Some good stuff there Seddy, theres never going to be a straight answer for this wonderful movie until Lynchy opens his big mouth. Anywhoo, for anyone interested heres a trimmed down version of my essay on the film in regards to theories on simulated reality and the idea of the hyperreal - more real than the real! It's all a recording dont'cha know...
‘Postmodern fiction embraces without anxiety a hyperreal world of simulations.’ Do you agree? Explore with reference to David Lynch’s 2001 film, Mulholland Dr.
‘Los Angeles is encircled by these “imaginary stations” which feed reality, reality-energy, to a town whose mystery is precisely that it is nothing more than a network of endless, unreal circulation: a town of fabulous proportions, but without space or dimensions. As much as electrical and nuclear power stations, as much as film studios, this town, which is nothing more than an immense script and a perpetual motion picture, needs this old imaginary made up childhood signals and faked phantasms for its sympathetic nervous system.’
(Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulations.)
Baudrillard’s suggestion that Los Angeles is nothing more than a town powered by a giant script, and controlled as if it were a perpetual motion picture is an idea that is explored throughout the 2001 film Mulholland Dr, a self-aware thriller dominated by its creator, David Lynch. Throughout the film we see a group of characters whose lives are being controlled and manipulated by several seemingly powerful figures. We hear of a creature behind a restaurant, a monster that can see through walls and control everything that is happening. We see Adam, the director failing to make the movie he desires due to a strange, disproportioned man that exists behind a glass wall, manipulating Adams movie and deciding ‘This is the girl’ for the starring role. In the surreal ending of the film, we come to understand that the whole of the Los Angeles that was presented to us in the first half was merely nothing but a dream, a fantasy come to life and created by the disturbed mind of Diane Selwyn. The compere of Club Silencio explains to his insomniac audience - ‘No hay banda. Il n'y a pas d'orchestre. There is no band. It is all a recording.’ (Lynch, 2001) Yet as they sit and listen, they hear the music of the orchestra, and they see the performance in front of them. However he continues to insist that it is merely all an illusion. What would become of our experiences as human beings if everything we see and hear in our lives is merely a recording, a predetermined trajectory of our experiences? What becomes of identity in a world where everything and everyone seems to be performing roles as part of their script? The script that both Baudrillard and Lynch believe the city of Los Angeles is following. In Mulholland Dr, David Lynch explores each of these questions in the wittingly distorted narrative of his film. Disguised as an unsolvable detective story, the riddle that unravels before our eyes contains no comforting answers about our reality, and the reality we witness in the film. There is no band and there is no truth. Throughout this essay I will endeavour to explore the question of whether or not the postmodern fiction of Lynch’s Mulholland Dr. embraces without anxiety the hyperreal world of simulations that he presents before us in his film and whether we are all existing in our own world of simulations and simulacra. By looking closely at Jean Baudrillard’s theories on hyperreality and the different simulacra that produce this hyperreal world that Mulholland Dr. exists in, we first need to come to some understanding about Baudrillard’s basic theories.
Baudrillard first published Simulacra and Simulations in 1981. He claimed that ‘reality no longer emitted signs which guarantee its existence. Signs now construct the real as simulations.’ (Horricks and Jevtic 1996, 103) It is these simulations that Baudrillard now believes make up the hyperreal world in which we now live, a world once connected to the real, but now separate from the real world that used to exist. As he suggests with the opening quote of this essay, Baudrillard believes that America has constructed itself a world that is more "real" than real, and those inhabiting it are obsessed with timelessness, perfection and objectification of the self. Its authenticity has been replaced by copy, a substitute for reality, therefore nothing is real and those participants engaged in this illusion are incapable of seeing it, rather like the character of Betty in her dream. The example Baudrillard gives for portraying his theory is by using Disneyland in Los Angeles. ‘Disneyland is there to conceal the fact that it is the “real” country, all of “real” America, which is Disneyland. – Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, when in fact all of Los Angeles and the America surrounding it are no longer real, but of the hyperreal and of simulation.’ (Baudrillard 1988, 172) This idea of the hyperreal is the idea that a copy of something is produced, rather like a clone. However, this clone will contain none of the impurities of its original; it is a filtered and more aware copy. This difference therefore makes it separate from the original, making it more real than real, becoming hyperreal. With the above quote, Baudrillard is suggesting that Disneyland is what America strives to be, an imaginary world that we all know is simply a simulation. This knowledge we possess that portrays Disneyland as nothing but a simulation makes it the ‘real’ world. Therefor it is when we step out into Los Angeles, and the rest of America that we enter the hyperreal world, a world that exists under the same laws of Disneyland, but the simulation is ignored. -
- The tagline for the film when it was released read ‘A Love Story In The City Of Dreams’ (
www.imdb.com, 1st May), and that is precisely what the film is, a story that exists in a dream, and a city that turns out to be no more real than a dream. In order to break down each simulation that exists in this city of dreams, we first need try and put the events in the story in some kind of chronological order to separate the parallel realities that we are witnessing.
Diane Selwyn is a confused but ostensibly nice girl from Deep Rivers, Ontario. After winning a jitterbug competition, she becomes interested in acting, and with the money her deceased Aunt Ruth left her, she ventures to Hollywood to follow in her footsteps to impress her grandparents Irene and her husband. Upon her arrival she moves into a seedy apartment complex called Sierra Bonita. She auditions for a starring role in The Sylvia North Story, but unfortunately loses the part to a woman named Camilla Rhodes. Although she is filled with jealousy towards this woman, she is also very attracted to her, and they soon become friends and begin a lesbian affair. Camilla’s star continues to rise, and she secures small roles for Diane in her films as favours. But it is obviously not by talent alone that Camilla becomes a success, she uses her sex appeal to great advantage. By now Diane has fallen utterly in love with Camilla, although deep inside her she is still complicated by feelings of envy for her career and sexual power.
Events take a dramatic turn when Camilla falls in love with a recently divorced director, Adam Kesher, who is making a film featuring both Camilla and Diane. One day, Camilla attempts to break off the affair with Diane, who then throws her out of her apartment in rage. Diane begins to become depressed and isolated, whilst Camilla and Adam’s relationship turns to the kinky side, as it would seem they enjoy taunting Diane, kissing and being affectionate in front of her. However, Camilla still retains some affection towards her old lover and she returns to Sierra Bonita and attempts to explain herself, but Diane will not listen, and throws her out. Diane locks herself in her home and masturbates desperately trying to cling to some past fantasy they shared. Camilla attempts reconciliation once more when she invites Diane to a party at Adams house, sending a limousine to pick her up. After surprising Diane by intercepting her limo on Mulholland Drive, she leads her through a romantic short cut to the house. Here at the party Diane encounters several intriguing people, including a man in a cowboy hat, a blonde starlet who obviously has sexual desires towards Camilla, a mysterious Italian man who watches Diane whilst she drinks her espresso and Adams mother, Coco, who immediately grasps Diane’s emotional situation and pity’s her. At dinner, Diane nervously explains her experiences in Hollywood and her ‘professional’ relationship with Camilla. Coco’s response is a disdained ‘I see’ and she gives a consolidating hand-pat to Diane whilst Camilla and Adam flirt in front of her. As Diane becomes more enraged at the sight of Adam and Camilla, she eventually breaks down when they laughingly announce their engagement. Diane is devastated; it is obvious she is seen as a nobody, a loser suffering from unrequited love and only successful through leaching off of others. Her humiliation is complete.
Consumed by rage and jealousy, the increasingly unstable Diane hires the hitman Jo to kill Camilla. They make the deal over coffee at Winkies Diner, and after she is served by a cheerful blonde waitress named Betty, she hands over a large amount of cash to Jo, announcing ‘This is the girl.’ (Lynch 2001) as she passes a picture of Camilla across the table. Whilst she makes the deal, a dark haired young man stairs across at her from the register. Jo informs Diane that once he has completed his task, he will leave her a rusted blue key in her home. Diane naively asks what the key opens and receives harsh mocking laughter in response. After her meeting at Winkies Diner, Diane returns home, and as time passes, she becomes more isolated and unstable over her complicated feelings for what she has done. One day she falls asleep on her bed and has a vivid dream, involving all the different characters from her life during her time in L.A. The events are replayed with different identities, and stories that could have come straight out of a movie script. This dream she has is the first half of the film that we witness, the first reality Lynch shows us. Upon Diane’s awakening from the dream, the increasing hallucinations of her murdered lover continue to haunt her, and she constantly revisits the events which caused her to make her decision. She sits on her couch, red-eyed and trembling, staring at the blue key placed on the coffee table. There is suddenly loud knocking at the door which instantly triggers all of the repressed guilt, fear and despair that Diane has been experiencing over the past weeks and she finally has a psychotic break. Overcome by a hallucination of her grandparents convulsed in shrill laughter at her failure in L.A, they come at her with flailing hands, driving a screaming Diane to her bedroom where she reaches for a gun in her bedside table and shoots herself in the mouth. This event marks both the end of the film, and the end of the chronological order of Lynch’s story.
As we have already seen, Lynch’s film displays the degradation of a characters life, through the multilayered and fake world of Hollywood, and the hopeful dream of the simulated world of Diane’s desires. A running theme throughout Lynch’s movie is the effect of simulated experiences on the emotions and psychology of the mind. The compere of Club Silencio explains to his audience, ‘No hay banda – There is no orchestra.’ (Lynch, 2001) Throughout the film we witness several simulations, which produce different emotions in the characters and ultimately the audience viewing the film. From the beginning of the film, it is suggested to us that what we are seeing may in fact not be the ‘real’. We witness Dan (the dark haired man Diane views in Winkies whilst she makes the deal with Jo) explaining to his therapist a terrifying dream he has experienced, where he talks of ‘a man, in the 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 outside of the dream.’ (Lynch, 2001) This idea of the man behind the wall controlling everything hints at the idea of a false environment being controlled by another, i.e. – Diane’s dream. As the man realises he is in his lucid dream, living out the events that terrified him, he ventures to the back of the restaurant and comes face to face with the monster he had seen and he faints. Lynch shows us how the levels of reality in his film can and will become blurred, here is our first hint that nothing maybe what it seems. Earlier in the diner Dan describes the setting of his dream – ‘It is kind of half-night.’ - a world where boundaries between reality and dreams are evocatively blurred; Hollywood.
This idea of simulated emotions and experiences continues throughout Diane’s dream as we witness Betty attempting to make her way in the ‘dream place’ (Lynch, 2001) of Hollywood. It seems Betty’s only talent throughout her story is to play someone else. She suggests to Rita that they pretend to be someone else when they phone the police, and we also see her playing different roles in the form of the auditions she attends. We first see Betty’s incredibly acting abilities when she acts out the scene with Rita in her aunt’s apartment. Betty injects anger and fury into her performance, convincing both Rita and the audience that what she is saying is actually true. It is only once we see the script in their hands that we realise it is all an act. Later on in the film, when Betty is at her actual audition, she acts out the exact same scene with Woody, a fellow actor, but instead we see a totally different response to her script. Betty displays an incredibly sexual and emotional performance, emulating lust for the actor she is performing with. The watching producers and directors of the audition are amazed at what they see, along with the audience. With these two examples Lynch is showing the power of simulations on the emotions. We are shown the exact same scene, but it is acted out to us in total contrasting situations, playing with our emotions. This idea is explained at the climax of Diane’s dream when Lynch highlights the false reality of the Los Angeles he is presenting to us in the form of the performance at the ambiguous, Club Silencio.
As already mentioned, upon Betty and Rita’s arrival, we witness several performers playing instruments, when in fact they are not playing at all, it is all a recording. In an ultimate test of the power of simulation, Rebekah Del Rio appears on stage and delivers and incredibly emotional and powerful performance of a Spanish version of Roy Orbison’s ‘Crying’, with its lyrics crying out the feelings of Diane’s unrequited love from Camilla ‘I love you even more/ than I did before / but darling what can I do / for you don't love me / and I'll always be / crying over you / crying over you / yes now you're gone / and from this moment on / I'll be crying, crying, crying, crying / over you’ (
www.mulholland-drive.net, 1st May) Suddenly half way through the performance, the singer drops to the floor, surprising the tear stained faces of both Rita and Diane. She was not actually singing, once again it was all a recording. This enforced idea of the reality we are seeing is nothing but a recording portrays the self awareness this film has for its own existence. In the end of the film we feel pity Diane’s destroyed life, yet once again it is all just a recording. When we see Betty visit Adams set for the Sylvia North Story, the auditions we witness are of the actresses singing along to a backing track, on a set that resembles a recording studio. Constantly Lynch is showing us multi-layered worlds. The Hollywood he portrays throughout both Diane’s dream and her waking world contains layer upon layer of different simulations, all evoking emotions in its participants. When Dan talks of the man behind the walls controlling everything, we are given the sense of some controlling power, such as a director. Whilst Adam is attempting to make his movie, we witness a strange man located behind a glass wall, controlling Adams life and his movie. At the end of the film, when the blue smoke clears and all is revealed, we find out that Diane has conjured up the whole first half of the film, she has been in control of the events that we have witnessed. When we learn the history of Camilla and Diane, we then learn that Camilla has been in control of Diane, using her sexual power over her, and she is the main cause for the Diane’s desperate dream, clinging onto her last glimpse of hope and happiness. These images of an unseen controlling power represent Lynch’s own controlling power over the movie we are seeing, he is the director and his constantly in control of what we see and what we do not. He is the creator and player in the separate realities we have witnessed.
In conclusion David Lynch’s Mulholland Dr. embraces the hyperreal world of Los Angeles, in which Mulholland Drive twists and turns. Throughout his film he delivers two realities, the ‘real’ and the hyperreal. As with Baudrillard’s Disneyland theory, the ‘real world’ which we experience is the first half of the Lynch’s story, Diane’s dream. In this we witness a world in which we are a guest in Diane’s own fantasy. In her dream she has the power over Camilla she never posses in the hyperreal world of L.A. She comforts and shelters her from the world outside their apartment. She even has the power to manipulate Camilla’s own identity, placing the blonde wig on her head and constantly blurring their identities. This ‘real’ world in which we witness Diane’s fantasies is enthusiastically revealed to us in the climax of her dream when we learn everything has been nothing more than another simulation. With no apprehension the compere at Club Silencio informs us that all we see is merely a recording, an act. Just as when we visit Disneyland, all that we see is placed there for a purpose, to raise emotions in us. Baudrillard highlights this when he suggests that Disneyland exists to ‘conceal the fact that real childishness is everywhere, particularly among those adults who go there to act the child in order to foster illusions of their real childishness.’ (Baudrillard 1988, 172) However strange their relationship may seem, there are arguably no characters in Mulholland Drive with strong identities in any conventional sense. In Lynch's direction, everyone seems to be merely performing to a playback recording, even in the waking world of Diane, the hyperreal world of Hollywood and America that Lynch is willing to reveal to us. This Hollywood is a simulacrum in this hyperreal world; an infinitely recyclable web of dreams, lives and characters where everyone always plays a role and no relationships can be readily established. David Lynch's Hollywood emerges as a self-organized system, in which all components are interconnected by a network of feedback loops, playing out the same dreams over and over.
In the end, Mulholland Dr. is not only a story about a few characters' lost sense of self but about the fake identity of Hollywood itself. It embraces the hyperreal world of Diane Selwyn, and the Hollywood in which Lynch his self would have filmed his picture Through his characters in his evocative simulacrum, we perceive the malleability of our own identities and reality. Although we may live geographically far from "the dream place" of Hollywood, it remains a significant part of a prosthetic culture that encapsulates our own sense of reality. It seems Lynch strongly agrees with the over used cliché that suggests we are all performers on the stage of life and he chillingly enforces this idea in the case of singer Rebecka del Rio, whose piercing voice still fills the room after her body has collapsed on stage. The show must go on, and on and on and on forever. In the final moments of his masterpiece, he suggests the only escape from this eternal performance that Diane and Camilla both become the victims of, comes in Mulholland Drive’s final utterance: Silencio .
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I'll post all my thought on it when ive seen it a few times. Just ordered it so should get it this weekend 
This is the girl. 
