A Lynchian Trilogy: Lost Highway, Mulholland Dr., and Inland Empire; or, Hegel, Kierkegaard, and Buddha in the land of the movies

I tend to view Lost Highway, Mulholland Dr., and Inland Empire as retellings of the same story from different angles and with different philosophical implications. All three set up a dichotomy between the real world and the ideal world, the latter identified with or exemplified by movies in general and Hollywood (the Dream Factory) in particular. In the first two films, the ideal world is characterized as the world of love, in which the loved one embodies the lover’s ideals (and/or defines them) and the lover is the center of the loved one’s world; and in both cases the real world is one in which the loved one cheats on the lover and the jealous lover then kills the loved one. In the adulterous act the lover dissolves the ideal by removing herself from her assigned role as its embodiment; and by focusing her attentions on another, she casts the lover from his or her desired place at the center of the ideal world. Thus, the adultery acts as a perpetual rupture of the real into the ideal.

The two films have slightly different approaches to these themes. In Lost Highway, the ideal world is that of a cheesy “guy movie”, and the spurned/murderous lover idealizes himself as a virile young dude. From his masculine perspective, his loved one’s adultery has the connotation of emasculation and is intimately connected to his fear of impotence. In Mulholland Dr., the ideal world is more explicitly acknowledged as the dream world of Hollywood, and the spurned/murderous lover idealizes herself as a caring, talented woman who is the center of attention. (I don’t think it really makes much use of her “female” perspective, unlike Lost Highway’s depiction of the “male” perspective.)

The two films also arrive at opposite conclusions. In Lost Highway, the real and ideal merge in the end, with the movie-world and the real world colliding, and with the ideal, virile young dude merging with the real, emasculated older male.  This presents a sort of Hegelian picture in which the real disrupts the synthetic ideal, and then the two are  combined into  a new synthetic whole that contains the contradictory elements within itself. The story is also presented as a sort of eternal return: the synthetic whole ends up back at the starting point of the story. Hence, just as in the Hegelian dialectic, we can infer an endless repetition of synthetic wholes being ruptured by a contradictory element and then being synthesized into a new whole, of a reality being forced into a set of archetypes and then erupting those archetypes.  In Mulholland Dr., in contradistinction to this, the real and ideal are irreconcilable; their difference cannot be overcome, and the irreconcilability leads to the story having a definite end: the lover’s despairing self-destruction. It’s like a Kierkegaardian critique of the earlier film’s Hegelian dialectic.

What interests me most about Inland Empire is how it retells this same story from a very different and much larger perspective, and how its conclusions act as a commentary on the earlier films. The protagonist of Inland Empire is no longer the scorned lover, but the cheating loved one; this is an immediate upheaval of the earlier stories. It forces us to completely change our perspectives and sympathies. In this story, a conflation of the real and the ideal is actually what drives the cheater to cheat; she is so absorbed in the ideal world which she is cast into that she adopts her role in it as something real. Simultaneously, we see the story of male emasculation and female cheating retold again and again in many forms, setting it up as an archetypal tale, rather than “the real” that ruptures the ideal; we see how the ideal world acts as a perversion that makes the loved one a whore; and in Dern’s monologue, we see a story told by an embodiment of the problems that “real” women face as they are forced into the roles that men wish for them. All of these aspects continually comment upon one another, and put the earlier films in a broader context.

By far my favorite part of Inland Empire is the celebratory ending. When the camera pulls back from the scene of Dern’s height of misery, the film asserts a philosophical rejection of the earlier two films: it insists that there is no distinction between the real and ideal. The miserable “real” world that always threatens to rupture the ideal world is itself a construct of archetypes and ideals. I don’t know much about Lynch’s Transcendental Meditation beliefs, but I think the film’s ending is a profound and revelatory celebration of Mahayana Buddhism’s central tenet that “There is not the slightest difference between cyclic existence and Nirvana” (in which case the earlier films can be seen in the light of Theravada Buddhism’s more pessimistic quest for self-annihilation). Being and non-being, sensuous and notional reality, are illusory. The distinction between them is the cause of suffering, the cause of the story of infidelity and murder endlessly repeating. Even the distinction between movie-reality and the viewer’s reality is broken down at multiple levels, as a woman who has been watching the movie meets Dern’s character, and as Lynch’s actors and characters have a wrap party set to a dancer lip-synching Nina Simone’s Sinnerman. As the Buddha said, “O what an awakening, all hail!”

Blue Velvet (Lynch, 1986): society is a social construct, it’s all made of dreams, and we can’t stop the robin’s dancing

At the end of Blue Velvet, there’s a scene of suburban bliss with an obviously fake robin standing on the windowsill. I love that scene. There’s a great special feature (or maybe an easter egg) on the DVD, in which the cinematographer describes shooting it. He says they originally tried to get a real bird, but when they ended up using a fake one, he kept saying to Lynch, “We can’t shoot this; it looks ridiculous”, and Lynch responded, “Yeah, it’s perfect!”

The scene is played for irony, but its artificiality does not suggest that the characters’ happiness is a fleeting illusion. I think the whole point of the movie, which is emphasized by the hokey characters, the artificiality of the suburban setting, and the obvious fakeness of the bird, is that the happy everyday life that the characters briefly leave and then return to is an artificial construct. But that doesn’t mean it’s any less meaningful; the happiness that they find at the end is real, even if it is based on artifice. It’s like an extension of Rousseau’s description of the social contract: society is an expression of the general will. Blue Velvet extends that idea to the next level, in which the very reality of the everyday social world is a social construct. The robin is a fabrication, but it is a fabricated representation of social ideals; it is built from the ideals of the everyday people such as Dern. And as long as people live in terms of those ideals, they are real. They exist even if they are constructs.

Consider how that ties in with the role of blue velvet in the film. The blue velvet is vividly colored, but more importantly, it is textured, and Hopper pointedly feels it in the rape scene. It is a representative of the raw, visceral, tactile existence underlying the social construct. The robin, though a realization of Dern’s dreams, is artificial; the velvet you can feel between your fingers. Also consider the fact that the town is a logging town: it removes the wildness of the forest, uncovers the darkness hidden there (a theme returned to in Twin Peaks), and turns the trees into tools for human construction. The movie does a great job of setting up and showing the interactions and attractions of both worlds: the artificial world built of common ideals and phony robins, and the mysterious, raw world built of primal and personal deviance and populated by Frank Booths.

Also, the “In Dreams” scene is the greatest thing ever: a profound mixture of absurdity and melancholy, ideality and kitsch, propelling the film past the foundations of social reality and into the quagmires of the Self and the swooning horrors of obsessive love.