“This Is the Girl”

Abstract

Adopting film critic Melissa Anderson’s “acteurist” approach to Laura Dern in Lynch’s Inland Empire (2009), this essay explores Naomi Watts’s role in Mulholland Drive (2001), putting media scholar Mary R. Desjardins’s ideas around the “recyclable” nature of the female film star in dialogue with Naomi Klein’s theory of the “digital double.” If the Hollywood dream factory recycles, and alienates, female stars whose visage appear onscreen, what to make of the selves curated today for social media—especially among young women? Providing a close analysis of the prophetic declarative “This is the girl,” a revealing motif throughout the film linking Betty’s imagined Hollywood “dream place” to the film’s lackluster LA backdrop, this essay unpacks how Watts’s dual roles as Betty Elms and Diane Selwyn reflect the ways in which the abjection of the would-be Hollywood ingenue, either endured or witnessed from behind a screen, can warp a woman’s sense of self.