The Temporality of the Landscape & Mulholland Drive

Betty is a starry-eyed young actress from Ontario who comes to Hollywood to make it big. She stays in her aunt's apartment, who happens to be an actress. Alone in the apartment, Betty is startled when she finds Rita, a stranger, naked in the shower. While Betty initially believes Rita is a friend of her aunt's, she later learns that Rita was in some sort of accident that has given her amnesia, resulting in her inability to remember who she is. The only clues they have are Rita's purse full of cash and a mysterious blue box without a key. Betty's big heart leads to the two of them becoming friends as they spend their time attempting to figure out who Rita is. While their story constitutes the primary narrative, the film is complicated by several other threads that include Adam, a director with a big ego, a shadowy faceless corporation that will stop at nothing to get their way, and a few other minor characters.

The film is notorious for its ambiguity, but what seems to be widely accepted is the film’s commentary on Hollywood. Usually described as a neo-noir film with surrealist qualities, I’m beginning to think of it as a horror movie. Unlike most horror movies where the characters are being mutilated by a masked psychopath, Mulholland Drive's monster is the city itself.

In his paper, "The Temporality of the Landscape," anthropologist Tim Ingold argues that the landscape "is constituted as an enduring record of — and testimony to — the lives and works of past generations who have dwelt within it, and in so doing, have left there something of themselves" (152). Viewed from a horror movie perspective, this description could be interpreted to mean that the landscape is haunted.

Unlike a haunted house that is possessed by an immaterial figure, Ingold holds on to the material. This is where he begins to introduce his perspective. For Ingold, debates over what a landscape is have been divided into views that it is either material or cultural. However, for Ingold, this binary is artificial. The truth, according to Ingold, is an interconnection between the material and the cultural. In Mulholland Drive, the Hollywood hills are pregnant with the past and reproduce cultural symbols in the form of houses of the rich and famous. The aerial shots of LA’s opaque skyscrapers reveal faceless corporations that use communication networks like a nervous system to organize the weak and willing participants of the city. The palm trees sprout from the city’s skin, and movie theaters capture the attention of attendees, blurring the lines between what is real and what is fake.

By dissolving the boundary between the human and the world, Ingold seems to be announcing the death of the human.

"I reject the division between inner and outer worlds - respectively of mind and matter, meaning and substance - upon which such distinction rests. The landscape, I hold, is not a picture in the imagination, surveyed by the mind's eye; nor, however, is it an alien and formless substrate awaiting the imposition of human order. 'The idea of landscape', as Meinig writes, 'runs counter to recognition of any simple binary relationship between man and nature' (Meinig 1979b: 2). Thus, neither is the landscape identical to nature, nor is it on the side of humanity against nature. As the familiar domain of our dwelling, it is with us, not against us, but it is no less real for that. And through living in it, the landscape becomes a part of us, just as we are a part of it.” (154)

In Mulholland Drive, after her accident, Rita has no memory of who she is; all she has is a mysterious locked box and a purse full of cash. Throughout the film, we see moments where Betty and Rita are, in a way, living the same life. At one point, Rita adopts a blonde wig, and later Betty plays the successful actress in the back of a limo. While we don’t know Rita’s past, if the two are on the same trajectory, it seems reasonable to assume that Rita once was as innocent as Betty. Through her time in the city, her old self was killed off in exchange for nothing more than a purse full of money. Slowly, the city incorporates itself into the human, revealing that it is in us and we in it. While the city’s incorporation is welcomed by some, Adam, the hotheaded director, shows us how the landscape’s dominance can lead to resistance. Adam’s story portrays the individual's fight for sovereignty in a place that wants to reduce the human to a docile body.

By animating the landscape, Ingold makes something that was once static dynamic. To account for its dynamism, Ingold introduces a set of ideas that are crucial to thinking about a living landscape. Important to the dynamism of the landscape is attention, resonance, movement, rhythm, and the generative nature of forms. When Rita is sitting at Winkie’s, the name Diane Selwyn grabs her attention. Unsure what the name means, she and Betty are moved by its resonance to the point of following it by moving their bodies throughout the city. Betty’s aunt was an actress, Rita was too, and at one point in the film, Betty hears a director described as being past his time. In this sense, the city has a rhythm to it. And lastly, towards the end of the movie when things start to get more confusing, we see how a person’s form is generated by the sum of their relations with the city.

While I don’t think we’re likely to hear people describing Mulholland Drive as a horror movie anytime soon, I think the possibility affirms Ingold’s argument that it is our attention, the stories we tell, the rhythms we encounter, and the resonances we feel that can generate new forms of life.