This is not an essay about The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl in 3-D

On Mulholland Drive and performing reality

I could not tell you when I developed this strange and wayward relationship with dreams. I was a weird and constantly queering child who believed in big things in big ways. I saw ghosts - affectionately nicknamed ‘grey faces’ - in my bedsheets; I deconstructed and reconstructed every mundane surface into a projection screen for my small perversions. I could tell you, however, when I first became aware of the sprawling significance that the unintelligible world of sleep had on my brain and my body. The first time I watched The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl in 3-D was the first time I thought about clawing my one-night-only sold-out venue takeovers out of my make-believe and into reality. It was the first time I officially learned about dream journals and probably the first time I unofficially thought about genderqueerness and metamorphosis and a body uninhibited by the laws of space and properness. Don’t get your hopes up, though. This is not an essay about The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl in 3-D. This is an introduction. A wandering one, I’ll admit, but an introduction, nonetheless. I promise. 

My name is Aliyah, and I spent a good portion of my ‘becoming’ dodging my body like a bullet. I’d take refuge from myself on Tumblr and Twitter and fanfiction.net (before graduating to archiveofourown.org), in role-playing games that I can’t remember the names of, in slack-jaw, big-bellied dreams that I took pride in learning how to ‘control’. I was this inverted Alice in Wonderland, skin tucked all the way inside, holey bone-armour preparing for a fall it could not withstand, and I was tumbling down the rabbit hole. Whenever I’d come back to my body, it would be to fix it. I was, before anything else occurred, a young Black ‘girl’. Even without anything else I was about to excavate from myself, those things already felt as though they were in contention with one another. Point is, I was disembodied, discombobulated, pipe cleaners in the hands of a shaking toddler, glitter glue everywhere. I felt—as many of us have—this flattening pressure to build myself into the best image of a normal and neutered human being. I failed that task, in becoming queer and crumbly and ever-changing, and during my late teens set out on a journey of repossessing my body. 

Inverted Alice in Wonderland recovers after the fall. Sketch by Aliyah Knight, July 2025.

I tried to sort. I tried to remodel and redecorate. I tried to stretch out my skin to see how many unanswered questions I could file away in my chest cabinet. But it was tricky. My rind was stiff and slowly shrinking, and I had become all pokey and pixelated and oddly framed during my leave of absence from my body. I was all lumps and bumps and incomplete alternate universe epub files and pronouns that still needed to be tagged and tested and I had no idea where to put everything. Even though, in my head, I had done my expanding and exploring—I had experimented with different names and somewhat accepted my nasty lesbianism—I could not figure out where to fit this freakiness in my mannequin. I saw the eyeballs sinking out of skulls and suctioning to the window glass, and I understood that ‘owning’ myself would never be that easy. I felt like a ghost slinking back into warm, wondering meat; I was—and wanted to be—paranormal, but I was governed by some survival instinct making me cosplay as some ‘normal human being’. 

David Lynch passed away earlier this year, but I imagine his Rat Meat Bird body parts forever lingering. Last night (as I’m writing this), I rewatched Mulholland Drive, and I thought back to my teenage self who felt that my flesh-muscle skin-suit was far from the real me. I thought of Severance, the science fiction television hit that imagines an inevitable endpoint to the work-home balance myth, and interrogates how we define and assert ownership over our own existence. This idea of a person split into bits—when trapped in midcentury modern architecture and a science-fiction premise teetering on reality—feels confronting, if not extreme, but is simultaneously reflective of the compartmentalist and capitalist reality we live in. We are, of course, a different self at work than we are with friends than we are at home. For many of us, we may be fractured and fragmented further; we may be dozens of different selves scattered across social media platforms and anonymous forums. But, if we are to break ourselves down in the simplest of ways, we can divide ourselves into exactly two: the conscious and subconscious versions of our being. 

Trying on a real human skin-suit. Sketch by Aliyah Knight, July 2025.

Most of us believe that the ‘real’ version of us is the one swallowing sun-made light beams and rainwater and phlegm, but Mulholland Drive challenges that. Lynch traps his characters in life and death and Hollywood sets and dreams, and we understand that—in every approximation of ‘existence’—there is still some control room. There is somebody watching. There is some puppet-toucher whose hands tangle strings. In Lynch’s world, or universe, or Los Angeles, the body is not the hard line that quarters off reality. Though the ‘dream’ undoubtedly represents a fantasy—Naomi Watts’ ‘Betty’ is born wide-eyed with a million dollar beam, ripe to be bitten into and bloodied up by the brutal film industry—it is as self-deprecating as it is masturbatory. Betty is the hidden gem that’ll never be dug up and the lesbian who fucks inbetween closed doors and cutting to the next scene. Even in our wonderland reimaginings of things, we place ourselves under the microscope and sentence ourselves to perform in our petri dish prisons for the masses. ‘Reality’ is harsher and easier to scrape your shins on, but is still, nonetheless, an estimation of inhabiting. 

There is no version of the story built from bricks or sticks or anything other than the eyes of the viewer, peering through the keyhole. Within the pictures of David Lynch—whether we find ourselves awake or in a dream—there is no body, there is only performance. 

Three bodies, feverishly dancing in their petri dish. Sketch by Aliyah Knight, July 2025.

A few months ago, I wrote and then acted in a one-person show. I spent months of my life gluing on and scratching off a second skin repeatedly, preparing to give myself over to her, searching for authenticity. Of course, by the time I reached the stage, I found that I had morphed into another beast entirely. I was something like a broken disco ball, absorbing and exploding whatever thoughts an audience had of me. Anything ‘real’ that resonated through my body was gutted and glazed over and strung up for its exhibition by the sheer fact of me, dinner, having served myself up for the paying public. And yet, there is something dazzling and addictive and often deeply moving about this friction between honesty and performance. I think it’s because this this suspension of disbelief is closer to reality than any actual ‘realness’. We spend most of our lives performing a parody of ourselves. We install invisible audiences in our bedrooms like security cameras, ensuring that our masks don’t slip or split to reveal something gross or sincere or awkward or cringe. 

Body as dysfunctional disco ball. Sketch by Aliyah Knight, July 2025.

We do this to ourselves for a reason. We live in a state of near-constant surveillance. We wake up and walk into an eternal and immersive live performance piece, knowing that, if we pause the act for any reason, our vulnerability may end up being tossed about by millions. Nobody needs me to tell them that this is terrifying or bleak or bizarre or boring. I’m just here to try to question it. 

I’d like to pull down the plastering and look at the foundations of the house we’re living in. I’d like to—in reaching through film (and various other art forms)—attempt to understand what it means to radically exist in a body during a time of infinite avatars and mass disembodiment. You can think of this column as my detective movie evidence board as I begin this journey of searching, screaming, and hopefully more David Lynch. Thank you for hanging out with my pixelated flesh and brain and dreams. Welcome to ‘body at work’.