her murderous act, assuage her pangs of 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 of Hollywood

society. Betty/Diane and Rita/Camilla embark on a Nancy Drew-like investigation to unravel the enigma of Rita’s identity and get to the bottom of 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 76

cinematic language of 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 of 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 77

sequence serves a similar purpose as the opening sequences in Blue Velvet and Lost

Highway, both of 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 of 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 of 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 of 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 78

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 of her adolescent jitterbug feat, an event that gave her a taste of 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 of the first and second acts/phases necessitates a meticulous examination of the third act/phase.

Unlike Lost Highway, which at least partially reveals the protagonist’s outer reality and source of trauma in the beginning, Lynch does not give any indication of 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 79

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 of emotional catastrophes,

interpersonal failures, and existential disillusionments we witness in her present life.

Moreover, the ambiguity of the jitterbug sequence as a symbolic expression of 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 of 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 80

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 of 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. He’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 of 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 of 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 of 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 of desire. 81

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 of a limo that Camilla sent for her, Diane looks confused but expectant; the invitation gives her a glimmer of 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 of 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 of 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 of her object of desire seemed to be once again 82

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 of that night only exacerbates this distressing experience and jars to the surface the traumatic dissonance between Diane’s imagined perception of herself and her inability to achieve the desire of 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 of her ideal ego in the shadow of her failure to fulfill the desire of 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 of the table that she came to Hollywood from a small town, Deep River, after winning a Jitterbug contest. “That sort of 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 of 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 of me. Anyway, that’s when we became friends. She helped me, 83

getting some parts in some of 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 of 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 of desire, enjoyment, and passive- aggressive sexual rejection in front of her. As this scene painfully evokes, “Diane remains within the deadlock of 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 84

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 of 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 of 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 85

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 of 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 of 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

of 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. 86

What’s more important here is that the pillow shot signals a shift into an unconscious

register of 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 of 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 of 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 of 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 of cash, although we never find out where she was headed, why she was going there, where she got the money, or what 87

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 of 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 of 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 of the wishful fantasies of whole nations” (“The Creative Writer” 32).

As an American woman, Diane’s unconscious mind has been molded around and fixed to the “wishful fantasies” of 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 88

Hollywood, whether in famous films or the lore surrounding the LA studio system during the Golden Age of Hollywood. Diane’s fantasy reflects this as it distorts her repressed desires and fears into more manageable forms by appropriating all manner of 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 of 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 of reality, however, Rita’s secret—her identity—represents Diane’s repressed identity and trauma: her torturous desire, oppressive guilt, and the scarring memories of 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 of 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 of 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 of noirish conspirators, assassins, and hidden entities. Thus, within this paranoiac vision Diane can cast aside all culpability and vindicate herself of her wrongdoings. 89

The car crash fulfills two impulses: it absolves Diane of the guilt attached to her

hired assassination and renders her impossible object of desire powerless, helplessly

available, and completely dependent on Betty/Diane. If the failed assassination of Rita is

the wish-fulfillment of 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 of 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 of desire” (205). Indeed, in a manner by now

distinctive to Lynchian noir, Diane l’antasmatically rewrites the narrative of 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 90

other words, in typical Lynchian noir fashion, Diane’s fantasy implements dream-logic

and assumes the cinematic language of 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 of 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 of half-night, but it looks just like this, except for the light, and

I’m scared like 1 can’t tell you. Of 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 of 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 of him in the dream; Dan 91

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 of this place.. .outside of 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 of 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 of 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 92

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 of Diane’s situation that represents the

inevitable failure of 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 of her repressed fear, desire, and guilt in their primal psychic constitutions. In other words, the bum stands in for her deep-seated fear of 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 of failure and loss. The bum lives behind a dumpster in the back of 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 of the film as

Diane’s fantasy crumbles and she encounters her trauma in the realm of 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 of this godawful feeling”: 93

the symptom induced by his root trauma. Ultimately, Dan encounters the source of 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 of 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, 94

symbolically associating him with the bum skulking behind Winky’s diner. Dan’s

description of the bum applies just as well to Mr. Roque: “There’s a man in back of 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 of 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 of 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 of desire that is completely open to Diane.

Following the Winky’s diner scene, we see an enigmatic chain of nefarious phone calls that come from the top echelons of society down to the bottom. Mr. Roque initiates 95

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 of 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 96

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 of 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 of her oppressive desire, the elderly couple function as

Lacan’s conception of 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 ofjouissance —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 of following one’s spontaneous

tendencies; it is rather something we do as a kind of 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 of enjoyment. Only by

fabricating this ornate fantasy can Diane placate the obscene superego and achieve the

oppressive desire imposed on her by it. 97

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 of 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 of harsh realities. As the superegoic impetus of 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 of her traumatic desire and enables her to enjoy the idealized desire stipulated by her superego. “The psychic apparatus is intolerant of 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 98

welcomed into her idealized conception of Hollywood society, where she stays at the

opulent LA home of her Aunt Ruth, who happens to be out of 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 of just how fragile

Diane’s psyche is: unable to cope with even the most common of 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 of Hollywood society at

large; i.e., the Other of Lacan’s Symbolic order that structures every assuaging fantasy in

Lynchian noir. This is reinforced throughout the first act/psychic phase as everyone

outside of Mr. Roque’s cabal of 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 99

is oveijoyed.

With Hollywood society fully behind her. Betty/Diane “finds herself in the perfect

mysteiy”: she discovers Rita/Camilla, helpless and deprived of her identity, inside her

aunt’s house. Diane’s fantasy splits Rita into two: amnesiac Rita is Diane’s projection of

what she desires in Camilla—that is, how she wishes her to be—while Rita’s true identity

represents the traumatic uncertainty of her desire and all of the negative associations she

has of Camilla, This emphasizes the function of fantasy as it “attempts] to deliver the

impossible object in a pure form, free of any pathological taint” (McGowan 208). Thus,

Rita’s true identity is a dark enigma for Diane—a noir mystery—just as the oblique

identities of Lost Highway's Alice/Renee and Blue Velvet's Dorothy Vallens function as

impossible objects of desire through which the protagonists find themselves enmeshed in their respective film noir labyrinths. The only vestige of Rita’s true identity is a black purse she has on her that contains a pile of 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 of 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 of criminal activities is quickly descending upon Rita for reasons beyond her scope of knowledge. As Betty, she is detached from this dark, noirish 100

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, of course, the ultimate fantasy scenario; the rescue wins the love of 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 of desire to reciprocate.

Of 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 of many instances of 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 101

movies,” she says, all gung-ho, “We can pretend to be someone else.” A metatextual nod to the artifice of 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 of cinema—“the popular treasury of 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 of Lynchian noir, a traditional film noir plot is framed within a larger neo-noir stoiy of 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 of 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 102

own ego self, the film explores deeper questions about the unstable and delusory nature

of identity.

As such, Betty and Rita’s investigation takes on a more abstract quality: their

investigation is one that delves into the complex depths of 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 of 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 of 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 of 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 of itself, mentally identifies with the wholeness of the reflected image, and subsequently strives for the rest of 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 103

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 of the Imaginary order, the objectified ideal ego

creates a lack in the subject that throws him/her into a Sisyphus-like pursuit of 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.” Of course,

Betty is Diane Selwyn, and yet even in reality she could never “tell [herself] who she is” without defaulting to the false perception of 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 of 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 104

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 of imminent danger attached to Rita’s mysteiy. The latent signification of 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 of instinct serves the one end of 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 of 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 of her, gives her a place to hide out, and in one of the most significant 105

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 of the two merging into one is a visual evocation of the

fantasized reversal of 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 of desire. In both films, the protagonists, consumed and traumatized by desire, physically manipulate someone to achicve the unreal wholeness promised by the objec t of desire. By wrapping others in self-serving fictions, both

Scottie and Diane fantasmatically relieve themselves of the trauma instigated by the heavy burden of desire.

As her unattainable object of desire, Betty/Diane identifies Rita/Camilla as an

ideal part of 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 of identification.. .In

its identification with other human beings, the small others [or objects of desire] come

into being in the child’s world, and become the objects onto which all kinds of 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). 106

Thus, it is the lack initiated by the Mirror Stage, rather than the actual object of 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 of 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 of desire. As Lacan posited, “Desire is lack in its very essence..,The fact is that there is no object that desire is satisfied with” (‘The Logic of Phantasy” 182). Desire is absolute, without end— impossible. Attaining the object of 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 of 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 of desire, consummating the very desire that underpins her fantasy. As with the protagonists of 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 107

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 of 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 of actually obtaining this fundamentally impossible desire is subversive and eradicates the central impulse driving the fantasy.

Having her object of desire does not satiate desire precisely because the cause of desire is distinct from the symptomatic object of desire; rather, the cause of desire exists within the shadowy depths of our unconscious minds, a dormant product of our infantile experiences. Thus, upon finally possessing her object of desire, Diane/Betty confronts the impossibility of desire and, in doing so, hits a dead end. Just as Fred Madison’s fantasy ends directly after he sexually merges with his object of 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 of Diane’s fantasy and horrific encounter with her trauma in its Real manifestation. Waking up in a trance-like state, Rita rhythmically exclaims “silencio” 108

and, in the dead of 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 of fantasy. The emcee, a well-dressed impish man, overtly

draws attention to the unreality of 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 of 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 of a traumatized woman in the midst of 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 of 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 109

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 of 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 of wholeness and unity, only to find ourselves unexpectedly jarred out of 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 of the world, causality, identity, etc. Psychologically, our minds desire order and, hoping to make sense of ourselves and the world, cling to patterns, conventions, expectations, and anything that will ground us to the illusion of 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 of 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 of seeing 110

through its mechanics” (274). This natural tendency to become so absorbed in an unreal representation of 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 of existence, and deceiving ourselves to the point of becoming completely unmoored from all vestiges of reality.

Besides indicating the hypnotic unreality of Diane’s fantasy and the illusory nature of subjective reality, the Club Silencio spectacle exhibits the mechanisms of desire. Diane’s attempts to merge with her object of 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 of 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 of desire is not actually the solution to desire, but is merely a symptom of 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 Ill

sounds of 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 of 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 of consciousness. Throughout the performance,

Betty/Diane is forced to confront the residual Real emerging from such slippages of her unconscious fantasy’s structuring chain of 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 of her bottomless, despotic desire and indelible lack.

This psychological upheaval plunges her back into the trauma incurred by this 112

impossible desire, although now, on the vertiginous cusp of fantasy, this trauma emerges in its Real manifestation. Like the father in Lacan’s reading of Freud’s “Father, can’t you see I’m burning’' dream, the horror of Diane’s raw, undistorted, and ineffable trauma— i.e., her Real trauma— is experienced only by means of 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 of dolor and, as the chanteuse sings “Llorando”—a maudlin song about the emotional anguish of unrequited love—, she sobs uncontrollably with Rita, lamenting the loss of 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 of both valences of 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 113

moment of the Club Silencio spectacle, it is a symbol of Diane’s Real trauma; contained within it is the truth of 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 of Camilla, thus linking the mysterious blue key in the fantasy to the culmination of Diane’s trauma: the murder of her object of 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 of 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” of the second act/phase over, the film’s third act/phase depicts the memories of 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 of 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 of any prospect of 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 of the monstrous bum sitting behind the Winky’s diner dumpster bathed in an 114

ominous flashing red light—a sign of 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 of 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 of its connection to the blue key and box, visually indicates the onslaught of Diant’s Real trauma. The elderly couple are horrifying not merely because of 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 115

actions exhibited here. This bizarre discordance is textbook uncanny, “that species of the frightening that goes back to what was once well known and had long been familiar”

(The Uncanny 124). This particular strain of the uncanny is distinctly Lynchian: the elderly couple are archetypal figures of the home, of 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 of a prim and proper old couple of their ilk.

As outlined above, the elderly couple represent to Diane the superegoic imperative ofjouissance: 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 of 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 of the elderly couple, sadistically punishes her for failing to abide by their impossible demands. As originators of her impractical desire, they are the root 116

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 of Diane’s Real trauma. As the seed of her traumatic desire, they set everything into a frenzied motion that ultimately overwhelms her and impels her to self-destruction.

As the apogee of Lynchian noir, Mulholland Drive distills and hyperbolizes the

“oneiric, strange, erotic, ambivalent, and cruel” motifs of 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 of film noir and using them as vehicles through which to explore the mechanisms of the unconscious psyche,

Lynch presents spectators with a psychoanalytic examination of 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 of film noir is distinctly capable of visually translating and expressing psychic trauma and, more specifically, the repression of unabating guilt, the delusory and constructed nature of identity, the traumatic lack created by impossible desire, and the psychic function and limitations of fantasy. 117

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 of 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 of noir to address the social issues, moral systems, 118

and collective concerns of 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 of noir with the language of the unconscious,

Lynchian noir pivots radically inward not only to explore the mechanism of psychological trauma underlying the noir sensibility, but also to replicate the subjective experience of futilely fleeing this fatalistic trauma and the devastating failure to accomplish this impossible feat. In doing so, Lynchian noir transcends the collective social traumas of the external, ostensibly objective world and moves beyond the surface- level iconography and style of noir without total ly tossing aside these elements. This singular alternative approach to the aesthetic appropriates the encoded iconography and semiotics of classic film noir—in particular the psychoanalytic undercurrents latent in the genre—to visually translate the labyrinthine complexities of the psychic apparatus in the throes of trauma and investigate the broader themes of identity, (ambiguous) desire, ambivalence, ontological confusion, epistemological uncertainty, paranoia, existential despair, sexuality' and eroticism. The psychoanalytic subtext of 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 of 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 119

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 of mass media, in particular Hollywood cinema. However, these fantasies are revealed to be recursive, merely repeating their traumatic encounters in a different set of 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 of cinema to construct the 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 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 120

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 of the fantasy itself.

And yet, on the cusp of 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 of 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. Of 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 121

its capacity to phenomenologically replicate the pernicious intrusion of 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 of disruptive, uncanny revelations of 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 of becoming too engrossed in fantasies, and offers experiential lessons in awakening from such fantasies and false realities. 122

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