This is Not the Film: Narrative Frustration, Indeterminacy, and Silence in David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive

Abstract

‘A Love Story in the City of Dreams’ ran the coy promotional tagline for David Lynch’s 2001 film Mulholland Drive. Since its release, this ‘love story’ – jagged, fragmentary, achronological – has inspired an overproduction of criticism focused on dream analysis. Central to such a mode of interpretation, one which separates content from form, which mines for content at the expense of considerations of form, is the distinction between those facets of the film’s narrative marked off as ‘fantasy’ and those marked off as ‘reality’. While these investigations have, in their way, been fruitful, they have also had the lamentable effect of rendering legible, reducing to a story, a work of art which, as a time-bound cinematic experience, deliberately resists the consolations of a linear narrative, amounts, in effect, to an anti-story that in its non-revelations, its silences, becomes time-less. And though inquiries into the formal features of Mulholland Drive have been made (by Jennifer Hudson (2004) and David Roche (2004), for instance), the ways in which Lynch employs narrative frustration and indeterminacy as a disorganising principle in his film have not been adequately explored. This article aims to redress the deficiency by examining Mulholland Drive as a film which, like its predecessor and, to some extent, progenitor, Ingmar Bergman’s Persona (1966), undermines its mysteries by foregrounding its own constructedness and historicity as an art object (in Lynch’s case, through a parodic treatment of the Hollywood system and noir aesthetics), which occludes and then collapses its narrative proliferations, subverting attempts at a definitive thematic reading, and which as a result establishes a temporality, an atemoporality, in which assertions of fantasy and reality are voided, and can only fall silent.