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#563 - Mulholland Drive, Part 2 (Patreon)

Published:
2024-10-03 01:56:21
Imported:
2026-06
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Content

In the exciting conclusion of our discussion of David Lynch's MULHOLLAND DRIVE (2001), Betty becomes Diane and fantasy merges with reality... or perhaps "reality" and "fantasy" are never whole extricable?

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Comments

Justin Yozzo

Thanks for covering one of my absolute favorite films, btw! Now, more importantly, can you guys suffer through some scenes from an episode of Survivor? Jon Lovett, yeah, Pod Save America guy, was on and got the utter shame of being the first fuckin person kicked off. Cathartic!

relaxok

I’m surprised you guys didn’t talk about the scene when Kesher is shooting Camilla’s scene and sees the girl for the first time, and Betty comes in and he sees her.. one of the greatest scenes ever.. but anyway, loved the episodes

sinesynced

Something else that I think this reading of the film nicely implies is that, not only does fantasy help to render reality coherent, but desire is a terrifying, destabilizing force. The latter part of the film might not be soberly "real", but it's an illustration of how desire without fantasy shakes itself to pieces, making reality an atemporal, incoherent mess. That's also an interesting political implication of the reading, I think

Chris Sherman

On the cowboy, Zizek has that bit about postmodern parenting. The old fashioned father says, “get in the car, we’re going to grandma’s house,” whereas the sensitive, contemporary parent says, “of course you don’t have to go to grandma’s house, but don’t you think that will hurt her feelings?” If the cowboy is the enforcer for the bizarre cabal financing Kesher’s “dream project,” he’s a singularly unimposing one, at least physically. Instead, he’s turning the outright coercion the financiers are exerting over Kesher into a fait accompli and blaming Kesher for the fallout. Kesher can go along for the ride (money and success) but he has to twist his own desires and inner life to accommodate the financier’s plan. When Kesher sees Betty at the casting session, the conflict briefly reignites for Kesher. Something about Betty calls to him, but a moment later, he resigns himself to his decision. To take it a bit further than the film strictly calls for, capitalism doesn’t just exert brute force over us (work or starve) it also calls on us to reshape our desires in order to feel some satisfaction.

Shane

I was happy to hear Todd McGowan's work cited on this episode. If I may, he cohosts an excellent podcast called Why Theory. Friends here would love it.

Chris Sherman

Really great discussion and I particularly enjoyed Luke’s insights into way the two parts of the film depend on each other and form a greater whole. Thanks, guys!

sinesynced
>>151241901

It's incredible, he gets voted out instead of the guy visibly having a mental breakdown on day 2 simply because he is so annoying

Justin Yozzo
>>151241901

Paramount+ definitely has it. Get a little free trial and sit down with Will to enjoy. You can mostly skip the parts that aren’t about his tribe (the Yellow tribe). He even hides from his teammates that he wrote speeches for Hillary and Obama. It can be assumed that none of them listen to PSA. Season 47 Ep 1

Oliver Elliott

Maybe it’s too simple, but it seems like the movie is about the characters’ subjective perspective of, and ambivalence about, their own lives. So Kesher both feels kind of a loser who’s getting cheated on and pushed around by producers and feels like a super successful director who’s hooking up with an attractive actress. Betty/Diane both feels like a talented actor who “made it” (relatively speaking) and feels like a middleweight, at best, who, unlike Camilla, can’t score the really good roles. Isn’t this explicitly the proposition The Cowboy states - that how you think about things affects the way things are? Seems like the movie, at least in part, is making that idea literal.

sinesynced
>>151313468

Relatedly (also maybe obvious), the statement you quote is a threat--Kesher can accept the limitations of the suits and be happy with the freedom he's allowed or raise a stink, and the way he acts (it seems) will have very real consequences for him

Ashley Naftule

An excellent reading of the film, tho I’m surprised y’all didn’t remark on the wish fulfillment aspect of the hitman in the Bettyverse. Just as how everything else seems to go right for her in that dream version of Hollywood, in that world the hitman is a bungler. The effort to whack Rita fails and his subsequent attempts to find her/cover his tracks fail miserably. But in the Diane version, the more real failure-ridden Hollywood, the hitman IS competent and succeeds in carrying out his contract (hence the blue key in Diane’s apartment at the end). The hitman doing his job is the one thing that goes “right” in Diane’s world, an act motivated and willed by her (whereas in the Betty world the one thing that goes wrong is the conspiracy to rob her of the part, something that she has no control over). So I don’t necessarily think the hitman stuff in the Diane section is a fantasy—it’s absurdly heightened, but that’s the real horror, the evil thing she kills herself to escape the guilt of in the end.

Michael and Us
>>151443795

Good point. I feel like we sort of treated the hitman scene in the Betty part as somewhat disparate from the rest, but you're right it's intimately connected with everything. - L

Devon Hansen

I know it might be a bit hack but I I couldn’t help reading the cowboy as a kind of Reaganite figure. His aphorism about how the way a person’s life turns out is the result of their “attitude” feels like a kind of neoliberal mantra, in the way it holds the individual responsible for whatever happens to them, and the way he forces Kesher to repeat it back to him has this kind of coercive, hypnotizing, or propagandistic quality to it. A lot of the movie does seem to point toward the alienation and individualization we feel when the fantasies that are sold to us as things to chase after turn into nightmares and our failures to realize those fantasies send us into self-destructive cycles of inadequacy and dissociative relationships with our own senses of identity.