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Love discusses the figure of the tragic lesbian, which she refers to as one of modernity's excluded others. She critiques the 2001 film Mulholland Drive by David Lynch, which explores the interconnectedness of tragic and comic versions of female same-sex desire, revealing lesbian identity to be ineluctably caught up in a sedimented history of fantasies and myths.

The trap, at this last moment, is the wrong kind of emphasis on the undoubted fact that it could indeed be otherwise. To make it already otherwise, by selecting the facts and by subtly reducing the pressures, is to go over into propaganda or to advertising. . . . We have to see not only that suffering is avoidable, but that it is not avoided. And not only that suffering breaks us, but that it need not break us.

-Raymond Williams, Modern Tragedy

ALTHOUGH THE MODERN SUBJECT may imagine himself capable of the metaphysical heroics of Oedipus or Antigone, his suffering tends to be ordinary, banal-a disgrace rather than a catastrophe. Tragedy survives into the modern era, but it loses its patina of sublimity. The model of tragic experience is no longer Icarus's spectacular plunge into the sea, but rather a slow sinking into disillusion and immobility. Even the supremely tragic "event" of modernity-the death of God-feels like a disappointment, not a disaster. Subjects are increasingly hardened against a world that seems at once brutally rational and completely meaningless. Given that this "state of exception" is now the rule, the fact that modern subjects are no longer able to experience the full intensity of tragic feeling should be taken not as a sign that tragedy has disappeared, but rather that it has become so widespread as to be unrecognizable.

In his 1966 study Modern Tragedy, Raymond Williams considers the rapid expansion of tragedy in the twentieth century. In the gas chambers and killing fields that served as tragedy's theater of operation in the modern era, the scale of tragic suffering went beyond all known limits. At the same time, tragedy was democratized: while classical tragedy treated only the fall of gods and heroes, modern tragedy takes seriously the wreckage of even the most undistinguished lives. While Williams applauds this leveling of tragedy in one sense, he is attentive to its costs. While modern tragedy has overcome the elitism of classical tragedy, there is a sense in which we can only understand it as tragic that, in modernity, everyone is exposed to tragic suffering.1 The modernization and democrati/ation of tragedy means that suffering is multiplied even as the reasons to suffer become more and more obscure. Henri Lefebvre describes this state of affairs in "What is Modernity?" when he writes, "Our era is trying to eliminate the tragic, while all the while it is slipping deeper and deeper into tragedy."2 Williams particularly laments the individual and isolated nature of tragic suffering in the modern era, a state of affairs linked to the profound atomization of modern society. For Williams, this breakdown of an integrated community is a disaster, because no alliance can be forged between modernity's tragic subjects.3

Terry Eagleton takes up this point in his recent book, Sweet Violence. Eagleton sees as tragedy's greatest potential its ability to rally a "community of suffering"4 that would be grounded in the universality of human pain. Both Eagleton and Williams ground their dream of a tragic community of suffering in Marx's notion of a universal class, a class "which is the dissolution of all classes, a sphere of society which has a universal character because its sufferings are universal, and which does not claim a particular redress because the wrong which is done to it is not a particular wrong but a wrong in general."5 In discussing the end of tragic heroism, Eagleton writes, "[U]nder democracy, tragic protagonists do not have to be heroes to be tragic. The only qualification for being a tragic protagonist is that you are a member of the species" (94). What is crucial in this tragic collective is that each member of the species should be interchangeable with any other member.6 Eagleton interprets Marx's call for a universal class in the context of contemporary debates about identity politics: his argument for the political usefulness of the concept of modern tragedy is pitched explicitly against what he calls the "glib particularism" of contemporary left politics.

Eagleton concludes his book by arguing that there are in fact no minorities, that what we tend to think of as oppressed minorities in fact constitute a single majority. Discussing the figure of the scapegoat in classical tragedy, he writes,

In the current preoccupation with minorities, one vital insight is in danger of being obscured. The astonishing fact about global capitalism is that it is the majority who are dispossessed. There are, to be sure, degrees of dispossession, and shipyard workers are by no means destitute. But while the idea of a social order which excludes certain vilified minorities is familiar enough, and these expulsions are visibly on show, the mind-shaking truth of a class analysis is that the social orders have always invisibly shut out the majority. This is so paradoxical a fact, as well as so impalpable a one, that we have failed to be sufficiently struck by il. It carries a double message: that a system entranced by success is in fact a miserable failure; and that there is more than enough of this failure for it to convert itself into power. The classical pharmakos can be thrust out of the city because its rulers have no need of it, other than as an object on which to off-load their collective guilt. It is also terrible to look on, too hideous to tolerate within one's walls. But the modern-day scapegoat is essential to the workings of the very polis which shuts it out. It is not a matter of a few hired beggars or gaolbirds, but of whole sweated, uprooted populations. (296)

Eagleton's argument against minority politics is a familiar one; at this point, it is at least as familiar as the narrative of the "exclusion of vilified minorities." Yet Eagleton does not take into account the extent to which modernity is bound up with the specific exclusions he dismisses here. Key aspects of modernization, such as commodification, global migration, and the breakdown of social hierarchies, went hand-in-hand with the development of new technologies for the classification and management of populations. In this sense, modernity produced its own tragic others. While Eagleton is certainly right to suggest that the majority of the world's population is made up of "the dispossessed," the dispossessed are dispossessed in particular ways.7 Simply "seeing through" the ideology of race or gender will not do away with the damage that these concepts have done. As in classical tragedy, the moment of recognition comes too late.

Eagleton's concept of the pharmakos-the scapegoat who visibly suffers the guilt of an entire population-is crucial to understanding the nature of modern tragedy and to imagining a tragic collectivity that does not operate under the sign of the universal. As Eagleton writes, the scapegoat is "symbolically loaded with the guilt of the community"; chosen from the "lowest of the low," this "desolate, abandoned figure is a negative sign of social totality" (278). The pharmakos is crucial in Eagleton's defense of modern tragedy; in his view, this outcast figures the possibility of a radical challenge to the existing order. Yet he also insists that this figure should be unmarked: "When it comes to victimage," he writes, "anyone will do" (278). The modern scapegoat, however, is by definition marked. Constituted as a sign of spectacular difference, he can be easily identified by his characteristic morphology as well as by his psychological profile. Modern tragedy cannot be separated from the tragedy of the so-called minorities: implicit in the concept of the pharmakos is the modern tragedy of social types.

Modern tragedy is equal opportunity tragedy: everyone is exposed to tragic suffering, but some people are more tragic than others. Modernity's others suffer losses and violence like everyone else-but a seal of seeming inevitability is added to their suffering. Their experience appears determined by their being. Nothing befalls them: because their very existence seems tragic, not only every catastrophe but every passing disappointment takes on the character of a curse and seems to arise from within rather than from without. The tragic condition of the scapegoat underlines his suffering, making it appear obvious, even natural. What George Steiner describes as "absolute tragedy," "the image of man as unwanted in life," is a general condition and a typical experience of modernity.8 Yet this experience is overdetermined in material and psychic ways for modernity's others, who represent these losses for the community as a whole. The modern pharmakos stands in for a sense of loss that is widely shared: this figure embodies and literalizes what are in fact more general features of modernity. Registering the death of the universal on his overly particular body, he takes the blame for the losses of modernity, among which must be counted the death of tragedy itself.9

Recently, a few critics have suggested how we might rethink modern tragedy by drawing attention to some of modernity's excluded others. In an essay on the tragic mulatto, Werner Sollers suggests that we might understand this cliched figure as actually tragic, an embodiment of tragic conflicts in the concept and deployment of race in America.10 In her work on tragic women, Rita Felski suggests that women, by representing the contradictions of modernity, may be its exemplary tragic figures." Such reflections on modernity's tragic others inform my own attention, in this essay, to the figure of the tragic lesbian. Like the tragic mulatto or the tragically suffering woman, this is a figure thought to be unworthy of serious attention. For one thing, she can appear to be profoundly anachronistic, an outdated figment of the homophobic imagination. In addition, her suffering, which most often takes the form of disappointment in love, does not really register as tragic, but as simply sad or pathetic. I argue that it is a mistake to dismiss this figure as a mere specter of ideology. Her suffering, apparently so far from modernity's mainstage, is significant precisely as modernity's remainder. As banal and pitiable as the tragic lesbian's experience is, it makes sense to name it as tragic: this is what modern tragedy looks like.

A genealogy of the modern lesbian turns up some outlandish characters. Like the modern homosexual, her origins can be found in the medical and criminal literature of the late nineteenth century. In the writings of the sexologists, the female invert is an unfortunate creature, a woman whose desires, habits, and sartorial choices conflict tragically with her biological sex. The invert, however, is not the only precursor for the modern lesbian, who can also lay claim to a more scandalous set of ancestors. These perverse schoolgirls, vampires, and poetesses appeared in works by authors such as Theophile Gautier, Honore de Balzac, and Charles Baudelaire, but also in any number of less distinguished literary and pornographic texts. This wicked sisterhood tended to have more fun than the mannish women of the sexological case histories; however, they paid for their indiscretions, meeting fates ranging from abandonment to dismemberment.

While the gory antics of these hollow-eyed vixens may seem old-fashioned, it would be a mistake to think of them as irrelevant to contemporary lesbian representation and experience. While lesbian chic is getting a lot more press these days than lesbian vampirism, it is nonetheless the case that the figure of the lesbian remains an object of collective longing and loathing. A spur to acts of phallic virtuosity both on-screen and off, the lesbian sits at the crossroads, charged with unspeakable secrets of desire. While such phantasmic images of the lesbian should not be confused with the "reality" of contemporary lesbian existence, neither should they be written off too quickly or too completely.

David Lynch's 2001 film Mulholland Dnve takes up several of the most powerful and persistent images of the lesbian. That Lynch had hit a vein was clear from the inordinately enthusiastic reviews that appeared in mainstream media and on the Internet. Reviewers rhapsodized in particular and at length about the film's sex scenes, as if there were a contest to see who could enjoy this representation of female same-sex desire the most. However, I happened to talk to several people who told me that they were disturbed by Lynch's representation of lesbians as objects of "male fantasy." These well-meaning viewers expected to find a sympathetic audience in me-as a lesbian, as someone who works on "lesbian representation." I was irritated by this assumption and found myself perversely defending male fantasy: "Hundreds of years of experience have gone into making those fantasies . . . those are quality fantasies!" Of course, these viewers were in one sense right-Mulholland Drive is awash in male fantasy. This in itself is not so shocking, though, since we can find traces of such fantasies in any representation of lesbianism-and in "real life" as well. Given that the lesbian is so overwritten by cliche, the central criterion for judging lesbian representation tends to be whether it challenges reigning cliches of the lesbian or capitulates to them. Lynch is not interested in challenging lesbian cliches; instead, he works almost exclusively through such cliches, exploring both the sweeping vistas and the back alleys of this stereotyped world.

Hollywood-the Dream Factory-is the perfect setting for Lynch's reflection on the relation between individual and public fantasy. If Hollywood cinema is without rival as the site for collective dreaming, it is no less true that it is an industry that passes off cliches as dreams. The film's universe is populated by a range of "walking cliches," from the promising young starlet to a maverick director to the gangster powerbrokers. As hackneyed as these tropes are, Lynch never gets to the bottom of them: while their ideological role is obvious, they are at the same time the source of mystery in Lynch's film. The film moves between different levels of fantasy, treating the relation between unconscious, structuring fantasies; dreams and daydreams; and shared, public fantasies (generic features, character types, verbal and visual cliches). While it is possible to read this film as a depiction of a confrontation between fantasy and real life, fantasy, in fact, has a much more diffuse presence in the film, underwriting "real life" at every moment. Mulholland Drive is both a film "about" fantasy and a film permeated by fantasy at every level: in its setting, its narrative structure, and its visual techniques, the film reflects constantly on the experience of the fantasizing subject. Lesbianism operates in the film as a site for the exploration of fantasy-it occupies a strange twilight realm, somewhere between a dream and a cliche.

The first part of the film traces the adventures of Betty (played by Naomi Watts), a young hopeful just in from Canada who is trying to make it as an actress in Hollywood. On her first day in town, Betty arrives at her aunt's apartment, where she encounters a noirish beauty recovering from a car accident (this character, played by Laura Elena Harring, calls herself Rita after seeing Rita Hayworth's name on a poster for the movie Gilda). In her purse, Rita has no clues to her identity: just a lot of cash and a blue key. As Betty attempts to get her career under way, the two women embark on a series of adventures in order to try to discover Rita's true identity. At the same time, the film traces other plots, including the story of a young director (Adam Kesher, played by justin Theroux) who is losing control of his film to the gangsters who "really" run the film industry.

Betty misses an opportunity to audition for the director's movie in order to go with Rita to the apartment of a woman named Diane Selwyn. After snooping around the complex for a while, they are horrified to discover a woman's rotting corpse in Diane's bed. Back home, they create a disguise for Rita that makes her look like Betty; Betty then invites Rita to spend the night in bed with her, and the two women have sex. In the middle of the night, Rita wakes up and asks Betty to take her to Club Silencio, a theater where they see a series of simulated performances, including a Spanish-language version of Roy Orbison's "Crying," sung by Rebekah del Rio. The scene in the club serves as a hinge in the film: while they are there, Betty reaches into Rita's purse and finds a blue box, a match with the key from early in the film. The two women return home, Rita opens the box, and both women disappear from the frame and from the film.

The rest of the movie takes place in a world that has a lot in common with the first part: settings (Diane Selwyn's apartment, the diner Winky's, the director's house on Mulholland Drive), plot elements, and the use of the same two main actresses. Pointedly missing from this part of the film, though, are the characters of Betty and Rita. We finally meet Diane Selwyn in person-she is played by Watts, who is now almost unrecognizable as the perky, radiant blonde from the first half of the film. Diane is a failed actress; she is haggard, bitter, and sunk in depression. Harring reappears, playing the role of Camilla Rhodes, the actress whom Adam Kesher was forced to cast in the lead role of his film. In this reconfiguration, it appears that Camilla and Diane are both aspiring actresses; that Camilla has had a brief affair with Diane and dropped her; and that Camilla has become a star and is now engaged to the director. Furthermore, we come to understand that Diane has hired a hit man to have Camilla murdered. In the end, Diane, driven mad by remorse, retreats to her bedroom and shoots herself-thus setting the scene for the discovery of her corpse by Betty and Rita earlier in the film.

In Mulholland Drive, Lynch draws on not one lesbian cliche but two, as he juxtaposes the two most familiar lesbian plots of the twentieth century. In the romance between Betty and Rita, Lynch presents lesbianism in its innocent and expansive form: lesbian desire appears as one big adventure, an entree into a glamorous and unknown territory. This fantasy both compensates for and functions as a screen for the story's other lesbian narrative. In the story of Diane and Camilla, Lynch offers us a classic lesbian triangle, in which an attractive but unavailable woman dumps a less attractive woman who is figured as exclusively lesbian. Just as it is necessary that there should be no man in the first, positive scenario, it is crucial that the betrayal in this second story should come in the form of the inaccessible woman's "ending up" with a man. Within such a narrative, the woman who discards a woman for a man stands in for the glamour of mobile desire, while the "committed lesbian" represents the horror of a fixed but impossible object choice. The continuing resonance of this plot of triangulation is legible in the fact that lesbianism is popularly understood as both the hottest thing on earth and, at the same time, as something fundamentally sad and not at all erotic. The lesbian is at once the sexiest possible woman and at the same time an abject and unwanted creature, just as the innocent, schoolgirl plot floats magnificently free of the imperatives of the phallus, reproduction, and social reality itself, so in the classic lesbian triangle the heterosexual order asserts itself with crushing effects for the abandoned woman.

In Mulholland Drive, Lynch scrambles these two plots, refusing to respect the distance between the comic and the tragic versions of female same-sex desire. By casting Naomi Watts as both Betty and Diane, Lynch shows schoolgirl capers and abject lesbian longing to be two aspects of a single fantasy. Diane offers a resonant image of the tragic lesbian as the couple's abject remainder: unable to resist the totalizing logic of heterosexual romance, she is condemned to futile rage, jealousy, and self-destruction. In showing Betty as Diane's imaginary alter ego, Lynch reveals the idealized image of the lesbian to be a ghostly effect produced by the social impossibility of lesbianism. It appears that Diane, the ultimate loser, can hardly do without her fantasized twin, the woman who won the jitterbug contest and walked away from the prize. But at the same time, Betty cannot exist without Diane's longing for her: her victory is meaningless without Diane's loss. In this sense, the tragic lesbian stands behind the shimmering image of the lesbian-as-fantasy-object-a dark shadow she cannot shake.

In their essay "Fantasy and the Origins of Sexuality," Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis attempt through a rereading of Freud to restore fantasy as the "fundamental object of psychoanalysis."12 They argue that we cannot understand fantasy simply as the opposite of reality, pointing out that, in a psychoanalytic view, fantasy is "more real" than reality, because it supports and structures the very appearance of reality. Furthermore, Laplanche and Pontalis do not understand fantasy as a way of seizing on an object of desire: rather, they describe it as the "setting of desire" and see neither the subject nor the object of desire as fixed in the fantasy scene. "Fantasy, however, is not the object of desire, but its setting. In fantasy the subject does not pursue the object or its sign: he appears caught up himself in the sequence of images. He forms no representation of the desired object, but is himself represented as participating in the scene although, in the earliest forms of fantasy, he cannot be assigned any fixed place in it . . . As a result, the subject, although always present in the fantasy, may be so in a desubjeclivized form, that is to say, in the very syntax of the sequence in question" (26). Laplanche and Pontalis describe fantasy that is not attached to an object, but that is organized as a scene. The dreamer may be a character in this scene, but he is not guaranteed to be its protagonist; his identification may be with any of the characters in the scene, or, in fact, with the "very syntax of the sequence in question."

In her 1984 article "Fantasia," film critic Elizabeth Cowie takes up Laplanche and Pontalis's work to consider the relation between public and private fantasy and the role of gender difference in structuring fantasy. "Conventions are thus the means by which the structuring of desires is represented in public forms, inasmuch as . . . fantasy is the mise-en-scene of desire. What is necessary for any public forms of fantasy, for their collective consumption, is not universal objects of desire, but a setting of desiring in which we can find our place(s). And these places will devolve, as in the original fantasies, on positions of desire: active or passive, feminine or masculine, mother or son, father or daughter" (87).13 Cowie argues that conventions-generic conventions, conventions of filmic representation, or the conventions of narrative-structure desires into public forms that allow for multiple identifications. These identifications are not completely unbound (as we might think of desire before its representation in fantasy) but rather are structured according to more or less fixed "positions." Gender difference is crucial in such positioning: though gender cannot determine precisely how one will identify, it determines the places that are available. Or, as Cowie writes, "While the terms of sexual difference are fixed, the places of characters and spectators in relation to those terms are not" (102).

This version of fantasy can, I think, help us read the opening moments of Mulholland Drive. The film begins as a few shadows move in slow motion across a blue screen; these blurry shapes will become visible as parts of human bodies only later. As the music hits full swing, several figures emerge, some shadows, some realized in full color, dancing an exuberant jitterbug, still against the backdrop of an electric blue screen. These figures overlap and play against each other, moving in and out of cut-out "blank" or "empty" silhouettes of dancing couples. (There are no "intermediate types" here.) The wild profusion of couples suggests that, as a viewer, it is not necessary to choose just one of these positions. The total effect is of a scene, a fantasy in which every image on the screen is potentially available as an object of desire and/or identification. The cliches of gender do not disappear in such a scene, but rather they are scattered across the screen. As a result, the spectator's investment here is in sequence, in the exuberance of gesture, and in the pleasure of moving imaginatively across the boundary between male and female, as well as across the boundary of the human form. Out of this depthless field, the triumphant face of Diane/Betty emerges in a halo of white light, the apparent winner of this contest. Her ghostly appearance as the protagonist of this scene signals a turn from an unfixed fantasy to a first-person wish-fulfillment dream that sets the film's narrative in motion.

The jitterbug contest is taken up again the second half of the film, when Diane describes how she came to Hollywood at Adam and Camilla's dinner party. In this scene, Diane emerges as a familiar figure-the tragic or failed lesbian, destined to lose her lover to a man. Late in the film, her story finally congeals, as she delivers it in a bitter, tearful, and subdued voice: "I won this jitterbug contest. That sort of led to acting. To wanting to act. When my aunt died, she left me some money." In this version, the blissful elasticity of the earlier fantasy drains away. As this early scene resolves into a story, we see that it is already a narrative of failure, with Diane cast as its abject protagonist. Diane's speech finds no audience, as the bored and intolerant guests at the dinner table have trouble making even the most rudimentary sense of her life story. Diane's speech in this scene is contrasted with the overauthorized speech of Adam and Camilla. The party turns out to be the occasion for the announcement of Adam and Camilla's marriage; however, this event turns out to be so legitimate, so expected, that the actual announcement is redundant. Adam is so busy kissing Camilla that he barely gets the words out; he only ever says, "Camilla and I are going to . . ." and the rapt audience and his guests fill in the blank.14

By contrasting these two versions of the jitterbug contest, Lynch underscores the difference between desubjectivized fantasy and fantasy as wish fulfillment. He also suggests that fantasy in its expansive, scenic form may not be able to survive its translation into narrative: the dream scene, itself a playful cliche, hardens into a different and more devastating kind of cliche. Lesbianism in Mulholland Drive represents both the utopian possibility of doing without a fixed sexual object as well as the disastrous consequences of fixing on an object that is by definition lost. In the dinner party scene, Camilla with her perverse heterosexuality is allied with mobile, scenic fantasy; as an exclusively lesbian woman, Diane's desire is understood as tragic from the start. For her, the stakes are impossibly high: the difference between these two forms of fantasy means the difference between success and failure, between sexiness and abjection, even between life and death.

Lynch explores the volatility of cliche in the film's remarkable sex scenes. The first of these pictures the happy moment when Rita and Betty "get together"; the second scene pictures a "failed" erotic encounter, in which Diane "discovers" that Camilla is leaving her for Adam. Both scenes are deeply engaged with the stock images of lesbian representation: they pile up lesbian cliches quite freely, sometimes incoherently, and with effects that are both funny and moving.

The first scene occurs shortly after Betty and Rita have seen Diane's corpse. We find Betty musing in bed, modestly attired in pink pajamas. Rita appears in the doorway, wearing a towel and the blond wig that they have fashioned for her. Though the opening of the scene is played like an outtake from a college dormitory, Rita's dark eyes smoldering beneath her platinum hair suggest she may have wandered in from a different picture. The generic dissonance of this scene is the source of its comic effect as well as the reason for the constant misunderstandings between the two characters. Both the schoolgirl and the femme fatale are stock lesbian characters, but they are not supposed to end up in bed together. Betty's opening invitation to have Rita join her in the bed recalls a tradition of boarding school romances that walk a fine line between innocence and experience, between cuddling and depravity. Rita nearly passes for a character in such a drama at the beginning of this scene, though by the time she drops the towel it is clear where the scene is heading. Before climbing into bed, Rita pauses, striking a classic pin-up pose: we see almost her entire body, centered in the frame, lit from behind, and punishingly voluptuous.

As the scene gets going between these two women, it reflects a very familiar idea of what sex between women looks like-very breasty, very kissy. The mother-daughter "plot" of lesbian romance is invoked here as well: her torso looming up out of the bedclothes, Rita appears for a moment as a "noir mom" come to tuck in her daughter. The familiar but slightly "off" quality of this scene is underlined after the women start to kiss. Betty pauses to give voice to that ultimate cliche of the lesbian encounter: "Have you ever done this before?" In response to this naive (or faux-naive) question, Rita's honestly amnesiac response is "I don't know. Have you?" The intense pleasure and surprise of this line is difficult to account for. It shines more brightly for being set against a background of hardened cliches. It also seems to point to a kind of Utopian plenitude in the midst of this more or less predictable scene. Rita's response is striking in its insistence that what matters is not memory but desire. Her innocence here loosens the bonds between the past and the future and insists that the future is still in the making. It does not matter if we have done this before, or if we even know what it is (Have you done this before? What is this, anyway?). Together with Betty's next response ("I want to with you"), this line suggests that what we have done and who we are does not count for much-what matters instead is what we are about to do, what we want to do.15

The later scene between Diane and Camilla works according to a much different logic. It occurs in the morning, just after Diane has been awoken from a deep depressive sleep. Perhaps one of the most striking features of Mulholland Drive is the physical transformation of Naomi Watts from the beginning to the end of the film. After she "wakes up" in the second part of the film, Watts's perky slim body appears too skinny, ragged-as if hollowed out by desire. While we might read the scene between Betty and Rita as Diane's fantasy, it reads much less clearly as "sexual fantasy" than Diane's later encounter with Camilla. The iconography of this brief encounter is drawn from soft-core pornography, and the proximity of Diane's masturbation scene to this one suggests that this may be a more "straight," end-oriented erotic fantasy.

In this scene, Camilla, the focus of all Diane's longing, appears more radiant than ever. As Martha Nochimson points out, it is as if she has literally sucked the life out of Diane.16 The life has certainly been sucked out of the dialogue in this scene, which proceeds from cliche to cliche. Diane's cheesy, slightly '80s line ("What was that you were saying, Beautiful?") is matched for pure woodenness by Camilla's response ("I said, 'You drive me wild!'"). Camilla plays the part of the femme fatale to the hilt, following "libu drive me wild!" almost immediately with "We can't do this anymore," and, more emphatically, "Diane, don't!" These characters mouth their lines without conviction, their speech entirely devoid of the hesitation and surprise that characterize dialogue in the earlier scene. The possibilities for multiple identification and the improvisation opened in the first section of the film are shut down here, as each of the women plays her assigned role in a familiar-all too familiar-drama of lesbian triangulation and betrayal ("It's him, isn't it?"-but of course it is!).

In Mulholland Drive, cliche can be as deadening as Betty's "Have you ever done this before?" or as expansive as Rita's "I don't know." In the first hall of the film, reality is structured by cliche but is nonetheless thickly studded with surprise. In the second half of the film, that reality hardens to the point of total immobility. Fantasy in part one gives reality a wonderful texture, a dazzling appearance that recalls the luminous world of the jitterbug dream in the beginning of the film. It also loosens the hold of cliche, making available stock genres and roles for shifting identifications. In the second part of the film, we alternate between a grim reality (with no trace of fantasy in it) and a compensatory world of fantasy in which desire is closely tied to an object that is always already lost. The object of desire is lost in both worlds-but the first part of Mulholland Drive points to the possibility of a kind of fantasy in which the loss of the object is not played in a tragic register.

The hardening of fantasy in the second half of the film has particularly dire consequences for Diane, because the role she takes up is a tragic one. While Camilla's utterly cliched role still allows for some mobility and transgression, Diane turns into a cliche without any "give," without any "play." She reaches the depths of abjection in the masturbation scene, when on the couch she touches herself, tears rolling down her face. As Diane stares at the stony surface of the fireplace opposite, the rough, variegated surface of the chimney blurs in and out of focus. Lynch uses this technique several times during the film, and in this case it seems particularly closely tied to Diane's point of view. As her tears repeatedly blur this irregular surface into a smooth screen, it seems that Diane is willing herself into fantasy. But in this scene, her powerful fantasy-machine has run down; she manages for an instant, but the same stony reality keeps returning.

Camilla's betrayal of Diane is the oldest story in the book, a classic in the genre of homosexual tragedies of betrayal. Perhaps the best known is Oscar Wilde's trial and death: both Wilde and Diane make the mistake of expecting extraordinary things from people who turn out in the end to be quite ordinary. Anyone can make such a mistake, but it is because the homosexual already occupies the position of the scapegoat that his sacrifice looks so natural. For "someone like Diane," love fails because it must, because Sapphic promise inevitably founders on the rocks of homosexual impossibility. It can be counted as a tragedy that for modern subjects, having impossible desires means that you become an impossible person. Given that homosexuality is considered a tragic state of being, it is difficult for any individual homosexual life-story to signify as tragic.

Diane's abject longing for Camilla Rhodes is at some distance from the sublime defiance of Antigone. While Antigone's refusal of Creon's injunction makes her an enemy of the state, Diane's love for Camilla puts her outside the norm. Her state of exile does not have the dignity of rebellion. To add insult to injury, her desire for a "normal woman" makes her appear nothing more than a poor wretch, panting after goods that she cannot have. Mulholland Drive is remarkable in that it takes Diane's tragedy seriously. By linking Diane to Betty, her radiant alter ego, Lynch manages to make her suicide count as tragic action. Her rotting corpse is at the center of the film, the "content," if there is any, of the blue box.

Many gays and lesbians consider dwelling on such tragedies to be counterproductive in the extreme. According to this view, "homosexual tragedy" belongs to a different era, to a time when living as a homosexual was nearly impossible. Given that social circumstances have changed so profoundly in the last thirty years, they argue for the need to get over this past, not eroticize it. Such a view does not account for the ways in which lesbians and gays, despite the new possibilities that are open to them, continue to be positioned as modernity's others. Such structural facts are slow to change, as are the feelings that circulate around them. For contemporary subjects whose identities and desires are bound up with this past, this injunction to "get over the past" can sound like bullying.17 As masochistic fantasies were off-limits for second-wave feminists, so for contemporary lesbians socially regressive desires-fantasies about lesbian abjection and glittering femmes fatales-are perhaps the greatest taboo. Our desires are supposed to lead the way to a different future, not fasten us to the image of the past.18 Such forward thinking, however, cannot address structural inequalities or the real complexities of desire. Instead, we need a politics that goes "all the way down," that is attentive to the dark places of affective and erotic life.

A crucial debate about the political uses of tragedy has considered the question of whether tragedy is absolute, or whether it can be amelio-rated through social change. The fact that homosexuality is tragic is a social rather than a natural fact. But it is not necessary to imagine that homosexual life will never change in order to experience it as tragic in the present. This vision of homosexuality is a product of ideology, but ideology has real effects: simply recognizing its illusory nature is not enough. (Such a point seems to be at the heart of the central sequence in the film, the "live" performance in Club Silencio. Although the emcee continually describes the scene on the stage as an illusion, this illusion has palpable effects: the stage lightning induces an epileptic fit in Betty; Rebekah del Rio's faked death elicits real tears from both women.)

Mulholland Drive depicts lesbian fantasy as inextricably bound up with lesbian tragedy. While Betty and Rita's unscripted antics gesture toward an escape route, the film keeps circling back to a dead end. The film supports Slavoj Zizek's suggestion that "fantasy does not simply realize a desire in a hallucinatory way: rather, . . . a fantasy constitutes our desire, provides its co-ordinates; that is, it literally 'teaches us how to desire.'"19 The fact that fantasy does not follow after desire, but rather constitutes it, means that there is in the subject no pure wellspring of desire. (Or, as Zizek puts it, "there is no secret treasure in me" [10].) Recognizing the structuring function of fantasy means giving up on the dream of lesbian authenticity, which in this light looks like just another cliche. In a related sense, we might say that psychic injury is not a threat to subjectivity but rather constitutive of it. It is for this reason that we cannot blame Diane's death on a lack of optimism or a lack of nerve. As long as lesbianism is socially denigrated, her corpse will continue to turn up in the midst of even the dreamiest lesbian fantasy. Diane Selwyn is a structural effect of homophobia, one of the tragic others that modernity produces with such alarming regularity.

UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA