You Love to See It: Mulholland Drive (Patreon)

Two women writhe and gasp in a coolly modern bed made up with the kind of crisp linen sheets and dark comforter ubiquitous in the late 90s and early 00s. Like all of Lynch’s love scenes it has a florid, almost soapy quality to it, the kind of emotional hyper-realness — think BOB’s demented laughter in Twin Peaks and Frank Booth’s pitiful, seething whine of “baby wants to fuck” in Blue Velvet — that so frequently renders his work both transcendent and disturbingly artificial. This sense of unreality is further heightened when the lovers attend a late-night performance at a local theater where a woman sings ‘Llorando’ — a Spanish-language version of Roy Orbison’s ‘Crying’ — a song about a lover with a secret longing for an old flame and unable to express it aloud, resigned to weeping at the absence of their love from her life. Partway through the performance the singer collapses and is dragged away, but the song continues.

In decoupling voice and emotion from the body, Lynch foreshadows the coming transformation of identities undergone by Betty and Rita and the reconfiguring of their emotional bond which comes with it. Not long after, the women awake as different people, this time embittered ex-lovers separated by a class divide stemming from Diane’s (Betty’s) failed acting career and Camilla’s (Rita’s) success. A woman the viewer first met as Camilla Rhodes kisses this new Camilla/Rita at a lavish party to which Diane is invited, lipstick smearing over perfect skin. There may be a man on Camilla’s arm when she starts to make her big announcement, but this is the real betrayal, a declaration of definitive rejection.

To wake up without warning in an unwanted body is a terrifying proposition, one which acts as an entry point for a transsexual reading of Lynch’s magnum opus. What is Betty’s transfiguration if not an inquiry into the difference between desire and disregard? Where does Lynch’s movie posit that desirability resides? The women’s bodies remain unaltered even as their lives are completely uprooted and their identities scrambled, but their moods, their presentation of themselves, these things undergo radical change. Betty is chipper and industrious, a girl scout with something of Nancy Drew in her. Diane is insecure, a miserable woman alone in the world except for her shattered dreams and hopeless, soured longing for a woman who no longer cares about her. She has become Other, partly through rejection, partly through her own congealed self-hate.

In one key scene, Diane lies masturbating on the couch in her apartment, crying and sniffling as she does until snot smears her upper lip and strands of saliva stretch between her teeth. Her long, thin hand moves frantically under her unzipped jeans. This is the sexuality of a self-loathing person, one who has come to despise herself over time and whose sexual needs must now be engaged through a clinging veil of misery. This closely parallels the act of fucking while dysphoric or dysmorphic, reaching for release against the tremendous pressure of feelings of wrongness and alienation from the self. Lynch’s film is so particular, so idiosyncratic, that it touches the edges of worlds beyond even its considerable scope.