“It’s No Longer Your Film”: Fictions of Authorship in Lynch’s Mulholland Drive

It’s not like you set out to do a certain type of thing; the ideas tell you what it’s going to be, and by the time you realize what that is, it’s almost done.

—David Lynch¹

Of course, the director does not have full control over his work; this explains why the auteur theory involves a kind of decipherment, decryptment.

—Peter Wollen

in an early scene in david lynch’s Mul-holland Drive (2001), a young director named Adam Kesher takes a meeting with the mysterious Castigliane brothers to discuss the recasting of his current film. The brothers, who represent the film’s financial backer, slide a headshot across the table and inform Adam, “This is the girl.” He protests, but they insist. Finally, the enraged director loses his cool: “This girl is not in my film!” “It’s no longer your film,” one brother replies. Lynch cuts to a close-up of Adam’s face—slack, defeated. The meeting is over. Adam walks out.

It is tempting to read this scene allegorically, as a barely veiled critique of commercial film-making practices or as a lament for the death of the cinematic auteur. That Adam’s life will be literally threatened later in the film—by a cowboy, no less—implies that directors within Lynch’s universe might even risk effacement by forces within their films (character, genre, etc.), as well as market forces without. At first glance, then, Mulholland Drive might seem to offer a rather conventional defense of auteurism, in the tradition pioneered by Cahiers du Cinéma critics and popularized abroad by Andrew Sarris, among others. One might even be tempted to see Adam’s movie-within-a-movie as a film à clef, a fictional counterpart to the real Mulholland Drive, which, like the film’s The Sylvia North Story, faced significant and nearly calamitous setbacks during production.²

As this article will suggest, however, this scene functions less as an allegory than as a set piece—one used to showcase not the loss of authorial control but the fictional status of such control in the first place. Indeed, Mulholland Drive can be seen to repeatedly disrupt the privilege historically assigned to the auteur and to mobilize long-standing myths of authorship primarily for the purposes of debunking them. A careful analysis of the film reveals that this critique of authorial intention can be discerned even in the film’s camerawork, ensuring that Mulholland Drive in both style and substance works to dramatize if not the “death” of the film author, then his disappearance from the interpretive scene.³

Based on such evidence, this article suggests on the one hand that Lynch’s notions of authorship owe more to revised theoretical formulations—such as Peter Wollen’s semiotically inflected gloss on auteurism or Michel Foucault’s poststructuralist approach to authorship as a “function”—than to the original politique des auteurs. At the same time, this article contends that the most compelling articulation of the director’s role emerges from the film itself, which evinces a vision of the filmmaker not as all-powerful “author” but as unconscious dreamer, a figure who generates the raw material for a film but does not presume to adjudicate or even guarantee its meaning. In this sense, Lynch would seem to place himself squarely in the tradition of surrealist artists who, as Roland Barthes has noted, sought to undermine through their “automatic” praxis prevailing discourses of authorial expression, intention, and control. In so doing, Barthes observes, they “contributed to the desacralization of the image of the Author by ceaselessly recommending the abrupt disappointment of expectations of meaning . . .” (144).

To suggest that Mulholland Drive channels surrealist and psychoanalytic discourses for the purposes of discrediting historically dominant and Romantically inflected paradigms of authorship, however, is not to suggest that the film disowns authorial power. On the contrary, Lynch’s work does not disappoint “expectations of meaning” so much as continually defer them, stoking spectatorial hopes with mechanisms at once intra-, inter-, and paratextual, such that audiences may be made...