Lez-tracurriculars: Mulholland Drive

Hey, Lez Hang Out listeners! It's been a hell of a week and we just wanted to release one of our special Patreon bonus episodes for all of you so that you can take a much-needed break from all that doomscrolling.

Today, Ellie and Leigh discuss the 2001 surrealist mystery Mulholland Drive in this special Lez-tracurriculars bonus episode first released to our Patreon in 2022. If you have not seen this movie yet, buckle up, because this episode is about to make zero sense.

Mulholland Drive is essentially a 2-hour long fever dream. The story follows Betty, played by Naomi Watts, an aspiring actress new to L.A. and the amnesiac woman she befriends who refers to herself as Rita. Rita has lost her memories and does not even know her real name after being the sole survivor of a deadly car crash on Mulholland Drive. She winds up breaking into Betty’s aunt’s apartment, because what else is an injured woman with severe memory loss to do, surely not go to the hospital, that would be ridiculous. Betty finds Rita in the apartment and decides to help her try to remember her identity. Along the journey, many truly indescribable things happen that only make marginal sense when it becomes apparent that everything is a dream.

As the dream shifts back to reality, we find ourselves in the same apartment with a woman who looks exactly like Betty but is instead a struggling actress named Diane. She is distraught over her ex-girlfriend Camilla, a successful actress who looks exactly like “Rita,” leaving her for a man and decides to get revenge by hiring a hitman to kill her. When Diane finds out that the deed has been done and Camilla is dead, she becomes overwhelmed by hallucinations and shoots herself in the head. Although this film is technically a lesbian film, it certainly does not make anyone feel good about being a lesbian. It is written and directed by a man; the sex scenes are very male-gazey, the relationship between the women is toxic and there are many unfortunate tropes like Camilla’s bisexuality being treated like a joke, the dangerous scorned woman, the predatory lesbian, and not one but two gays are buried by the end.

Even still, this movie is an interesting, chaotic, and artsy ride that did amazingly well at the box office and is worth a watch if you ignore the extremely depressing ending.

You can support Lez Hang Out while unlocking a bunch of exclusive perks, including access to our Discord channel, 23 and counting full-length bonus episodes, weekly ad-free episodes, and more by joining us on Patreon. You can also support the podcast by buying our original merch at bit.ly/lezmerch and purchasing our original Lez-ssentials songs for as little as $1 each on Bandcamp.

You can find your fav tol and smol hosts Ellie & Leigh at @elliebrigida and @lshfoster respectively.

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