There Is No Band
On desire, fantasy, and reality
Good morning, dear readers.
A few days ago I scrapped a draft of this newsletter (I couldn’t make my way to a point) and was lightly stewing over it that evening when my husband and I put on Mulholland Drive for the first time in years1. I was surprised and delighted by how much I had forgotten, by how fun it was to give over to the Lynchian dreaminess and let a piece of art unfold around me. Even setting aside the narrative weirdness (which I mean as a compliment), it’s just gorgeous to look at and listen to. I hesitate to make any bold statements about what is “about”2 , but I think on at least one level that the film is very much about desire and fantasy, how the two are necessarily (and painfully) connected. Desire creates fantasy to feed itself; fantasy both does so and becomes a separate machine for the desire, turning the desired object into a sort of separate entity from the real thing.
What do I desire, and what am I not seeing clearly— what fantasy am I living in— because of it? What am I engaging with as fantasy, instead of reality?
You hear it all the time in craft advice and in workshops, the drumbeat of motivation: What does this character want? Want is locomotive, so integral to what makes a character three-dimensional that we are urged to intimately understand these wants in order to craft a narrative, to craft characters and action that feel authentic, believable to a reader. In musicals, you have the I Want song, spelling desire out to the audience. In novels, we’re encouraged to place the want further in the background— that golden rule of showing instead of telling— but almost always, and often just as explicitly as song, it’s there. This character wants to see her daughters married off; that character wants to get revenge on his ex-fiancee’s new husband; this other one wants to be king. Scribbled deep in my notebook in character outlines for my novel are lists of my character’s desires & wants, and what they are doing (or not doing) because of that desire. This one wants to be a good helpmeet, so she’s going to move across the world and be a missionary. That one wants to make amends for her failure to act earlier (and maybe also get a little revenge), so she’ll try to be a whistleblower. & so on. Desire drives change; change drives narrative. Or, if not literally narrative, then fantasy, the outcome of desire; they’re desiring the fantasy (or dream) come to life. In the event of an absence of desire, the aberrance is noteworthy: this character wants nothing. What does that mean? Isn’t it sad? (And even then, it’s often just a different sort of desire dressed up as apathy: a desire for stasis, a desire for isolation, etc.)
In Mulholland Drive, Diane/Betty wants Camilla/Rita, and she wants stardom. In the article “Lost on Mulholland Drive: Navigating David Lynch's Panegyric to Hollywood” by Todd McGowan for Cinema Journal, McGowan identifies the two “halves” of Mulholland Drive as coming from that Lacanian desire/fantasy dichotomy:
In our ordinary experience of reality-and in most films-fantasy and desire overlap and bleed into each other; we never know the precise moment at which we move from the world of one to the world of the other….. By initially setting up Rita and the first part of Mulholland Drive as an exemplar of desiring subjectivity and then later revealing that situation as itself part of a fantastic scenario, Lynch shows how mystery does not sustain desire but is itself a flight from desire, an attempt to escape the horrible deadlock that desire produces.3
First, we see the fantasy, the life where Betty is a talented and sparkling new Hollywood arrival with a pliant, loving Rita in her bed. Second, we see the desire, the raw reality (and pain) that led to such a fantasy: Diane’s intense want, particularly stark (or joyless) and disjointed because it’s a total removal of fantasy. In Lacan’s framing of desire4, Camilla/Rita is the objet petit a (the unattainable object of desire) for Diane/Betty. Her desire drives her to the point of jouissance, the transgression of the pleasure principle and the splitting of the subject, self-obliteration. It’s especially interesting that in Mulholland Drive, the subject splits after a doubling (classic Lynch, of course, lover of doppelgangers). A scene where Betty lovingly fits Rita for a wig that resembles her own hairstyle is quickly followed by them sleeping together for the first time, which in turn quickly leads to the “split” of the movie, the end of Diane/Betty’s fantasy. I’m oversimplifying— it’s Lynch, and I’m no philosopher— but the broad strokes of that pairing are there, and intense.
I’m reminded (probably obviously, c’est moi) of Blanche, in A Streetcar Named Desire, consummate desire-r and spinner of fantasy. She has spent an entire life building a fantasy world around her desire; to be a lady, to be desired, to be rich and in society. It’s exactly jouissance (the transgression of her pleasure and desire) in pursuit of this fantasy that drives her to ruin. When Stanley (& the world) forcibly break that fantasy, her mind breaks with it. Mulholland Drive ends with a suicide; Streetcar, an involuntary committal. When the scaffolding provided by fantasy is destroyed, it can be devastating. In contrast, I imagine it would be a relief to a different kind of character, returning to a certain kind of reality. Either choice is revealing.
BLANCHE: I'll tell you what I want. Magic! Yes, yes, magic! I try to give that to people. I misinterpret things to them. I don't tell the truth. I tell what ought to be truth. And if that is sinful, then let me be damned for it! - Don't turn the light on!5
After watching something like this, it’s almost impossible to resist considering your own life through that lens. What do I desire, and what am I not seeing clearly— what fantasy am I living in, what light won’t I turn on— because of it? What am I engaging with as fantasy, instead of reality? When is that behavior protective (or generative), and when is that harmful?
Thinking about this idea of desire relative to my own writing, the lightbulb moment came when I realized my novel does, in a way, have a similar dichotomy: without boring you with a full outline, the gist is that there is a before, where one character is allowed to act out his desires unchecked, and an after, where that fantastic environment is completely (righteously, in this case) dismantled. What if I approach that turning point in a similar way? Like the ending of a (horrible) dream? This may or may not be something I actually do anything with (while cribbing from David Lynch is probably a good idea, in reality the character mentioned is the one whose POV you deliberately don’t get and the story is a bit more….. moralistic than Lynch’s work), but it’s a fun way to think about or expand on what’s already there as I try to make the ending, well, better.
Il n'y a pas d'orchestre!
Til next time & with love,
Courtney
What I’m reading, watching, & generally consuming lately:
This interview with the truly amazing Marilynne Robinson, nytimes. (unlocked) . I disagree with some of her observations, but she’s a super interesting subject.
The Hive and the Honey, by Paul Yoon. I wasn’t familiar with Yoon’s work before I grabbed this sort of randomly at the library (I liked the green and the blurbs) and I’m so glad I read it. Excellent short stories6.
Lemon thumbprint cookies from Ovenbird Bakery. Homemade lemon curd might be one of the nicest things in the world.
Rabbit Hole, by Kate Brody, who I had the pleasure of hearing read at my local indie last week. A fun (and also, well, dark and frequently upsetting) look at grief and family and true crime, specifically the Reddit/designated subreddit/”What’s your favorite rabbit hole?” spectatorship of true crime. Hard to find a point of comparison but would say it’s a little I Have Some Questions For You meets The Guest?
Kelsey McKinney in Defector on Flaco. I’m not a New Yorker and have no connection to him at all, but something about that beautiful bird finding his freedom and then it being taken away by just the indifference of human development breaks my heart.
Tove Jansson’s The True Deceiver, which I read for my book club on translated fiction. My first “adult” Jansson and it was so good; the vividness of the characters and setting in such a small book were extremely compelling. (Also, she painted the cover art of the NYRB issue!)
The monk who burns himself has lost neither courage nor hope; nor does he desire non-existence. On the contrary, he is very courageous and hopeful and aspires for something good in the future. He does not think that he is destroying himself; he believes in the good fruition of his act of self-sacrifice for the sake of others.
Perfectly timed to my newsletter last week: Amelia Tait for New Statesman on the “Disney Adult Industrial Complex.”:
“What is going on in both the UK and the United States that makes entertainment one of the few places left that people can escape into?” questions Giroux. “People’s lives are so fraught with anxiety, with poverty, the lack of housing, and debt,” and that the only way people have to relieve their troubles is to use the services of companies that may have contributed to those problems in some way.”
This lovely, tiny essay in Granta: “Generation Gap,” by Sarah Moss.
Speaking of lovely, tiny essays: my friend
has a really wonderful zine of music writing out now, called Five Songs. More thoughtful thoughts TK (I’ve been forcing myself to read it slowly, one piece at a time) but for now just know that it’s good, and you can get your own copy via her newsletter.
These days everyone wants an audience to feel exactly the same thing.
That’s a narrow road. And that [approach] can be a very entertaining and a fantastic experience—I’m not putting it down one little bit, but cinema is a very wide road. It can do many things, and some stories allow for more abstractions. It’s still important to not lose people along the way. I think [Mulholland Drive] walks that line—there’s a lot to see if you pay attention.
David Lynch, https://filmmakermagazine.com/archives/issues/fall2001/features/dream_factory.php
McGowan, 2004. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1225915?seq=7
As the dusty part of my brain that finished grad school six years ago understands it. Please be kind if I’m butchering it/my apologies to all the guys spinning in their graves right now!
Williams, Tennessee. A Streetcar Named Desire.
There is a WIDE range but I just realized a dog gets hurt in each of the three books I recommended this week. I’m normally a big baby about that kind of thing and still made it through, but….. reader beware?