Tracing Intertextuality In David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive

The aim of this study is to investigate the work of David Lynch, Mulholland Drive (2001) from intertextual perspective. The present research tries to detect and elaborate the intertextuality of this movie and its relationship to other previous films. To this end, the researcher concentrates on the intertextuality and its influence on the re-reading the present film. Taking these into consideration, the suitable approach is based on a library research, and intertextuality is the central theoretical framework to fulfill this aim.Kristeva in her book Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art (1980) developed Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of dialogism further and coined the word Intertextuality in literary field; however, it has been adapted and modified to other fields of study such as film study. The central idea of this theory is that texts like novels, films and plays, are always in relation to other texts in a way that generates diverse interpretations. She claims that a text is the intersection axis of various texts, patterns, styles and describes the text as a constructed as a mosaic of quotation; any text is the absorption and transformation of another. Authors do not produce their works from their own original minds. They rather accumulate them from the text in existence and then transform and polish them in new style in order to represent a newborn piece of work. According to her, a dynamic text develops a system of referentiality, a varied polyphonic network of references, citations, quotations and influences. Texts are therefore tracing the previous others texts and largely shaped by the repetition and transformation of other textual structures. Taking this theoretical framework into consideration, the researcher found the discernable trace of film noir, particularly Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1950), in Lynch’s film. Mulholland Drive is the postmodern film which tries to revive and recreate the crime story in new milieu. Through the similar setting, Los Angles, Hollywood, Lynch refabricates the murder mystery which male narrator is replaced with female one. By using a non-chronological narrative and a tinge of surrealistic effect, Lynch makes the film more complicated and dreamlike in eyes of viewers. Thus, lynch’s references to film noir of the classical American cinema and alterations in it, represents the concept of intertextuality developed and discussed by Kristeva in postmodern text.

کلیدواژه ها:

David Lynch ، Film Noir ، Intertextuality ، Julia Kristeva ، Mulholland Drive