December 28 2003 at 6:29 AM No score for this post
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I came to this conclusion after studying the clues (and making a lot of notes) provided by David Lynch on the DVD...
Overall Plot:
It's all about Diane & Camilla & the Director Adam. Rita & Betty (& Aunt Ruth going holidays) are products of Diane's imagination. I think there's 3 main sections to the film (not 2) - The first 1 is Diane's ultimate Hollywood fantasy, the 2nd is the closer-to-reality - "what she would like to see happen" fantasy. The 3rd is the actual reality, which in my opinion is as follows...
Aunt Ruth dies and Diane inherits the 'dingy' apartment (#12). She goes there after winning a dance contest hoping she can hit the big time in Hollywood. She starts sleeping with the neighbour in the other apartment (#17), they eventually break up. When they break up near the end of the film, Diane is fantasising about being with Camilla all along - with the coffee turning into ice tea - & the ashtray re-appearing.
Diane auditions for a role (with the older/tanned fellow) but narrowly misses out to a 'girl with brown hair' (Camilla). She does get a smaller role in the film which is how she develops a 'relationship' with Camilla & the director. She then becomes obsessed with and falls in love with Camilla. The problem is, Camilla is sleeping with the Director, and is also having a lesbian affair with the girl who played the 'original' Camilla in Betty's fantasy. Diane eventually goes to the lengths of hiring a hitman to kill her.
Diane also prostitues herself in order to make the money. The cowboy is one of her clients, she sleeps with the Cowboy 'twice more' because she needs the money to pay the hitman to kill Camilla because the Director gave Camilla the role in Sylvia North story instead of Diane (ie he did 'bad').
. At the end, the normal-looking blue key is the signal that the hitman has done his job, Diane's guilt overwhelms her and she commits suicide.
David Lynch's DVD hints:
1) Start of film - dance contests shows dancer's and their shadows - very much setting the overall tone of the film. We also see Diane's parents at the start when she wins the jitterbug contest, they re-appear in her fantasy as people she met on the plane.
2) Red lampshade is in Diane's apartment. At the start, the mafia dudes ring the director's apartment to find out where Camilla is (the girl is still missing), the director then rings Diane's place to see if she's see her.
3) Title of the film is 'Sylvia North Story', the title is mentioned twice in the film.
4) 'An accident is a terrible event...' - which accident is David Lynch referring to?...
1) the car crash - happens at the shortcut up to the pool party with Adam & Camilla (fantasy accident)
2) Hitman shooting the fat lady, the cleaner etc... - (real accident...?)
5) "Who gives a key & why?"... again which key David!? - Coco gives Betty the key to the 'nice apartment' because Aunt Ruth and Betty 'probably have an understanding'. Also the assasin gives a key to Diane after he has killed Camilla.
6) Robe, ashtray, coffee cup.... all signs that we're currently in (or about to be in) fantasy land.
7) Club Silencio: The realisation is that what Betty is experiencing is total fantasy. Then we see the blue box for the second time and we start seeing true reality. The first appearence of the blue box marks the move from the 'higher' fantasy (Betty/Rita) to the 'more desparate' fantasy (Diane/Camilla).
8) Did talent alone help Camilla? YES. The mafia-dudes were Diane's paranoid side - to bring her down and see that Camilla got the role.
9) The man behind winkies?. This is where Diane does her most foul deed - paying the hitman off to kill Camilla. It could be arguead that Diane is actually the 'bum'.
10) Where is Aunt Ruth. According to Betty near the start, she's helping shoot a film in Canada, according to Diane at the end, she's dead.
I would be keen to hear responses to this...
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The elderly couple on the plane cannot possibly be Diane's parents. No one, regardless how self-absorbed, could possibly be so emotionally distant from her own parents as to cast them in the role of two strangers she met on the plane. Nor, for precisely the opposite reason, can they be the judges of the jitterbug contest as others have suggested. They have to be people who have some real significance to her but for whom she does not feel an especially close emotional bond. They are the right age to be her grandparents, and the most reasonable explanation is that she lived with them, but probably not for an extremely long period of time.
I don't think her aunt is dead; I think that she and her aunt are estranged. It would be stretching the limits of coincidence to have her parents and aunt all dead when they were no more than middle aged, and just because her fantasy identifies her aunt as dead at one point doesn't mean it has to be taken as fact.
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The 'old couple' are definitely her parents, watch the very start of the film with the jitterbug contest (I never suggested that they're dead). Her Aunt is definitely dead, Diane explicitely states this near the end of the film - 'Betty' says she's in Canada near the start of the film but this is Diane's fantasy.
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They are not her parents. They are her grandparents WITH WHOM SHE WAS LIVING at the time of the jitterbug contest. To repeat the obvious, no one could possibly see her parents as nothing more than an affable old pair of strangers with whom she shared a plane ride.
And the fact that she says her aunt is dead is no proof of anything. Earlier on in the movie she said her aunt was alive. The scene at the party was just something in her head, like a lot of other scenes in the movie. It may have encapsulated her experiences in Hollywood, but it didn't literally happen.
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Aunt Ruth may be dead, she may be in Canada, and she may be in Paris.
When Camilla is cutting her hair, Betty takes the scissors and puts them on a 'Tour Paris' book. This may just be coincidence...but its a Lynch film, he wouldnt have closed up on the book for no reason.
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The "Tour Paris" book may be an allusion to Coco Lenoix (sp?), and have nothing to do with Aunt Ruth. My conjecture is that Coco has to do with cocaine, and that Camilla/Rita is either an addict or Diane's imagination is seeing her as one. There seem to be a lot of allusions to drugs in the film, though whether they are all actual or some of them are a result of Diane's imaginings is another matter.
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the old couple are not her parents or her grandparents, they are part of her fantasy of camilla and the director in the future. If you notice when the director and Camilla are about to make their statement (probably that they were getting married) they begin to laugh much in the same way that the old couple laughed in the car. The thought of how she killed camilla and broke that future led her to kill herself (the part where the old couple chase her into her room and she shoots herself.)
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