1
The Slipstream of Mixed Reality: Unstable Ontologies and Semiotic Markers in The Thirteenth Floor, Dark City, and Mulholland Drive
N. Katherine Hayles Department of English and Design/Media Arts Nicholas Gessler Department of Geography and Design/Media Arts University of California, Los Angeles
“slipstream fiction,” works that occupy a A decade ago, a popular borderland between mainstream and construction of virtual reality saw it as a science fiction because they achieve a realm separate from real life, a science fictional feeling without the perception reinforced by cumbersome usual defamiliarizing devices.1 Polhemus helmets that entirely encased He the user’s head. That view has writes, “the heart of slipstream is an dramatically changed with recent attitude of peculiar aggression against technological developments such as ‘reality.’ These are fantasies of a kind, enhanced reality glasses that overlay but not fantasies which are ‘futuristic or simulations onto real landscapes, ‘beyond the fields we know.’ These embedded sensors, and wearable books tend to sarcastically tear at the computers. Now the buzz is about structure of ‘everyday life’” (n. p.). “mixed reality,” the promiscuous Remarking on this trend, Joan Gordon mingling of computationally-intensive and Veronica Hollinger in Edging into simulations with input from the real the Future: Science Fiction and world. As Simon Penny has remarked, Contemporary Cultural Transformation “Our children will not call [this observe that works set in the present are technology] virtual reality. They will becoming increasingly important in call it reality.” Similar trends have contemporary science fiction; “the marked the development of certain challenge for science fiction today is less strands of contemporary science fiction. to extrapolate a far future than to keep Darko Suvin’s famous characterization up with a permanently mutable present” of science fiction as “cognitive (2). They hypothesize that as the pace of estrangement” has traditionally been technological change accelerates, we associated with fictions that use perceive ourselves as already living in a extraterrestrial settings, futuristic science fiction world. As a result, technologies, alien creatures, and other conventional distinctions between strategies to defamiliarize the fictional science fiction and ordinary reality become increasingly difficult to world and create works clearly different 2 than mainstream fiction (3-15). By articulate and maintain. contrast, the last few years have seen the These developments set the stage emergence of what Bruce Sterling calls for narratives, including novels and 2
films, that have staked out a territory we construction? The questions intensify call the slipstream of mixed reality. In when the markers separating simulation mixed realities ontological and from reality are deconstructed as the film epistemological issues tend to be progresses. If mixed realities are foregrounded, for the represented worlds difficult to disentangle, can any level often cannot be assigned unambiguously claim ontological priority over another? either to science fiction or ordinary At once unsettling normal reality and reality. To investigate the dynamics of normalizing simulated reality, The the slipstream of mixed reality we will Thirteenth Floor occupies a middle explore three recent films that range position in the slipstream of mixed along a spectrum of possibilities.3 In reality. The Thirteenth Floor the limits of By contrast, Dark City falls on present technology are stretched to the science fiction end of the spectrum. imagine a computational simulated Its version of a simulated world emerges world in which “self-learning cyber from a distinction between implanted beings” become virtually artificial memories and staged indistinguishable from real-life humans. environments on the one hand, and on The humans who create the technology the other an ineradicable core of can download their consciousness into personality that retains its identity the simulation, temporarily displacing independent of these manipulations. the simulant’s consciousness and Again murder enters the narrative as the occupying his body. As the boundaries acid test opening the seams between separating the simulated and real worlds realities. When John Murdoch (Rufus become increasingly permeable, violent Sewell) wakens and disrupts the ruptures occur as borders are discovered, implantation of the memories that will leading to assaults and murder. construct him as a killer, he embarks on That all three films initially a journey of discovery that will pit him present themselves as murder mysteries against The Strangers, aliens who is not a coincidence. Plots tend control the Dark City through “tuning,” deathward, as characters in Don their telepathic communication with DeLillo’s novels frequently assert, machines that nightly alter the because death (the inevitable result of citysppace according to their being alive) bestows consequentiality on experimental plans. The purpose, their events. Murders real and attempted minion Dr. Daniel Schreber (Kiefer occur in these three films but they prove Sutherland) explains to Murdoch, is to to be misdirections, feints calculated to discover what makes human beings conceal more disturbing truths different from them, which Schreber underneath. The Thirteenth Floor identifies as “our capacity for exemplifies the pattern, problematizing individuality, our souls.” Unable to death’s ultimate finality and displacing remember anything before his abduction its centrality with deeper ontological into the Dark City, Schreber, like all the concerns. How seriously should one imprisoned humans, must take on faith take bodily harm when the entity that there remains a core identity within. occupying the body is a temporary When Murdoch discovers that he has visitor? How serious is death when the undergone a mutation that bestows on entity in question is a computational him the alien capacity to “tune,” he 3 occupies a liminal status that restores the modified by the recognition that the human and liberates the city but at the film’s idiosyncrasies are themselves cost of becoming part alien himself. located in a broader cultural context that Like The Thirteenth Floor, this has been moving toward the slipstream ambiguous ending is able to recuperate a of mixed reality. In the slipstream, stable ontology only by fundamentally simulation and real life, science fiction changing the nature of that which has and everyday reality, merge to form an been recuperated. ontologically unstable amalgam that is, At the “ordinary” reality end of these films suggest, finally the only the spectrum is Mullholland Drive, reality we can call our own. which unlike the other two films does Leakage and Liminality in The not rely on science fiction tropes or Thirteenth Floor technological interventions to unsettle The slipstream of mixed reality is ontological security. Rather, its mixed visually suggested by the simulator’s reality effect comes from narrative portal, portrayed as a laser-like layer of sequencing that renders problematic the green light rays covering Douglas Hall distinctions between reality, dream, (Craig Bierko) as he prepares for the hallucination, and flashback. In contrast transfer into the simulated 1937 world. to other films that represent dream Emerging from his first visit in which he sequences after the viewer has been dangerously pushes his immersion time introduced to normative reality, thus to the limit, he jerks his head upward allowing a clear distinction to be made while his body is still under the rays, a between the real and unreal, Mulholland vivid enactment of a borderland in which Drive gives only the briefest initial clear-cut distinctions between real and glimpses of quotidian reality in contexts simulated worlds blur as the two realms that make understanding them as such begin to leak into one another. The almost impossible on a first viewing. cyberbeings in the simulated world are Rather, Mulholland Drive situates the haunted by the experiences their users establishing scenes in a “reality” that is have while downloaded into the already a dream. This narrative strategy simulation. The simulant’s was sufficiently opaque to confuse consciousness is put on hold while the reviewers when the film first opened so user’s consciousness takes over the that it was widely misinterpreted as a simulated body, and the user’s dream throughout.4 Careful study experiences manifest themselves to the reveals, however, that the film is stimulant as almost-memories they constructed according to an idiosyncratic interpret as déjà vu. As the memories but nevertheless coherent semiotic of intensify, they function more like reality markers that the viewer can learn hauntings. Grierson (Armin Mueller- only by watching the film. Mary Stahl), the sedate sixtyish antique dealer Sweeney observes in the documentary in the simulated 1937 world who has The Art of David Lynch that Lynch does been modeled on his creator Hannon not create his films by watching other Fuller, begins to recall with shame the films but by projecting into exteriorized amorous adventures in which Fuller form his internal landscapes. This indulged when he displaced Grierson’s insightful comment illuminates the consciousness and occupied his body to film’s signifying strategies; it should be have sex with young women. 4
Retrospectively, these hauntings user who occupies his body. When he is function as clues to the film’s central threatened by a low-life bartender who is mystery: the present-day “real” world is attempting to blackmail him because the itself a simulation created by a reality bartender has information about above it. When the mysterious Jane Hannon’s murder, he surprises himself Fuller (Gretchen Mol) appears on the by pushing his opponent’s head through scene, claiming she is Hannon Fuller’s a car window so violently that the thug is daughter, she actually has transported frightened and runs away. Other into the present from her world set in complications arise from leakages 2024. Her world has created thousands between worlds. Hannon’s murder, of simulated worlds, she tells Douglas, which occurs at the film’s beginning, but only his world has created another was David’s attempt to keep the true simulation in turn. Jane is immediately nature of the present-day world a secret attracted to Douglas because he is from its inhabitants, for Hannon had modeled on David, her husband in the stumbled across the fact that his world 2024 world. As if dimly tapping into too was a simulation. The boundary David’s memories, Douglas comments between the worlds can be sealed, David that she looks familiar, calling it déjà vu. thinks, by this act of ultimate violence, Jane reinterprets the experience by made all the more vicious by the assigning it a romantic significance, pleasure he takes in carving up his claiming “they say that déjà vu is usually victim. a sign of love at first sight.” She has Far from keeping the worlds fallen in love with Douglas, she will separated, Hannon’s murder initiates a later explain to him, because he series of events that ensures the worlds embodies the goodness that her husband will increasingly become entangled with David lost when he began to indulge his one another. Realizing how dangerous sadistic inclinations by torturing and the knowledge is, Hannon leaves a murdering people in the 1998 world. message for Douglas “in the system” by Jane’s attraction cannot, however, put to entrusting a letter to Ashton (Vincent rest the explosive implications of the D’Onofrio) the suave and explosive revelation that the present-day world is bartender in the 1937 world modeled on as unreal (and real) as the 1937 world. Whitney, Douglas’s mild-mannered The traffic between worlds opens a programmer colleague. Instead of Pandora’s Box of metaphysical and giving the letter to Douglas, as Hannon psychological complexities that cannot instructed, Ashton reads it himself. be stuffed back by a declaration of love. Following its instructions, he drives to One complicating factor is the “the end of the world” and discovers leakage that occurs between simulant where the edges of the simulation drop and user. Not only can Douglas be off into nothingness. This forbidden affected by the behaviors of the simulant knowledge goads Ashton into wanting to whose body he occupies, as when he escape into the “real” world that created lights up after denying twice that he the 1937 simulation. Tortured by smokes (a habit Ferguson, his double in knowing his world is only a model, the 1937 world, practices); he can also Ashton attacks Douglas when he returns, be affected by the personality of David, asking “What is real?” Demanding “Is his creator and the sadistic upper-level this real?”, he then shoots Douglas in the 5 leg. “How do you like having your life answer to Ashton’s lingering demand to fucked with,” he shouts. The fight know what is real. “They’re as real as continues in a room with a heated pool, you and me,” he asserts, speaking truer where the violent action contrasts with than he knows. Here the film loses an misty air that blurs boundaries and opportunity to explore the ethical makes unambiguous delineation complexities of the situation, for if the impossible. When the two plunge into simulants are in fact “real” people, the pool as Ashton tries to drown shutting the simulation down can only Douglas, the jump cut to Douglas being amount to mass murder, since all the pulled by Whitney from the simulation, simulants would then be wiped from choking and gasping for breath, existence. accentuates the similarity between being The omission is deliberate, for immersed in the green laser light and this realization drives the later plot of submerged in simulated water so real it Daniel Galouye’s Simulacron-3, the was killing him. novel that provided the starting point for We later discover that if someone the script. Like the film, the novel is set is killed in the simulation while an in a present-day world that has created a upper-world user is occupying the body, simulation so real it entrances the the user’s consciousness dies with the programmers who download into it. simulant’s body. Since the user’s Unlike the film, however, the novel’s consciousness is no longer alive to re- simulation serves as the focal point for occupy his own body, when the body political intrigue, for it can be used emerges from the simulation, the either for research into the secrets of computer places the simulant’s “human nature,” as Douglas Hall puts it, consciousness—now the only or, in a more banal and ultimately consciousness available—into it. In this sinister plot, as a data-mining way the simulant’s consciousness is able replacement for the omnipresent public to leap out of the simulation to the opinion pollsters, dubbed Certified (relatively) real world above. The Reaction Monitors, who constantly boundaries are thus in fact permeable in pester the citizens of the 1998 world for both directions, allowing traffic to flow their views on commercial products. So from lower to upper as well as upper to pervasive has this practice become that it lower. This programming oversight is constitutes a sizable portion of the foreshadowed by Whitney’s early world’s economy, fortified by the warning to Douglas, “You could die!” powerful Association of Reaction Monitors that has successfully lobbied The revelation that the 1998 for laws compelling citizens to answer world is a simulation intensifies the the CRM’s ubiquitous questions. When ambiguities that haunt the scenes with the novel’s Douglas Hall realizes his retrospective ironies. When Douglas world is a simulation, he understands barely escapes death by drowning in the that it is being used for data mining by simulated world, he is mobilized into the world above, much as his company furious action, insisting when he returns intends to use its simulated world. If his to his world that he intends to shut the company’s simulation puts the CRMs simulation down. “These people are out of business, Douglas’s world will real,” he shouts to Whitney in an cease to fulfill the purpose for which it announcement that can be taken as an 6 was created by the upper world and will world, is as fully capable of a consequently be wiped from existence meaningful life as the citizens of her by its creator, the sadistic David. In the world. Echoing the concerns of novel these ambiguities are carried not Galouye’s Douglas Hall, the filmic so much by dialogue as by a complicated character insists, “None of this is real. set of protocols that allows one character You pull the plug, I disappear, and to probe and partially control the nothing I ever say, nothing I ever do, consciousness of another, enacted most will ever matter.” fully when Douglas struggles to retain Although the film swerves from control of his consciousness against the novel in downplaying the suggestion David. By reducing these complications that the plug might be pulled, the film and omitting altogether the political effectively settles the argument in Jane’s battle for how the simulation will be favor when David, knowing she has used, the film reorients the emphasis betrayed him by falling in love with toward metaphysical complexities rather 5 Douglas, downloads into Douglas’s than political satire. world to kill her while she is also These perplexities provide the downloaded in the 1998 world. Since central focus for the latter half of the her death in the simulation would mean film, as characters in both the 1937 and the destruction of her consciousness in 1998 worlds struggle with what their the 2024 world, the death threat must be lives mean if their consciousness, and seen as something more than a game, indeed their entire perceived universes, restoring its status as an ultimate are merely electrical impulses running in concern. If her death is real, then it a computer. When Ashton’s body is follows that her life in the simulated struck by a car while occupied by world must also be consequential and Whitney, the death of Whitney’s thus in some sense real. Through this consciousness automatically ensures that plot twist consequences are knitted back the computer will upload Ashton’s together with actions, restoring the consciousness into Douglas’s world, the possibility for ethical action that was first time Douglas (and we) realize this threatened when characters could reverse transfer is possible. By now apparently escape the consequences for Douglas has discovered his world too is their actions by uploading back into their a simulation. When the usually-cynical own world, as Douglas did when he was Ashton, stunned by the superior being drowned by Ashton. From an technology of 1998, proclaims that ethical viewpoint it does not matter, the people in this world are like gods, film suggests, whether the lives one Douglas replies ironically that he is little plays with are simulated or real. more than a mechanical figure in the Sacrificing someone else to gratify crude arcade game he keeps in his office, sadistic desires is always wrong and capable only of making preprogrammed fraught with ethical implications. Jane moves. He repeats this denial of free tells Douglas that her husband “made will and ultimate meaning to Jane, himself a god, and it corrupted him.” calling himself a “puppet.” Jane Douglas’s conclusion concerning the responds, “A puppet doesn’t have a simulants in the 1937 world, “they are as soul,” insisting that Douglas, and real as you and me,” can now be implicitly everyone in the present-day understood in a positive rather than a 7 negative sense, as a recognition of the to Jane and Douglas from the beach rights of simulants in both worlds to where he is walking his dog. meaningful lives. This trite ending is rendered Throughout, the 1998 and 1937 more complex in the film’s closing shot. worlds have been distinguished by As the screen goes black, the display strikingly different visual styles. contracts to a white dot in the middle, as Whereas the 1937 world has lightly- if a television or computer screen was tinted sepia tones and is replete with rich being shut down. The implication, of lustrous fabrics and crowded cabaret course, is that Jane’s world is also a scenes appropriate to the nostalgic simulation, a suggestion slyly imported function it serves for its creator Hannon into Galouye’s novel through its title, Fuller, the present day world is rendered Simulacron-3. Although characters in in saturated primaries, icy blues and reds the novel’s present-day world explain reflected in cold glass and steel surfaces. the eponymous name of their simulation When Detective McBain (Dennis by saying that it took three tries to get Haysbert) cuts the plot’s Gordian knot the simulation to work, the title haunts by shooting David just as he is about to the novel with the intimation that even kill Jane, the bullet shatters a large glass the third uppermost world is a window, metaphorically penetrating the simulation. boundaries separating the worlds. As Instead of turtles all the way David’s consciousness dies, Douglas is down, reality may be simulations all the automatically uploaded into Jane’s way up, a view that renders every level world, in effect allowing her to exchange ontologically unstable but nonetheless the corrupted David for Douglas, who also restores the possibility for meaning resembles the person David used to be at every level. Detective McBain, who before he played god. We know that broods over the action in the 1998 world McBain’s conscious act of killing was and functions as a kind of narrator for initiated by a phone call from Jane. the film, sums up this view when, after Although we do not hear their he has killed David in Douglas’s body, conversation, we can infer that she has he tells Jane “Just leave us all the hell clued him in to the situation. After alone down here, OK?” If every killing David, McBain makes clear that available reality is a simulation, the he understands the true nature of his reality markers that distinguish science world when he asks, “Is somebody going fiction from mainstream fiction can no to unplug me now?” This dark note is in longer function effectively, for the sharp contrast to the final scenes differences that mark a world showing Douglas awakening in the 2024 constructed through cognitive world, where the predominant rose estrangement as distinct from the colors and futuristic utopian style that everyday world are deconstructed. In suggest all the problems have been the worlds depicted in The Thirteenth solved. Douglas, united with Jane, even Floor, all realities are mixed—at least all recovers in surrogate form his that we can know. relationship with his father figure Hannon Fuller, for in the 2024 world Memory and Authenticity in Dark City Jane’s father, the model for Hannon, Whereas in The Thirteenth Floor enjoys evident good health as he waves issues of ultimate concern are 8
problematized because quotidian reality consciousness as it struggles to construct is revealed to be a simulation, in Dark a coherent self from artificial memories City the focus shifts to simulated and a subjectivity that proves to be more memories and environments. Tampering than the sum of what it can remember. with the minds of the simulants after The drama is played out primarily they are created, a realized possibility in through the character of John Murdoch, Galouye’s novel where memories are an inhabitant of the Dark City who frequently erased or reprogrammed, is successfully (and unconsciously) resists omitted from the film version. Rather the latest memory imprinting and than introducing the additional awakens in midstream, with his previous complication of “real” versus “unreal” memories wiped out but his new ones memories, past events remain not yet installed. consensually intact, allowing the focus The implantation is carried out by to stay on the central ontological Dr. Daniel Schreber, a human who has question of whether a simulated world been forced to work for The Strangers can have meaning. By contrast, in Dark but nevertheless harbors subversive City the split between the real and unreal ambitions. In sharp contrast to the ultra- moves inward into the mind, creating a modern simulation equipment of The dichotomy between an artificial past Thirteenth Floor, the technology here is constructed by implanting false rendered anachronistically, the synthetic memories, and an inaccessible yet still memories contained within an ornately theoretically possible authentic core. antique syringe reminiscent of the This dichotomy is reflected and inverted kludgey technology of The City of Lost in the city’s architecture, split between Children. Like that film, the lighting of an ordinary-appearing surface and an Dark City is inspired by the noir alien core. Although the Dark City tradition, as Roger Ebert has noted, appears normal to its inhabitants, using point light sources, dark shadows, underneath are The Strangers, aliens and smoke-obscured rooms to create a who control the machinery telepathically sense of visual impairment that prevents through the “tuning” that nightly us from ever seeing the whole picture at rearranges the city surface according to once. The absence of clear sight lines their experiments. As with The gestures metaphorically toward the Thirteenth Floor, anomalies function as condition of the human inhabitants, who crucial clues to the truth, here the facts are periodically injected with memories that day never breaks over the Dark City of completely different lives than they and all roads circle back to their starting had led before. Dr. Schreber, mixing points. and matching memories “like so much The mixed reality of The paint,” concocts from them synthetic Thirteenth Floor is created in part by lives that have no authentic roots in the having two different consciousnesses past. When Schreber discovers that John occupy the same body, a time-sharing Murdoch has attained the alien capacity arrangement. Although leakages occur, to “tune,” he hypothesizes it is an each consciousness retains its individual evolutionary mutation that has identity. In Dark City the schism occurs spontaneously emerged as a survival not between one consciousness and strategy. Realizing that John’s abilities, another but within the same unique among the human inhabitants of 9
the Dark City, have the potential to resist (Colin Friels), the previous detective the aliens, Schreber confides to him investigating the serial murders, has what he knows about their history: that apparently gone mad and had to be they were abducted and taken to the dismissed. When Bumstead visits Dark City as laboratory stock on which Walenski at his home, he is holed up in to carry out the alien experiments. an empty room, the walls and ceiling Possessing a group mind and painted with spiral-like labyrinths. communicating through telepathy, The When Bumstead tells him he is Strangers are a dying race determined to frightening his wife, he insists, “She’s discover the secret of what makes not my wife. I don’t know who she is. I humans unique individuals. Although don’t know who any of us are.” In the rationale is only lightly sketched in retrospect it is clear that Walenski knows the film, apparently they believe that if at least part of the real situation, they can somehow discover the source of including that his “wife” is associated human individuality, they may be able to with him only through a fictitious past re-engineer themselves and reinvigorate and there is no way out from the Dark their dying species. So they inject John City. Bumstead guesses that Walenski is Murdoch with the memories of a reacting to something he learned while murderer to see if, given this false past, investigating the case. Walenski he will now act like a murderer. The explodes, “There is no case. There irony, of course, is that by tampering never was. This is all just a big joke. with the human mind, they are It’s a joke,” he goes on in a significant eradicating the very individuality they pronouncement revealing that murder is hope to understand, a dynamic that not primarily what is at stake here. A makes their relations with the humans a similar dynamic occurs when Emma zero-sum game. Murdoch (Jennifer Connelly), John’s memory-injected wife, tries to apologize Like The Thirteenth Floor, Dark to him for the extramarital affair her City initially presents as a murder memories tell her she committed. At mystery. John Murdoch awakens to find that point John knows that her memories a prostitute dead in his apartment, her have been implanted, and he brushes body gruesomely mutilated and spiral- aside her apology like Walenski brushes like labyrinths incised on her breasts. aside Bumstead. Everything on the Also like The Thirteenth Floor, the surface, from an illicit romance to murder is only a cover for deeper murder, is trivialized because it operates ontological issues. We never learn in the service of what is concealed anything about the dead woman and underneath the Dark City. come to understand that her body is intended merely as set dressing for The plot evolves, then, as a Murdoch’s identification as a murderer. struggle to escape from the labyrinth, Death thus ceases to be an ultimate penetrate the surface, break through to concern and becomes instead an opening the outside—metaphors for going from move in a game whose stakes are illusion to truth, laboratory animal to otherwise than they at first seem. The authentic selfhood. The outside assumes chief detective assigned to the case, mythic proportions in the billboards Inspector Frank Bumstead (William advertising Shell Beach, the promised Hurt), is there because Eddie Walenski outside where the sun pours down over 10 an ocean stretching to a vast horizon, give you some more pretty things soon, signifying a geography diametrically Anna.” She objects, saying “I’m not opposed to claustrophobically encased Anna,” but they override her protestation Dark City. When John discovers a as an adult would that of a fractious scrapbook he supposedly made as a child, responding “You will be soon. child, it is blank when he first sees it. Yes.” Confiscated by Bumstead, it later shows At the center of John’s quest for up in the detective’s office filled with authentic selfhood is his attempt to pictures. Even this apparently hard recover his family and connection with evidence, however, is revealed as an his childhood, including Uncle Karl who illusion. When John insists to Schreber runs an establishment called “Neptune’s that he can remember his childhood, Kingdom.” On display is not the vast Schreber tells him “You still don’t ocean but only a few aquaria, allusions understand, John. You were never a to the goldfish that John rescues when he boy, not in this place. Your entire awakens disoriented from the failed history is an illusion, a fabrication, as it memory implantation and knocks over is with all of us. You made those the goldfish bowl. When Uncle Karl drawings happen with your gift.” In an entertains Johnny with that most banal of odd sense, the filled album does reveal family activities, a slide show of shots who he is, not by pointing backward from his childhood, John discovers not toward an origin that can connect him the authentication he seeks, however, but with an authentic past but by gesturing discrepancies that reveal the slides are forward to the mutant being he is artifacts concocted by The Strangers, becoming. “all lies.” The creepiest sign of the The specter of a childhood disjunction between a childhood severed severed from its rightful function as from natural adulthood are the aliens precursor to adulthood haunts the film who occupy children’s bodies, their throughout. The aliens have usurped the diminutive forms in scary contradiction parental role, regarding the kidnapped to their superhuman powers and humans as laboratory rats under their bloodthirsty intentions. One of The control, an image repeated in the spirals Strangers tells John “We use your dead cut into the dead women’s breasts, the as vessels,” so these unnatural children, obsessive drawings decorating in addition to their own monstrosity, Walenski’s room, the rat running a spiral signify the deaths of human children maze that Schreber is inspecting when who will never grow to adulthood. Emma visits him, and the rat trap When Schreber confirms that Bumstead finds in Walenski’s cluttered John has acquired the ability to “tune,” office. With their vastly superior mental The Strangers are incredulous because, powers, The Strangers regard the as their leader Mr. Book (Ian humans “like lost children,” perhaps an Richardson) says, “It requires several of illusion to that other City of Lost your lifetimes to master our gifts. The Children where the sun seems never to idea that a simple man could develop the shine. When The Strangers ominously ability to tune” seems to them to defy the visit Emma to inject her with the order that constitutes them as the adults memories that will eradicate her past, in charge and humans as the “lost they tell her condescendingly, “We will children” under their control. Through 11 his mutation, John has in effect been replays the previously implanted able to break through to adulthood as it memories of Murdoch’s childhood. is constituted within the regime of The Interpolated into these synthetic Strangers. One of the first indications of memories are new elements, Schreber’s his status comes when he resists The admonishments urging Murdoch to Strangers’ command “Sleep,” their action and assuring him he can succeed usual way of dealing with humans who against The Strangers. In effect, inconveniently interfere with their Schreber is remixing Murdoch‘s false designs. He can no longer be treated as childhood, giving him instead the an overgrown child resisting going to childhood he needs to reach maturation bed but must be reckoned with as a fully as a purposeful adult equal to the most commensurate adult. His quest to play powerful alien. this adult role leads him back in a circle The price Murdoch pays to enter to a wall poster advertising Shell Beach, this god-like status is acceptance of his the mythical outside he now realizes he alien powers. The film intimates that by can never reach. Furious, he rips successfully resisting the aliens, he has through the poster and finds a brick wall preserved his individuality. The epic underneath. Bumstead at his side, he battle scene makes clear, however, that begins tearing through the wall--only to he now possesses in full The Strangers’ expose the nothingness of outer space. powers of telekinesis. It remains an The outside is thus revealed as an open question whether his mutant absolute disjunction, the Dark City as an abilities have contaminated his “soul,” immense artificial spaceship floating his presumed human essence. Following through the dark vastness of outer space. the climactic battle, Murdoch again Trying to defend Murdoch, Bumstead encounters his doppelganger, Mr. Hand, breaks loose from the Dark City’s who tells him that his human imprint “is gravitational shield and is lost in the not compatible with my kind” and that blackness, giving us our first glimpse of he is dying. The scene’s composition the Dark City from the outside. has been anticipated by an earlier scene In a plot to find out what in which Murdoch fights with Mr. Hand Murdoch is thinking, The Strangers have on the ridge of a peaked roof, a struggle injected Mr. Hand (Richard O’Brien), resolved when Mr. Hand tumbles down one of their group, with his memories, one side, Murdoch down the other. This creating a monstrous doppelganger that foreshadowing sets up the later death of is half alien, half Murdoch.6 Now they Mr. Hand as a hygienic separation of the intend to inject Murdoch with their twins, with the alien contamination group memories, converting him into the remaining with Mr. Hand and the human mirror double of Mr. Hand, a human essence with Murdoch. who possesses an alien core. In return Later events testify, however, they expect that they will finally learn that Murdoch has become, if not an alien the mystery of the human soul, for they mutant, at least a superhuman entity. will share his essence even as he shares His status as a god is confirmed when he their past. Forced by The Strangers to uses his newly realized power to carry out this plan, Schreber overcome The Strangers and take over subversively injects him instead with an control of their machinery, using it to especially prepared concoction that reinvent the Dark City as a place full of 12
light and water, the two elements they the city is no longer dark, it remains an loath. As the sun rises over the Dark artifact run by machinery hidden from City in a shot that shows it from an the view of all its occupants except the exterior viewpoint as a huge metropolis omnipotent Murdoch (and Schreber, floating in space, the parallel with who has conveniently dropped out of the Genesis is unmistakable. Moreover, the picture). In a sense, then, the city is still spirals that had earlier connoted an a simulation, a mixed reality that appears exitless maze are now converted into real to the inhabitants but is actually wispy clouds spiraling over the city. As circumscribed by the limited boundaries Roger Ebert observes, this and disjunctive relationship to the transformation plays off the spiral’s outside characteristic of all simulations. alternative signification as an allusion to As with The Thirteenth Floor, this the Fibonacci series. Found throughout mixed reality is the only reality its nature in everything from the chambered inhabitants will ever know. nautilus to spiral galaxies, the Fibonacci Time Sequencing and the Mixed Reality series (created by adding two previous of Mulholland Drive elements in the series to create the next, as in 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, . . .) is associated Whereas in The Thirteenth Floor with the ability of simple elements to the virtual reality simulation was created self-organize, forming complex by a computer that can link to symmetries. The clouds, arising from consciousness, and in Dark City by a the moisture that The Strangers mind linked to machinery, in Mulholland abhorred, are not static like the walls of Drive the virtual reality engine is the a labyrinth but self-organizing patterns, mind alone. The sequencing makes the always changing, always new. It would film virtually impossible to understand be easy to see them as metaphors for the on a first viewing; only in retrospect can openness of free will and fecund the viewer put together the pieces to creativity, were it not that the city is still construct a coherent story. Significantly, ruled over by a superhuman deity who the detective characters that play conceals from the inhabitants its true prominent roles in The Thirteen Floor nature. The promise (or specter) of and Dark City are here relegated to bit godhood haunts Dark City as it did The parts that scarcely impact on the action Thirteenth Floor because simulations at all. Their function is allocated instead necessarily imply a hierarchy in which to the viewer, who must actively re-think the creator exists on a superior plane the story from the beginning once the from the created. ending has been reached, since the contextualizing information that enables The film attempts a naturalized this reconstruction to take place comes at ending by having John encounter Emma, 7 the film’s conclusion. now converted into Anna with no memory of her past life, at the pier The first coherent set of scenes overlooking the Shell Beach he has just depicts a plot to kill a beautiful woman created. As the two agree to go to Shell (Laura Elena Harring) in the back of a Beach together, the cozy reconcilement limousine, foiled when joyriders crash is tainted by the audience’s knowledge into the car and kill everyone except her. that they enter into their presumed new Dazed, she makes her way down the hill relationship far from equal. Although into Hollywood from Mulholland Drive 13 and conceals herself in an apartment wants to kill Rita and why. But as with whose owner (later identified as Betty The Thirteen Floor and Dark City, the Elms’ Aunt Ruth) is leaving on a trip. attempted murder covers a deeper and When Betty (Naomi Watts) arrives more disturbing reality. Only in the final shortly afterward, she discovers the scenes are we given the information that woman taking a shower and befriends allows us to understand that the action her. The woman, who has lost her takes place during the last two hours of memory as a result of a head injury from Diane Selwyn’s life. Figure 1, “Time the crash, takes the name “Rita” from a Sequencing in Mulholland Drive,: shows nearby movie poster advertising Rita the temporal positioning of each section, Hayward. Thus the film opens with an indicates its ontological status (real life, apparent attempted murder, and much of flashback, or dream/hallucination) and the subsequent action focuses on the the duration of each section. Betty and Rita’s attempt to find out who
A clue is given in the opening shots Seen from this retrospective showing someone sleeping under red position, the plot with Betty and Rita is sheets, covered by an orange blanket. encased entirely within Diane’s dream. These colors reappear in Betty Elm’s 14
spangle-studded sweater, visually the set that Adam Kesher orders cleared connecting the sleeping Diane with the while he passionately kisses Camilla, personae she creates in her dream. Betty another dig at Diane that suggests is the innocent self, the better self, that Camilla enjoys sadistically causing her Diane wishes she was, brilliantly played pain. Devastated by these by Naomi Watts. Since the film has developments, Diane meets with a been widely misunderstood, it may be scruffy lowlife hit man and gives him helpful to review the evidence that Camilla’s picture. He tells her that once indicates most of the film happens events are set in motion they cannot be within Diane’s dream. At the changed and asks her if she is sure this is engagement party shown in the final what she wants. “More than anything in scenes, we learn that Diane had won a this world,” she assures him, whereupon jitterbug contest whose prize was a trip he tells her that when the deed is done, to Hollywood (this contest is shown at she will find in her apartment a blue key the film’s beginning as the credits roll). that he shows her. When she asks This, along with a small inheritance “What’s it open?” he laughs, for from from her grandparents, enables her to his point of view this is entirely come to the place often called the irrelevant. The suggestion that the key nation’s dream factory to try to make it can nevertheless open something in the movies. She auditions for various important reappears in Diane’s dream parts, including The Sylvia North Story, and provides a central metaphor for the she says in a conversation with Coco dream’s logic. Kesher (Ann Miller), Adam Kesher’s The dream recycles nearly all the mother, but the director Bob Brooker characters that appear in the party but “didn’t think so much of me.” Instead assigns them different roles, appropriate the part goes to Camilla Rhodes, the to Diane’s agony at having ordered a beautiful woman who appears in Diane’s murder whose consequences are literally dream as the amnesiac Rita. Camilla unbearable for her. The casting is befriends Diane and arranges for her to immediately apparent to us once we get small parts in exchange for a lesbian have seen the party, since the same relationship. But when Camilla decides actors play both their dream characters to marry her director, Adam Kesher and real-life counterparts. The most (Justin Theroux), she tells Diane they important doublings, of course, are Betty must break off their relationship—a and Rita standing in for Diane and scene depicted at the end immediately Camilla, now cast so that Betty becomes before the engagement party scene. At the protective, nurturing friend Camilla’s insistence, Diane agrees to go altruistically trying to help a dazed and to the party, but clearly for her it is an confused Rita. Betty is the rightful exquisite torture. Not only do Adam and occupant of the apartment, transformed Camilla announce their engagement, but from the drab dump where Diane lives Camilla also kisses another woman in into a lushly decorated beauty, so her front of Diane while making sure she letting Rita stay with her is another sees it, a hint that she may continue her example of her largesse. Coco Kesher, lesbian affairs but not with Diane. In almost the only person to whom Diane similar fashion, Camilla had earlier talks at the party, is cast as Coco Lenoir, asked that Diane be allowed to stay on the well-intentioned busybody apartment 15 manager who disapproves of Rita would return, another re-writing that staying with Betty (as Adam Kesher’s transforms Diane’s murderous intentions mother, she could certainly be expected into loyalty and altruism. to disapprove of Diane’s lesbian The conspiracy provides relationship with Camilla). Alone of the tantalizing clues to what the dream tries characters Adam Kesher remains who he to conceal. One of its instruments is the is, a hip up-and-coming director with an mysterious Cowboy, a fleeting figure at attitude, but around him the dream the party whom Diane glimpses passing builds an elaborate conspiracy plot through a doorway. In the dream, he meant to explain why he cannot have the becomes the hokey but somehow still real object of his desire, transformed dangerous enforcer who warns Adam from Camilla/Rita to Diane/Betty. “You will see me once more if you do Within this general framework good. You will see me two more times are many details that complicate the if you do bad.” Since we see him twice story, investing the transformations with more, at the party and when he appears delicate irony and dramatic tension. In in hallucinated form to waken Diane, the the dream Betty pulls off a dynamite dream logic implies she has done “bad” reading for a part in The Sylvia North rather than “good.” The real life Story, transforming a banal script into an conspiracy, of course, is between Diane explosive scene fraught with the and the hit man. In the dream the hit ambivalence of sexual attraction twisted man appears as a vicious punk who for together with deep hatred—a vicarious some reason needs the black address enactment of what Diane feels toward book of an acquaintance, presumably to Camilla. The director Bob Brooker, who track down Rita. Rather than simply ask “didn’t think so much” of Diane in real his friend for the book, the hit man cold- life, is rendered as a near-idiot incapable bloodedly plugs him. When a stray of saying anything that makes sense, bullet rips through the wall and hits an never mind insightful. The woman obese woman in the apartment next Camilla kisses at the party is cast in the door, the hit man goes after her as well, role of the dream’s “Camilla Rhodes,” comically struggling with her in a scene recycled as the actress that the ripe with black humor. This struggle is mysterious conspiracy foists upon Adam witnessed in turn by a humble cleaning Kesher. When Adam initially rebels man. Lured into the room supposedly to against their suggestion (actually their lend aid to the screaming woman, the command) that he cast “Camilla cleaning man is also killed by the hit Rhodes” as the lead, the conspiracy man. The final victim is the vacuum shuts down his production, bankrupts cleaner, whose smoking demise sets off him with a phony credit rating, and a fire alarm. With these ludicrous threatens him with violence until he developments, the scene enacts a sense knuckles under, even though his longing of consequences spiraling out of control. looks toward Betty plainly indicate that In sharp contrast is the he would much rather have her instead. mysterious head honcho of the Betty, for her part, runs out of this conspiracy, an impeccably dressed older important audition despite Adam’s man in a wheelchair who is encased in a encouraging stare because she has hermetically sealed room, apparently to “promised a friend” (Rita) that she make sure nothing from the outside 16 world, from germs to rival gangsters, This figure is introduced when an touches him. Despite his ailing health unnamed young man sits at a booth in and nearly immobile condition, he is Winkie’s restaurant and confides to his able to pull strings that jerk other companion (perhaps his psychoanalyst) characters into furious action. He that “I’ve had a dream about this place. communicates with his minions with a It’s the second one I’ve had.” He tells nearly imperceptible shake of the head, his companion that in his dream he sees but this is enough to initiate a chain of his companion standing by the cash telephone calls that move from one register in this very spot. In the dream, beefy hand to another. Since his motives the young man then goes outside to the and position are never explained, we back—and out pops a figure so dreadful, may wonder if he represents Diane’s so monstrous that the young man unconscious, communicating through declares, “I hope that I never see that chains of intermediaries and pulling person outside my dream.” At his strings while remaining unmoved and companion’s urging, he decides to unmoving. confront his fear. With his companion trailing behind, he goes outside and Despite the dream’s attempt to walks behind the restaurant. Just as he is rewrite Diane’s character and transform nearing the dumpster, around the corner the consequences of her actions, real life appears a derelict that we glimpse only keeps breaking through more and more for a second, scarcely human with insistently. The unbearable truth of the unkempt hair, a filthy face and obscured murder Diane has purchased interrupts features. The young man collapses. In the sanitized construction of her dream the dream logic the derelict represents repeatedly through the voices of her that which is so dreadful it cannot be dream characters. At first the leakages faced, the devastating truth that Diane are subtle, as when Rita tells Betty “It attempts to evade through her dream. It will be OK if I sleep,” a hope dispelled is no accident that the derelict’s double when she wakens and still cannot is within the dream itself, for he is remember who she is. Rita’s positioned at the crux where the expectation that sleep will cure her convolutions in the dream’s logic parallels Diane’s hope that sleep will become most intense. Nor is it an restore her sanity. The interruptions accident that when he appears again, it is become more insistent when Louise a signal that the truth cannot be kept at Bonner, cast in the dream as a loony bay any longer. tenant in Betty’s apartment complex, knocks at the door muttering The dream’s climax comes when “Someone’s in trouble.” Here the dream the dream’s script breaks down, logic is at its most self-referential, for revealing that it is powerless to change Louise has no counterpart at the party; what has already happened in real life. rather, her double is within the dream The tension begins to build when Betty itself. The shape of her unkempt hair and Rita visit the same Winkie’s and profile connects her to the dream’s restaurant in which the young man most mysterious character, a figure recounted his dream, a setting nearly invested with a fear so intense he is identical to the one in which Diane had rendered almost monstrous. met with the hit man. In that scene, Diane glanced at the waitress’s nametag 17 and saw “Betty,” the name she will all recorded” and “It is all an illusion,” appropriate for her alter ego in her despite the appearance he creates of dream. In the dream sequence set in the having live musicians create the music same restaurant, Rita glances at the on the spot. His colleague then waitress’s nametag and sees “Diane,” a introduces “La Llorona de Los Angeles, name that rings a bell with her (as well it Rebecca del Rio.” Literally “the crying might!). Following this clue, Rita one,” La Llorona is the protagonist in a produces the name “Diane Selwyn” and Hispanic folk tale about a woman who is she and Betty visit Diane’s apartment. jilted by her husband. In despair she Breaking in through the window, they drowns their two children in the river. penetrate to the bedroom to make a After nights of weeping in remorse she ghastly discovery, a decaying corpse on drowns herself, and her ghostly sobs are the bed. The corpse is an unmistakable often heard in the night.8 The film’s recognition within the dream of the deep version of “La Llorona” sings Rob trouble in which Diane finds herself, as Orbison’s “Crying” in a faithfully well as an indication that the dream rendered Spanish translation. Although cannot sustain its illusions for much the vocalist’s hair is disheveled and her longer. The discovery frightens Rita and makeup overdone, she sings so Betty so badly that, retreating back to expressively and powerfully that Rita Betty’s apartment, they cut Rita’s hair and Betty begin weeping. Betty in and hide it with a blond wig, making her particular is so affected that she begins into a double for Betty. Snuggling in violently trembling. The lyrics to bed, Betty confesses her erotic attraction “Crying,” mourning a lost love that will to Rita and they begin making love. never return, combine with the allusion When Betty asks Rita if she has done to La Llorona to constitute the dream’s this before, Rita says she does not know, most transparent recognition so far that and when Betty confesses that she loves by ordering Camilla’s murder, Diane has Rita, Rita significantly does not answer, not only lost her lover beyond hope but another indication that Camilla’s also condemned herself beyond rejection of Diane in real life is redemption. It is at this point that the beginning to affect Rita’s behavior in the singer collapses, although the richly dream. The dream’s illusions are further sorrowful voice continues as she is emphasized by a camera shot positioned unceremoniously dragged off stage. We to superimpose half of Rita’s face onto realize that she must have been lip- half of Betty’s, creating a composite syncing and that the voice is, as the portrait in which the two characters impresario warned, “all recorded,” just merge. In retrospect we realize that all as the events that the dream attempts to of the dream characters are being rescript and replay have already been generated by Diane’s mind, speaking the irreversibly acted out in real life. thoughts she wants them to have. With this recognition, the dream The dream’s climax comes when can no longer maintain its illusions. Rita awakens at 2 am and tells Diane When Rita returns to the apartment, that they must go to the Club Silencio. Betty has disappeared, as if to signal that Arriving at this eerily empty this idealized double for Diane cannot be establishment, they find an ominously sustained. As Rita opens the mysterious costumed impresario telling them “It’s blue box with a blue anodized triangular 18 key, the camera zooms into the black grandparents crawling under the door in interior and the Cowboy appears in the miniatures and then growing to normal doorway, saying “Hey pretty girl, time to size, she flees into her bedroom, puts a wake up.” Perhaps alluding to Pandora gun into her mouth, and pulls the trigger. ’s Box, the blue box functions Camera shots of the derelict’s face and symbolically as the knowledge that ghostly images of Betty and Rita replay Diane has ordered Camilla’s murder, the crucial realizations that led to this opened with a blue key that alludes to moment. The final shot is of a blue- the blue key she found in her apartment haired woman reminiscent of La Llorona indicating that the murder has been sitting in the balcony at Club Silencio. committed. Diane then awakens from She pronounces “Silencio” as if echoing sleeping on the bed, the dream having the conclusion of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, failed to solve her problems, which now “The rest is silence.” confront her with renewed terror. As she A recuperative reading such as goes into the living room, we see the hit we have given here must recognize that man’s blue key on the coffee table, even if the film can be rendered as a establishing that the murder has already coherent sequence, it nevertheless is taken place and that the dream was an presented as if it were ontologically attempt to evade this reality. The next unstable. Thinking about why this kind sequences are a real visit from her of fragmented narrative has become so estranged roommate, as well as widespread on the contemporary scene, hallucinations where Diane imagines including films such as Memento and that Camilla has come back to her. The Run Lola Run and contemporary fiction most revealing scenes are flashbacks to ranging from Gravity’s Rainbow to the breakup scene, the engagement House of Leaves, we speculate that as party, and the scene where Diane meets the flow of information and the the hit man to arrange Camilla’s murder, technologies of interconnectivity have thus finally giving us the information we increased exponentially across the globe need to put together a coherent with the advent of the microcomputer, chronology of events. distributed processing, the Internet and The conclusion comes when we the World Wide Web, the art of cut to the derelict playing with the blue storytelling has dramatically changed. aluminum box, now open to signify that As theorists Janet Murray, George the cat is out of the bag. Indeed, out of Landow, Marie-Laure Ryan and Michael the paper bag at his feet crawl miniature Joyce among others have argued, versions of Diane’s grandparents, nonlinear modes of storytelling, rescripted in the dream as a well- especially fragmented non-chronological meaning couple Betty meets on the plane narratives, are becoming increasingly but here transformed into demonic visible and important. The highly creatures hysterically laughing, as if in nonlinear narrative of Mulholland Drive recognition that Diane’s dream of further suggests that the technologies of making it in Hollywood has turned into a virtual reality feed back into the culture horrible mockery of success. We cut to to change perceptions of how stories are her apartment, where she hears a knock conceived and created, even when the on the door. When the truth enters in the technology is not literally present. form of her hysterically laughing Thinking of the mind as a virtual reality 19 machine (as Richard Dawkins among ------. Lost in Space: Probing others has argued it is) implies that the Feminist Science Fiction and notion of mixed reality has so permeated Beyond. Raleigh NC: our contemporary context that it no University of North Carolina longer needs to be linked with an actual Press, 1993. technology to be capable of shaking the Dark City. DVD. Producers Andrew ontological and epistemological ground Mason and Alex Proyas. Director on which consensus reality is built. Alex Proyas. New Line The conjunction of The Cinema, 1998. Thirteenth Floor, Dark City and Dark City. “The Basement: The Mulholland Drive suggests that in the Philosopher’s Library.” slipstream of mixed reality, we are no
Landow, George. Hypertext 2.0: The The Art of David Lynch. Videocassette. Convergence of Critical Theory. Producer and Director Toby Baltimore: Johns Keeler. Fox Lorber, 1997. Hopkins University Press, 1997. Barr, Marlene. Feminist Fabulation: Mulholland Drive. DVD. Producers Space/Postmodern Fiction. Iowa Mary Sweeney, Alain Sarde, City: University of Iowa Press, Neal Edelstein, Michael Polaire, 1992. and Tony Kranz. Director David Lynch. Universal Pictures, 2002. 20
Murray, Janet Horowitz. Hamlet on the ive_analysis/index.html> (March Holodeck: The Future of 30, 2003). Narrative in Cyberspace. New Zacharek, Stephanie. “David Lynch’s York: Free Press, 1992. latest tour de force,” Salon.com Penny, Simon. including thinking that the Spanish jitterbug contest and Betty’s winning it. version of Roy Orbison’s “Crying” sung 2. The red lampshade is significant by La Llorona is “an Italian aria” (26). because it stands on Diane’s bedside In contrast is the excellent analysis table and therefore orients the scenes in “Everything you were afraid to ask about which it appears as occurring in real ‘Mulholland Drive’” by Bill Wyman, time. 3. The title of the film for which Max Garrone and Andy Klein, as well as Adam Kesher is auditioning is The the review by Stephanie Zacharek, Sylvia North Story, which Diane “David Lynch’s Latest tour de force.” mentions later at the party. 4. The 5 accident of course occurs on Mulholland The film’s interest in ontological and Drive. 5. The hit man gives Diane a epistemological issues is clear from blue key to signify Camilla’s murder has “The Basement: Philosopher’s Library” been completed. 6. The robe, the on their website, where they have ashtray, and the coffee cup are quotations from over fifty philosophers significant because they identify the real on the nature of reality. time scenes from the flashbacks that 6 Alex Proyas’s original script for Dark occur in the last section of the film. 7. City is much darker than the version that Felt, realized, and gathered at the Club finally was made. In the original script, Silencio is Diane’s regret over the loss of Mr. Hand was named Mr. Black, and Camilla and her murder. 8. Camilla was Murdoch’s character, taken over by the helped, of course, by sleeping around, aliens instead of successfully resisting including with her director Adam them, is named John White, making Kesher. 9. The young man at Winkie’s clear the doppelganger relation between encounters his worst fear, with the them. Apparently Proyas brought in derelict symbolically connecting to Lem Dobbs and David S. Goyer to help Diane’s recognition that she has ordered him re-write the script. Comparison of Camilla’s murder. 10. Aunt Ruth the original script with a transcript of the remains in her apartment the entire time. film suggests that Dobbs and Goyer had Her departure on a trip is encased within a salutary influence, for they Diane’s dream and does not occur in real transformed an unwieldy script that life. This is indicated when, as Diane is often bordered on grotesquerie into a about to awaken, Aunt Ruth comes into tightly structured screenplay. her bedroom and looks around; the blue 7 Apparently concerned that viewers box that Rita has just dropped on the would not understand the film, David floor in the dream is nowhere to be seen, Lynch included in the Mulholland Drive because that action occurred in the DVD “David Lynch’s 10 clues to dream and not in real life. Unlocking This Thriller.” Since there is 8 We are indebted to Stanley Allen for no commentary on the DVD, this list drawing our attention to the La Llorona remains Lynch’s only commentary on folk tale, email communication Nov. 7, what he intended the film to signify. As 2002. evidence for the cogency of our reading, we can respond to all 10 clues successfully as follows. 1. The two clues revealed before the credits are the