This Camilla is suddenly the object of the charms of the young film director, now happily separated from his wife. We see him putting the moves on her on his movie set. Camilla makes sure that Diane can watch, which she does, glowering.
Later we see Diane masturbating in an unhappy frenzy.
Whaddaya mean, "We don't know about the box"?
Readers give their views -- from the persuasive to the far-fetched -- on "Mulholland Drive"
The phone rings; the phone she picks up is the one that isn't answered at the beginning of the movie. Diane is taken in a limo to the party -- the same limo, it seems, we saw Rita in at the beginning of the film. It's on the same ominous trip up Mulholland Drive, too.
But she's not about to be shot. Instead, she's greeted at a party by Rita, who is now Camilla. The host is the director, and the weird Coco is now the director's mother! She questions Diane with a look of disapproval on her face. We learn that Diane was a teen jitterbugging champion in Canada who came to Hollywood after her aunt died and left her some money. Diane says she's acted a bit, and met Camilla at an audition for a big part in a movie called "The Sylvia North Story," directed by Paul Bruckner. But she lost the part to Camilla.
Diane, humiliatingly, is forced to watch first as the blond Camilla from the first half of the movie comes over and kisses her Camilla, deeply on the lips. And then Camilla and Adam make out in front of her at the table. They seem to be about to announce their engagement.
This scene abruptly cuts to one in which we see a distraught Diane sitting again in the diner, paying the shaggy hit man $50,000 to kill her girlfriend. He's holding a black book. She'll find a blue key on her coffee table when the deed is done, he says.
The camera pans out into the back lot of the diner, where we see the monster again. It's a homeless man, it turns out, his face filthy and his hair matted. He's turning the mysterious deep blue box over in his hands.
We suddenly are reintroduced to the cheerful elderly couple who accompanied Betty off the plane -- incredibly tiny, and crawling out of the mysterious box. Now they are shrieking and horrific. They chase Diane around her apartment in a phalanx of terror. She flees to her bedroom and shoots herself in the head.
The couple laugh maniacally.
We see the ominous L.A. cityscape at night. Spectral washed out images float over it, just like at the beginning of the movie. This time we can see Betty and Camilla's faces.
Then there's a shot of an odd, heavily made-up actress from the club the women went to.
"Silencio," she says.
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This all leaves a number of questions. Let's take them in order. (Feel free to send us suggestions, quarrels or further thoughts on the film.)
What the fuck is going on in this movie?
Well, it seems that Diane had her girlfriend murdered. Then, in a masturbatory fantasy cum fever dream in the moments before she commits suicide, she reimagines her ruined career and failed relationship with the woman she loves.
The dream begins with Camilla/Rita miraculously escaping the hit Diane had taken out on her. From there, Diane, a product of Hollywood, imagines the story in cinematic fashion: She sees herself as the naive wannabe starlet Betty, who succeeds on sheer talent and solves whatever problems are thrown her way. She even gets the girl!
Thematically, Lynch seems to be working out a number of things: the enticing but empty imagery of the movie screen; the accompanying imagery that is used as stardust to cover up the unpleasantries of the movie-making process; the imagery that the ambitious use to reimagine and remake themselves; and the imagery and imagination actors put to work to create their characters.
Wait, go back to the Diane and Rita stuff. Where does Betty fit in?
Diane and Betty are the same person.
Get out!
Some viewers see that it's the same person right away; others are flummoxed because they just seem different. If you look closely, you see they're the same actress. The actress, Naomi Watts, delivers a technically dazzling performance. It's difficult to believe that chipper Betty and the ground-down Diane are the same woman, but they are.
As a reader points out in a letter to the editor, Lynch even slips in a wry joke. "It's weird to be calling myself," Rita says as the pair call Diane. "Hi, it's me," Diane says immediately afterward, on her answering machine.
Fine: "So it was all just a dream." Is that the cliché you're contending Lynch is giving us?
Well, it's a little more complex than that. It certainly does explain the exaggerated gestures, heightened emotions and odd plot turns in the first part of the movie. Seen as dream motions, Betty's hokey "I'm goink to be a stah, darlink" schtick makes more sense.
Next page: OK, so what about the box?