ack!!! Now Aunt Ruth has been abused?

(sorry, but hopefully people get the point.)

kmkmiller wrote:ack!!! Now Aunt Ruth has been abused?

(sorry, but hopefully people get the point.)

Just pointing out another reasonable explanation that doesn't involve "Lynch intruding on her dream to give us information about Diane." Whether Aunt Ruth was abused or not, the painting could appear in Diane's dream simply because it actually hung in Aunt Ruth's apartment. Why it hung in Ruth's apartment, and what significance it might have to Ruth (if any) is admittedly speculation.

kmkmiller wrote:but it's all speculation, siku.

Yes and No.

If I see a young person with old couple in the street I might assume they are the grandparents. But ask me later and I'll probably reply that I don't know. They could be ANYONE.

That's in the real world. But this is drama, story telling.

kmkmiller wrote:there is a bargain struck between a viewer and a filmmaker...

Right. We're in a dialogue. Active communication. When a filmmaker shows us an image of, say, a policeman arresting a shoplifter we assume it's a policeman. But this isn't like assumimg in the real world. In the language of film we're being TOLD this is a policeman. If it later turns out that it's not it's actually another criminal pretending then this is a TWIST, a REVEAL.

A film is a construst and a language. It is a text that can be read, and reading it includes reading what is implied. In doing so should we not apply the principle of parsimony?

If not grandparents, who? If not the abusers, what? What are your blank impossible-to-interpret characters bringing to this story? To this drama?

Then what?

Furies. Supernatural entities that torment the guilty into inflicting a punishment on themselves.

As far as Betty is concerned they're just two old people who she met travelling to her dreamplace.

She's in jitterbug smiling alone at first and then they show up saying "no no no no no no, not just yet young lady, you're gonna go on a little trip to find out who you are first." next thing you know they're there at the airport wishing all the luck in the world. and be careful.

it might have mattered that they were her grandparents in the tv show that never got made, but the idea that turned it into a movie made them something else. that something else is so much more important than the old people being Diane's grandparents.

Well, for me, it's simple really: the firt part is a dream, a wish of her life would have been, and then it's the reality. But of course it's the reality seen through her eyes and it is distorced. For example, in the dinner party, I highly doubt Camilla kisses a girl in the middle of all that people, and especially not with her fiance right besides her. Homosexuality isn't well viewed, even if female. Men might like female bisexuality, but only for their voyeristical pleasures and certanly nor in party with their family. I mean, it's just so unreal. So I think she amplified what she saw: for example, Camilla kisses the girl on the face but for Diane it was a sign of betrayal, that she has someone else and doesn't need her anymore.

I just don't understand the last scene with the blue lady. Is it Diane in the afterlife, remembering her life?

P.S - I also don't understand why the hit man didn't appear in the beggining of the film. I mean, the guy who threatened Camilla were someone else. What's the logic of that?

Kmkmiller - Now I've got YOU speculating.

Just two old people Betty met on the plane?... Not sure that's all there is to it. I've got talking to people on planes but they don't creep under doors and chase me onto my death bed!

As to the furies connection, we've discussed this before and I agree entirely. But I see no contradiction here: Her grandparents are her furies, sure. And maybe Camilla is her muse, the Bum her shadow self, etc, etc. (illustrative examples only and probably inaccurate!).

But can't we allow Diane a real world AND a symbolic/metaphotical/supernatural/bardot world? If what you see in the film priviledges the latter, fine, but you don't have to deny the former. The observation that the old couple are furies doesn't displace or disprove the possibility of insight into Diane's family background.

never said they met on the plane siku.

i said she met them on a journey to her dreamplace. nitpicking, maybe.

Regarding Aunt Ruth being abused, too (by the maybe-grandparents), I've actually wondered that a lot myself recently.

I started writing up a theory on it the other night but lost it all due to very poor planning. I wondered also if there was any chance that Aunt Ruth was actually Diane's biological mother. You know, in one of those I-got-knocked-up-and-gave-my-kid-to-my-parents-to-raise situations. What would be creepier still is if Diane is the offspring of Ruth and Ruth's father. Specifically what has begun to seem weird to me is the black-and-white photo of Ruth and Diane/Betty that is in the Havenhurst apartment. If the photo is real in any way, why, exactly? An aunt and her niece would typically not go to a photo studio to have a picture taken, would they?

Additionally, in the photo, does it look to anyone else that she may be a brunette and not a redhead? If she was a brunette and dyed her hair red, could that be another reason for the Rita Hayworth "Gilda" poster? And if Ruth was a brunette and some point, and Diane was fixated on her, could it explain her attraction to brunettes? I could just be reading too much into the whole Aunt Ruth situation. As some have pointed out, who knows if she even existed in the true sense of the word?

I've loved reading everyone's theories in this thread.

Ooh! Sorry for the add-on post here, but I also started to think about how the audition script for "The Sylvia North Story" could also work as an interaction between Aunt Ruth and Diane (in my crackpot "Aunt Ruth as abuser" pseudo-theory).

nohaybanda wrote:Ooh! Sorry for the add-on post here, but I also started to think about how the audition script for "The Sylvia North Story" could also work as an interaction between Aunt Ruth and Diane (in my crackpot "Aunt Ruth as abuser" pseudo-theory).

I consider that possibility off and on as well, mostly (like you) based on the audition scene. Just based on that, it definitely could work.

The line that I always puzzle over in the audition scene is "If you're trying to blackmail me, it's not going to work." Assuming the scene is indeed a flashback/clue to abuse in Diane's past, it's hard to imagine what Diane might have or have done that makes her think the abuser might be trying to "blackmail" her. The only thing I can think of is guilt... maybe the abuser knows something about Diane, and Diane doesn't want them to tell her parents? But guilt about what? The abuse itself? Some other secret? Dunno...

That line is very puzzling. The best I can come up with is that they (Diane and whoever the abuser is-- it works no matter who it is, really) had been together before that discussion, and maybe Diane didn't complain or fight back initially. That happens sometimes in abuse situations, especially if the victim really loves and trusts the abuser, or wants the abuser's "love". Then the person has mounds of guilt over not fighting back or reporting it, as it could be perceived as consensual when it actually was not.

the blackmail line works better if you think of the scene being an interaction between Diane/ Betty and killer Bob from TWIN PEAKS.

it's easy to go down the abuse path because of this scene. that is because what Killer Bob does to people is a sort of abuse, anyway.

anyway. the abuse theories are like the tide, they ebb and flow, there's no longer much a point in fighting that tide, and there's that cenci painting too so i, personally, can't rule it out. in fact 95 percent sure it would have come up in the TV show had they made a TV show out of it.

just saying there are other ways to figure out that audition scene. If the blackmail line was sort of a square peg in the round hole of the abuse theory.

I think the Cenci painting is there as information for the viewers. I don't think it holds meaning for the characters themselves, even if it tells us something about them.

I think the Cenci painting is there as information for the viewers. I don't think it holds meaning for the characters themselves, even if it tells us something about them.

I do too. Totally. i just think it's interesting because it had never occurred to me before, the classic theory is that Betty is Diane's dream, but Diane doesn't look like an art scholar so it's safe to assume that while she might have been abused as a child, her brain would not express that using a Cenci painting. the point is, it's convenient to think of Betty as a dream because we lack words to express it otherwise, but it's not a dream in the strict Freudian sense of the word. she doesn't call it a dream. she calls it a dreamPLACE. So in a way, it's more a place where everything is like a dream, but it is not strictly a creation of her own mind all on its own.

So what's the best word to call it? a vision? an experience?

Me too. I assume the Cenci picture is a conceit to communicate with the audience - Diane's mind brings an abused figure into her dream. To suggest Diance wouldn't know this particular picture so someone else or something else must be intruding her dreamplace is... reaching, to me.

That said it would be interesting to catalogue other discrepancies between the dream world and what we know of the inside of Diane's head.