Beyond Authenticity

Abstract

Mulholland Drive (2001) forms the centerpiece of the final chapter, which assesses not only cinema’s recent transformation of the detective story but also David Lynch’s exploration of the genre’s multiple ancillary pleasures. So enthralled is he by them that the film comes to seem a meta-investigation, reducing any over-arching plot to sustained uncertainty if not complete irrelevance. Instead, it has been displaced by the beguiling divergences offered from the beginning by hard-boiled divergences. In a film in which all the ingredients of “furniture,” attitude, and identity are present (including a femme fatale, flashbacks, noirish lighting, and identity reconstructed) nothing finally adds up, or is meant to. That may be the most satisfying conclusion to a genre vehicle born of diversion and misdirection.