Abstract
This essay considers the lesbian as a modern tragic figure through a reading of David Lynch's 2001 film Mulholland Drive. While many have identified Lynch's representation of female same-sex desire in the film as a textbook example of male fantasy, the film offers a subtle treatment of intimate relations between cultural plots of lesbian fantasy and lesbian tragedy. In this sense, Mulholland Drive insists on the importance of clich�s and stereotypes in structuring reality at the same time that if offers several images of the reworking of such clich�s in dream and fantasy. The paper considers lesbian representation in the film in the context of a longer tradition of cultural stereotypes, arguing that the tragic of failed lesbian should not be dismissed a mere specter of ideology. Rather, engaging with twentieth-century theorists of tragedy, Love argues that this pathetic figure is better understood as actually tragic, marked as she is by the exclusionary regimes of the modern.
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