ABSTRACT
As the example of Bound suggests, lesbianism, perhaps even more than male homosexuality, remains the ideal plot element through which to foreground the dubiousness of visual signs in cinema and the narrative connections frequently strung on them. Released as cinema enters its second century, David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (2001) takes the classical cinematic confl ation of homosexuality and spectacle to formal extremes. In place since the Production Code era and thematically amplifi ed in the decades thereafter, the reduction of sexuality to scene retains the potential to off side audiences more accustomed to the mimetic illusions based in character and plot, the mainstays of heterosexual execution. Given specular precedence but subjected to a complicated narrative erasure, the lesbian story line of Mulholland Drive-crucially split between two apartment spaces-provides the perfect analogue for a postmodern fi lm practice that draws attention to the conditions of its own cinematic intelligibility.1 Incapable of sustaining narrative coherence, lesbianism dissolves the ideological conventions of narrative realism, operating as the switch point for the contesting storyworlds within Lynch’s elaborately plotted fi lm, both of which are set in the same Hollywood milieu and share the Lynch-like fi gure of the young male director, Adam Kesher (Justin Theroux). The parallels with that other eponymous cinematic address Sunset Boulevard (Billy Wilder, 1950) are many, not least the way Mulholland Drive offers a sustained refl ection on Hollywood’s perverse investments in the female image irrespective of the requirements of story, which are more particularly associated with a masculine compulsion to narrate or direct.
