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AS WESTERNERS, WE TEND TO INSCRIBE various stimuli within the discourse of traditional logic, favoring the idea that the endless series of events, persons, and images that abound in our experiences can be reduced to a singular and cohesive whole. In Mulholland Drive (2001), a film that has puzzled viewers since its world premiere, David Lynch successfully reverses coherence by making the traditional "sense" (logic) of the temporal, spatial, psychological, and linguistic conditions of the film's characters and surrealistic world defer to the nonlogical "sense" (intuitive and emotional perception) of those conditions. Although critics remain divided on whether or not logical sense can be derived from Mulholland Drive, both sides, when examining or reviewing the film, have either ignored or glossed over Lynch's aesthetic interest in the realm of the unexplained and his distrust of linguistic structure. This failure, one might argue, does Lynch and his film a great disservice. When looking at Drive, it is important to consider Lynch's aesthetic principles regarding the discourse of sense, and provide a close reading of how he defers the discourse of traditional logic to the discourse of nonlogic in the film. This essay examines the character of Rita (Laura Elena Harring) and the Club Silencio setting and scene as examples of this deferral. These examples enable us to see that, once Lynch's aesthetics are kept in mind, we can then more fully appreciate the surrealistic world of Mulholland Drive, a world in which truths about "reality" are "sensed" (perceived and known) through the unexplained-the fluid and rhythmic pulsions of the "discourse" of intuitions and emotions. These can be perceived as contradictions or meaninglessness, and as absences in symbolic language-the blurring of conceptual borders.
Indeed, Mulholland Drive is a conundrum as curvy and convoluted as the road for which the film is named. Set in the mysterious and menacing dream world of Los Angeles, the film circles around a trance-like landscape where the actual amalgamates with the fantastic, defying semblances of cohesion. Lynch imbues Drive with the avant-garde deconstructivism prevalent in Angeleno culture. Realities are juxtaposed, identities shift and merge, and unsettled viewers find themselves taking on the role of detective. Like the blackness inside the film's enigmatic blue box, any logical nucleus for Drive remains elusive and...