No hay banda. Prosthetic memory and identity in David Lynch's Mulholland Drive*
Abstract : A world of increasing deficiency and instability finds its remedy, its chance of survival, in the order of the prosthetic . David Lynch's Mulholland Drive here becomes its own narrative prosthesis, helping us perceive some disturbing implications of a culture in which memory and identity are prosthetically organized.
"No hay banda. Il n'y a pas d'orchestre . There is no band. It is all a recording," the compère insists. The audience is gathered in an underground theater. There is music, there is performance. There is nerve and intensity. Yet, he contends, "it is an illusion."
What would become of our experience as human beings if everything we see and hear around us, indeed, if life itself, turned out to be merely a recording, a predetermined trajectory of existence? What would become of identity in a world where everything appears scripted and everyone seems to be performing roles?
With all its bewildering might, David Lynch's Mulholland Drive raises such deeply philosophical questions about ourselves. Lynch's wittingly distorted narrative patterns confuse viewers who adhere to linearity and rationality as consensual yardsticks for cinematic experience. Guised as an unsolvable riddle, Mulholland Drive contains no comforting answers about reality. There is no band and there is no truth.
Nevertheless, I will in this essay try to illuminate and interpret the opaque storylines of Mulholland Drive through the concept of prosthetic memory. I believe Lynch's film yields invaluable insight into postmodern theories of the intricate interplay between film, time and memory. His work, above all, is a cordial invitation to think, to abstract. And I will pick up the glove to do so, knowing that Lynch himself, with the subtle fun-poking attitude he displays throughout his film, might find elaborate attempts at theorizing his movie amusingly futile. I will take the risk and try to carry his spirit further. I here subjectively prescribe an abstract understanding of a highly abstract film. In order not to appear quite as confusing as Mulholland Drive , however, my essay will be sustained by three general contentions that are connected in a kind of conceptual circuit. First, human identity can be thought of as the offspring of time and memory - that is, as a matrix constituted by the experience of memory on one axis and by the experience of time on the other. Second, identity in a postmodern world relies heavily on elaborate use of prosthetic memory. Third, film represents in itself a form of prosthetic memory and has through its history as a medium contributed significantly to a shifting perspective of human identity and reality.
By no means, however, do I here claim to possess the access code - that salient blue key - to the Chinese box of David Lynch's mental universe. The symbolism of a key and a lock makes for a booby trap of conventional logic. Tellingly, even the lead character in Mulholland Drive , confronted with the mysterious key, is eventually driven to ask what it is intended to open. Her question elicits nothing but shrewd laughter from the other end of the table. Indeed, looking for the key to Mulholland Drive - a supposed real meaning behind the surface confusion - becomes an act of Sisyphean proportions, simply because such a secret, metaphysical door opener does not exist, probably not even in Lynch's mind. As he puts it himself, echoing the words of Susan Sontag, "a film is its own language, an entity. It should not be translated back into words."
If reality is a mere reflection of language, as the poststructuralist inclination goes, then language - in its conventional linguistic sense - has unfortunate implications for our understanding of cinema. Attempting to read Mulholland Drive as a true representation of some universal reality is in this sense obviously futile. Another possible attempt at absolving the logical contradictions Lynch puts forth is explaining the film as a "dream" (or perhaps a nightmare to some). Relegating the immediately incomprehensible to the realm of dreams only serves to reassert a rigid and unaltered sense of reality. As such, it amounts to an ideological maneuver, an outright repression of cognitive possibilities and critical potential. If film is its own language, it also follows its own logic and creates its own sense of reality, with which we as viewers are encouraged to engage ourselves. Lynch hints at this by describing the setting of Mulholland Drive through the character Dan at Winkie's diner: "it is a kind of half-night," he says - a world where boundaries between reality and dreams are evocatively blurred. In a word: Hollywood.
Mental adaptation: from memory to culture
In fact, Lynch's story appears in many ways as multilayered and intricate as Hollywood itself. Into the dreamscape that enrobes contemporary Los Angeles enters the aspiring young Canadian actress Betty Elms, who befriends and soon falls in love with Rita, a woman suffering from amnesia after a car accident on Mulholland Drive. Simultaneously, a young director, Adam Kesher, is coerced by an elusive web of powerful mobsters into casting an unknown actress, Camilla Rhodes, in the lead role. The first of many curious twists is presented here, as Camilla Rhodes appears throughout the movie looking exactly like either Betty or Rita, alternately. The initial search for the Rita's identity leads to a murdered Diane Selwyn, who somehow becomes reincarnated with Betty's looks later in the film. Around this ostensibly kaleidoscopic core orbit a subset of oddball characters and random historical allusions, contributing to the feeling of thorough temporal and narrative disruption.
Although Lynch lures us from the outset into a sense of linear logic - which is why we are able to grasp the sense of an actual plot - he soon twists and turns the narrative inexorably around. Mulholland Drive 's dramatic time span of the film becomes very difficult to pinpoint. In one sense, the general story seems to unfold over a few days - weeks at most. Lynch's many long camera takes and dwelling scenes serve to heighten an occasional feeling of continuous time between short elliptical leaps. In quite another sense, the film seems to take place from the 1950s until the present - and beyond - in its own spatial and temporal universe. Separately, the different storylines appear to follow their own temporal logic - as if they occur in parallel universes - but weaved together in a linear film format, a singular sense of dramatic time eventually evaporates. And the implosion of a coherent temporal structure, as we shall see, has major consequences for the characters' identities.
Wandering helplessly around in disarray after the car accident, the character of Rita clearly illustrates how memory is a fragile yet vital component of identity, as Daniel Schacter amply points out in his work on memory. However, her case also signifies the extent to which identity relies on memories and experiences stored outside the human brain in order to operate. In other words, in order to understand Lynch's movie better, we need to move towards a more open understanding of mind.
In a seminal 1995 essay, Alison Landsberg discusses the implications of what she calls 'prosthetic memory' - memories which do not come from a person's live experience in any strict sense. "Although memory might always have been prosthetic," she writes, "the mass media - technologies which structure and circumscribe experience - bring the texture and contours of prosthetic memory into dramatic relief." In particular, Landsberg contends, cinema has for roughly a century had the capacity to generate experiences and memories of its own - "memories which become experiences that film consumers both possess and feel possessed by." (191) The essential assumption of prosthetic memory as a theoretical construct is that reality always has been mediated, as a consensus upheld through narrative and information cultures - or indeed through the very structure of language itself. The concept of linear time is precisely such a cultural narrative, institutionalized in the grammar of Indo-European languages - a past, a present, a future - and perpetuated by film as a medium. In postmodern theory, the real as an unequivocal condition can be seen to have retreated from its previously uncontested inhabitation of grand structures and narratives, into the realm of the individual - effectively turning reality into a highly (and dangerously) relativistic enterprise. As such, the systematic and proliferated use of prosthetic memory leads to a conception of what we may call 'prosthetic culture' - roughly describing the ways in which culture, seamlessly or not, weaves together individual realities. From this point of view, culture is little more than the standardizing process of individual psychologies.
French theorist Jean Baudrillard, for example, has sought to inverse the traditional social scientific approach to culture by rethinking the relations between individuals and culture in semiological terms. Consumption, he argues, is the basis of our (prosthetic) social order. More than simply being an organized economic activity of buying goods and services, he contends, consumption is a complex sign system that endows consumers with meaning as individuals. Writes Baudrillard: "Far from the individual expressing his or her needs in the economic system, it is the economic system that induces the individual function and the parallel functionality of objects and needs. (.) The individual is nothing but the subject thought in economic terms, rethought, simplified, and abstracted by the economy. The entire history of consciousness and ethics (all the categories of occidental psycho-metaphysics) is only the history of the political economy of the subject." (1981, 70)
Individual identity, I would argue, relies heavily on consumptive practice as experience, as memory. From this follows, in a non-Cartesian sense, that our sense of self is necessarily not located on the inside of the brain but outside it in all forms of bodily and mental relations - in supermarket aisles and university hallways, on computer drives, in the cinema. This may be counter-intuitive and there are certainly grounds for questioning where the boundary lies between a "real" memory and a "prosthetic" one or whether, if Landsberg's argument is properly considered, memory would be the only prosthetic component to identity and society - if not, in other words, prosthetic memory has wider implications.
Yet this ambiguity is also one of the key strengths of the concept, which ultimately forces us to ask questions about what it means to be human in a technological age. Prosthetic memory, just like Lynch, prods our understanding of reality and authenticity and implies that our functioning in a technological, consumption-driven society depends on affiliations far beyond our conventional idea of identity. Prosthetic memory, in this sense, is caught up in a kind of feedback loop - it can be regarded as a prosthesis insofar as it resurrects personal identity and thereby sustains the economic web of consumption, which in turn ensures some form of moderately stabile, consensual reality - a standardizing of human minds. So prosthetic memory implies a prosthetic culture, in other words, which keeps a thoroughly deconstructed postmodern world from imploding. It is, in Lynch's terms, the tape recording that keeps the music of the band alive. The illusion of the band - of spontaneity, improvisation and free will - can be seen to govern our conventional perception of life. Yet, in Mulholland Drive , the characters appear conspicuously scripted, their agency stripped. Their existence, we could say, is ensured prosthetically.
Bodily vulnerability: from identity to instinct
Rita takes her name from a classic Rita Hayworth poster in Betty's bathroom and proves throughout the movie to be little more than a desirable image without personality, helplessly gravitating towards her newfound friend. Betty, on the other hand, may not be amnesic per se but she arrives in Los Angeles exuding a kind of fair-haired naiveté - a symbolic human innocence still untainted by Hollywood. Apart from an explicit reference to her Ontario home town and aunt Ruth, her one-dimensional character reveals only a talent for playing roles, for being someone else. Her memories, in other words, seem to be almost exclusively comprised by consumed cinematic experiences that enable her to assume other characters. Thus, Betty arrives in Hollywood neatly packaged as one of its best customers.
The incessant search for Rita's 'true' identity quickly takes on an air of 1950s Nancy Drew and Hitchcock mysteries. "Come on," Betty quips, "it will be just like in the movies. We'll pretend to be someone else." Their elaborate detective work adheres to the notion of truth existing as a rationally discoverable entity - as a key opening a lock - in the real world. Ironically, all they can hope to extract from their fervor is Rita's name and address - a socially assigned identity that makes little sense without the continued presence of her memories.
The process of assuming a new identity becomes a reconfigured childhood of sorts, beginning with mimesis of one's environment - a mirror stage - moving towards a cognitive reconstruction of the self. Behavioral guidelines - a lifetime in the making - are resolutely washed away with the memories. As imploded selves, the two characters constitute wandering black holes operating on impulse, voraciously absorbing influences and experiences that come their way. That their relationship becomes deeply sexual is therefore hardly surprising. Both characters weld in a desperate search for their own identity, exploring new sensibilities - or are they new? "Have you done this before?" an aroused Betty asks Rita while making out naked in her aunt's bed. "I don't remember," Rita replies. It is the unknown and the image having intercourse. Later, as the duo travel to that band-less concert somewhere in the Los Angeles night, they appear as a veritable yin and yang; the blonde and the brunette, one dressed in red, the other in black. Rita, as the enigmatic symbol of a nostalgic Hollywood stardom, represents everything newly arrived Betty is not.
However, to be in love with someone without identity is a little like being in love with a mirror - 'a mirror without memories,' in the words of Linda Williams - onto which the projection of oneself is the only visible apparition. Here, the storyline of Betty and Rita resemble the main characters in Alain Resnais' classic Hiroshima Mon Amour . Like Nevers, Rita virtually absorbs the realities of the people nearby - her lack of memory becomes a hypnotizing gravitational force. Michael Roth argues in his analysis of Hiroshima Mon Amour that the truly unforgettable is what cannot be recounted or narrativized because this process is precisely what surrenders memories to the equivalence of other memories and forces them into existing mental schemes. With a slight spin we can transfer his argument onto Mulholland Drive to posit that Rita's lack of memories - and particularly the gradual unraveling of her enigmatic past - is what causes existing mental schemes such as the conventional process of narrativization to implode (thus making the experience truly unforgettable). Above all, the portrayed effect of amnesia on its surroundings in these two films signifies the closely knit relationship between memory and a sense of reality.
As both Betty and Rita constitute such emotional black holes, their narcissistic love affair becomes doubly intense, to the extent that their roles ultimately appear interchangeable. The mirror without memory can only reflect another mirror, leading to an experience akin to an entire hall of mirrors. The Cartesian boundaries between the physical - their bodies - and the metaphysical - their sense of identity - are sucked in by the figurative Chinese blue box, which becomes the pivotal metaphor of the film and its narrative spin-around. Suddenly, the mysterious Rita appears as the equally mysterious Camilla Rhodes. The once cheerful Betty, on the other hand, has become the reification of her other dimension: a vengeful and neurotic Diane Selwyn, trapped in the downward spiral of a disintegrating love affair with, yes, Camilla Rhodes/Betty. We can note that this sudden dimensional change of events and characters occurs after a dark night of passion and a disturbing performance of art - perhaps eliciting a reservoir of unconscious, irrational memories.
Life: a prosthetic performance
However strange their relationship may seem, there are arguably no characters in Mulholland Drive with strong identities in any conventional sense. In David Lynch' direction, everyone seems to be merely performing to a playback recording. The hotshot director Adam Kesher finds himself enmeshed in a network of surreal henchmen whose strangely abstract nodal point resides in the bizarre character of Mr. Roque - a man with a disproportionately small head who lives behind a glass pane. The perturbed Dan at Winkie's diner appears to be sleepwalking in his own lucid dream. At Betty's first audition, the participants seem awkwardly contrived, the director Bob Barker delivering his lines with less zeal than a cold read. Several other characters - such as Koko, the flamboyant concierge, and Cookie, the downtown hotel manager - reappear in different roles, as Adam Kesher's mother and a stage manager, respectively. This Hollywood is, in short, a simulacrum, an infinitely recyclable web of dreams, lives and characters where everyone always plays a role and no causal relationships can be readily established. David Lynch's Hollywood emerges as a self-organized system, in which all components are interconnected by a network of feedback loops; it is a cinematic expression of postmodern complexity theory.
History and time are recycled as well, in the form of ubiquitous references to the golden days of 1950s Hollywood . "The Sylvia North Story," Adam Kesher's movie, largely comprises jukebox memorabilia. His film is hijacked by the ludicrously mafiaesque Castigliane brothers. The character of Koko oozes of cabaret flare and old-school show business. The film's ostensible oracle is The Cowboy, a veritable cinematic anachronism. Dreamily, the characters look towards the Southern Californian sky. Up above those legendary Hollywood hills, overlooking a distant Los Angeles, is the mythical and deserted road known as Mulholland Drive that runs through the dreamscape as an underlying stream of historical consciousness - as the "Deep River" where Betty comes from.
In the end, Mulholland Drive is not only a story about a few characters' lost sense of self but about the fractured or prosthetic identity of Hollywood itself. Memories of Hollywood are conspicuously prosthetic, stored in a dizzying array of film footage and gossip columns and continuous revivals, reconstructions and remakes. The inherent language of Mulholland Drive thrives on a meta-language, a postmodern pastiche of references - a truly high context message - which turns the film itself into a prosthetic narrative of sorts. We are able to immerse ourselves into the film precisely because of our elaborate prosthetic memory banks - the simulacrum that exists in our minds as much as in Hollywood itself, the place were such minds meet and melt.
In this sense, an increasing reliance on external technological means of remembering, of constructing identity, also signifies a decreasing reliance on personal experiences as the basis of our identities. However, the implied scenario of such a development is not necessarily one of Blade Runner or Total Recall , as Landsberg discusses in her article, where human lives become almost entirely robotic. Rather, the concept of prosthetic memory emphasizes how our memories work in intricate and significant tandem with a technology-driven consumer society. Schacter hints at this in his reference to studies in cognitive psychology that demonstrate how "forgetting memories over time is an economical response to the demands placed on memory by the environment in which we live." (81) In other words, prosthetic memory may be thought of as a psychological survival tactic, just as a prosthetic culture works to ensure the survival of our entire social system.
No hay banda . Through the characters in Lynch' evocative simulacrum - to whom life is endlessly prerecorded and predetermined - we perceive the malleability of our own identities and our collusion with technological means of prosthetic remembering. Although we may live geographically far from "the dream place" of Hollywood, it remains a significant part of a prosthetic culture that encapsulates our own sense of reality and shapes us into cogs of a grand culture machine. To say that we are all performers on the stage of life may be a worn-out cliché. What Lynch seems to be suggesting, though, is chillingly encapsulated by the band-less performance in Mulholland Drive . As in the case of singer Rebecka del Rio, whose piercing voice still fills the room after her body has collapsed on stage, the show must go on. Relentlessly. The script and the assigned role eclipses human agency. And the only escape from the tyranny of eternal performance - from the white noise of sights and sounds - comes in fulfillment of Mulholland Drive 's final utterance: Silencio.»
* Author: Bjorn Ekeberg
Abstract : A world of increasing deficiency and instability finds its remedy, its chance of survival, in the order of the prosthetic . David Lynch's Mulholland Drive here becomes its own narrative prosthesis, helping us perceive some disturbing implications of a culture in which memory and identity are prosthetically organized.
"No hay banda. Il n'y a pas d'orchestre . There is no band. It is all a recording," the compère insists. The audience is gathered in an underground theater. There is music, there is performance. There is nerve and intensity. Yet, he contends, "it is an illusion."
What would become of our experience as human beings if everything we see and hear around us, indeed, if life itself, turned out to be merely a recording, a predetermined trajectory of existence? What would become of identity in a world where everything appears scripted and everyone seems to be performing roles?
With all its bewildering might, David Lynch's Mulholland Drive raises such deeply philosophical questions about ourselves. Lynch's wittingly distorted narrative patterns confuse viewers who adhere to linearity and rationality as consensual yardsticks for cinematic experience. Guised as an unsolvable riddle, Mulholland Drive contains no comforting answers about reality. There is no band and there is no truth.
Nevertheless, I will in this essay try to illuminate and interpret the opaque storylines of Mulholland Drive through the concept of prosthetic memory. I believe Lynch's film yields invaluable insight into postmodern theories of the intricate interplay between film, time and memory. His work, above all, is a cordial invitation to think, to abstract. And I will pick up the glove to do so, knowing that Lynch himself, with the subtle fun-poking attitude he displays throughout his film, might find elaborate attempts at theorizing his movie amusingly futile. I will take the risk and try to carry his spirit further. I here subjectively prescribe an abstract understanding of a highly abstract film. In order not to appear quite as confusing as Mulholland Drive , however, my essay will be sustained by three general contentions that are connected in a kind of conceptual circuit. First, human identity can be thought of as the offspring of time and memory - that is, as a matrix constituted by the experience of memory on one axis and by the experience of time on the other. Second, identity in a postmodern world relies heavily on elaborate use of prosthetic memory. Third, film represents in itself a form of prosthetic memory and has through its history as a medium contributed significantly to a shifting perspective of human identity and reality.
By no means, however, do I here claim to possess the access code - that salient blue key - to the Chinese box of David Lynch's mental universe. The symbolism of a key and a lock makes for a booby trap of conventional logic. Tellingly, even the lead character in Mulholland Drive , confronted with the mysterious key, is eventually driven to ask what it is intended to open. Her question elicits nothing but shrewd laughter from the other end of the table. Indeed, looking for the key to Mulholland Drive - a supposed real meaning behind the surface confusion - becomes an act of Sisyphean proportions, simply because such a secret, metaphysical door opener does not exist, probably not even in Lynch's mind. As he puts it himself, echoing the words of Susan Sontag, "a film is its own language, an entity. It should not be translated back into words."
If reality is a mere reflection of language, as the poststructuralist inclination goes, then language - in its conventional linguistic sense - has unfortunate implications for our understanding of cinema. Attempting to read Mulholland Drive as a true representation of some universal reality is in this sense obviously futile. Another possible attempt at absolving the logical contradictions Lynch puts forth is explaining the film as a "dream" (or perhaps a nightmare to some). Relegating the immediately incomprehensible to the realm of dreams only serves to reassert a rigid and unaltered sense of reality. As such, it amounts to an ideological maneuver, an outright repression of cognitive possibilities and critical potential. If film is its own language, it also follows its own logic and creates its own sense of reality, with which we as viewers are encouraged to engage ourselves. Lynch hints at this by describing the setting of Mulholland Drive through the character Dan at Winkie's diner: "it is a kind of half-night," he says - a world where boundaries between reality and dreams are evocatively blurred. In a word: Hollywood.
Mental adaptation: from memory to culture
In fact, Lynch's story appears in many ways as multilayered and intricate as Hollywood itself. Into the dreamscape that enrobes contemporary Los Angeles enters the aspiring young Canadian actress Betty Elms, who befriends and soon falls in love with Rita, a woman suffering from amnesia after a car accident on Mulholland Drive. Simultaneously, a young director, Adam Kesher, is coerced by an elusive web of powerful mobsters into casting an unknown actress, Camilla Rhodes, in the lead role. The first of many curious twists is presented here, as Camilla Rhodes appears throughout the movie looking exactly like either Betty or Rita, alternately. The initial search for the Rita's identity leads to a murdered Diane Selwyn, who somehow becomes reincarnated with Betty's looks later in the film. Around this ostensibly kaleidoscopic core orbit a subset of oddball characters and random historical allusions, contributing to the feeling of thorough temporal and narrative disruption.
Although Lynch lures us from the outset into a sense of linear logic - which is why we are able to grasp the sense of an actual plot - he soon twists and turns the narrative inexorably around. Mulholland Drive 's dramatic time span of the film becomes very difficult to pinpoint. In one sense, the general story seems to unfold over a few days - weeks at most. Lynch's many long camera takes and dwelling scenes serve to heighten an occasional feeling of continuous time between short elliptical leaps. In quite another sense, the film seems to take place from the 1950s until the present - and beyond - in its own spatial and temporal universe. Separately, the different storylines appear to follow their own temporal logic - as if they occur in parallel universes - but weaved together in a linear film format, a singular sense of dramatic time eventually evaporates. And the implosion of a coherent temporal structure, as we shall see, has major consequences for the characters' identities.
Wandering helplessly around in disarray after the car accident, the character of Rita clearly illustrates how memory is a fragile yet vital component of identity, as Daniel Schacter amply points out in his work on memory. However, her case also signifies the extent to which identity relies on memories and experiences stored outside the human brain in order to operate. In other words, in order to understand Lynch's movie better, we need to move towards a more open understanding of mind.
In a seminal 1995 essay, Alison Landsberg discusses the implications of what she calls 'prosthetic memory' - memories which do not come from a person's live experience in any strict sense. "Although memory might always have been prosthetic," she writes, "the mass media - technologies which structure and circumscribe experience - bring the texture and contours of prosthetic memory into dramatic relief." In particular, Landsberg contends, cinema has for roughly a century had the capacity to generate experiences and memories of its own - "memories which become experiences that film consumers both possess and feel possessed by." (191) The essential assumption of prosthetic memory as a theoretical construct is that reality always has been mediated, as a consensus upheld through narrative and information cultures - or indeed through the very structure of language itself. The concept of linear time is precisely such a cultural narrative, institutionalized in the grammar of Indo-European languages - a past, a present, a future - and perpetuated by film as a medium. In postmodern theory, the real as an unequivocal condition can be seen to have retreated from its previously uncontested inhabitation of grand structures and narratives, into the realm of the individual - effectively turning reality into a highly (and dangerously) relativistic enterprise. As such, the systematic and proliferated use of prosthetic memory leads to a conception of what we may call 'prosthetic culture' - roughly describing the ways in which culture, seamlessly or not, weaves together individual realities. From this point of view, culture is little more than the standardizing process of individual psychologies.
French theorist Jean Baudrillard, for example, has sought to inverse the traditional social scientific approach to culture by rethinking the relations between individuals and culture in semiological terms. Consumption, he argues, is the basis of our (prosthetic) social order. More than simply being an organized economic activity of buying goods and services, he contends, consumption is a complex sign system that endows consumers with meaning as individuals. Writes Baudrillard: "Far from the individual expressing his or her needs in the economic system, it is the economic system that induces the individual function and the parallel functionality of objects and needs. (.) The individual is nothing but the subject thought in economic terms, rethought, simplified, and abstracted by the economy. The entire history of consciousness and ethics (all the categories of occidental psycho-metaphysics) is only the history of the political economy of the subject." (1981, 70)
Individual identity, I would argue, relies heavily on consumptive practice as experience, as memory. From this follows, in a non-Cartesian sense, that our sense of self is necessarily not located on the inside of the brain but outside it in all forms of bodily and mental relations - in supermarket aisles and university hallways, on computer drives, in the cinema. This may be counter-intuitive and there are certainly grounds for questioning where the boundary lies between a "real" memory and a "prosthetic" one or whether, if Landsberg's argument is properly considered, memory would be the only prosthetic component to identity and society - if not, in other words, prosthetic memory has wider implications.
Yet this ambiguity is also one of the key strengths of the concept, which ultimately forces us to ask questions about what it means to be human in a technological age. Prosthetic memory, just like Lynch, prods our understanding of reality and authenticity and implies that our functioning in a technological, consumption-driven society depends on affiliations far beyond our conventional idea of identity. Prosthetic memory, in this sense, is caught up in a kind of feedback loop - it can be regarded as a prosthesis insofar as it resurrects personal identity and thereby sustains the economic web of consumption, which in turn ensures some form of moderately stabile, consensual reality - a standardizing of human minds. So prosthetic memory implies a prosthetic culture, in other words, which keeps a thoroughly deconstructed postmodern world from imploding. It is, in Lynch's terms, the tape recording that keeps the music of the band alive. The illusion of the band - of spontaneity, improvisation and free will - can be seen to govern our conventional perception of life. Yet, in Mulholland Drive , the characters appear conspicuously scripted, their agency stripped. Their existence, we could say, is ensured prosthetically.
Bodily vulnerability: from identity to instinct
Rita takes her name from a classic Rita Hayworth poster in Betty's bathroom and proves throughout the movie to be little more than a desirable image without personality, helplessly gravitating towards her newfound friend. Betty, on the other hand, may not be amnesic per se but she arrives in Los Angeles exuding a kind of fair-haired naiveté - a symbolic human innocence still untainted by Hollywood. Apart from an explicit reference to her Ontario home town and aunt Ruth, her one-dimensional character reveals only a talent for playing roles, for being someone else. Her memories, in other words, seem to be almost exclusively comprised by consumed cinematic experiences that enable her to assume other characters. Thus, Betty arrives in Hollywood neatly packaged as one of its best customers.
The incessant search for Rita's 'true' identity quickly takes on an air of 1950s Nancy Drew and Hitchcock mysteries. "Come on," Betty quips, "it will be just like in the movies. We'll pretend to be someone else." Their elaborate detective work adheres to the notion of truth existing as a rationally discoverable entity - as a key opening a lock - in the real world. Ironically, all they can hope to extract from their fervor is Rita's name and address - a socially assigned identity that makes little sense without the continued presence of her memories.
The process of assuming a new identity becomes a reconfigured childhood of sorts, beginning with mimesis of one's environment - a mirror stage - moving towards a cognitive reconstruction of the self. Behavioral guidelines - a lifetime in the making - are resolutely washed away with the memories. As imploded selves, the two characters constitute wandering black holes operating on impulse, voraciously absorbing influences and experiences that come their way. That their relationship becomes deeply sexual is therefore hardly surprising. Both characters weld in a desperate search for their own identity, exploring new sensibilities - or are they new? "Have you done this before?" an aroused Betty asks Rita while making out naked in her aunt's bed. "I don't remember," Rita replies. It is the unknown and the image having intercourse. Later, as the duo travel to that band-less concert somewhere in the Los Angeles night, they appear as a veritable yin and yang; the blonde and the brunette, one dressed in red, the other in black. Rita, as the enigmatic symbol of a nostalgic Hollywood stardom, represents everything newly arrived Betty is not.
However, to be in love with someone without identity is a little like being in love with a mirror - 'a mirror without memories,' in the words of Linda Williams - onto which the projection of oneself is the only visible apparition. Here, the storyline of Betty and Rita resemble the main characters in Alain Resnais' classic Hiroshima Mon Amour . Like Nevers, Rita virtually absorbs the realities of the people nearby - her lack of memory becomes a hypnotizing gravitational force. Michael Roth argues in his analysis of Hiroshima Mon Amour that the truly unforgettable is what cannot be recounted or narrativized because this process is precisely what surrenders memories to the equivalence of other memories and forces them into existing mental schemes. With a slight spin we can transfer his argument onto Mulholland Drive to posit that Rita's lack of memories - and particularly the gradual unraveling of her enigmatic past - is what causes existing mental schemes such as the conventional process of narrativization to implode (thus making the experience truly unforgettable). Above all, the portrayed effect of amnesia on its surroundings in these two films signifies the closely knit relationship between memory and a sense of reality.
As both Betty and Rita constitute such emotional black holes, their narcissistic love affair becomes doubly intense, to the extent that their roles ultimately appear interchangeable. The mirror without memory can only reflect another mirror, leading to an experience akin to an entire hall of mirrors. The Cartesian boundaries between the physical - their bodies - and the metaphysical - their sense of identity - are sucked in by the figurative Chinese blue box, which becomes the pivotal metaphor of the film and its narrative spin-around. Suddenly, the mysterious Rita appears as the equally mysterious Camilla Rhodes. The once cheerful Betty, on the other hand, has become the reification of her other dimension: a vengeful and neurotic Diane Selwyn, trapped in the downward spiral of a disintegrating love affair with, yes, Camilla Rhodes/Betty. We can note that this sudden dimensional change of events and characters occurs after a dark night of passion and a disturbing performance of art - perhaps eliciting a reservoir of unconscious, irrational memories.
Life: a prosthetic performance
However strange their relationship may seem, there are arguably no characters in Mulholland Drive with strong identities in any conventional sense. In David Lynch' direction, everyone seems to be merely performing to a playback recording. The hotshot director Adam Kesher finds himself enmeshed in a network of surreal henchmen whose strangely abstract nodal point resides in the bizarre character of Mr. Roque - a man with a disproportionately small head who lives behind a glass pane. The perturbed Dan at Winkie's diner appears to be sleepwalking in his own lucid dream. At Betty's first audition, the participants seem awkwardly contrived, the director Bob Barker delivering his lines with less zeal than a cold read. Several other characters - such as Koko, the flamboyant concierge, and Cookie, the downtown hotel manager - reappear in different roles, as Adam Kesher's mother and a stage manager, respectively. This Hollywood is, in short, a simulacrum, an infinitely recyclable web of dreams, lives and characters where everyone always plays a role and no causal relationships can be readily established. David Lynch's Hollywood emerges as a self-organized system, in which all components are interconnected by a network of feedback loops; it is a cinematic expression of postmodern complexity theory.
History and time are recycled as well, in the form of ubiquitous references to the golden days of 1950s Hollywood . "The Sylvia North Story," Adam Kesher's movie, largely comprises jukebox memorabilia. His film is hijacked by the ludicrously mafiaesque Castigliane brothers. The character of Koko oozes of cabaret flare and old-school show business. The film's ostensible oracle is The Cowboy, a veritable cinematic anachronism. Dreamily, the characters look towards the Southern Californian sky. Up above those legendary Hollywood hills, overlooking a distant Los Angeles, is the mythical and deserted road known as Mulholland Drive that runs through the dreamscape as an underlying stream of historical consciousness - as the "Deep River" where Betty comes from.
In the end, Mulholland Drive is not only a story about a few characters' lost sense of self but about the fractured or prosthetic identity of Hollywood itself. Memories of Hollywood are conspicuously prosthetic, stored in a dizzying array of film footage and gossip columns and continuous revivals, reconstructions and remakes. The inherent language of Mulholland Drive thrives on a meta-language, a postmodern pastiche of references - a truly high context message - which turns the film itself into a prosthetic narrative of sorts. We are able to immerse ourselves into the film precisely because of our elaborate prosthetic memory banks - the simulacrum that exists in our minds as much as in Hollywood itself, the place were such minds meet and melt.
In this sense, an increasing reliance on external technological means of remembering, of constructing identity, also signifies a decreasing reliance on personal experiences as the basis of our identities. However, the implied scenario of such a development is not necessarily one of Blade Runner or Total Recall , as Landsberg discusses in her article, where human lives become almost entirely robotic. Rather, the concept of prosthetic memory emphasizes how our memories work in intricate and significant tandem with a technology-driven consumer society. Schacter hints at this in his reference to studies in cognitive psychology that demonstrate how "forgetting memories over time is an economical response to the demands placed on memory by the environment in which we live." (81) In other words, prosthetic memory may be thought of as a psychological survival tactic, just as a prosthetic culture works to ensure the survival of our entire social system.
No hay banda . Through the characters in Lynch' evocative simulacrum - to whom life is endlessly prerecorded and predetermined - we perceive the malleability of our own identities and our collusion with technological means of prosthetic remembering. Although we may live geographically far from "the dream place" of Hollywood, it remains a significant part of a prosthetic culture that encapsulates our own sense of reality and shapes us into cogs of a grand culture machine. To say that we are all performers on the stage of life may be a worn-out cliché. What Lynch seems to be suggesting, though, is chillingly encapsulated by the band-less performance in Mulholland Drive . As in the case of singer Rebecka del Rio, whose piercing voice still fills the room after her body has collapsed on stage, the show must go on. Relentlessly. The script and the assigned role eclipses human agency. And the only escape from the tyranny of eternal performance - from the white noise of sights and sounds - comes in fulfillment of Mulholland Drive 's final utterance: Silencio.»
* Author: Bjorn Ekeberg
