The grinning face of a young woman forms a translucent screen against the city lights of Los Angeles in the final shot of David Lynch's Mulholland Drive (2001) before the film fades to black (see Figure 1.1). Platinum blonde hair blends with washed-out skin and a broad smile. Pale pink lips are barely dis-tinguishable from teeth, cheeks, hair or eyes. Colourful architectural flashes highlight the omission of detail in an unadorned face. The woman gazes over the top of the buildings against which she is super-imposed; the focus of her gaze remains for us an abstraction. But we have seen this face before. The smile recollects her character's arrival in Hollywood at the beginning of the film. She bears the lightness of the aspiring actress's potential but has by now found only heartbreak and revenge. Her figuration here is a depleted facsimile of the narrative's optimistic beginning. Translucent, half-figured, the precari-ous vagueness of her visible image is doomed to repetition.

This sequence aligns the lesbian with invisibility. It conjures the historical characterisation of the lesbian's cultural presence as only ever ‘an impalpabil-ity, a misting over, an evaporation, or “whiting out” of possibility’ (Castle, 1993: 28). The character behind the face in Figure 1.1 desires, wants, loves, hurts, fucks and kills. Over the course of the whole film, we see her body, her breasts, her sweat, her tears, her snot. But in this particular visual moment, her corporeal presence is flattened, reduced to a vacant smile. She is aestheti-cally ‘whited out’ to make way for the opaque city of dreams to which she is in thrall and which she both haunts and is haunted by. Whiteness already enables an invisible process of de-racialisation: it is presumed to be unnotice-able in a representational system in which white skin passes as universal (see Dyer, 1997a). The extreme whiting of the image in Figure 1.1 accentuates the conditions of (white) lesbian representability in classical Hollywood cinema. Her blonde hair is characteristic of mid-century Hollywood glamour; it recalls Marilyn Monroe, the enduringly irresistible pin-up. It is also metaphorically imperative as a device of invisibility. Blonde-haired, not possessing but rather lacking colour, she succeeds at femininity but not at corporeality; muted by gender, she is not quite the subject of her own image.