A/V#6.04 2007 Autumn
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Despite many attempts, critics have had little luck in recuperating the plot and understanding characters in David Lynch’s film Mulholland Drive (2001). Attempts to fit character subjectivity into the reactive molds of the subject, and to explicate their inconsistency through layers of dream and reality have failed and, more importantly, they have disregarded the radical possibilities the film offers to move beyond an ontology of transcendence.
In this paper, I show how the Deleuzian concept of immanence offers a fruitful way of rethinking the function of characters in film beyond narrative structures and Cartesian notions of subjectivity. Through the concept of the event, it becomes possible to argue that Mulholland Drive opens for a reconsideration of the conventional function of character as a representation of an individual subject. Thinking in terms of an ontology of immanence, we can see the film as a collapse of the traditional structure of subject and object, cause and effect. In this way, we can let the film amend the logic of reactivism which, as Nietzsche argues, builds the notion of the subject through mistaking effect as cause. Thereby, the possibility arises to consider characters in the film as events rather than subjects.
In Mulholland Drive there are no ready made characters, no interior subjects explicable through narrative. Rather, the relationship between virtual and actualized experience, makes characters into immanent effects of the event. This, I show is most centrally illustrated through the disjunctive duplication of characters into virtual and actual components within the film. The persistent crystallization of characters, most centrally of the main characters Rita, Betty, Camilla and Diane, offers an fruitful opportunity of rethinking the event in the heart of Hollywood.
