Dancing in Hollywood's Blue Box: Genre and Screen Memories in Mulholland Drive‪.‬

The opening sequence of David Lynch's Mulholland Drive (2001) offers a condensed image for the film's complex exploration of postmodern subjectivity as mediated for the viewing public by the Hollywood film industry. In this highly reflexive sequence, Lynch portrays the cinematic screen as a depthless, indeterminate space devoted to performance conceived as pure artifice. Jitterbugging couples clothed as from an idealized, timeless moment of 1950s innocence multiply on the screen to fill its space. Background and floor level are erased, leaving the couples dancing gleefully past and even through each other, until a faintly readable image of the film's star-struck central female figure emerges, smiling beatifically, as the implied winner of the dance contest. Lynch succinctly embodies in this opening sequence a range of ideas about the cinema, conveying both ambiguity and ambivalence about its capacity to project and satisfy desire. For example, viewers can discern apparently directionless but actually scripted and edited movement enclosed within the screen space. The sexual dance is at once enlivened and constrained by the standard of heterosexual coupling. We see performance enacted primarily for an audience's approval and only secondarily for the performer's pleasure. We also bear witness to the Hollywood medium's endlessly proliferating, fractured selves as they become visible in palimpsest (I count only three distinct couples here). Finally, we infer an American culture in which the cliches of genre film both embody and parody the nostalgia for wholeness and coherence. The joyful sequence diagnoses the problem of subjectivity in a culture whose populace gleans self-image from the ubiquitous screen-image, its joyfulness made ironic by the flat simulations that substitute for the "real." (1) Lynch offers in the film a vision of the Hollywood unconscious, exposing the repressed material of the dream factory and the challenges that the almost infinitely replicated selves projected in the world market of images pose to identity. (2)