Betty
NaomiWatts
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Sex |
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Female |
Quotes: "It's strange to be calling yourself." "I just came here from Deep River, Ontario |
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Age |
Middle 20s |
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Origin |
L.A. Airport |
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Address |
1612 Havenhurst |
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Occupation |
Actress |
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Fashion style |
Pink Cardigan |
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Family |
Aunt Ruth |
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Relationship |
Rita |
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Doppelganger |
Diane |
Naomi
Watts about Betty
For me, Diane is the reality-based character. That is the truth of the situation. Things are so awful in her life, in this rock bottom place, this horrid state of dementia, that she creates Betty as how she would have liked it to have been. Betty was optimistic and hopeful and pretty and peppy and sweet and everyone loves her and she’s in control of Rita. Rita doesn’t know who she is and Betty loves this power and this control she has over Rita. [...] Almost everyone likes to have some kind of power – a kid will dress her doll and give her a name. That's what Betty was in the dream with Rita – she was able to tell Rita who she was and manipulate her in different ways. [...] So that’s the wish, the dream, the fantasy, the projection, whatever you want to call it. It’s the reverse when we’re talking about Diane and Camilla.
Playing Betty was the hardest part for me, because she was less naturalistic than Diane. I needed to make her human somehow. When I see her now, I go, "Oh, my God, you're a psycho." But there were places where I tried to show that she had deeper dimensions, for example, when she turns detective.
In Diane’s dream, erotic fantasy desperately competes with guilt, fear of discovery, and the reality principle of death itself. The key tools of Diane’s psychological dream defense are familiar ones in the Freudian toolkit: idealization, splitting, condensation. Diane becomes someone else to avoid the guilt of Diane’s murderous deed. She becomes the idealized Betty to preserve her identification with (and jealous longing for) Camilla’s Hollywood success. Betty is the idealized part of Diane that has been spoiled and lost, sacrificed on the altar of Hollywood’s cruel, often destructive reality. The persona of “Betty” preserves the unspoiled Hollywood of the youthful Diane’s naïve dreams and thwarted ambitions. In her fantasy, Diane realizes the talent and success that she never could achieve in real life. - (Richard K. Sherwin)
The Failures of the Betty Image - (Alan Shaw)
Betty had been brought into the world of Diane's mind because she represented a certain time when Diane felt loved by her aunt, and she embodied a zealous hope for a Hollywood career, and she personified a certain type of innocence. But all three of these rationales for Betty's existence are falling apart.
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First off, Diane's aunt was never around when Betty was present during the entire fantasy and so Betty never succeeded in reconnecting with her aunt's love. And since Betty was also unable to get Rita to say she loved her just like Diane was probably unable to get Camilla to profess love for her, Diane was still stuck in an unloved state.
Secondly, Betty did not succeed in getting the other personas to make Betty the star of the central movie production in her mind. Even though the other personas got rid of the first Camilla, they choose another Camilla-type of persona instead of Betty to be the one that they believed could be a
star - Blonde Camilla. Again, this was ultimately just like the real life of Diane who had lost confidence in herself long ago, so she did not believe that a person like her could ever become a star. In fact, that is why she wanted so much to become like Camilla. -
And thirdly, there is a growing realization that Betty's innocence has been lost as well. There is something about Betty engaging in sexual activity to win Rita's love that brings back a horrible memory of her child abuse. There are hints of the issue throughout the fantasy, but the most obvious one comes up when Betty is doing an audition with the lecherous actor named Woody.
Michael J. Anderson on Betty
Betty, she represents all the
actors in Hollywood that bet literally their whole lives, hoping that they
would have a chance in
Trivia: Betty and Bitsie are common nicknames for someone named Elizabeth »name connections
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Thread: Naomi's interpretation... - (Dave H.) |
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