Loved the Wyman, et al., article, and here are some of my thoughts on the movie. The first part is a dream/fantasy of Diane Selwyn's, which she is awakened from by her neighbor's knock on the door. It is her "wishful thinking," a way to recast her sorry situation so that Camilla loves her again. She has paid for the hit, but wishes that something would go wrong and Camilla would show up at "Aunt Ruth's" apartment where she would meet "Betty," and they could start anew, with Camilla's memory erased. It is a girlish fantasy, full of romance and intrigue. Diane dreams that the hit has gone awry, and that Camilla shows up carrying the money and key that the hit man had been carrying, thinking she was carrying her own purse. And the hateful Diane was lying dead and rotting all the time, Betty's old and shameful self.
Rather than see her Camilla as calculating and unfaithful, Diane imagines how "the system" manipulated Adam into selecting a different "Camilla" for the part -- the other woman whom Diane saw kissing her Camilla soulfully at the party -- and this way Diane erases any relationship between Adam and her Camilla. She imagines also that Adam was immediately attracted to her, to Betty, the astonishing young ingénue, but that Betty was true to Rita and ran off to be with her, leaving Adam to his disastrous predicament with the tawdry "Camilla."
The blue key in her dream is mysterious and unrecognizable until it is used to unlock the box, which contains Diane's horrible, unthinkable reality, a reality where she has paid for her lover's murder. We flood through the box into reality in Diane's room where she is waked up by the knocking. The deed has been done, because the real blue key is there on her coffee table.
The old couple she imagined as rooting for the fantasy Betty come to mock her fantasy, and she shoots herself in desperation to turn off their voices.
The wretched monster of a man behind Winky's is actually the man who told the other man about his dream of the horrible monster. The "monster" is the embodiment of his fears about himself, of all our fears about our hideous, shameful selves, including Diane's, and he holds the blue box of Diane's reality, who had in fact manifested her own most fearsome monster self by killing her lover.
As to your comment about the hit man's black book, he said, before he shot the long-haired guy, "So that's Ed's famous black book." But I didn't hear "Ed" referred to anywhere else in the movie, did you? The book appears to be a thread, showing the hit man during a previous hit, before Diane hired him to do Camilla. Her dream of the messed up murder of the long-haired guy is part of her wishful-thinking fantasy that he was actually incompetent, hence she could dream that his hit on Camilla had gone awry, which allowed Camilla to come back to Diane/Betty in her dream/fantasy.
-- Ellen Gwynn
One comment, and forgive me if I'm a little vague but I saw it during the film festival, and have not yet gone back to refresh my brain:
At some point in the movie, I believe soon after "Rita" puts on that blond wig, the gals get ahold of Diane's phone number and decide to call her. There is a scene of the two of them hovering over the phone receiver, and Betty laughs and says something like, "It's weird to be calling myself."
The comment makes sense in the context of the film at that moment, but later, of course, you see its significance after Betty has "become" Diane. I suppose you could say that it is the part of Diane that knows she is imagining this whole scenario, making the joke that she is calling herself ... because she is.
Anyway, loved the "Mulholland" piece. Hope you follow up with more.
-- Veronica Ambrose
You guys pretty much said all that needs to be said about the blue box when you mention that Diane "repurposes images from her reality and incorporates them into her fantasy. The blue key is repurposed as the bizarre art-deco looking key in the fantasy of course, but so too is her question to the hit man repurposed: "What does the key open"?
In her fantasy I believe she creates a vessel for the key to open -- this becomes the blue box. Also, it's no coincidence that Betty/Diane finds the blue box in the portion of the film that argues for illusion. Her fantasy is breaking apart and the real world elements that comprise it are coming into sharp focus.
I also believe this is why Betty begins shaking so violently during the performance -- as if she is being roused from her fantasy prematurely. When the two women finally return home to use the key in the box, Betty disappears suddenly -- presumably because the collision of these two events is too powerful a reminder of the deed the real Diane set in motion. The exit Lynch orchestrates for the Betty character is perhaps a little too restrained to be typically Lynchian, but I'm actually quite pleased that he didn't overplay it.
If that's not at least a partially satisfying answer, I don't know what is ... Hmmm. In any case, great article. Thanks.
-- Darby McDevitt
Thanks for the article. A response based on the "I have no idea" answer to the blue box question:
Given the morphing symbolism of dream imagery, aren't the blue box and the blue key the same object? The blue key becomes the ultimate symbol of the capture and corruption of her innocence ... a sort of Pandora's box in reverse for the dreams and realities of Hollywood.
-- Daniel Barnhart
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