Percepción del docente del proyecto “Cuánto Vale un Embarazo”

Club Silencio reinforces the idea that the movie theater has had a signifi cant impact on Lynch’s spatial consciousness. Cinemas hold the potential for infi nite escape within a perfectly bounded arena, an immersive experience with another frame at the center. Th e fl owing curtains, lucid sounds, intense darkness and isolated light that characterize cinematic experience constantly return throughout Lynch’s stages.

Moreover, in Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire , the interiors of two classic Los Angeles cinemas—the Tower Th eater and the Orpheum Th eater—stage uncanny confrontations. Th e cinema, then, is an essential space for Lynch: an environment constitutive of more than just fi lm spectatorship.

What is more, the architecture of cinematic production has become a guiding force in Lynch’s recent work. Studio sets, boardroom meetings, rehearsal rooms and audition booths appear throughout Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire . While housing a series of platforms for performance, the fi lm studio represents a somewhat diff erent form of

Lynchian stage. In essence, his last two fi lms display the worlds “on the other side of the curtain.” As such, there are fewer physical stages and less drapery on display. Instead, the construction of fi ctional performance is the main concern, with architecture a critical component.

Specifi cally, it is the Paramount Studios lot on Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles that holds Lynch’s attention. Paramount moved there in 1926, when the company was known as Famous Players-Lasky, having purchased the site from United Artists. ²⁵ Th e advantages this location provides Lynch are three- fold. First, it is the only major studio in Los Angeles whose location allows for a shot juxtaposing the Hollywood sign and a cinematic soundstage—the creepy sequence that appears early in Inland Empire . Th e most potent symbol of cinema, an advertising hoarding precariously balanced on a mountainside, is thus placed alongside the elaborate machinery that underpins it. Second, the Paramount lot lies adjacent to the Hollywood Forever Cemetery. Lynch literalizes this geographical proximity: ghostly detritus—images and phrases from fi lm history that refuse to rest in peace—haunts Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire . Cecil B. DeMille is one of the many famous Hollywood fi gures buried in the cemetery, and the making of DeMille’s epic Samson and Delilah (1949) features in another Paramount production, Sunset Boulevard . Wilder’s fi lm is the third and most important factor in Lynch’s decision to base his interrogations of fi lm- making at the Paramount lot.

Wilder and Lynch share a fascination with the architecture of the fi lm studio. Betty Schaefer, in Sunset Boulevard , is thrilled by the constructions of the Paramount lot: “Look at this street: all cardboard, all hollow, all phoney, all done with mirrors. You know, I like it better than any street in the world.” Architectural authenticity is at its most vulnerable in Hollywood, where the same spaces play host to ersatz versions of global locations. Here, though, Betty suggests that openly acknowledging the fake and fl imsy fi ttings of the studio lot might allow us to appreciate its other delights—pure imagination and a utopian commitment to visual pleasure without the restrictions of everyday urbanism.

Betty Elms, in Mulholland Drive , is another idealist who gasps at the Paramount gate famously featured in Sunset Boulevard . Her visit to the studios is more problematic because she fails to understand the

“cardboard” nature of the environment and its inhabitants. As with Club Silencio, our assumptions are also in fl ux here. Initially, Betty’s audition at Paramount is a resounding success. Lynch crowds an assortment of

agents and assistants around her performance, which is so sincere it lift s the banalities of the script to unexpected emotional heights. As George Toles has noted, the surprising aff ect this performance generates jolts the audience, removing any assumption of ironic superiority over the characters: the distance between the screen and the spectator is again narrowed via a Lynchian stage. ²⁶ Notably, Betty is off ered the enigmatic directorial advice: “Don’t play it for real until it gets real”. At Paramount Studios, though, Betty cannot grasp which elements of the place are “all hollow, all phoney, all done with mirrors” and which are “real”. Her elation following the audition is swift ly shattered by gossip that the director will

“never get that picture made.” Betty is then taken to a soundstage where auditions for Th e Sylvia North Story are taking place against a cardboard backdrop of the Hollywood Hills (Plate 46). Further artifi ce emerges in the form of two lip- synched pop performances inside gaudy booths, before Betty exchanges an intense look with the director Adam Kesher. Yet, in the midst of all this pretence, how “real” is their connection? We certainly sense something important, but Betty’s fantasy is abruptly exposed in the fi nal stages of the fi lm, when Diane Selwyn, standing in front of another cardboard urban scene, watches Adam seduce Camilla Rhodes instead.

Th e diff erence between Wilder’s Betty and Lynch’s Betty pivots on their respective roles in the movie business. Mulholland Drive distorts the failed ambitions of an actor who craves the spotlight. In Sunset Boulevard , Betty Schaefer is an aspiring screen- writer, who happily admits: “What’s wrong with being on the other side of the cameras? It’s really more fun.”

It is Norma Desmond, another actor who has problems distinguishing the “phoney” from the “real,” whom Lynch’s Betty takes aft er. In Lynch’s fi lms, the male architects of performance, such as Mr Reindeer in Wild at Heart or Mr Eddy in Lost Highway , enjoy pulling the strings and observing the spectacle. Th ose who must perform upon the stage, like Betty Elms or Laura Palmer, struggle with their allocated roles. In front of the cameras and the curtains, their position is much more vulnerable. Th e fi lm spectator, however, cannot observe these crucial situations from a safe distance. Th e dynamics of the Lynchian stage ensure we are implicated in the performance, its boundaries extending beyond the screen to encompass the auditorium around us.

Sections of Sunset Boulevard were fi lmed in soundstage 18 at Paramount Studios. Th is is the same building in which Hitchcock assembled the world of Rear Window and in which Marlon Brando directed One-Eyed Jacks (1961), which would later give its name to a

brothel in Twin Peaks . It is these endless coincidences—the ability of a soundstage to juxtapose, in Foucault’s terms, “several sites that are in themselves incompatible”—that so appeals to Lynch. By contrast, Baudrillard, while captivated by Los Angeles, was left unimpressed by Paramount Studios: “Where is the cinema? It is all around you outside, all over the city, that marvellous, continuous performance of fi lms and scenarios. Everywhere but here.” ²⁷ For Lynch, though, Paramount Studios epitomizes the strange shared spaces of cinema. Th ese “phoney” sets contain distinct historical reverberations, which Lynch seeks to capture through the literal imposition of certain architectural features, such as the Paramount gate or Norma Desmond’s car. Th ey also provide the perfect stage for an exploration of fantasy. Despite their thin materials,

“phoney” studio sets constitute a distinct architectural scenario, a series of tangible, inhabited spaces. Likewise, Mulholland Drive emphasizes a physical and highly visceral experience of fantasy. Indeed, Betty’s fantasmatic Hollywood is a much more alluring world than Diane’s miserable existence.

By Inland Empire , the divisions between psychological space and physical reality have all but evaporated. Notably, the world of On High in Blue Tomorrows , one of the many fi lms within Inland Empire , is created inside soundstage 4 at Paramount. Connected by an alleyway to soundstage 18, soundstage 4 is also clearly visible when entering through the studio’s famous gate—the threshold traversed by Norma Desmond and Betty Elms. In eff ect, Lynch traces a literal pathway through cinematic history, taking us from Sunset Boulevard to Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire , as if these worlds were somehow linked. Moreover, the half- fi nished studio sets that litter all these fi lms, alternate worlds that were never fully constructed, are both a reminder of Hollywood’s unrealized projects and a stark metaphor for the psychological eff ects of ruined careers. As the next chapter demonstrates, Inland Empire places a whole geography of cinema under one roof. In a sense, soundstage 4 at Paramount Studios is the room in which the incompatible spaces of Southern California and Central Europe, Classical Hollywood and its transatlantic neighbor, are all housed. Th is hulking heterotopia, totalling over 13,000 square feet, contains multiple, endlessly changing worlds.

Yet, even warehouses like this are not perfectly sealed worlds. Jean Renoir once told Bernardo Bertolucci to welcome the unexpected events that occur in fi lm- making via an evocative metaphor: “You must always leave the door of the set open because you never know what might come in.” ²⁸ In Inland

Empire , Lynch literalizes this idea in an uncanny fashion, by having Nikki creep into the back of soundstage 4 to disturb rehearsals for her own fi lm.

“Th e stage is supposed to be ours and ours alone,” complains Kingsley, the director of On High in Blue Tomorrows . As ever, though, certain gestures allow unexpected performers to penetrate the Lynchian stage. Th us, the

“other side of the cameras” cannot remain a safe and sealed world—it, too, is heterotopian in nature. In a permanent mode of performance, Nikki continues her remorseless search for psychological stability, behind the curtains, in front of the cameras and in the alleyways that join them.