Musings on Persona, 3 Women, Images, and Mulholland Drive

To understand Ingmar Bergman's Persona, Robert Altman's 3 Women and Images, and David Lynch's Mulholland Drive we have to understand the broader contexts that surrounded and penetrated these films. In the 1950s sociologist and cultural anthropologist wrote a book entitled The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. In that seminal book Goffman, drawing on Shakespeare's notion that all the world is a stage and we (us) are merely players, argued that those of us living in the rich core countries of the north, were actors on the stage of life.

Goffman argued that all of us played multiple roles on the stage of life. In late modernity and early postmodernity we played multiple roles such as student, teacher, salesperson, and friend, for example. At school I might play the role of student. At work i might play the role of cashier. I know how I am supposed to play these roles because I live in a postmodernist era dominated by the service industry and I have learned the cultural scripts for the roles I play via socialisation. I may realise that the roles I play are roles in the play of life. Or I might actually believe the roles I play, an everyday version of method acting.

The roles I play, as Goffman noted, are all socially and culturally constructed with scripts, front stages, back stages, and with the potential for role mistakes leading to possible stigmatisation. One has, I think, to be seen as part and parcel of the cultural understanding that our identities are not only multiple but also mutable. We can change who we think we are and who we want others to think we are. Who we are and who others think we are, are impacted, as Persona and 3 Women, two films that were impacted by the changing notions of identity and the roles we play that were in the cultural air in the 1960s and 1970s, by power relations and notions of prestige or celebrity. Mulholland Drive likewise plays with cultural notions of identity, multiple roles, and the fracturing and segmentation that is a central part of postmodernity. The US is a postmodernist society and many of Lynch's films, in addition to being updates of Bunuelian surrealism, are part and parcel of the fracturing of identity and the fracturing of roles we play that is so central to late modernity and postmodernity.