The Society of Analytical Psychology
In Partnership with the Everyman Cinema
“Everyman in Therapy”
David Lynch’s “Mulholland Drive” is an elaborately drawn story of desire, yearning and vengeance. The film’s structure and beguiling imagery evoke a surrealist dreamscape in the form of a strangely disquieting Hollywood film noir that works to accentuate both the tenuous margin between dream and waking states, and the confusion and synthesis of conscious and unconscious identities that represent aspects of the heroine’s psyche.
Betty is a wholesome, mid-western blonde ingenue who has come to the City of Angels to seek fame and fortune as an actress. Rita is a glamorous brunette left amnesiac after a car accident, wanders the streets of LA in a daze before taking refuge in Betty’s aunt’s apartment where Betty discovers her. Together, the two women attempt to solve the mystery of Rita’s true identity.
Lynch’s sublime film is a study in contrasts, alternating illusion with reality, journeying into unconscious realms involving archetypal symbolism, doubling, trickster and shadow material, and prospective and compensatory dream-like states where painful, personal experiences are repressed from consciousness. This repression of unwelcome truths and dissociation interweaves with an uneasy meditation on the dark, unaccountable menace of Hollywood, where glamour and glitz sit uncomfortably and oppressively alongside cruelty, and the indifference of a misogynistic industry where the mistreatment of women is normalised. It continues a recurrent theme of performance, where Lynch states: “I have a thing for curtains and the stage – a curtain hides something and we want to know what’s behind it”.
These aspects and more will be discussed following the film in a dialogue between Rupert Tower (Jungian analyst) and Diana Moffat (Jungian analyst), and chaired by Adam Reynolds (Head of Brand Partnerships, Everyman).
CPD Event
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