No Hay Banda: Desire and Illusion in Mulholland Drive
David Lynch’s Very Own Hollywood Nightmare Tour!
David Lynch's Mulholland Drive is an unnerving plunge into the subterranean realm of desire, fantasy, and existential longing. At its core, the film investigates how our fantasies can either help us confront the inherent negativity underlying desire, or serve as a veil obscuring that lack. Through its self-reflexive approach trained on the illusory nature of cinema itself, Mulholland Drive lays bare fantasy's fetishistic trappings and dares us to challenge them.
Ultimately, the film exposes an abyss at the center of existence. It guides viewers to encounter this absence through a story about fantasy's potential to traverse and overcome itself. The central idea is that there is an unbridgeable gap between the presumed object of desire and the objet petit a - the elusive, indefinable "cause" of desire that renders an object alluring in the first place.
The film seems to acknowledge the "nothingness" upon which love is founded, illustrating Lacan’s notion of the love-object as merely a placeholder for what is intrinsically lacking. This absence is situated in the Lacanian Real, which fundamentally defies representation. As a meditation on the illusory power of cinema, Mulholland Drive draws a provocative parallel between film and romantic love - perhaps explaining art's fixation on depicting love's fantasy.
By exposing the void underlying both love and cinema, the film attempts to explode our fetishistic mythologies about cinema's vaunted realism and the delusion that love can ever be truly fulfilled. Through its serpentine narrative about a doomed love affair, the film reveals cinema's inherent lack while questioning our impulse to treat film as a self-contained object of enjoyment divorced from lack. Ultimately, Mulholland Drive reveals that this same absence and impossibility underpin both love and film.
The central drama revolves around Diane Selwyn's unconscious creation of the idealized figures Betty and Rita, embodying her wish-fulfillment fantasy of consummating an erotic-romantic union with her former lover, Camilla Rhodes. For Freud, such fantasies serve a defensive function - enabling the ego to retreat from unresolved outer trauma by channeling its drive energy into alternate psychical realms.
Mulholland Drive’s deconstruction of love’s inherent impossibility hinges on its clever two-part structure. The first two acts recreate Freud’s model of the mind, with the idyllic, romanticized fantasy representing the frontier between conscious and unconscious psychical operations. Here, the first two-thirds depict Diane’s imaginary scenario of a blissful relationship with Camilla. Only in the final third does the film reveal the harsh reality of their failed relationship, explaining the root trauma that necessitated Diane’s compensatory fantasy in the first place.
Crucially, Diane's desire is not simply left dissatisfied (as all desire inherently is), but abruptly and traumatically terminated at its feverish peak. This leaves Diane stuck in a sort of psychical holding pattern, fetishistically clinging to Camilla as her lost love-object. Her intricate fantasy realm functions as a staging ground for the deployment of various ego defenses - splitting, displacement, sublimation, idealization - by which she strives to redirect her unruly unconscious energies into more palatable symbolic guises like the wholesome persona of "Betty."
Spurned lovers often fantasize about both possessing and destroying their tormentor, the beloved who provokes and denies their unslaked desire. In the film’s final stretch set in grim reality, Diane has an erotic encounter with Camilla that kindles yet ultimately denies her desire. Shattered, Diane feels driven to violently purge herself of Camilla, hiring a hitman to eliminate her former object of desire.
Overall, Diane's overarching fantasy operates as an unconscious, psychoanalytic process aimed at destroying her fixation on the unattainable Camilla - which is to say, her libidinal investment in lack itself. The film suggests this requires symbolically "engaging" with and loosening one's grip on the traumatic kernel of the Real, the fundamental "nothingness" at the core of desire itself. Insofar as it encourages viewers to undergo and overcome such soul-sickening fixations, Mulholland Drive functions as a work of art that projects its own fantasy which facilitates psychological self-reflection and inner revolt in the viewer.
To embody these themes, the film operates across three distinct yet interwoven narrative levels: Diane's fantasy realm, cold objective reality, and uncanny intrusions from the Nothing/Real into both. A sense of quiet horror permeates the entire film, with this dimension of the Nothing/Real manifesting as various ominous, monstrous figures and disturbing occurrences.
For instance, in one pivotal fantasy sequence, a young man visits Winkie's diner accompanied by a companion (possibly a guide or psychoanalyst?). Terrified by two recurring dreams set in the diner, the young man describes perceiving a shadowy man "doing it" behind the diner's wall. The companion suggests the dreams have unconsciously drawn the young man here to discover whether this disturbing man truly "exists" in reality.
When they peer through a hole in the wall, they indeed witness a horrific, seemingly supernatural presence - a monstrous figure who appears to terrify the young man to death. This shocking event foreshadows the crucial role the Lacanian "gaze" will play in the film as the cause of subjective destitution.
Later, Betty and Rita themselves are shown sitting in what appears to be the same Winkie's diner, establishing a clear parallel between the earlier Betty/young man and Rita/monstrous figure entities. In another scene portraying supposed external "reality," Diane directly meets with a hired hitman to arrange for Camilla's murder, visually associating the same monstrous figure with Rita, insofar as Rita has now adopted a parallel role as Camilla's idealized fantasy avatar. This suggests that in Diane's compensatory psychical construction, the figure of Rita simultaneously represents both Camilla as resilient stand-in for the beloved (who captivates yet denies her desire), and some fundamental dimension of death, violence, the Nothing of the Real into which this figure disappears.
Early on, a corpse that Betty and Rita initially mistake for Rita herself also visually links Rita to this same monstrous dimension of the Real - underscoring how the character represents the way the object of desire captures yet refuses to fulfill the subject's want, leaving them in a state of metaphysical abjection. As Diane laments within her subjective destitution, she must somehow get rid of this trouble - represented in external reality as her felt need to literally eliminate Camilla, and within fantasy as a compensatory working-through process of psychically "detaching" from her fixation on Camilla as a fetishistic stand-in for lack itself.
The interweaving, dream-like fragmentation of the tripartite Betty/Diane/Rita throughout evokes Freud's model of the psyche as a ceaseless negotiation between conflicting intrapsychic forces and agencies - the primitive drives of the id, the reality-testing operations of the ego, and the restrictive moral imperatives of the superego at constant odds with each other, all jockeying for emergence and influence over conscious experience.
As the idealized fantasy figures of Betty and Rita begin to merge into a composite two-headed persona over the course of the dream narrative, representing the romantic subject's futile attempt to locate and unite with their missing "piece" or ideal mate, the film seems aware that such a complete merging can never ultimately occur without inducing full-blown psychosis or dissolution of the subject itself. Those perpetually on the verge of feeling as though they have finally consummated their desire may defensively lash out, wishing to violently "kill off" the beloved/object who now appears to be fleeing and denying them their final union.
However, the film suggests that it is not the contingent object itself (here represented by Camilla/Rita) that needs to be eliminated, but rather the subject's delusional fantasy that this external object somehow contains or houses their own objet petit a - that constitutive lack, absence, and unfulfilled desire around which their subjective being is perpetually organized. Only by traversing and separating from this debilitating fantasy can the subject hope to achieve a more authentic, self-aware relation to the traumatic Real of their desire.
This idea comes to a head in the pivotal Club Silencio sequence, where Betty and Rita witness a performance that perfectly captures how surface appearances can conceal an underlying reality. Initially, the viewer expects a live musical performance, only for the emcee to declare "No hay banda" - there is no band, only a recording mimicking the illusion of a live act. This disorienting disclosure that "everything is an illusion" is then substantiated through the scene's central set-piece.
As a singer takes the stage to perform the melancholic Spanish torch song "Llorando" ("Crying"), her performance seems to mirror Diane's own repressed grief over her catastrophic loss of Camilla, and the psychological detachment required to finally relinquish her and move on. However, midway through the song's emotionally-charged climax, the singer abruptly collapses to the floor in a grotesque, seemingly catatonic stance.
And yet, her voice persists disembodied, the melancholic strains of "Llorando" continuing to linger in the air even as the performer's body has fallen. In this single, vertigo-inducing shot, Lynch's camera separates and distinguishes the embodied voice (as Lacanian master object/signifier of the objet petit a itself - that elusive yet omnipresent "cause" of desire) from the physical human subject who had briefly animated it.
This uncanny moment reveals that Diane's overwhelming romantic desire for the idealized Camilla figure stems not from some achievable wholeness in Camilla's actual self, but rather that sublime, ineffable dimension of the Other's desire - the objet petit a as transcendent object-cause of desire which can never be ultimately satisfied or attained, but only endlessly circulated around.
The fantasy ruptures when Diane confronts the total emptiness of the objet petit a around which her desire has been oriented. The monstrous presence perceived earlier thus represents this same traumatic lack in the Real "staring back" at the subject, with the disquieting camera zoom on Betty's mysterious blue box in this scene representing the pivotal vanishing point or trap-door through which Diane may exit her fatally destabilized fantasy realm.
From here, the film's final act depicts Diane's full-fledged immersion into the bleak world of external reality, now divorced from her compensatory dreamworld. This head-on confrontation with the Void her fantasy has been defensively covering over now compels her to finally relinquish her former fetishization of the love-object Camilla, and accept the harsh metaphysical disappointment of desire.
Yet the breakdown of Diane's fantasy doesn’t signal a simple renunciation of all psychical illusion. Rather, the surreal unraveling that occurs suggests that from within her very fantasy construction, an intractable core of the Real has managed to separate itself from the symbolic composition that had initially generated it. No longer attached to the fabric of Diane's imaginative scenario, this traumatic kernel of the Real now seems to possess an uncanny life and insistence all its own.
The objet petit a, the "immortal life" of desire itself, exists in a transcendent realm beyond the naively accepted limitations of reality's physical laws. Mulholland Drive suggests a more fundamental dissociation between phenomenal reality and the Real that persists in its midst. If the objet petit a names that elusive, immaterial thing around which human desire and subjectivity itself is structured, Mulholland Drive suggests that this transcendent dimension definitively belongs to the Real of desire, not the actual reality to which the subject has grown safely, if deludedly, accustomed.
It’s a trippy revelation that inevitably gets smoothed over and reabsorbed into ordinary reality, with the film’s framing device retrospectively recoding the events as Diane’s fantasy. But that fleeting glimpse raises an important question: which parts of our lived experience are objective, and which are just unconscious projections of our desires? There is a fictional, wish-fulfilling dimension inherent in even our most mundane interactions, a transferential aspect through which we often unconsciously relate to the other as a mere stand-in for some more primordial imago or part-object from our psychic landscape. “Is this not what happens in transference,” Zizek asks, “in which, while we relate to a ‘real person’ in front of us, we effectively relate to the fiction of, say, our father?” The ultimate aim is recognizing the unconscious fantasies and symbolic fictions woven into our experience of everyday reality.
Lynch's film forces this uncomfortable self-interrogation onto the viewer as well as the characters. The uncanny stylistic tics that render Diane's fantasy world increasingly unreal and distorted ultimately serve to pull us out of the fantasy too. The aim is for the spectator to undergo the same process of traversing the fantasy that the film's narrative trajectory enforces upon its protagonists. Just as Diane must ultimately relinquish her compensatory erotic reverie about Betty and Rita, so too must we as viewers resist being wholly seduced by the sleights-of-hand that cinema has customarily traded upon.
This subversive intent becomes especially apparent when considering how Mulholland Drive consistently plays into, and then upends, the reassuring genre conventions of classic Hollywood romanticism and noir detective fiction. The dreamily-scored first two acts centered on the growing relationship between wide-eyed blonde Betty Elms and the amnesiac Rita quickly establish all the typical signifiers of a frothy romantic comedy or mystery-thriller in the vein of Vertigo.
However, in the final third, these very same signifiers become tinged with a distinctly more lurid, horrific undertone. The initial premises and ensemble of characters remain superficially identical, yet their basic narrative units now start accruing shocking new layers of traumatic meaning and psychological implication under Lynch's deftly deconstructive gaze. Hollywood itself is demystified as the preeminent "dream place" where such fantasmatic semblances are constructed and regenerated ad infinitum.
As the "Girl Next Door" archetype personified by Betty/Diane declares in one of the more overtly meta scenes: "This is the girl!" - seeming to self-consciously acknowledge her own status as mere fetishized role-player in the grand Hollywood imaginary. Rita's choice to rebaptize herself after the immortal sex symbol Rita Hayworth, seen iconically enshrined on a poster for the film Gilda, literalizes the way noir heroines have traditionally functioned as ciphers onto which male fantasies can be projected.
In fact, the entire production seems constructed as an extended gestural system, deploying the signifiers of classic genre filmmaking as ready-made vehicles for uncannily short-circuiting their ostensible fantasy premises. This subversive rhetorical operation comes through most forcefully in the repeated shots that fixate on and fetishize Rita's body in unmotivated displays of nude exhibition, only to abruptly cut to or culminate in visions of horror - a dread-inducing descent down the hallway towards her showering figure; an unsettling pan down the stairs behind the diner to disclose some ominous entity lurking in the surreal underground space; and most notoriously, that haunting reveal of the corpse lying in lurid repose on Diane's aunt's bed.
These jolting tonal disjunctions seem to wryly acknowledge and take to parodic extremes David Lynch's own signature proclivities as a connoisseur of the uncanny. And in doing so, they prompt us as viewers to adopt a more critically self-conscious spectatorial stance towards the lures of voyeuristic titillation and escapism that have traditionally comprised cinema's core appeals.
Maybe this is Mulholland Drive's crowning achievement - to hold up dream, desire and the act of cinematic fantasy-making itself as subjects for interrogation, while paradoxically enacting that fantasy all the while. Like the ghostly voice from Club Silencio, the film is a compelling performance that simultaneously demands and resists our belief.