From Irony to Narrative Crisis: Reconsidering the Femme Fatale in the Films of David Lynch

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Cinema Journal, Volume 52, Number 1, Fall 2012, pp. 25-44 (Article)

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Frida Beckman is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Thematic Studies at Linköping University, Sweden. Her research focuses on topics such as sexuality, history, and political agency as expressed through media such as literature, cinema, and television. Recent publications include the edited collection Deleuze and Sex (Edinburgh University Press) and articles on the TV series Carnivàle and Tim Burton’s adaptation of Alice in Wonderland ( forthcoming). She is also coeditor of two special issues of Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities on theories of sadism and masochism.

From Irony to Narrative Crisis: Reconsidering the Femme Fatale in the Films of David Lynchby FRIDA BECKMAN

Abstract:This article argues that the fi gure of the femme fatale, associated by feminist fi lm critics with the epistemological drive of causal and patriarchal narrative, attains a progressive potential when portrayed through the complex narrative temporalities of David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, Lost Highway, and Mulholland Drive.

T he femme fatale, Mary Ann Doane argues in her classic text Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, Psychoanalysis, represents an enigmatic relation between visibility and truth.1 She is highly visible and yet never quite what she seems to be. She is blatantly sexual at the same time that she is not fully legible; she

is attractive and threatening at the same time. Representing woman as an alluring secret that has to be revealed, the femme fatale, Doane notes, is “fully compat-ible with the epistemological drive of the narrative, the hermeneutic structuration of the classical text.”2 The unmasking of the “truth” of the narrative is also the unmasking, and the disarming, of the (sexual) power of the woman. In this way, the femme fatale is not only refl ective but also a powerful sign of a “classic Hol-lywood realism” which, as E. Ann Kaplan states, has often been viewed as collud-ing implicitly with a patriarchal status quo.3 At the same time, Kaplan notes, in its latent potential to subvert American values, the fi lm noir can offer a productive site for feminist revisions of the gendered structure of the classical text. Despite—or maybe because of—the femme fatale’s intimate entanglement with patriarchal narrative, the possibility of locating inconsistencies and gaps in fi lm noir narrative

1 Mary Ann Doane, Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, Psychoanalysis (New York: Routledge, 1991), 1.

2 Ibid.

3 E. Ann Kaplan, introduction to Women in Film Noir, 2nd ed., ed. E. Ann Kaplan (London: British Film Institute, 1998), 3.

Cinema Journal 52 | No. 1 | Fall 2012

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would also entail the possibility of revealing the progressive potential of the femme fatale for the representation of women in cinema. Therefore, this article is interested in the relation between the femme fatale and narrative temporality. In light of Gilles Deleuze’s recognition of time as capable of taking forms other than that of dialectical movement, this article revisits the problematic portrayal of female characters in Hol-lywood by taking a closer look at the temporality of the femme fatale, in the neo-noir generally and the films of David Lynch specifically. Lynch’s films offer an interesting venue for investigating the relation between the femme fatale and narrative temporality for a number of reasons. To begin with, many of his films qualify as neo-noir and offer various versions of the contemporary femme fatale. Second, these films, as many critics have noted, often complicate the represen-tation of time and narrative coherency. Lynch, it has been argued, has abandoned narrative as “the invisible norm of the movie experience.”4 A third reason Lynch’s films constitute a fruitful resource for revisiting the figure of the femme fatale is that his representations of women have been approached by critics with skepticism and ambivalence. While Lynch is frequently accused of misogyny, it has also been in-creasingly recognized that his portrayals of women harbor a more radical potential. Martha Nochimson, for example, argues that “Lynch’s disquieting representation of stereotypes” and violent handling of female characters is not a sign of misogyny as other critics have claimed but, rather, a case of offering an important distancing from the abuse of women that, unlike most conventional realist film, separates these images from the pleasure of the gaze.5 This article focuses on the three of Lynch’s films that are most blatantly noir: Blue Velvet (1986), Lost Highway (1997), and Mulholland Drive (2001). Offering neo-noir aesthetics, ambivalent female stereotypes, and complex nar-rative temporalities, these films make a good starting point for a contemporary recon-sideration of the temporal and gendered conditions of the femme fatale. Of course, the classic femme fatale has a long history that reaches back long before her instantiation in the film noir genre. In fact, as Foster Hirsch suggests, the geneal-ogy of the sexually alluring and dangerous woman who makes men her victims can be traced back “to the very origins of storytelling.”6 She recurs in myth and literature, and, according to Freud, in reality in the shape of a specific narcissistic female type. The danger of the femme fatale, coupling, as it seems, indifference and cruelty, is frequently portrayed as the allure as well as the ruin of the man. The femme fatale of film noir continues to stand as a nexus of sexual economy and the power of sexual difference. Here, her sexual power makes her a desirable object of men’s attention but frequently excludes her from their love, a love they save for the purer woman who is commonly posed as her counterexample. The femme fatale, as Doane points out, is far from a modern heroine; her behavior vacillates between the active and the passive,

4 Martha P. Nochimson, The Passion of David Lynch: Wild at Heart in Hollywood (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1997), 40.

5 Ibid. Similarly, Judith Bryant Wittenberg and Robert Gooding-Williams find in Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986) an unset-tling balance between the feminist and the misogynist. Judith Bryant Wittenberg and Robert Gooding-Williams, “The ‘Strange World’ of Blue Velvet: Conventions, Subversions and the Representation of Women,” in Sexual Politics and Popular Culture, ed. Diane Raymond (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1990), 157.

6 Foster Hirsch, Detours and Lost Highways: A Map of Neo-Noir (New York: Limelight Editions, 1999), 187.


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and the narrative culmination commonly coincides with her eradication, in order for the male subject to reestablish his power.7 In this sense, Elizabeth Cowie suggests, she is “simply the catchphrase for the danger of sexual difference,” and such a woman is almost always punished for her threat to masculinity and male power.8 The strong, independent, and sexually provocative femme fatale is typically subdued toward the end of the film noir, through her death, her abandonment, or her “rescue” from moral decline by a man. If it is correct that a certain Hollywood realism tends to confirm a patriarchal status quo through coordinating the gradual unmasking of the sexual power of the woman with the “epistemological drive of the narrative,” then this tradition of narrative con-tinuity itself must be of interest. Narrative and character continuity are central tenets of Hollywood filmmaking. The classical Hollywood system places its characters as the basis of the cause and effect of the narrative, and because the plot is driven forward by the characteristics and the choices of the main character(s), the causal develop-ment of the narrative relies on the coherence of character. This classical continuity system keeps both temporal and spatial concerns subordinated to cause and effect and thus to a not necessarily linear but ultimately commonsensical continuity.9 Even the most innovative contemporary American films, David Bordwell notes, tend to stick with “legible variants on well-entrenched strategies for representing time, space, goal achievement, causal connection, and the like.”10 Bordwell uses Christopher Nolan’s Me-mento (2000) as an example of how mainstream Hollywood filmmaking frequently offers complex narrative structures and “scrambled time sequences” but ultimately comes to rely all the more strongly on causal coherence.11 If Nolan’s film, incidentally a neo-noir itself, fits into a tradition that depends strongly on temporal coherence, this is also true for the tradition of its predecessors in the classic film noir tradition. There is little consensus, as Joan Copjec notes, among critics as to the exact defi-nition of film noir.12 The type of films that subsequently came to be gathered under this term, which was coined by French critics in the mid-1950s to denominate “a bunch of previously withheld American films which now, upon their foreign release, all looked and felt sort of alike,” were at the time of their appearance in Hollywood in the 1940s and 1950s seen as very un-Hollywood, both stylistically and tonally.13 The darkness that pervades these films both aesthetically and morally marks them, indeed, as very different from many other contemporary Hollywood productions. Despite this slightly outsider status, however, the film noir has in common with the Hollywood tra-dition its strong reliance on narrative continuity. While the filming techniques as well

7 Doane, Femmes Fatales, 2.

8 Elizabeth Cowie, “Film Noir and Women,” in Shades of Noir: A Reader, ed. Joan Copjec (London: Verso, 1993), 125.

9 David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, Film Art: An Introduction, 7th ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill 2003), 298.

10 David Bordwell, The Way Hollywood Tells It (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 75.

11 Ibid., 93.

12 Joan Copjec, introduction to Film Noir: A Reader, ed. Joan Copjek (London: Verso, 1993), xi.

13 Fred Pfiel, “Revolting Yet Conserved: Family Noir in Blue Velvet and Terminator 2,” Postmodern Culture 2, no. 3 (May 1992): para. 1.


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as complex plot structures, the skewed framing, and the tilted camera angles work to challenge the attention of viewers, the narrative of the film noir, as Ken Hillis notes, ultimately works to reestablish order and punish transgression from the set pattern.14 Even if there is ultimately a continuity to be had, however, it could be argued that film noir’s experimental narrative setup provides a potential opening toward alternative characterization and narrative logic. It is this potential, as we shall see, that Lynch taps into in his work. In spite of a clear fascination with Hollywood and its narrative traditions and cli-chés, Lynch’s films frequently deviate from the Hollywood pattern of coherent nar-rative logic. Lynch, as many critics have noticed, deemphasizes the role of coherent narrative. Kenneth Kaleta, for instance, suggests that the director “grafts singular vi-sual episodes” and that his shots are compositions rather than “steps in a narrative process.”15 Similarly, John Alexander notes—and this was before the production of Lynch’s later and more incoherent films—that Lynch evinces an “apparent disregard for narrative” that makes his work something of an eccentricity within a Hollywood commercial-cinema tradition that traditionally regards storytelling as its primary oc-cupation.16 If it is correct that film noir, despite its characteristic and deliberately obscure narrative, and despite its originally slightly alternative status in Hollywood, ul-timately relies on a reestablishment of narrative as well as moral order, and if it is also correct that this reinstatement of narrative continuity and moral order is intimately intertwined with the punishment and thereby restitution of the femme fatale into the order of things, then Lynch’s neo-noir films that include the femme fatale but exclude narrative and temporal continuity need interrogation.

Blue Velvet: Morality and Recognition in the Noir Tradition. It has been argued that neo-noir films are in some ways in a better position to realize the classic noir out-look than were the films of the original movement. Unlike the classic films, which were only identified as such retrospectively along with the genre itself, the neo-noirs are able to work self-consciously to develop the noir sensibility, framework, and themes.17 If the earlier noir tradition expresses an ambivalence in that it, as Hillis suggests, chal-lenges the American dream by questioning the Enlightenment ideal of self-betterment and individual power18 at the same time that it tends to ultimately affirm contempo-rary moral codes by ascertaining that transgressions are punished, the later neo-noirs, Mark T. Conard notes, respond to changing moral standards (and the demise of the

14 Ken Hillis, “Film Noir and the American Dream: The Dark Side of Enlightenment,” Velvet Light Trap 55 (Spring 2005): 3.

15 Kenneth Kaleta, David Lynch (New York: Twaine Publishers, 1993), iv–v.

16 John Alexander, The Films of David Lynch (London: Charles Letts, 1993), 4.

17 “Neo-noir” refers to films made after the classic film noir period (which Conard defines as 1941–1958) that build on noir themes and aesthetics. However, if the contours of the film noir are vague, those of the neo-noir, as Robert Arnett notes, are decidedly amorphous, and sometimes any film that includes crime and a detective seems to be placed in the genre. See Mark T. Conard, introduction to The Philosophy of Neo-Noir, ed. Mark T. Conard (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2007), 1; Robert Arnett, “Eighties Noir: The Dissenting Voice in Reagan’s America,” Journal of Film and Television Studies 34, no. 2 (Fall 2006): 123.

18 Hillis, “Film Noir and the American Dream,” 4.


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Production Code) and follow through on the moral ambivalence introduced in the classic noirs. To the thematic preoccupation with crime and violence, with “moral am-bivalence” and an “inversion of values” in the film noir, Conard suggests, the neo-noir adds a moral confusion not absent, of course, from classic noir films, but which makes it increasingly difficult to tell the good guys from the bad guys and right from wrong.19 With the neo-noir, J. P. Telotte suggests, it becomes possible to at least partly revise the view of the role of characters in classical Hollywood films presented by Bordwell. Bor-dwell, as Telotte notes, offers a perspective on Hollywood characters that largely coin-cides with classical narrative and its well-rounded, realist, and recognizable characters. Such characters fulfill cultural and narrative expectations and function as key catalysts for narrative continuity and closure. In “Rounding Up ‘The Usual Suspects,’” Telotte argues that the neo-noir makes it apparent that the common approach to Hollywood and noir characters presented by Bordwell’s influential work on cinema is, in fact, insufficient, and perhaps even misleading. The traditional nature of well-recognizable characters in Hollywood is unsettled by many neo-noirs, which, Telotte suggests, offer key developments in terms of character as they take us from the comforting recog-nition of classical plot-driving characters to anomalous, unpredictable, and untrust-worthy figures. This is not to say that noir characters have never been untrustworthy before. Quite on the contrary, a typical trait of the classical noir is in fact the ambiguity of both the detective and the femme fatale. Nonetheless, Telotte notes, even if these are “anomalous characters” that “predictably produce anomalous patterns,” they are ultimately harmless because they ultimately reinforce the status quo. Such characters function as markers “of an underlying classical pattern of characterization. In this way, even the transgressive figure becomes a knowable character of the sort that has been seen as common to the film noir.”20 Such figures become warnings but not true threats to the expected narrative development.21

The anomalies of these neo-noir characters, however, remain anomalous, Telotte suggests. In films such as Pulp Fiction (Quentin Tarantino, 1994) and The Usual Suspects (Bryan Singer, 1995), characters are no longer the plot-driving, well-recognizable enti-ties that Bordwell identifies; they are arbitrary and do not always make sense. In this way, Telotte notes, the neo-noir adds another layer to the morally ambivalent cultural challenges of the classic noir. Bringing together Conard’s and Telotte’s arguments, it seems that the neo-noir has the potential of offering a way out of preestablished morality as well as character standardization. With this confusion of moral standards, the destiny of the femme fatale is at least occasionally revised. On the one hand, it has been suggested that the woman in the neo-noir is depicted as a victim rather than a femme fatale, and on the other hand, it also becomes more common for the femme fatale to break free from the moral enforcement of the traditional noir ending.22 In

19 Mark T. Conard, introduction, 1.

20 J. P. Telotte, “Rounding Up ‘The Usual Suspects’: The Comforts of Character and Neo-Noir,” Film Quarterly 51, no. 4 (Summer 1998): 16.

21 Ibid., 14.

22 Patrick Murray and Jeanne Schuler, “‘Anything Is Possible Here’: Capitalism, Neo-Noir and Chinatown,” in Conard, ed., Philosophy of Neo-Noir, 169.


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neo-noirs such as Body Heat (Lawrence Kasdan, 1981), Basic Instinct (Paul Verhoeven, 1992), and The Last Seduction ( John Dahl, 1993), the femme fatale escapes the “final jus-tice” of the conventional narrative climax, either through succeeding in her treachery (Body Heat and The Last Seduction) or by deceiving the whole legal system by escaping capture and continuing to exercise her femme fatale sexuality (Basic Instinct). In many ways, Lynch’s Blue Velvet fits well into the neo-noir revision of character to which Telotte points. It is, as Fred Pfiel argues, almost “too easy” to list the noir ele-ments in the film, including the discovery of evil behind a pretty surface; corrupted police officers; homoerotic relationships; and most important in the present context, a tension between a dark, sexually challenging woman and a blonde and bland one between which the male protagonist is torn.23 Arguably, Lynch’s film would make an even more powerful example than those Telotte uses of how the neo-noir revises rec-ognizable characters. First, there is something slightly askew in the portrayal of the two women in the film. Dorothy Valens (Isabella Rossellini) inhabits the role of the femme fatale of the film, and with her dark secrecy and dangerous sexuality she ini-tially seems to fit well into the traditional role. And yet Valens is not ultimately the dangerous woman she appears to be. Hirsch, for example, notes that Valens’s “sexual masquerade” is ultimately exposed and that her role is really that of a conventional, victimized woman.24 When Jeffrey (Kyle MacLachlan) spies on her in the famous scene in which he hides in her closet, he sees her taking off her “femme fatale ‘mask’” and, Arnett suggests, thereby watches her disclose that she is much more a mother and a victim than a dangerous and powerful woman.25 This means that although Blue Velvet complicates the role of the femme fatale by making her a dangerous sexual threat and a caring mother at the same time, the film lacks subversive potential in terms of the femme fatale on the level of empowerment (the dangerous woman is conventionalized as a victim, and her sadomasochistic sexuality remains in the hands of the man [Den-nis Hopper]). Second, and more important for my argument, Lynch’s positioning of the two main female characters—the mysterious, dark, and sexually challenging Va-lens and the blonde and virtuous Sandy (Laura Dern)—is not only a presentation of anomalies and untrustworthiness but also a blatant play with the over-recognizability of noir stock characters. It has been argued, for example, that “the good girl” part, Sandy, is subverted ironically by an excessive parodying of goodness and innocence.26 Through Sandy, Hirsch suggests, Lynch reveals how the virtue of the good-girl char-acter is insufficient in the dark world that appears through Jeffrey’s investigations.27

In this sense, the presence of a narrative resolution as well as a moral enforcement of the female roles—Jeffrey ends up paired with the relatively innocent Sandy and is thereby “saved” from the darker powers of sexuality and uncertainty—may be seen not as a revision of but as an ironic commentary on Hollywood stereotypes. Lynch, as Kenneth Kaleta points out, “is a filmmaker who knows, loves, and uses film history

23 Pfiel, “Revolting Yet Conserved,” para. 8.

24 Hirsch, Detours and Lost Highways, 176.

25 Arnett, “Eighties Noir,” 127.


27 Ibid.


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and its conventions.”28 He fits well into a “post-classical Hollywood” tradition of allu-sion which gives much contemporary film something of a double coding. In Blue Velvet, as in many of Lynch’s productions, however—Twin Peaks (ABC, 1990–1991), Wild at Heart (1990), Lost Highway, and Mulholland Drive—Lynch overtly invites Hollywood cli-chés to fill new functions in an eccentric universe that thereby becomes simultaneously very familiar and very strange. Lynch’s use of clichés has been met with ambivalence. Is Lynch an ideal symbol of postmodern repetition and self-reflexivity or a representative of the deep unconscious? James Naremore writes in his first edition of More Than Night: Film Noir in Its Contexts that Lost Highway is “frozen in a kind of cinematheque” and “just another movie about movies.”29 After being taken to task by Slavoj Žižek, who, in a long essay on the same film, pointed to the seriousness and “redemptive value” of Lynch’s use of clichés, Naremore backed down in the second edition of his book, admitting that clichés in Lynch’s films, and especially in Mulholland Drive, can serve a powerful function.30 While I would not choose the Lacanian route that Žižek does, I agree with him that Lynch’s work is more than a “postmodern exercise” and that it needs to be taken “thoroughly seriously.”31 Lynch’s use of Hollywood clichés in general, and the film noir genre in particular, exceeds the playfulness of intertextual reference. His references to conven-tions and clichés are not just on a level of advanced coding; they play a central role in rethinking the function of characterization. Thus, Blue Velvet may be seen as reinforc-ing Telotte’s argument about the revision of Hollywood characters in the neo-noir. Although the film lacks the narrative convolutions present in Lynch’s later films, its anomalous images and characters function to challenge the “comforting recognition” on which standard Hollywood characters rely. If Blue Velvet may be seen as offering an ironic commentary on the portrayal of women in Hollywood, it still, compared to most of Lynch’s later films, offers a rela-tively coherent narrative and a comparatively “conventional” ending in which things are wrapped up and order is restored. This is true also of the other noirs in which the femme fatale reaches her goals and maintains her sexuality (Body Heat, The Last Seduction, and Basic Instinct). Even where the ending differs, the femme fatale remains intimately connected with the epistemological narrative that Doane describes. This means that even if Blue Velvet may be seen as somewhat revising the role of the femme fatale, the dis-closure of her enigma remains intimately connected with the revelation of the “truth,” and she thereby remains tied to the revelatory narrative. In accordance with Telotte’s argument about the neo-noir, the qualities of the femme fatale have been slightly modi-fied, but her function remains within the machinery of the patriarchal status quo. This begs the question of what happens to the femme fatale in Lynch’s later films, in which narrative coherence and temporal continuity are more radically troubled.

28 Kaleta, David Lynch, xii.

29 James Naremore, More Than Night: Film Noir in Its Contexts, 2nd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 304.

30 Ibid.; Slavoj Žižek, On the Art of the Ridiculous Sublime: On David Lynch’s, “Lost Highway” (Seattle: Walter Chapin Simpson Center for the Humanities, University of Washington Press, 2000), 3.

31 Žižek, On the Art of the Ridiculous Sublime, 3.


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Lost Highway: Resisting Epistemological Striptease. Both Lost Highway and Mul-holland Drive lack the relative coherence of Blue Velvet, and both have setups in which the cinematic narrative is suddenly subverted and a similar yet decidedly different narrative reality is introduced. The perplexity caused by these films has preoccupied critics aiming to recuperate a narrative logic. Depending on the theoretical starting point, the split between two seemingly incongruous realities in both Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive has been identified as a split between desire and fantasy, or between dream and reality. Without wishing to suggest that such readings do not work, and that Lynch’s frequently oneiric films do not invite Freudian, Lacanian, and Jungian readings, I would contend that the very suggestion that we need to install narrative continuity in Lynch’s work is problematic. These kinds of domestications of Lynch’s narrative unruliness constitute an underestimation of its disruptive potential, espe-cially where female characters are concerned. If we focus, instead, on the potential that Lynch’s disjunctive temporalities open up, two issues become particularly interest-ing. First, the narrative doubling in the two films also entails a doubling of the femme fatale figure. This way, a more traditional femme fatale character is problematized by the introduction of a slightly less traditional and decidedly more disruptive dangerous woman. Second, the narrative instability of the two films offers gaps and contradic-tions through which the epistemological binding between the femme fatale and the narrative can be reconsidered. At the heart of the mystery of Lost Highway is a woman, Renee Madison (Patricia Arquette), who is as sexually challenging as she is secretive. Her combination of an alluring and sexually explicit style with a secretive and vaguely treacherous manner keeps her husband, Fred Madison (Bill Pullman), in the grip of an intense but impotent desire. Renee’s seemingly impenetrable integrity positions her not only as an object of desire but also as a desiring subject in her own right. As such, she becomes unman-

ageable for Fred, who, as Todd McGowan sug-gests, fails to figure out who she is and what she wants.32 Renee remains a mystery to her husband, and his desire becomes unbearable. Her enig-matic sexuality threatens to undo the male subject. Toward the end of the

first part of the film, Fred kills and dismembers his wife, sitting among her bloody remains in utter desperation (Figure 1). He could never get to her secret, and his dis-membering of Renee’s body suggests that he has pursued the answer to her secret in every detail; as McGowan suggests, he is searching for the secret of her desire as if it

32 Todd McGowan, “Finding Ourselves on a Lost Highway: David Lynch’s Lesson in Fantasy,” Cinema Journal 39, no. 2 (2000): 54.

Figure 1. Fred (Bill Pullman) looks for the secret of his wife’s desire in David Lynch’s Lost Highway (October Films, 1997).


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could be found somewhere in her body.33 Renee has a strong but indefinable sexuality. As a “catchphrase for sexual difference,” to refer back to Cowie,34 she symbolizes an unfamiliar and threatening female sexuality that is endlessly attractive but that needs to be conquered if the male subject is to remain intact and primary. This kind of sexuality, as Cowie noted, must be punished. In pulling down the man with her (Fred is sentenced to death for the murder), the destruction of them both seems preferable to the continued existence of the unbearable female unknown. If the deaths of both Renee and Fred had been the culmination of the narrative, Lost Highway would have fit well into Doane’s identification of the correlation between the unfolding of the femme fatale and the unfolding of the narrative—the disciplin-ing of female sexuality as narrative climax. As we have already noted, however, Lost Highway does not offer a causal, coherent narrative in the style of classic Hollywood conventions, and this “resolution” does not constitute the narrative climax. On the one hand, the causal climax of the narrative seems to have been reached. The sexually uncontainable woman has been punished, and she has destroyed the man in the pro-cess. On the other hand, this is the point at which the causal narrative of conventional Hollywood storytelling begins to fall apart. Lost Highway, as Hirsch notes, functions to dismantle “noir’s historical dependence on internal logic and consistency.”35 The twisting of the film’s narrative continuity places the destruction of Renee as a question rather than an answer to issues of both narrative conventions and female sexuality. As cause and effect are replaced by images that cannot be directly fitted into a causal structure, we are forced to reconsider both time and identity. That a creative potential can be found in the fact that causal narrative fails becomes clear if we locate an alternative theory of time. To begin with, and to bring closer to-gether aspects of time and narrative, we may note that the ultimately causal chain of events that the classical continuity system supports corresponds to what is identified in Deleuze’s philosophy of cinema as the “sensory-motor schema” of traditional realist narrative. This schema describes a “setting which is already specified and presupposes an action which discloses it, or prompts a reaction which adapts to or modifies it,” and the schema is found in a classical cinema dependent on an organization of images in accordance with narrative and temporal continuity.36 This kind of structure (identified by Deleuze as the “movement-image” of classical realist cinema) could be described in terms of a real-possible axis in which moments of narrative are constructed through the possibilities contained and restricted by the previous moments of the same narra-tive. In other words, a causal narrative relies on an interdependent relation between the real and the possible, because the possible is a future estimated as a causal exten-sion of the real, or the present. In post–World War II cinema, however, Deleuze recog-nizes the emergence of a cinema in which such a subordination of time to movement is destabilized. This new cinema (“the time-image”) offers creative images that make

33 Ibid., 60.

34 Cowie, “Film Noir and Women,” 125.


36 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 5.


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visible “relationships of time which cannot be seen in the represented object and do not allow themselves to be reduced to the present.”37 This shift between the focus on movement and the focus on time is a way of thinking about time, not in terms of the real-possible, but in terms of the actual-virtual. The actual is the physical present, and the virtual is a dimension of reality that, while being interchangeable with the actual, is not determined by causality. This means that although causality is an estimation built on already-determined variables, the dynamic between the actual and the virtual holds the potential for time to move more creatively, that is, according to routes unhampered by the conditions of the present. Rather than trying to recuperate a causal narrative in Lost Highway, this alternative view of time opens up new ways of reading the film. Instead of the morally and structurally expected narrative climax, the second part of Lost Highway presents a new man and a new femme fatale. Or are they? While Fred is in jail waiting for the execution of his death sentence, the film’s narrative takes an unexpected turn, and his jailers find in his place a younger man called Peter Dayton (Balthazar Getty). The link between Fred and Peter remains unclear. McGowan sug-gests that the two parts of the film stand for desire and fantasy, respectively, and that Peter and his reality are the (Lacanian) fantasy that provides Fred with an answer to the enigma of the woman. “Fantasy,” McGowan suggests, “proves an explicit staging of the Other’s ‘secret.’”38 Through Dayton, Fred’s impotence is exchanged for an ac-tive virility, and Renee’s unbearable and unknowable inaccessibility is exchanged for the more knowable, but also more overtly dangerous, Alice Wakefield. Played by the same actress (Arquette), Renee and Alice, like the two seemingly separate universes that they inhabit, are both alike and different. Like Renee’s, Alice’s sexuality is danger-ous, but unlike Renee’s, it is dangerous not because she constitutes a female unknown but because she belongs to another, very powerful man. Her sexuality is strong and dangerous, but it seems to have no secrets, and its danger can be comfortably fitted into the universe of male desire, order, and possessiveness. Through Alice, McGowan contends, Fred “gets answers to all his questions.”39 According to McGowan’s reading, Alice is part of Fred’s fantasy and a version of Renee that he can handle. Regardless of whether we agree with McGowan’s Lacanian reading, the shift from Renee to Alice offers a number of interesting openings. The unsettling of tempo-ral continuity and character consistency complicates the compatibility between the femme fatale and the narrative drive. The typical conquering of the sexual power of the femme fatale that serves as the narrative and moral climax of the film noir and that Lost Highway enacts in its first part is replaced by a much more complex narra-tive reality and female character. If Alice initially seems more knowable and thereby less threatening, as McGowan suggests, she ultimately turns out to be unconquerable. Seemingly more available, she ultimately remains elusive to Peter/Fred and also more potent. After inducing Peter to murder and robbery according to a classic noir for-mula, she makes love to him and leaves him. As she walks away from him and leaves him naked and exposed in the sands of the desert, her deathblow comes with her final

37 Ibid., xii.

38 McGowan, “Finding Ourselves on a Lost Highway,” 60.

39 Ibid., 64.


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words: “You will never have me.” McGowan reads this scene as the final rupture of Fred’s fantasy. After this scene, Peter is transformed back into Fred, and his escape from desire, McGowan argues, has thereby come to an end. As long as the confusing temporality of the narrative is explicated in terms of reality and fantasy, Renee/Alice remains identified purely as an object of desire. How-ever, if we read the temporal shifts in the film in terms of the actual and the virtual rather than reality and fantasy, a possibility appears to extricate Renee/Alice at least partly from her location in male fantasy. Considering Renee/Alice as a set of poten-tials means lifting her from her determination in fantasy and placing her, instead, in a context of difference in itself. This is a difference in itself rather than difference from something, because, as the real-possible axis is absent, we cannot identify a preestab-lished identity. In other words, the shifts between the actual and the virtual prevent us from locating an original identity in relation to which we can determine difference. The shifts between actual and virtual keep us from “resolving,” and thereby eventually disarming, the femme fatale. When Fred follows Alice’s steps into the little cabin in the desert into which she has disappeared, he finds that she is not there. Instead, the “mystery man” is there, that is, a strange man who has kept appearing both in and out of Fred’s life. Fred asks him about Alice. “Alice who?” is the answer. “Her name is Renee. If she told you her name is Alice she is lying.” As the mystery man lifts a film camera to his eye he continues, “And your name? What the fuck is your name?” With this question, it becomes clear (unless Fred/Peter’s inexplicable transformations have already made it so) that the ambivalence of the narrative not only disables the eradication of female sexuality but also extinguishes the ensuing reestablishment of male subjectivity connected with the traditional destiny of the femme fatale. There is, instead, a manipulation of narrative time and spatial control. Recalling Laura Mulvey’s seminal essay on visual pleasure here allows us to consider how the gendered cinematic gaze plays with the tension between film’s capacity to manipulate the dimension of time and the dimension of space. Playing on the tension between film as controlling the dimension of time (e.g., editing, narrative) and film as controlling the dimension of space (e.g., changes in dis-tance, editing), cinematic codes, Mulvey argues, “create a gaze, a world, and an object, thereby producing an illusion cut to the measure of desire.”40 When Fred, instead of seeing and thus recuperating the naked Alice in the cabin, is met with an aggressive camera that is positioned as a weapon, the controlling function of narrative time and space is almost literally thrown back into his face (Figure 2). In this way, the virtual is also revealed as a part of Fred. After all, his

40 Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in Media and Cultural Studies, ed. Meenakshi Gigi Durham and Douglas Kellner (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006), 403.

Figure 2. Confronted by the mystery man’s (Robert Blake) camera, Fred (Bill Pullman) loses the prerogative of being the origin of the narrative in Lost Highway (October Films, 1997).


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identity is as indeterminable as that of the femme fatale, and by thus unsettling Mul-vey’s gendered control of time and space, Fred becomes virtual at the same time that he loses the prerogative of being the origin of the narrative. Returning to the notion of the cinematic gaze, we can see also how the play be-tween accessibility and inaccessibility in Lost Highway is reinforced by a play with the centrality of visual pleasure and its relation both to narrative resolution and to the femme fatale. Writing about Charles Vidor’s classic film noir Gilda (1946), and Rita Hayworth’s famous striptease scene in it, Doane suggests that striptease “provides the perfect iconography for film noir, economically embodying the complex dialectic of concealing and revealing which structures it at all levels—particularly those of lighting

and plot.”41 The gradual revela-tion and mastering of the mystery of the plot that is also, as we have seen, intimately connec ted with the exposure and conquering of the femme fatale, could be considered an epistemological striptease—a stripping of layers of unknow-ability that leads to the baring of the truth. In the case of Vidor’s film, this is certainly true. The eponymous Gilda’s mysterious-ness is ultimately revealed and her sexual power tamed (Figure 3). When Alice walks away from Pe-ter/Fred, completely naked apart from her shoes, this, however, must be contrasted with the fact that the layers of the story have not been stripped—quite the contrary, some have been added, as has the un-knowability of Alice (Figure 4). In Lost Highway, the “baring of the truth” is ultimately that she, despite

her seeming knowability earlier in the film, and despite her total nakedness toward its end, is ultimately unknowable. If Fred failed to find the “truth” in Renee’s dead body, Alice’s naked body remains equally enigmatic. Unlike Gilda (who only takes a glove off in her famous striptease), Alice is literally, but not conceptually, disrobed. As the final sequence of the film brings us back to the highway on which the film started, and the white lane separators yet again disappear with great speed beneath the car, Fred/Peter remains as lost regarding the secret of the femme fatale as ever. Her sexuality challenges his identity and ultimately brings him down, and in that sense one could argue that Lynch follows the conventions of the film noir. Even if one argues


Figure 3. Rita Hayworth’s famous striptease foregrounds, ac-cording to Doane, her epistemological disrobing in Charles Vidor’s Gilda (Columbia, 1946).

Figure 4. Alice (Patricia Arquette) is literally, but not con-ceptually, disrobed in Lost Highway (October Films, 1997).


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that Renee and Alice are the same, and that the woman therefore is punished (through Fred’s murder of Renee in the early part of the film), the climax of the narrative hardly reveals the “truth” of the woman. What Lynch’s eccentric style allows for is an open-ing of time to the unpredictable. The cinematic arrangement of time is not subjected to an underlying dialectical order or a moral narrative time but is, instead, allowed to exist in several incongruent spaces. This is quite a radical thing to do considering the mutual dependence of event and narrative, both in narratology in general and, as we have seen, in classical Hollywood filmmaking. Disrupting the narrative continuity in relation to which the classical femme fatale has had a mutual dependence, Lynch’s film displaces the connection between the resolution of the narrative and the conquer-ing of the woman. Lost Highway, Hirsch argues, offers a “Möbius-strip universe of dissolving and doubled identities” in which “time and space are unreliable.”42 In Lost Highway, the unreliability of the femme fatale, which the conventional noir generally resolves through the causal logic of patriarchal narrative, is coupled, instead, with an unreliable plot. This way, the femme fatale remains tied to the narrative, but the epistemological drive of the narrative is kept from its traditional goal. The narrative resolution simply lacks moral reinforcement.

Mulholland Drive: Replacing the “Truth” with the Virtual. In the beginning of Mulholland Drive, an amnesiac woman whose identity is a mystery stumbles along Sunset Boulevard. Like Billy Wilder, who lets the flickering sign of Sunset Boulevard appear in the darkness of his famous film with the same name, Lynch provides us with flickering close-ups of the street signs of both Sunset Boulevard and Mulhol-land Drive. These early scenes make Lynch’s evocation of the film noir even more blatant than in his earlier films. Not only does Lynch evoke Billy Wilder’s classic noir Sunset Boulevard (1950) through his title, chiaroscuro lighting, rain-drenched dark city streets, and sinister background music, he also evokes the noir tradition structurally and stylistically, by virtue of his complex plot, convoluted crime story, and frequent use of flashbacks. Mulholland Drive also works very closely with typical noir conventions in terms of character. As in Lost Highway, there is a disjunctive doubling of charac-ters: Rita and Camilla (both played by Laura Harring) inhabit the role of the femme fatale; Betty and Diane (Naomi Watts in both cases) in different ways double as the “good girl.” And as in Blue Velvet, where the exaggerated portrayal of the good girl makes Sandy into an ironic comment on the classic virginal heroine, both Betty and Rita frequently come across as parodies of female Hollywood characters in general and film noir characters in particular. Of course, the fact that Mulholland Drive is set in Hollywood and fits into the movies-about-movies tradition reinforces the parodic aspects of the film. When Lynch makes his female characters not so much into clichés but into the very idea of clichés, his portrayals of Hollywood women can be seen as commenting on “the way film reflects, reveals, and even plays on the straight, socially established interpretation of sexual difference which controls images, erotic ways of looking, and spectacle.”43 As in Lost Highway, the use of clichés also plays a central role


43 Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” 342.


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in the reorganization of conventional plot structure and characterization. Also like Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive is split into two different parts displaying two very similar and very different universes, thus troubling identification as well as narrative continuity. The duplication of universes and its troubling of character and narrative continu-ity is foregrounded already in the first scene of the film. Before the opening credits we are presented with a montage of a large number of couples jitterbugging in an

undefined location in front of a large violet screen. The couples are duplicated in what appear to be moving mirror images and through reflections on the screen behind them (Figure 5). Looking at this multiplication of images care-fully, one notices that there is a temporal discrepancy between the movements of the dancers and their reflections. This dis-

crepancy suggests a link between images at the same time that it undermines the sta-bility of this relation. Causal narrative continuity is replaced by what appears to be a noncausal play of images and characters that are filtered through several layers of time simultaneously, and it is difficult to identify which exactly is the “original.” At the same time, the set, with the undefined location and background screen, is sug-gestive of the use of the blue-screen technique in filmmaking. While this setup points back to the artificiality of filmmaking itself, the inconsistency of visual images here at the very beginning of the film already seems to undermine Hollywood’s classic continuity system. Many previous readings of Mulholland Drive have aimed to recuperate the film struc-turally and to reinstate it into a Hollywood tradition based on narrative coherency and recognizable characters. As with Lost Highway, McGowan has made a Lacanian read-ing, identifying the different parts of the film as fantasy and desire. According to his analysis, the pain of impossible desire illustrated in the second part of the film induces the fantasy which constitutes the first parts of the film. Psychoanalytic readings are in-deed frequent and possibly activated by how the film lends itself to stand as “a master class in Freudian dream theory.”44 One ambitious and meticulous mapping of the plot is offered by N. Katherine Hayles and Nicholas Gessler, who suggest that there are enough “semiotic markers” in the film to reconstitute narrative coherency.45 Briefly, Hayles and Gessler identify most of the film as Diane’s dream. In “real time,” Diane has contracted the hit man to murder Camilla, and her dream is a way to “rewrite” the unbearable fact of her deed. Thus, the dream remakes her into the promising and

44 Jay R. Lentzner and Donald R. Ross, “The Dreams That Blister Sleep: Latent Content and Cinematic Form in Mul-holland Drive,” American Imago 62, no. 1 (2005): 120.

45 N. Katherine Hayles and Nicholas Gessler, “The Slipstream of Mixed Reality: Unstable Ontologies and Semiotic Markers in The Thirteenth Floor, Dark City and Mulholland Drive,” PMLA 119, no. 3 (2004): 493.

Figure 5. David Lynch plays with the relation between images and time in Mulholland Drive (Universal, 2001).


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unselfish Betty, who does everything she can to help the poor, helpless Rita. While assigning decidedly different meanings to the film, most readings rest on this same dream-reality split. They recognize the complex structure of the film, its nonchrono-logical order of events, and its incomplete accounts of the different ontological levels of waking time and dream. Here, as in Lost Highway, the apparent urge to identify nar-rative continuity undermines the potential to reconsider the figure of the femme fatale in Lynch’s films. But rather than attempting to push the film back into a tradition of narrative continuity that intertwines the disrobing of the femme fatale within itself, we should instead concentrate on the moments within the film when the narrative does not follow the pattern and when this break with continuity opens up gaps in character-ization. A possibility of revising the relation between the femme fatale and narrative continuity appears if we reconsider the way we read time in Mulholland Drive. At one point, we can see almost literally how virtual images replace those of conti-nuity. In a scene where the unknown woman (Harring) who has been stumbling along Sunset Boulevard is trying to recall her own name, she stands in front of a large bath-room mirror. The woman cannot see herself in the mirror, but the viewer can see her reflection in it. The woman is looking into a smaller side mirror that does not reflect her own image but, instead, the film poster on the wall featuring Hayworth as Gilda in Vidor’s aforementioned film. At this point, then, Lynch’s general flirtation with the film noir tradition and overt references to Sunset Boulevard develop into a direct usage of this earlier tradition for the characterization of one of his film’s protagonists. Hay-worth’s Gilda constitutes a prime example of the sexually challenging woman who creates trouble for the male protagonist but who is ultimately punished, domesticated, and returned to the status quo of the patriarchal order. Gilda, Doane points out, also illustrates the epistemological order of the film noir narratively by its inclusion of Gilda’s striptease scene. As noted earlier, Doane sees striptease as embodying the dia-lectics of concealing and revealing that stands at the heart of both the film noir and the femme fatale. The conquering of the femme fatale coincides with the conquer-ing of the mystery of the narrative. In Gilda, Doane suggests, the enigmatic Gilda is ultimately “disrobed” through the “epistemological power of cinematic narrative.”46 She is conquered and subjected by Johnny Farrell (Glenn Ford) as well as revealed as a “good woman” whose sexual power was only a desperate “act” of love. In Mulholland Drive, when the nameless, amne-siac woman stands in front of the two mirrors, she has access only to the image of Gilda/Hayworth (Figure 6). Preceded by a frame in-cluding only a direct focus on the Hayworth poster,


Figure 6. Femme fatale images shift in Mulholland Drive (Universal, 2001).


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the following frame includes the reflection of this poster in the smaller mirror and the reflection of the woman in the bigger mirror gazing at this reflection in the smaller mirror. Initially, the frame includes the direct image of the side of the woman’s face, her reflection in the mirror, and the entirety of the smaller mirror with its reflection of the poster. Seen here is only a blurred part of the back of the woman’s head in the corner of the frame. What could be perceived as an actual image, the direct view of the woman outside the mirror reflection, is thus granted precious little space. This actual image in the lower corner of the frame is in view only for a second before the camera moves in. In the following instant, the disappearance of the frame of the big mirror has made its reflection appear as an actual image in relation to the reflection of the image of Hayworth in the smaller one. As the camera continues to move in, the direct image of the woman disappears out of frame, followed by the exclusion of her reflection. The final image of the sequence is of the Hayworth poster in the small mirror. By this time, the viewer has also lost sight of the frame of this smaller mirror. At first glance, this mirror scene conforms to the eroticized presentation of women in film that offers women as objects of contemplation rather than as subjects in their own right, in accordance with Mulvey. The cinematic image, Mulvey argues, con-structs and maintains sexual difference in general and the objectification of women in particular. Mainstream films code visual representation according to the dominant patriarchal order in which the image of the female character is constructed according to the erotic desire of the male gaze.47 The scene certainly seems like a powerful case of such objectification, whereby, as Mulvey puts it, woman’s visual presence “tends to work against the development of a story line, to freeze the flow of action in moments of erotic contemplation.”48 The film has indeed slowed down to let us contemplate the beautiful and nearly naked woman in front of the mirror. The case is aggravated by the fact that while the woman lacks access to her own image, the viewer has full access to her, wrapped only in a towel and still slightly wet from her shower. It is possible, however, to read this scene differently. The “to-be-looked-at-ness” of the woman, to again quote Mulvey,49 is not an end result, as Mulvey’s essay suggests, but a beginning. The presentation of the femme fatale here is a means rather than an end, because this presentation constitutes the material with which Lynch’s film opens up for a space beyond this role. In this scene, Lynch evokes the figure of the femme fatale while at the same time disrupting its normative role. The zooming of the camera in the mirror scene replaces causality with a set of instant shifts between images, shifts that make the status of the image indeterminable. The reflection of Rita in the mirror is virtual in relation to the actual image of her. But as this reflection becomes the content of the image, the actual image of the character becomes secondary. In trying to regain her memory, the woman’s search in the mirror becomes not a confirmation of what seems to be a predetermined identity but a dive into a set of increasingly imperceptible images. The presence of the Hayworth poster in the mirror is suggestive of a particular kind of


48 Ibid.

49 Ibid.


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female role—the femme fatale—for the woman in front of the mirror to inhabit. But while the poster points to this role, the shifting between images in the scene constitutes the most visually explicit example of how Lynch’s film exchanges the causal develop-ment of identity for a more unpredictable shifting between actual and virtual images. As John Mullarkey notes, the virtual is originally understood optically by Deleuze’s predecessor Bergson as “the mirroring of the unreal as real.”50 Bergson’s continued description of the virtual, however, develops this idea of mirroring in terms of the virtual as a reflection that does not diverge from the actual but, as Mullarkey puts it, “distorts it.” In this scene, the simple mirror image through which the woman in the film can confirm an identity as a femme fatale is complicated by time slowing down, not to satisfy our gaze but to unsettle it. This unsettling of the gaze is empowering, not only because it disturbs the conven-tional location of woman as visual pleasure but also because, when read through the virtual, it points to the possibility for change inherent in the cinematic images them-selves. In both Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive, an alternative dimension of the pres-ent is exposed, a dimension which offers the possibility of transformation. This means that the narrative tradition based on the real-possible axis, and which, as we have seen, bears close links with the moral subjugation of the femme fatale, can be exchanged for a reversibility of actual and virtual. Deleuze underlines the reality of both actual and virtual as well as their reversibility and proposes that the disengagement of the virtual from the real is impossible, since actual and virtual states are in a constant process of mutual creation.51 Such creation is based not on the causal development of the pres-ent, but on shifting between dimensions of reality. While the name Rita and its obvious links to Hayworth, Gilda, and thus the femme fatale are clear in the first part of the film, the role of the femme fatale is not actualized until later, when temporalities have shifted and the Harring character carries the name Camilla Rhodes. Camilla Rhodes is a name that has earlier appeared on the headshot of an unknown blonde, who is identified as the choice of lead actress for a film within the film: The Sylvia North Story. The viewers see this photograph at a director’s meeting and later when she is perform-ing at an audition, when the director is forced to declare, “This is the girl.” The phrase “this is the girl” recurs in Mulholland Drive, pronounced by different men who in different ways regulate film production within the film. The combination of the definite article the and the unspecified “girl” positions the women in the film as a set of unspecified girls, girls who can be chosen and become “the girl.” This is reinforced by the fact that who “the girl” is changes. What does not change is that men invariably pronounce the declaration, and the act of choosing is thus positioned as a male pre-rogative. This function of the notion of “the girl” is a literal staging of Mulvey’s claim that female figures in film are shaped and styled in accordance with the projected fantasy of the male gaze.52 “The girl” is a position that has little to do with any of the female characters in the film. Initially, the perky Betty’s promising talent suggests that

50 John Mullarkey, “Forget the Virtual: Bergson, Actualism, and the Refraction of Reality,” Continental Philosophy Review 37 (2004): 483.

51 Deleuze, Cinema 2, 69.



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she may become “the girl,” but in the end, Rita actualizes this role, though not until she has taken on the name of Camilla Rhodes. However, the power of what may be seen as the performative utterance “this is the girl” is negotiated through the shifting temporalities of the film. By letting the narra-tive fold in on itself, two classic female identities—the passively chosen “girl” and the ultimately conquerable femme fatale—are renegotiated. Becoming Rita in the begin-ning of the film foreshadows becoming Camilla in the second part, something which in turn will lead to the car crash in which Camilla was supposed to die but did not. A temporal loop seems to be activated which, if allowed to complete its circle, would fol-low “the girl” returning, surviving the car crash, forgetting her identity, and becoming Rita ad infinitum. Where a coherent narrative could have established the identity of “the girl,” the unsettled temporality of the film lets actual and virtual roles haunt each other, disallowing identification. Not only does this make the impersonal male gaze apparent, but furthermore, it ultimately allows “the girl” to escape the passive identity assigned to her and to become a truly powerful femme fatale. Ultimately, “the girl” is not the ambitious Betty. Neither is she the timid-looking blonde woman called Camilla Rhodes of the actress’s photograph. Ultimately, “the girl” is neither passively chosen nor punished by her wayward sexual allure. Rather, and in the shape of Harring’s classic femme fatale style, she steals the show, securing her career as well as a marriage with the director. And as her kissing another woman in one of the last scenes in the film indicates, this femme fatale retains her sexual power and freedom (Figure 7).

Conclusion. The ironic evocation of Hollywood clichés is evident in Blue Velvet as well as in Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive. In the latter two films, however, the employment of clichéd characterization is accompanied also by more complex narrative temporali-ties than the usual Hollywood continuity and characterization allow for. Therefore, these films develop further the break with Hollywood conventions that Telotte sees in neo-noir films such as The Usual Suspects and that I have identified in Blue Velvet. If

Figure 7. The femme fatale retains her sexual power and freedom in David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (Uni-versal, 2001).


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neo-noir characters disturb the comfort of recognizable classical plot-driving charac-ters by introducing anomalies in characterization, as Telotte argues, Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive take a step further when they break also with narrative logic. This is of particular relevance in relation to the figure of the femme fatale, who, as we have seen, has intimate connections with the narrative development and climax of the film noir. The intimate connection between the femme fatale and narrative structure in gen-eral and patriarchal narrative structures in particular makes her an interesting figure for investigating alternative narrative structures in the search for ways out of this posi-tion. Although the neo-noir offers a more complex view of the femme fatale than its classic counterpart, this later tradition does not often offer a way out of the positioning of the woman as ultimately caught up in male systems and narratives. However, when the familiar character type of the femme fatale is removed from its interdependence on coherent narrative development and climax and emerges instead through different, overlapping, and incongruous layers of time, her function begins to shift. Moving from Blue Velvet to Lost Highway to Mulholland Drive in this article has meant moving forward not only in terms of chronology but also in terms of narrative complexity. While Blue Velvet is an intricate film in a number of ways and far from straightforward by Hol-lywood standards, the narrative is temporally coherent. The potential of the film to convey a revision of the femme fatale is, as we have seen, located in its ironic inflation of noir characters. It is in its bothering of the “comforting” nature of Hollywood characters, to use Telotte’s words, that Blue Velvet finds its radical potential. It could be argued that Blue Velvet, despite its narrative resolution and despite the fact that Jeffrey ultimately chooses the blonde innocent woman over the dark, sexual, and dangerous one, offers a valuable disturbance of the comforting recognition of the figure of the femme fatale by making Dorothy into both a “catchphrase for sexual danger” and a mother. Lynch’s conjoining of the typically nonmaternal femme fatale with the figure of the caring mother might not result in an empowered female character, but it does destabilize the comforting recognition of stereotypes. However, recalling Doane’s association of the femme fatale with the hermeneutic structure of the classical narrative, Bordwell and Thompson’s explanation of the Hol-lywood continuity system in which time and space are subordinated to causality, and Kaplan’s identification of this system with a status quo of patriarchal narrative, the presence of unsettled narrative coherence should be recognized as opening up space for a revision of the role of the femme fatale. In Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive, the unsettling of identification, the doubling of characters, and the confusion of on-tological states function to withhold the narrative development and climax on which the progression and conquering of the femme fatale has traditionally relied. The fact that character development cannot be predicted in relation to the present makes it possible to discuss how the figure of the femme fatale can be reconfigured exactly through her intimate correlation with the development of the narrative. The tradition whereby the resolution of the narrative coincides with the disarming of the sexual power of the woman is played against itself, as narrative logic and temporal continuity are rejected. Lynch’s overt evocation of film noir, combined with a disjunctive narra-tive, could be seen as a way of reenacting “the classical continuity system” while at the same time disrupting its normative reliance on causal narrative. Lynch activates


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classical Hollywood film noir conventions of continuity while opening a way in which his female characters could be seen not as the coherent but stereotypical femme fatale of this earlier tradition, but, instead, as a varying set of potentials emerging from the inclusion and overlapping of different layers of time. Lynch’s films play with the pre-dictability of the development and destiny of the femme fatale while also unsettling this identity through the unpredictability of the virtual. Considering the femme fatale in Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive through the shift-ing movement between actual and virtual rather than through the predictable relation between the real and the possible makes it possible to downplay the overpowering role of causal narrative and to promote, instead, the creative potential of unpredictability. The creative potential of the virtual is such because it opens up a future that is not a projection of previous expectations and identities. As Elizabeth Grosz notes, instead of a future in which the present can “still recognize itself,” the concept of the virtual enables “a future open to contingency and transformation.”53 At the same time, the virtual is powerful because it builds on what is already there. The virtual is always in exchange with the actual and is always, Deleuze contends, part of reality. In the context of the femme fatale, this is empowering, not simply because it frus-trates the moral resolution that controls the desire and the destiny of the femme fatale as in Lost Highway, or because it frustrates the gaze that circumscribes and objectifies female sexuality as in Mulholland Drive, but also because the reconsideration of the femme fatale does not simply mean letting her “win” in the end or denying the power of her sexual attraction. Rather, it allows for a layer of unpredictability to be located in the very concrete images of typical femme fatales. When Lynch allows for the actual and the virtual to coexist in his films, he builds on a long tradition of objectification and sexual demarcation at the same time that he frees up the potential for the femme fatale beyond her classic positioning in narrative history. ✽

53 Elizabeth Grosz, Time Travels: Feminism, Nature, Power (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 229.

The author would like to thank Dr. Charlie Blake and Professor Peter Lurie, as well as the two anonymous Cinema Journal readers, for their insightful and inspiring comments on various drafts of this article.

From Irony to Narrative Crisis: Reconsidering the Femme Fatale in the Films of David Lynch

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