Towards a Logic of Sensation. A Deleuzian Reading to Contemporary Cinema through Mulholland Drive

Abstract

Gilles Deleuze considered the work of Alfred Hitchcock as the culmination of classical cinema (movement-image) at the same time that he laid the foundations of modernity (time-image). What has happened since then? To what extent is the sensorimotor link on which Deleuze founded both systems still a figurative mechanism for contemporary cinema? The following article considers that Mulholland Drive has replaced the aesthetic canon that, in modern cinema, was represented by Vertigo. The hypothesis of our work is that David Lynch’s film explores the Deleuzian crystal-image from what Deleuze himself, based on Bacon’s painting, called a “logic of sensation”. The overflow of affections, self-destruction, loss of identity, the subversive power of desire or belief in a world that no longer conforms to reality, are some of the elements that transform the gaze, action and reality, the main axes of Deleuze’s theory of cinema.