There are a couple ways to take the "asocial" argument, the way I was thinking about it. First, like I was saying, the world of the film (its social world) seems to me to be particularly cloistered, self-enclosed, and hermetically-sealed. You can't get there from here - from the world of everyday sociability; the rules that govern Mulholland Drive, and which govern the relationships of characters with one another, aren't the same as govern your interaction with me or with anyone else in the world outside the movie theater. I don't mean this in the way you might think, though. It's not that Mulholland Drive isn't explicable in terms of our world, and the subjectivity of its characters in terms of our subjectivity. Maybe its better to say that Lynch makes a few important interventions in the formal conditions of subjectivity and intersubjectivity. If subjectivity presumes a subject and an object, a self and an other, it seems important to say that only half of the equation is represented in Mulholland Drive. Self without an other, or an other without a self: this paradox is alive and well in the world of David Lynch. Rita and Betty belong as characters to a scene of fantasy that surpasses them both, and which neither can claim to possess as "hers." Same with the cowboy, the director, the studio bosses. What's missing is subjective interiority - the ability to think, reason, to act of one's own volition. What motivates the characters is external to them; but it is also the same force that acts upon all (the code for which is the man behind the wall). Is it death that moves them? It seems irrelevant whether or not we call the characters living or dead, since in a world of illusion, of fiction, one is always only playing dead, playing living. Lynch's world is wholly that of fiction; but in his world, fiction aggregates to itself unprecedented powers of violence and seduction; spoken language is its weakest weapon, body language, gesture, facial expression, its strongest.
Mulholland Drive is a paradoxical world: not only does it not "make sense" as a narrative, but its nonsense isn't even hidden, it's put in plain view - the blue box, for example, or the man behind the wall. In other words, the film isn't nonsensical because Lynch has simply left out or removed the relevant bits of information or plot (this is how Deleuze explains the shift from a cinema of movement to a cinema of time); rather, the film is visibly, openly nonsensical. Its paradoxes have congealed, or condensed, taking the form of objects fully inscribed within the world traversed by its characters. What's important here isn't, though, the "made-up" character of this world; because Mulholland Drive is emphatically not science fiction or fantasy. It's not nonsense for its own sake, in other words. My hunch is this: that Mulholland Drive takes place fully at the site of the Other, and in a manner that refuses to avow its relationship with the spectatorial Self. The Other without a Self, or an object without a subject: we can't make sense of these characters because their otherness is too much Other - as if an otherness totally Other had been given a framework, taken human form, becoming dispersed among a cast of characters (casting being one of the film's dominant themes) who can neither maintain their distance from one another nor merge finally back into their original state of inseparability (the fantasy of the wholly Other is the fantasy of the self-enclosed body, of the body that requires nothing Other for its satisfaction). I guess this is a bit convoluted, but what I mean is that the narcissism of the characters and their world is of a sort goes unchecked, dialectically, by anything that resists or negates it. Laura Harring's character is irresistible to Naomi Watts. A more conventional spin on the Betty character would put her into contact with Rita as a necessary counter-force: the jaded actress whose benevolent scorn forces Betty to harden herself in the tough world of Hollywood wheeling and dealing. Instead, Rita and Betty belong together to a scene of fantasy that requires nothing outside of itself to fulfill itself. Rita has the blue key, and Betty the blue box; who wouldn't predict a girl-girl sex scene somewhere near the end of the key-in-box plot-line?
Come to think of it, it's interesting that the second "half" of the film, post-key-in-box, is about Naomi Watts' individuation (the waking of dead Diane Selwyn) outside the world of Hollywood insiders (i.e. as a hapless striver): but of course, the film immediately assaults and kills her; individuation is death, but more than that, individuation is incompatible with the world of the film, and so the moment of Diane's full coming-into-being as an individual, when she has Camilla killed, is the moment that circumscribes both the beginning and the end of the film. The catch-22, then, is that to become an individual, Peggy has to enter the world of cinema, sacrificing her interiority to be swept up in the lifeless duration of a cinematic fiction; but to repossess her interiority, she has to take her own life. Either way, individuation is death in the world of cinema: to die in order to live onscreen, and to be killed so that the film can end. Fiction is deadly for Lynch - and this deadliness is the film's paradox: the absolutely-Other is death incarnate. I wonder if it isn't true that the most beautiful scenes in American cinema are always images of death, while the most beautiful scenes in European cinema are of love.
The film is antisocial in another way - and it's in this respect that the world Lynch imagines is of historical interest. It's not merely Otherness for Otherness' sake, or cinema for cinema's sake: there's a reason Mulholland Drive frightens us, compels us, and, ultimately, strikes us more familiar and less paradoxical than it otherwise should. The paradox of Mulholland Drive is the same paradox that structures, or has structured, the organization of power in America for much of the 20th century. The self-enclosedness of the film seems to me to take its cue from the self-enclosedness of executive and administrative power generally - power that has aggregated to itself both the means of production and the means of violence, but which has, up until very recently, kept itself more or less out-of-view, if not hidden entirely. Guy Debord territory, in other words. It's no coincidence that Mulholland Drive was released on the eve of Bush-Cheney executive unilateralism. The dream of executive power is to operate in a world where nothing resists the executive command - and where nothing resists, and where no principle of difference or individuation stands in the way of corporate efficiency, there's no need for language, communication, mediation. What's remarkable is that this cohort of power-holders, unlike the other totalitarian regents of 20th-century societies, hasn't any use for the cult of the leader, nor for the cult of personality. Instead, one worships at the cult of efficiency, of corporate unity - and, strangely enough, of a strange sort of social modesty: it's not necessary that anyone see evidence of one's power; in fact, it's essential that the exercise of force remain invisible, and that the accumulation of wealth be primarily if not fully out-of-view. But this is a paradox: power can't be exercised in a vacuum, nor wealth accumulated immaterially; power and wealth are always relational qualities. It's just not possible - and so society itself (culture) becomes the site at which executive wealth and violence are laundered, taking the form of characters, narratives (fictions), and speech. Mulholland Drive takes on the parameters of the executive world, reveling in the unimportance of fiction qua fiction, and also in the incredible violence and seductiveness of the power that works in and through fiction. Personally, I'm very happy that Lynch shows the paradox of executive authority for what it is: unmediated force, the absolutely-Other, death. To involve oneself in the world of executives is to accept a living death; to extricate oneself from this world, to negate it, is to be negated in turn. Where executive power holds sway, it dictates the terms of individuation; to be an individual means, very simply, to become an administrator: a false, impossible form of individuality, but an alluring one just the same.
Since the rise of the Hollywood system, cinema has held out to viewers the possibility of experiencing what it would be like to be an individual in a world otherwise (in reality) atomized through and through. Because capital organizes the world in such a way as to deny most people the possibility of possessive individuality - the ability to own property, but also to "own" one's experience in the form of unique, but communicable, memories - cinema makes accessible the thrill of individuality, though in a way that makes being an individual seem like more trouble than it's worth. The hero is assaulted by threats of a magnitude no audience member would ever wish on him- or herself (the sovereignty of the individual ego is justified in terms of threat); by the time our 90 minutes of individuality has elapsed, it no longer seems like such a bad idea to be a mere employee. Interesting, then, given the historical circumstances (the beginning of Bush totalitarianism, but, more importantly, the sudden coming-into-view of executive authority after decades of its remaining obscure), that individuality in Mulholland Drive is no longer commensurate with the spectator's wish for to be an individual (if only for a short time). For Lynch, the only individuality on offer in cinema is of a completely untenable sort: the living death of being-without-otherness. To a certain extent, the stakes of executive individuality are made clear: one can live one's narcissistic fantasy, but only by severing ties with the world of the living. Here, to enter the world of the film is to be possessed by an otherness that outlaws the self. Only in the land of the dead is power exercised immediately and without reserve; word and gesture serve to abolish all distance and difference. On the one hand, Mulholland Drive is a paean to the seductiveness of the executive fantasy, hence its creepily fascistic beauty. On the other hand, though, Lynch insists upon the fatal impossibility of this fantasy: No hay banda. Todo es illusion. The singer is held captive by a voice not her own; her body collapses. Individuality of this sort is untenable - death is its agent, it speaks in our name. Thankfully Mulholland Drive is a funeral for these living dead, even if a ravishing one.
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