Fantasmatic Splittings and Destructive Desires: Lynch's Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire

Obsessive-destructive desire, fantasmatic projections and paranoid-schizoid splittings of the female love-object into virgin/whore, ideal/nightmare pairs are central thematic concerns in Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire. However, Lynch not only orchestrates but in fact deconstructs these clichéd binary representations of women on the levels of content, form and narrative, and through his hyperbolic-ironic use of mise-en-scène as a tool for working against the narrative propositions of his images. While both Fred Madison in Lost Highway and Diane Selwyn in Mulholland Drive fail to obliterate their obsessions because they remain caught in a network of false fantasmatic conceptions, Nikki Grace in Inland Empire is able to liberate herself from the dark male forces who exercise power over her. Nikki thus also frees herself from the curse of binary male projections: in the beginning she is the embodiment of the ideal, the glorious movie star, while Sue Blue (her film-within-the-film character) is the ultimate incarnation of the male nightmare – the castrating, violent and abused white trash female. Nikki transcends both categories, she undoes the false split; in the end she is neither one nor the other but simply herself. Inland Empire is thus Lynch's most explicitly feminist movie in this trilogy on the fatal dynamics of binary thinking.