Mulholland Drive

David Lynch (1946–2025) turned sixty on January 20, 2006. The party sat in a restaurant near La Cienega and Melrose, the kind of room where the lighting flatters everyone and the valet knows which cars to bring around first. A producer who worked with Lynch had brought me. He had a plan for me that night, and the plan was Laura Harring (b. 1964).
He walked me over. He said something about how we should meet, the way a man speaks when he has already decided two people belong together. Then he left us standing at the bar. She turned to me. She gave me her attention, which felt like standing too close to a window in winter, all that light and I got scared. We talked for five minutes. I have no memory of a single thing said. I remember leaving her. I remember the relief of the back of the party, the ordinary world where a man like me knew the rules and where Gary Oldman’s manager Douglas Urbanski takes mercy on me and talks to me for the rest of the night while Lynch, Sting, Nicole Kidman and the beautiful people party.
I fled a beautiful woman at a film director’s birthday. That is the whole anecdote, and it is enough, because the question worth asking is not why I ran. The question is what she carried into that room that made running feel like the only safe move. She carried a hero system. So did I. They did not match, and the mismatch threw me.
Ernest Becker (1924–1974) argued in The Denial of Death that every man builds his life inside a scheme that tells him he counts, that his small span on earth touches something that does not die. A cop earns it through the badge. A scholar earns it through the footnote. A mother earns it through the child. The scheme hands out significance, and it hands out terror to those who fail its terms, and it lets a man look at his own death and say, not me, not really, because I belong to something larger. Becker called these schemes the routes to heroism. A culture is a pooled effort to feel immortal. Laura Harring built hers out of the one material she was handed early and could not refuse. She built it out of her face.
Start with the bullet. She grew up the first ten years of her life in Sinaloa, in Guasave, daughter of a Mexican spiritual teacher and a developer of Austrian-German blood. The family moved to San Antonio. At twelve a stray round from a drive-by shooting caught her in the head, a .45, and she lived. Sit with that. A girl takes a bullet meant for the air and survives, and the survival is not a thing she earned through merit or prayer. It simply happened to her body. A child who absorbs that learns early that the body holds death inside it at all times, and that life past the wound is a kind of borrowed thing she now has to justify. Becker would say the wound makes the hero system urgent. Most men keep death abstract. She could not. She had felt it enter her skull.
What she did next reads like a sprint away from the grave by way of transformation. Switzerland at sixteen, Aiglon College. The London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, commedia dell’arte, the Argentine tango. El Paso, then the pageant ladder, Miss El Paso, Miss Texas, and in 1985 Miss USA, the first Hispanic woman to take the crown. A year wandering Asia and Europe and a stretch as a social worker in India. A marriage in 1987 to Count Carl-Eduard von Bismarck-Schönhausen, great-great-grandson of Otto von Bismarck (1815–1898), and a divorce two years later. She dropped the e from Herring and became Harring. Then Hollywood, and then the role that fixed her, Rita in Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (2001), an amnesiac with no past who picks her name off a poster for Gilda because she sees Rita Hayworth (1918–1987) and decides to be her. Roger Ebert (1942–2013) wrote that Harring could stand still and make the case for remaking Gilda. The International Herald Tribune reached for Ava Gardner (1922–1990).
Here sits her sacred value, and here sits the trick Becker hands us. The value is to be looked at. To be a beautiful woman who walks into a room and gathers every eye, and to hold the gaze, and to make of that gaze a vocation rather than an accident. For Laura the gaze is how the girl who took the bullet becomes the image that outlives the body. Film fixes the face forever. She told an interviewer that film means something, that a man can make a difference with a film. She means that the screen catches a woman and keeps her past her own death. That is the immortality her hero system promises. The gaze is salvation.
Now watch the same value move through other rooms, and watch it mean something different in each, because the word holds still while the worlds around it change.
To the pageant judge in 1985, to be looked at is to be measured. The gaze ranks. It assigns a number, crowns a winner, and the woman who masters it has achieved something the judge can score and defend. She wore a cowgirl costume to Miss Universe, all-American, the body as a flag. In that room the gaze is merit. You win it.
To Lynch the gaze is dread. His whole life’s work pries up the beautiful surface to show the thing squirming under it, the severed ear in the clean grass, the homecoming queen face-down. Critics noted that death by head wound runs through his films like a watermark. He cast a woman who carried a real head wound to play a woman with no memory, pure surface, a face without a past. In Lynch’s room the gaze does not save the beautiful woman. It hollows her. The camera looks and looks until the face stops meaning safety and starts meaning the abyss. Mulholland Drive ends in Hollywood’s promise curdling into a corpse. The dream of being looked at kills the woman who chases it.
(I asked somebody on the film what it meant and he said it didn’t mean anything.)
To the Bismarck world the gaze means lineage. An aristocratic name turns a wife into an ornament that reflects the house. Beauty there carries a duty to the bloodline and the title, Gräfin von Bismarck, and the gaze rests on her the way it rests on a family portrait. She married into it and left inside two years, which tells you the fit was wrong, that her hero system ran on becoming and theirs ran on having always been.
To her grandmother’s Sinaloa, the Catholic world she came from, a beautiful girl looked at by men means danger. The gaze there is the evil eye and the appetite of strangers and the thing a mother warns her daughter against. Beauty is a gift from God and a trap men set, and the modest answer is to lower your eyes and cover up and not give the village a reason to talk. To be looked at is to be at risk.
To the spiritual current her mother taught, and to the India where she did her social work, the gaze runs the other way. The body is a veil. The face is the least true thing about a person. To see and be seen by the holy, darshan, is the only looking that counts, and the beautiful surface is the very illusion a soul must see through to reach what does not pass. In that room her sacred value is the snare, and freedom means caring nothing for the mirror.
To the Hollywood agent the gaze is a market. A face is an asset with a depreciation schedule, and the studio looks at a woman the way a buyer looks at a property, pricing the years she has left. The casting list, the close-up, the call that comes or does not. In that room to be looked at is to be appraised and, in time, marked down.
To the feminist critic the gaze erases. To be looked at is to be turned into an object, the woman emptied of self and filled with the wanting of the man who watches. Salvation for Laura reads as capture to the critic. The thing Laura built her life around is the thing the critic wants dismantled.
Seven rooms. One woman walks into each, the same woman with the same face, and the same act of being looked at means triumph, dread, inheritance, sin, illusion, price, and erasure. The word sits still. The hero systems move. Becker’s point lands here. There is no neutral place from which to say what her beauty means, because meaning lives inside a scheme, and the schemes do not agree, and each one feels to its members like plain reality rather than one bet among many.
Which returns me to the David Lynch party. I ran because her hero system and mine had no common term. She lived by the face and the gaze and the screen that keeps the body past its death. I live by the word on the page, the footnote, the small contribution to knowledge that might sit in a library after I am gone. Two routes to the same destination, two ways of refusing the grave, and at that bar they could not trade. She offered the immortality of the beautiful image. I had no idea how to receive it, and I told myself I had nothing she could use, so I gave her five minutes and ran.
The bullet sits under all of it. A girl survives a shot to the head and spends a life turning her face into something that cannot be killed twice. Then a director who films death by head wound puts her on the screen as a woman with no past, and the world calls it her finest work. Becker would not be surprised. The hero system is the thing we build to keep the wound from being the whole story. Hers worked. The face survives. The bullet did not get the last look.