Sigmund Freud, who was, strangely enough, suffering from a neurotic disorder, never looked into his patients’ eyes. Never admitting that a neurotic disorder was the reason, Freud and his followers – later theoreticians of psychoanalysis – explained that it was only possible to get the “freedom of association” if the doctor’s and the patient’s eyes did not meet. Lynch goes further in this wish to get free associations: he reveals the subconscious of his characters without even being present beside them or anywhere in the near, not speaking about looking into their eyes. Such a masterly “treatment” is, of course, only possible due to the nature of cinema, which allows dramatizing what has not yet been expressed in words; in all the rest of things, however, Lynch’s artificial, or, rather, poetic dreams are absolutely Freudian and, therefore, not only spectacular but also useful for the primary understanding of psychoanalysis.
There is nothing new in attempting to analyze Lynch’s films from the point of view of modern and postmodern philosophy. Martha P. Nochimson, in The Passion of David Lynch: Wild at Heart in Hollywood (University of Texas Press, 1992), analyses Lynch as the visionary explorer of the unconscious, a Jungian 'surfer of the waves of the collective unconscious'; Slavoj Zizek, in The Art of the Ridiculous Sublime: On David Lynch's Lost Highway (Seattle: Walter Chapin Centre for the Humanities, 2000), uses Lacanian idea of the ‘traumatic unconscious fantasy framework’ for the analysis of The Lost Highway; and these are only a few of the publicists who draw parallels between Lynch’s works and philosophical writings of the past century. However true it is that the “questions of meaning in cinema have never been restricted to questions of narrative” (see Mario Falsetto on David Lynch and Mulholland Drive www.synoptique.ca), it is still evident that it is the structure of narrative that brings Lynch’s films so close to practical demonstration of psychoanalytic procedure.
Despite the tendency among such critics as the above-mentioned to use more ‘neutral’ psychoanalytic theories, not making sexuality the cornerstone of the whole process, I would still like to turn to Sigmund Freud whose ideas find a direct reflection in Lynch’s films. In this work, I will try to show that there is much more than accidental parallels that can be drawn between Freud’s formulated notion and functioning of the subconscious and Lynch’s dramatization of the subconscious: in fact, I am convinced that Mulholland Drive is a pure example of dream-interpretation according to Freud, which demonstrates Lynch’s purposeful following the “guidelines” left by the originator of psychoanalysis to the future generations. Briefly, I will also touch upon some psycho-analytic elements in the Blue Velvet, Lost Highway, and Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me.
Alongside with psychiatry, Sigmund Freud had several more talents, including that in writing. The Goethe Award in literature that Freud received in 1930 was not an accident but a truly deserved prize for an intriguing and exciting literary piece. The Interpretation of Dreams makes the reader turn page by page, which is an effect that can only be achieved by a true master of suspense. This book can, therefore, serve as a “fertile” source to draw inspiration from – either for fiction- or screenplay-writing. Introducing The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud says: “In the following pages I shall demonstrate that there is a psychological technique which makes it possible to interpret dreams, and that on the application of this technique every dream will reveal itself as a psychological structure, full of significance, and one which may be assigned to a specific place in the psychic activities of the waking state.” (Interpretation of Dreams, Chapter I) Lynch, in Mulholland Drive, uses a reverse technique – he builds up a dream on the basis of the real events. And it does not matter that Lynch’s “real” events are also fictional: after all, there are rumors that most of Freud’s patients with their dreams and lives were derived from his imagination, which did not make the results of his psychoanalytic discoveries less significant.
Mulholland Drive, as many analysts have assumed, has the following structure: the first two-thirds of the film present a dream of the central character Diane who turns, in her own phantasised version of events, into an attractive young “angel” Betty; the last third of Mulholland Drive’s narrative presents relatively real events preceding and lying at the basis of Diane’s dream. Such a division into parts is, though, very relative, since the boundaries between “parts” are anyway blurred, elements of parts overrunning each other throughout the whole film.
Freud’s theory of the conscious and the subconscious pre-supposes that we perceive an individual as an unknown and unconscious “It” (Es) on whose surface there rests an “I” (Ich). “It” and “I” are not separated from each other by a clear borderline . Considering this, we may conclude that “I” and “It”, according to Freud, are, actually, one. This, as well as the fact that nothing, according to Freud, can underlie one’s dream but relations and events from one’s own life, is the reason for Lynch not to change the setting and the actor/character “staff” from the dream-part to the reality-part. Instead, Lynch achieves the dream-versus-reality effect by dramatizing the distortion and displacement phenomena described by Freud in the Interpretation of Dreams.
Freud’s idea is to analyze dreams not en masse, but on detail. In my opinion, this is also the most advantageous technique for analyzing Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, at least when it concerns analogy with Freud, who writes that “the dream never concerns itself with trifles; we do not allow sleep to be disturbed by trivialities. Dreams which are apparently guiltless turn out to be the reverse of innocent, if one takes the trouble to interpret them; if I may be permitted the expression, they ail show "the mark of the beast." (The Interpretation of Dreams, Chapter V)
The “beast”, whose mark is revealed in the course of Lynch’s invented dream, is the main character herself, who, in the so-called real version of events, turns out to be a jealous lover, nothing like the attractive blond “angel” she wishes and imagines herself to be. We can feel safe claiming that Diane really wishes to be Betty, because, according to Freud, “the dream is the (disguised) fulfillment of a (suppressed, repressed) wish.” (The Interpretation of Dreams, Chapter IV) Alongside with suppressing wishes, one’s inner censorship also displaces from one’s consciousness information which one’s “I” cannot stand remembering any more. The phenomenon of displacement lies at the basis of Diane’s dream, determining the dream’s shape and contents, things that are absent from the dream or present in it in distorted shapes.
Since my concern is the analogy between Mulholland Drive and The Interpretation of Dreams, I will stop at separate specific cases of Lynch dramatizing distortion in dreams.