derekfnord wrote:A good example of this is in the Alan Shaw essay, where he talks about the significance of the bong that's supposedly on Aunt Ruth's shelves next to a magnifying glass. Frankly, I couldn't definitely identify it even after knowing I should look for it, where I should look for it, when I should look for it, and why I should look for it. And even then, I could tell there was some object there, but I wouldn't say it's clear it's a bong by any stretch of the imagination. So to me, there's no way that seeing the "bong" (if bong it be) can be crucial to understanding the movie, because there's no way Lynch could just assume everyone (or anyone) would catch that.

Yeah, that damn Alan Shaw nicking other people's discoveries without acknowledgement.

Bong or no bong, half the ideas he came up with were taken from RT without accreditation. Sorry. Just gets my goat a bit some of that stuff. I said a few weeks ago I would make a "Shaw Essay" discussion thread. I should do that soon - don't want to derail this thread.

Uh, already derailed.



Full disclosure, I nicked a lot of stuff in my write up off the website (the strongest part of the website is not the theories page but the studies and cast pages, and the TP Podcast folks could have mentioned that). I think one of the obvious points but sometimes still needs to be said. You can read someone who thinks Mr. Roque is an alien, and the Ryan Entertainment building is a spaceship cloaked as a building in LA, and in that theory you might still come across an observation that you never noticed and helps you to build your own theory.

That said, I'm not convinced it's a bong. It's the copy of ROOTS by Alex Haley that I think tells us the most about who Diane is.

"I got a real to find your friend, Rita, here."

Ok, let's try this one out.

We don't have a page on the site to gather drug references, connections, ideas, but there has been plenty of chatter about it over time. Should we have a page? Perhaps the bong up there is questionable, but what do people think? Is Diane on drugs? Is that inferred? Is anyone else using drugs?

Hollywood must exist to a degree on a mountain of blow, so what do we see in MD?

Well, the most obvious example is the line: "Don't drink all the coke". I think that is so obvious it's almost a groan moment in the movie. As in duh.

If a list is compiled there should be a good definition about what is clear or clearly implied. Suffice to say "the breathing you hear right at the very beginning of the movie" does not qualify. You can imagine it's someone snorting a line of coke, but as far as a real study is concerned, it wouldn't cut the mustard in my book. Hope that doesn't limit the scope too much.

Personally, I'm not convinced drug references are very common or very significant in MD. In fact, I'd almost say the opposite... that, if anything, there are fewer than we might expect in a movie about dying dreams in Hollywood, and they're more conspicuous by their absence than by any way in which they're alluded to.

Yes, the "Don't drink all the coke" line could certainly be taken that way, but there are other possibilities too. The most obvious of those might be an old Coca-Cola ad campaign, which proclaimed "Coke Adds Life!" or even "Coke Is Life!" Betty admonishing Rita not to drink all the coke could be a dreamworld way of Diane asking Camilla not take her whole life away.

And really, as kmkmiller says, that's probably the clearest drug reference. Most of the others (the inhale, the bong, Cookie's name and speculation that he's Diane's coke dealer) are really obscure or speculative, IMO...

I hope I'm not being dense, but it looked to me like The Corpse In The Bed that Betty and Rita find has commit suicide by overdosing on pills (drugs).

There's certainly a lot of prescription-looking bottles in front of her decaying face.

I was unsure why one of the basic theories was, "most of the movie is a dream in drugged sleep", so last night I was watching the beginning of the movie's descent into the pillow in hopes that it could instead be the descent after Diane shooting herself, but passing out woozy fits much better than eating a bullet:

the view point is wobbling around, sideways and blurry, over the bed, staring at the wall/cabinets to the right of the bed, before it wobbles down face-first into the pillow. Assuming it rolls over from there, it wouldn't be too far off from the fetally-curled corpse.

KyleOrKyla wrote:There's certainly a lot of prescription-looking bottles in front of her decaying face.

I don't think those are prescription bottles... I think they're tufts of mattress stuffing created by the shotgun blast holes in the mattress.

derekfnord wrote:

KyleOrKyla wrote:There's certainly a lot of prescription-looking bottles in front of her decaying face.

I don't think those are prescription bottles... I think they're tufts of mattress stuffing created by the shotgun blast holes in the mattress.

Fair enough, I'm just going by what I thought I saw, so I'm sure the frame-by-frame viewing is more accurate.

I'll finish my thought on the corpse in the appropriate thread

The Pilot script says Laney "could be very good looking but she seems to be in poor health". Given the context, and parsimony, this suggests drugs to me.

That bong could easily be a candlestick you know.