In the same way, intermittent lighting plays an important role. The crackling discontinuity of electric lighting, lamps which crackle and blink irregularly before blowing, often at crucial moments, seem to express too strong a tension leading to a short circuit (or as an alarm, when separate worlds come into contact). Discontinuous, short circuiting, stroboscopic electricity is the visual emblem that signifies the climatic sequence in three Lynch films: the death and transfiguration of the baby in Eraserhead, Dale Cooper's arrival in the Red Room in episode 29 of Twin Peaks and the murder of Laura Palmer in Fire Walk with Me. In the apotheosis at the end of this last film, the intervals of light seem at last to be regulated and harmonised, forming a stable rhythm, a new continuity.

11. "Taboo."

"Each film is different. Whatever genre it's in, as soon as you start a film, you're inside a setting and you have to stay in it." Lynch was, here, describing the worlds/spaces he creates in his films. Anyone who ventures into them seems destined to remain there forever.

This is perhaps the only constant in Lynch's entire cinema: his postulate that more than one world exists, starting with The Grandmother (1970), where the boy leads a double life on two different storeys, connected by a staircase which he alone uses. The divide between these world settings seems to be linked to the divided mother. Where there are two women (in the form of two sides of the same woman), there are two worlds. The proof is that Fire Walk with Me (1992), a film about one woman, is also a film in which different worlds are so closely linked that they are but one, though unstable and flickering.

Connection is primarily an instance of ends, in the sense of connecting extremities, putting things end to end. Extremities are important for Lynch in two ways. Firstly as traces of a cut in a continuum – the whole from which they have been removed; and the poles of contact, in the sense that extremes meet. Contact in Lynch's films produces energy, where the dramatic, intense nature of being close, in proximity, when ends are about to meet. Provocatively the implicit question endures: which end lights up the other?

In Mulholland Drive the two female protagonists fall through the looking glass into a new dimension: Betty and the amnesiac "Rita" now appear to be different people, but not completely different. Betty is Diane Selwyn, a young actress, and the gay lover of Rita's new persona, Camilla Rhodes, a successful star who is preparing to dump Diane for a young director whose new project is funded by Mafia subsidy. Devastated with jealous rage, she arranges to have her lover killed – which is where the film ends/begins.

This paradoxical identity crossing is intrinsically part of the mannerism of Lynch's film but it also points to the Deleuzian complexities about the multiplicity of identities, the "molecularity" of identity, outside of identity. Indeed, Betty/Diane and Rita/Camilla are veritable tricksters of indeterminate identity and changeable individuality who continually alter their bodies, create and recreate a personality and float across time from period, and place to place.

According to Deleuze, what we see on the cinematic screen is the body, not insofar as it is represented as "object" but in the manner as it is lived as experiencing sensation. This has significant reverberations for how we interpret the "image", say, of "woman" on screen. She may exist as figural, not as figuration, and thus the image of woman might function as force, intensity. To Deleuze, the figural is the space of intensity.

The materials that artists use in forms, whether art or film, are actually complexly mutable. This exemplifies Deleuze's notion of "intensity"; all matter exists in modulation with the forms imposed upon it. "Beyond prepared matter lies an energetic materiality in continuous variation and beyond fixed form lie qualitative processes of deformation and transformation in continuous development." (Gilles Deleuze)

As "Tricksters" the two female protagonists in Mulholland Drive figure throughout the film as veritable "figures"/"figural" in a Deluzian sense. Rather than perceive them as characters, they function as "figurals", in terms of bringing together a set of movements, colours, tones, and resonances across the canvas of the screen.

Lynch paints a visually and aurally rhythmical moving canvas, which provides a mind-blowing chaotic mise-en-scene all the way through the film. In this way Mulholland Drive can be thought of as an event of experience, rather than a filmic text. In Lynch's movie,this imbrication of disturbing images with a processual beauty serves to offer a creative connection for the viewer, which can disturb just enough to affect the mentalities in a Deleuzo-Guattarian sense. Lynch takes us into our own mind/bodily zones, frighteningly and chillingly confronting the contradictory spaces of fantasy, reality, and the erotic – where they combine and where they disperse, where they meld and where they assemble – evoking a confrontation with one's own ghosts.

12. "Fall of the Rebel Angels."

In Lynch's films, time does not flow by itself. Either it seems an eternity, as if it was set on "pause", or it flows by in abrupt blasts. Lynch has a kind of incapacity to stylise time, to make use of the standard, average duration which cinema invented and which allows an alternation between action and dialogue. Time either drags on and on and seems frozen or it speeds by.

In Mulholland Drive Lynch structures the narrative trajectory, pertaining to a time-factor, a temporal notion, a processual "opening-out" into another space, another moment, in the future, before the present has actually become the past, so that past, present and future are, as it were, contained in the one movement. Certain scenes function in this manner – and in the mind of the viewer – define a character in some way. Once these scenes are animated, the rest falls into place.

As Deleuze indicates in Cinema 2, the notion of time does not exist as a linear projection to or from specific points, which have beginnings, middles and ends. All moments of time are moments in collision:

Indifferently divisible and possibly connectable, as if laid out on a single surface of availability, indeterminate until a contingent encounter makes one moment stand out or fall.
~~ Gilles Deleuze