What mélange of film clichés?
Diane seems to have imbued herself with the worlds of film, TV, even pop-culture camp, in her time in L.A. Much of what she and Rita attempt are procedures right out of a Sam Spade noir handbook by way of Nancy Drew -- peeking into windows, talking to neighbors, making anonymous phone calls and so forth. When the two are in their bed together, there's a double-profile shot that's an homage to Bergman's "Persona." Betty helps Rita turn herself into a blond, a rough doppelganger of Betty, à la "Vertigo." The sequences in which the director is bullied into using Camilla in his film have a tangential similarity to the conversations leading up to the infamous horse's head scene in "The Godfather." Readers note that "The Wizard of Oz" is in there too, as well as a strange pattern of parallels to "Pulp Fiction."
Whaddaya mean, "We don't know about the box"?
Readers give their views -- from the persuasive to the far-fetched -- on "Mulholland Drive"
There are also vague echoes of TV soap operas, pornography and a lot of other things, not to mention the presence of Chad Everett (the guy Diane does the audition with), '40s hoofer Ann Miller (Coco), Lee Grant (the aunt's weird neighbor), Billy Ray Cyrus (the pool guy), Robert Forster (a cop), and others.
The references all seem to be what the theorists call "blank," just memories ricocheting around in poor Diane's head at a really bad time.
Fine, fine. Isn't the cowboy just sort of a twist on the menacing Robert Blake character in "Lost Highway," the reindeer man in "Wild at Heart" etc., etc.?
It certainly seems like it. The goofy Roy Rogers getup is also another echo of a prelapsarian Hollywood when the studio system ruled and studio heads of virtually limitless power really did pull the strings.
The director did what he was told. Why did we see the cowboy twice?
Well, the cowboy appears once to Diane as a transition from her dream back to reality, apparently part of her fantasies before she kills herself. In the "real" last third of the film, we see the cowboy passing out of the party at the director's house. To us, caught up in the backward dream logic of Diane's fantasy, this would have been the one last time the director would see him, since he agreed to put Camilla in the movie. But in reality he was just someone she once saw out of the corner of her eye who was then incorporated into the paranoid fantasy of her dream.
What about that hooker the hit man questions and then ushers into his van? And what about those diner waitresses?
They seem to be Lynch's nods to the milieu he's filming in and the diverse women Hollywood chews up in various ways. Diane imagines herself as Betty in the dream after seeing a waitress named Betty when she's talking to the hit man. In the dream, Betty meets a waitress named Diane.
Betty loses a part in "The Sylvia North Story" to Camilla. Who's Sylvia North?
Beats us. But note that the director of that movie is Paul Bruckner -- the milquetoasty guy at her audition.
That weird old couple?
They appear in the opening jitterbug sequence as well. They may be the judges of the contest she won, or her parents. In the end, they seem to be signs of her innocent past come back to terrorize her.
The film's dedicated to Jennifer Syme. Who's that?
Syme was an actress who appeared in "Lost Highway." She died in a car accident. The tragic death was noted in the tabloids because she used to date Keanu Reeves.
What about the Silencio Club?
In the dream logic of Diane's imaginings, it's part of the glamour of Hollywood, and the out-of-body existence of many actors, and perhaps the ultimate emptiness of the reality that films purport to give us. The unexpected focus on sound, as opposed to image, which is what the rest of the film seems to be about, is typical for Lynch as well: His soundscapes, here as in his other difficult films, are extraordinary, and he regularly conflates sound and image. Remember that in "Blue Velvet," which also dealt with the reality beneath the surface image, young Jeffrey, the Kyle MacLachlan character, is introduced to that netherworld via a severed ear.
Lynch's longtime composer, Angelo Badalamenti, plays the espresso-drinking movie exec at the beginning of the film, incidentally.
Also, speaking of "Blue Velvet," Dorothy Vallens lived in the Deep River apartments. Betty is from Deep River, Ontario.
Next page: Diane's bombshell audition