Mulholland (Death) Drive

Abstract

This essay proposes David Lynch’s Mulholland Dr. as a site for rethinking dream experience, where the opposition between reality and illusion collapse into a tension among fantasy, desire, and the Real. Rather than treating the film as the dream of a single subject, it argues that Lynch constructs an oneiric dispositif in which subjectivity is unstable and finally dissolves. The film’s interstitial sequences – Diane’s corpse, the doubling of Rita and Betty, Club Silencio, the blue box – mark the erosion of any subject who could claim the dream as “hers.” What emerges is not a hidden truth but an object that persists independently of subjective anchoring: the voice continuing after Del Rio’s collapse, the grinning elderly couple, the box itself. These elements function not as symbols but as operators of impersonal enjoyment, indices of a Real anterior to subject and object. In this sense, Mulholland Dr. constructs a cinematic topology in which the dream ceases to be meaningful and instead reveals the inhuman kernel that structures subjectivity: the object, as death drive, that dreams through the subject.