This isn't new, or mine. It's not really a theory either - more a way of seeing.

It's been said many times: Diane's version of events in the so called 'reality' section is simply not reliable. With that in mind...

Basic MD explanation
Level 1 - Dream
Level 2 - Reality

Advanced MD explanation
Level 1 - Dream
Level 2 - Reality (but not very accurate - Diane's too psycho for that!)

My New Theory
Level 1 - Dream
Level 2 - Fantasy
Level 3 - Reality

In Level 3 I put the following:
- Aunt Ruth (implied)
- Grandparents (implied)
- Answering the door
- Making coffee
- Masturbating
- Suicide (?)

Everything else in the 'reality' section is Level 2 - Fantasy, IMHO.

Huh?
So what does this add? Granted, it's a subtle difference between the Advanced Theory and my 3 level Dream/Fantasy/Reality theory but I believe that:
(a) Lynch made it this way - kinda like russian dolls. Outrageously bold claim, to know the mind of the master, but there you go. It's what I believe.
(b) It does clarify Diane's world to separate events in two boxes - fantasized and real. For example (my personal bugbear) it explains why the Lamplady is a Camilla doppelganger, amoungst other things.

I just wanted to come here because, while it's not new, this 3 Level Theory deserves to be on a par with the famous 2 Level Theory.

Cool, but can we say where each of the three levels ends and the next level begins.

If the 3rd level reality contains the scene where the old people (still not going to call them grandparents until someone can provide more than a portrait on the shelf at Havenhust), what's up with them being an inch tall crawling under a door. That's not a real image.

I think your theory is a distinct possibility, Siku. It seems very possible to me that the only actual "reality" we see are the scenes where we see Diane wake up and put on her bathrobe over her sleeping clothes, and the scenes where she's wearing those clothes. All of the "flashbacks" could be fantasies or daydreams. (This would probably mean that even the masturbation scene is a fantasy, since the clothes she wears in that scene match the clothes she wears in the sex-on-the-couch and the throwing-Camilla-out scenes.)

Another possibility (really just a specific spin on the "Advanced MD explanation" above) would be that there's a dream and a reality, with part of the reality in real-time and part in flashbacks (as with the Basic explanation), and that the facts of the reality are reliable (the words people speak, their locations when they occur, and so on). But the feel of the facts is completely biased by Diane's perspective. In other words, perhaps she's coloring the facts, but not outright changing them...

(This would probably mean that even the masturbation scene is a fantasy, since the clothes she wears in that scene match the clothes she wears in the sex-on-the-couch and the throwing-Camilla-out scenes.)

also interesting is how Camilla, during the "break up scene" at the door, has the same top on that she wore when she magically appears in the kitchen.

kmkmiller wrote:also interesting is how Camilla, during the "break up scene" at the door, has the same top on that she wore when she magically appears in the kitchen.

Hmm... Not that I can see. The Diane on the right (Camilla... you came back!) you never see her top; only the bathrobe. The Diane on the left (making coffee) is wearing the same top she wore while sleeping and while answering the door for the Lamp Lady.

Camilla. Not Diane.

she has the same top on in the doorway scene as the magically appear in the kitchen scene.

No shirt on at all on the couch scene.

kmkmiller wrote:Camilla. Not Diane.

Oh, right! Duh! Yes, you're correct, of course.

Do you mean this outfit?

In the kitchen:



In the doorway:




She's also heavily made up and almost hyper-real, both for someone who's been snogging on a sofa and in comparison to Diane.

not anymore hyper-real than Rita.

the point is Camilla is wearing the same top in the "vision in the tkitchen" as she wore in the "break up door scene", so how does that work in an interpretation where we are talking about flashback montages.

Is that just a top that Camilla likes to wear all the time or maybe it was just a production convenience and Lynch just shot the kitchen scene and the door scene on the same day without a costume change?

It was red!

Love is/feels like a dream, isn't it?

yeah it does. so what, xav?

Kmkmiller -
Agreed, no more hyper-real than Rita. The Dream has a luminsoity to it that contrasts well with the grungy reality sections. The point I was trying to make is that Diane's hallucinations and other 'Fantasy' elements also have a different quality to them.

You're joking I assume when you speculate it was a production convenience. The red top appearing twice is deliberate, of course. It may be that the doorway scene is the last time Diane saw Camilla alive, so that's how she appears in the kitchen hallucination.

Xav -
Yes it is like a dream. So you see the same unreality to Camilla that I do?

kmkmiller wrote:If the 3rd level reality contains the scene where the old people (still not going to call them grandparents until someone can provide more than a portrait on the shelf at Havenhust), what's up with them being an inch tall crawling under a door. That's not a real image.

No, agreed that's Fantasy rather than Reality. I probably shouldn't have included them in Reality as all the info we have about them is presented in Dream and Fantasy.

Point I was getting at is that they really exist as does Aunt Ruth. Not so sure about Camilla.

The evidence for Old People as Grandparents
In the pilot Betty talks to her grandparents on the phone. So we know that her character was conceived as having grandparents.

That means the old couple are, in the pilot, clearly NOT the grandparents. Their characters were going somewhere else - an opening that wasn't followed up in the film.

So Lynch edited out the phone conversation to the grandparents, added the old people during the jitterbug at the start, the suicide at the end, and grinning in the taxi. This frees them up to be Dream versions of the grandparents, without the contradiction of the phonecall to the 'real' (pilot) grandparents.

The absense of her parents consolidates why Aunt Ruth is such an important figure for Diane.

Obviously I don't want to get drawn into pointless 'fan-fiction' speculation but this is what we know of Diane's family life. These Fantasy and Dream elements imply a real underlying family.
- Absent parents
- Grandparents (primary carers)
- Aunt Ruth (all too distant life line)
- An abuser (who? Not many possibilities so finger points to grandfather)

but it's all speculation, siku, i don't even know if we can say Diane has an Aunt Ruth.

when she speaks of her Aunt at the dinner party scene, Coco nods and says "in the movies?" and it's almost as if Diane is lying.

One of the big problems I have is how we look at the dream part of the movie. And I guess it's why maybe people don't like dream movies. There are parts of the dream that reflect the truth and parts of the dream that don't. and then who decides? and based on what? and how much can Lynch himself inject information into the dream that the dreamer would never know about.

it's us the viewer who decides which is which.

i'll just toss this out there.... it might be a little unsettling, this might seem a little obtuse and uncooperative, because i realize there is a bargain struck between a viewer and a filmmaker...

Here is the problem I have:

Here are the two questions.

Does Diane seem like a person who would know what the Cenci painting represents?

If not, how does her brain know to put it in her own dream to represent something?

It's Lynch intruding on her dream to give us information about Diane, isn't it?

kmkmiller wrote:Does Diane seem like a person who would know what the Cenci painting represents?

If not, how does her brain know to put it in her own dream to represent something?

It's Lynch intruding on her dream to give us information about Diane, isn't it?

But like you said, a dream can reflect a mish-mash of facts from reality, symbolic images, wish-fulfillment, and so on. So no, Diane doesn't strike me as a person who would know the significance of the Cenci painting. But perhaps Aunt Ruth is. If indeed the grandfather abused Diane, then it's certainly possible he also abused Ruth when she was a girl. Perhaps the Cenci appears in Diane's dream simply as set dressing (a painting that actually hung in her Aunt's real-world apartment), but hung in her Aunt's apartment for a reason significant to Ruth...