On January 15th, 1947, Elizabeth Short’s body was found in a vacant lot at the edge of a Los Angeles suburb. Her body had been brutalized and horrifically mutilated. This discovery, and the resulting unsolved homicide investigation, has become legendary in certain spheres of American history. The Black Dahlia, a cleverly crafted name that a grimy reporter came up with, has lived on in the fringes of the American cinematic mind for the past near century. Much of the case surrounds itself in a noir mystique, the heinous crime occuring at the height of the noir film genre’s popularity. Often these classic noir films’ imagery consists primarily of two things, gaze and violence. What do we remember most about Elizabeth Short? What she looked like, and how she died.
In 1984, Filmmaker and author Kenneth Anger caused a minor scandal with the graphic contents of his pseudo-nonfiction gossip filled book Hollywood Babylon II. Inside the tome, Anger infamously shares gruesome photos of Short’s mutilated body from the Black Dahlia crime scene. This was an extreme act in exploitation and likely the first time a large number of people could get their hands on these photos. The case had been mythologized for forty years at this point, but now the reality of it was widely available. The release of Babylon II also happened to coincide with the rise/golden age of the erotic thriller subgenre. More sex and violence, but the erotic thriller left more room for an intelligent director to expand on the gaze. Someone like Brian De Palma would just end up reinforcing the male gaze with a film like Body Double (1984). Smart satirists, yes I’m talking about Paul Verhoeven and Basic Instinct (1992), can mess with the gaze and empower somebody, like Verhoeven giving Sharon Stone mysterious power in Basic Instinct. When it comes to David Lynch, I think his closest film to becoming an erotic thriller is Blue Velvet (1986), but that label still doesn’t feel right.
Lynch’s relationship with noir is pertinent to about half of his feature filmography. I notice the highkey noir lighting in most of his films, especially Blue Velvet. Blue Velvet even has noir motifs repeated on the television screens in the film. Jeffery Beaumont’s, played by Lynch regular Kyle Maclachlan, family watches so many noir films on the TV that its uncanny. The whole of Blue Velvet, like the Black Dahlia photos in Hollywood Babylon, plays a lot with the sexuality, violence, and gender roles of noir cinema … noir mythology. Lynch throws Jeffrey into a closet and forces us to gaze with him. We are forced to go through a whole range of sexual feelings when we watch Blue Velvet and when we are placed in the shoes of the detective. David Lynch himself had four wives and five long term partners total, you can look it up. He definitely had some issues with maintaining his relationships and this reflects in his work. When watching his meditative O.J. Simpson send-up Lost Highway (1997) you can see a lot of his feelings all over the place. Out of David Lynch’s filmography, and especially within Lynch’s LA trilogy, Lost Highway engages with the gaze the most. The film is studded with buxom femme fatales, all played by Patricia Arquette, and even has plotlines concerning porno rings and adulterous relationships. Arquette’s second fatale, Alice Wakefield, tells Bill Pullman’s wife murderer character “You’ll never have me.”
Lost Highway depicts a Los Angeles outside of Hollywood, its principal characters aren’t involved with the industry, they are criminals, musicians, and mechanics. There are only two specters of female possession through cinema; Mr. Eddy’s porno ring and The Mystery Man, played by Robert Blake. The Mystery Man is depicted at the end of Lost Highway wielding a VHS camcorder, he captures people in images, captures women in the gaze. The permanent capture of images is antithetical to Fred Madison’s, Bill Pullman, quote “I like to remember things my own way. How I remembered them, not necessarily the way they happened.” Early in the film, Fred and his wife Renee are haunted by the Mystery Man’s tapes, Fred is haunted by impotence, he’s unable or at least subconsciously afraid of noir imagery. He gains confidence, conveyed through the possibly psychological creation of Pete Dayton in Fred’s mind. Pete, played by Balthazar Getty, is confident, sexy, and potent. He didn’t kill someone, ala bisect his wife, to get over his fear of the gaze.
Eerily, Lost Highway relates the most to the Black Dahlia murder, Elizabeth Short was cut in half. In the glimpses we get of Renee’s murder in Lost Highway, she was similarly cut apart. Black Dahlia conspiracy theorist and absolute kook Steve Hodel obsessed a little bit over these connections and went even further back in time. Steve Hodel earnestly believes, well he might write for cash at this point, that the surrealistic artwork of Man Ray and Salvador Dali were inspirations for Elizabeth Short’s killer. David Lynch, being a masterful surrealist, has displayed a similar set of inspirations in Lost Highway. In Fred and Renee’s living room, a very cold and sparse environment, there are three surrealist paintings on the wall that foreshadow the events of the film. David Lynch has also evidently taken inspiration from the Black Dahlia case itself. He talks about sitting down with one of the case’s detectives at Musso and Frank’s in his memoir Room to Dream. “Then he (LAPD Det. John St. John) goes to his briefcase … and takes out a beautiful, glossy black-and-white photo that he lays on the table in front of me. It’s a picture of the Black Dahlia lying in the grass, and it’s in mint condition. The focus and detail were perfect.” (Lynch, McKenna p. 354) Lost Highway is a film that engages with the mythology of murder. These symbolized abuses that have permeated and stained cinema. The classic images of femme fatales are permanent points of abuse that have gained permanence in the white male dominated space of American cinema. These are fictional abuses that have real consequences, what about real violence.
The Black Dahlia was a real person. Other murders have stained Lynch’s cinema, specters from the collective consciousness. Lynch was friends with Ira Einhorn, aka The Unicorn Killer, in 1970s Philadelphia. Ira killed his ex and hid her body, wrapped in plastic, in his apartment closet. Robert Blake, the man who played the Mystery Man in Lost Highway and a kid in the Our Gang Little Rascals shorts, solicited someone to shoot his wife in 2001. The plan succeeded, his wife was shot dead in an alley in the passenger seat of Blake’s Dodge Stealth. This event, as well as the other real abuses of Hollywood, strangely foreshadows the last quarter of Mulholland Drive (2001).
In the last parts of Mulholland Drive, it’s revealed that Naomi Watts’ character, the film’s protagonist, had hired a hitman to bump off an ex-lover as retaliation for her getting married. Right before Betty/Diane Selwyne kills herself over the guilt/ancestral trauma/narrative imprisonment, she cries and masturbates. Sex, violence, and grief. Much of Mulholland Drive lives with Laura Harring and Naomi Watts’ becoming filmic femme fatales in Diane’s noirish cinematic dream/fantasy. In the movie, at Club Silencio, there’s an entire metaphorical rant/performance about the fictional construction of cinematic narratives. Naomi Watts’ protagonist has a breakdown as she realizes she’s dreaming, realizes she’s a film character, realizes she’s an object of gaze, and realizes she’s objectified Laura Harring, aka Rita or Camilla Rhodes, for her own gaze.
Mulholland Drive has some similar ideas to Lost Highway, but goes in a different direction. The film is much more conscious of the film industry and its systems, its systems of abuse. Betty creates an imaginary all-powerful controller of the film industry that is ultimately responsible for all of the abuse. Mr. Roque, played by Michael J. Anderson, represents the abuse of power, the abuse of imagery in Hollywood. He’s the monster, and as concluded in Claire Dederer’s film criticism book Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma, these monsters are entirely normal. They are real people with real problems who’ve done real horrible things and at the same time have made real art. A monster like Mr. Roque, who controls all, seeks to divide and conquer. Monsters like Mr. Roque, Diane, or O.J. Simpson are everywhere, they’re normal. Mulholland Drive is another story of the Hollywood abuse deluge built on the echoes of traumatic pasts. Diane’s own grief motivates her suicide, Rita’s head trauma motivates her relationship with Betty.
Both Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive deal with the consequences of mythologizing abuse. Inland Empire (2006) really digs deep into the consciousness of film. If Lost Highway is about reliving, i.e. fantasizing, abuse imagery and Mulholland Drive is about cyclic systemic abuse in film, then it follows that Inland Empire must address abuse in some way, historical abuse. Inland Empire is a three hour schizophrenic digicam musing on the past. A world of lost futures, recycled trauma, curses, and specters. Haunted worlds, reminiscent of the haunted forest in The Blair Witch Project (1999). Inland Empire lives and breathes double identities, curses, and the consequences of exploitation.
Nikki Grace/Susan Blue, played by Laura Dern, inherits all of the traumas of exploited minorities. She lives through them, takes on their trauma, becomes one with fiction. She turns from real to fictional, analog to digital. Inland Empire is very intertextual. Laura Dern is a David Lynch regular, the film stars many actors he’s worked with previously. Justin Theroux, Harry Dean Stanton, Naomi Watts, Laura Harring, Grace Zabriskie, Diane Ladd, etc. They are familiar to an avid Lynch viewer. We recognize their faces, their symbolism, their movements, their screen presence. Justin Theroux was a victim of abuse in Mulholland Drive, in Inland Empire he’s now an abuser. It seems that the prospect of acting is cursed by intertextual relations. The fictional melodrama that’s the basis of the film in Inland Empire is intertextual with the history of melodrama in American cinema. Inland Empire isn’t a camp parody of a Douglas Sirk film, the Douglas Sirk film has become real. The film’s symbols have become reality for Susan Blue. It’s not longer an act, to quote Rosemary’s Baby (1968), “This is really happening!” Once a film is made and its ideas enter the zeitgeist, those ideas become reality. They are no longer fictional, they can’t be. Our media objects become our praxis.
The folk tale, Axxon N, Four Seven, and On High in Blue Tomorrows, are all “fictional” constructions that become reality for Nikki/Susan. The abusive cycle of domestic life becomes reinforced by the media it created. A brutal murder is bound to happen in a world of symbols. A cursed film like The Exorcist (1973) encourages spookiness. A troubled production becomes a cursed production. James Dean’s car becomes cursed after multiple crashes. A curse of loss, or gothic loss of life. These cursed things are tied to human superstition. Superstition reinforces the specters of the medium. Hauntology, an obsession over lost futures, a fetishization of fake nostalgia, controls our contemporary fiction which controls our praxis. There are real specters out there that aren’t from the media. The ghosts of history. The ghost of a Germanic folk tale. The ghost of abuse. Our society is built on ancestral trauma, we live through the passed on DNA fears of our ancestors. We are born ingrained with something etched way deep in the back of our minds. This American trauma has been recycled over and over. The European origins came in and killed anything new here, we live with their trauma. Now there’s recycled nostalgia, we can’t come up with anything new. "It is easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism." The latent hauntology in Inland Empire, the curse, is orchestrated by The Phantom. The Phantom, played by Krzysztof Majchrzak, must be stopped. You have to kill the lost futures, which is what Nikki/Susan does towards the end of Inland Empire.
To root out the resurging mythological Black Dahlia’s out there, you have to examine what our society, American cinema, is founded on. That is, if you want to truly remove the gaze. What deep dark desires motivate our filmmaking? Films, and art, call to something deep inside us that’s hard to put into so little words. Sometimes I get so obsessed with a film, I want to enter it. I want to become the film, I want it to become reality, and the media today is our digital reality. When you watch a noir film, you’re immersing yourself within the traumatic cycle of human history, the “recurring Black Dahlia”.
Filmography
Basic Instinct (1992)
The Exorcist (1973) or The Omen (1976)
All That Heaven Allows (1955)
Polyester (1981)
Blue Velvet (1986)
Lost Highway (1997)
Mulholland Drive (2001)
Inland Empire (2006)
Bibliography
Zizek, Slavoj. The Art of the Ridiculous Sublime: On David Lynch’s Lost Highway. Seattle, WA: Walter Chapin Simpson Center for the Humanities, 2000.
Nochimson, Martha P. “Inland Empire.” Film Quarterly 60, no. 4 (2007): 10–14. https://doi.org/10.1525/fq.2007.60.4.10.
Stiglegger, Marcus. “Tracing the Lost Highway : Mythical Topography in David Lynch’s Los Angeles Trilogy.” Networked David Lynch, January 10, 2023, 159–71. https://doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474497060.003.0010.
Fisher, Mark. The Weird and the Eerie. London: Repeater Books, 2020.
Paraskeva, Anthony. “Digital Modernism and the Unfinished Performance in David Lynch’s ‘Inland Empire.’” Film Criticism 37, no. 1 (2012): 2–18. https://www.jstor.org/stable/24777846.
Steve Hodel. “George Hodel, Surrealism, Man Ray, Dali and New Zodiac Connections.” Steve Hodel, February 21, 2019. https://stevehodel.com/2019/02/20/george-hodel-surrealism-man-ray-dali-and-new-zodiac-connections/.
Steve Hodel. “Director/Screenwriter David Lynch Reveals ‘New/Old Clue’ to Black Dahlia Investigation in ‘Dinner with John John.’” Steve Hodel, December 18, 2024. https://stevehodel.com/2019/04/12/director-screenwriter-david-lynch-reveals-new-old-clue-to-black-dahlia-investigation-in-dinner-with-john-john/.
Daly, Kristen. “Cinema 3.0: The Interactive-Image.” Cinema Journal 50, no. 1 (September 2010): 81–98. https://doi.org/10.1353/cj.2010.a405349.
Barthes, Roland. The Death of the Author, 1967.
Fisher, Mark. “What Is Hauntology?” Film Quarterly 66, no. 1 (2012): 16–24. https://doi.org/10.1525/fq.2012.66.1.16.
Anger, Kenneth. Hollywood Babylon II, 1984.
Steve Hodel. “Another Black Dahlia Portrait? Harvard's Fogg Museum Displays Two Man Ray Artworks-George Hodel portrait and Elizabeth ‘Black Dahlia’ Short Lookalike “ Steve Hodel, November 5, 2017. https://stevehodel.com/2017/11/05/another-black-dahlia-portrait-harvards-fogg-museum-displays-two-man-ray-artworks-george-hodel-portrait-elizabeth-black-dahlia-short-lookalike/
Lynch, David, and Kristine McKenna. Room to Dream. New York: Random House Audio, 2018.
Dederer, Claire. Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma. New York, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2023.
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