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Threads: Related Topics: Club Silencio = Blue Box | Pandora's box | Blue Key |
Possible meanings
In answer to what the 'real' blue key opens the hitman starts to laugh. This is bugging Diane - so in her dream she finds herself an answer by creating the blue vessel.
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The blue box signifies the trauma of discovery and consciousness. Diane's dream is broken when Rita opens it and sets the truth free.
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Pandora's Box - a gateway to evil and the truthful but terrible things Diane has done. The bum unleashes the elderly couple who, representing innocence, are chasing a woman who has committed a vile act. Her innocence has been lost, violently discharged within the evil dream. - (A. Kusich)
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One its most basic level, the blue box represents the repressed memories and awareness of reality that Diane must seal away in order to construct her fantasy world. Inscribed with Camilla's death, it's called into being when Diane orders the hit, a self-generated answer to her own question, "what does the key open?" (Allen B. Ruch)
I believe that just
before the Magician disappears at Club
Silencio, he causes the blue box to
appear in Betty's purse, although we don't see it until Rebekah sings. Perhaps
the evil Magician represents the person behind Winkie's (Lynch uses the same
type of lighting in both scenes) who is slowly forcing Betty/Diane to face the
reality of what she has done (also what she has become), as represented by
what's inside the blue box. - (humanist)
Notice how once the blue box appeared in Betty's purse and her shaking, Rita stopped holding her hands at Club Silencio. The self-delusional dream was already unraveling to reality. That's why Betty disappeared. Because Betty does not really exist; she is an idealized or former shinier/optimistic Diane in her real hopes and dreams, unfulfilled/unrealized (even in the dream). Rita is Camilla/Diane together as one, representing Diane's wishes/confusion. I don't think Rita being sucked into the box is saying that Diane desires to kill her again. It's symbolic of Rita finding out the truth by turning the key in the box, like metaphorically saying Betty/Diane is found out by Rita/Camilla of the truth... that Diane indeed killed Camilla in reality. - (Misslinda77)
[…] The blue box then appears in Betty's bag. An explanation of its appearance is unnecessary at this point; the dream narrative abandons any attempt at consistency when Rita awakes mouthing 'Silencio'. They hurry home, impatient to see what is in the box. Rita retrieves the key, and Betty abruptly disappears. Rita, after a perfunctory search for Betty, takes the key, opens the box and disappears too. Rita and Betty are also illusions, products of Diane's dream. The illusions of dreams and of show business are compared. The blue box symbolises show business. It glows an otherworldly shade of blue, irresistible, impenetrable except to those with the talent to unlock it. Once opened, it consumes all, as it does Rita, yet it is empty - again, we are reminded that there is nothing of substance inside. - (bunter)
In
the scene at Winkie's, when Diane asks the hitman "what's it open?"
the hitman is just laughing. But watch his small gestures: he starts laughing,
puts his head slightly to the window and is clapping with his right hand on the
windowsill. When you look out of the window you can see it across the street:
the blue dumpster - just
above the hand of the hitman.
Diane didn't see it but unconscious she perceived it. Driven by her bad
conscience, she is having nightmares. She shows paranoid behaviour. She is
staring at the blue key and suddenly she knows "what's it open". (It's
not important if this is the truth in reality; it only matters what's going on
in Diane's paranoid mind.
For me the hitman/dumpster scene is the most important scene/detail because it
solves the key secret - the meaning of the bum and the blue box: The bum examines
the blue box. The raw meat is a symbol for the corpse. The can opener is a
symbol for handcuffs. It explains the Winkie's scene
with Dan, it explains the scene at Pinks (the
hitman lets the prostitute/Camilla vanishing in his blue van/dumpster) and it explains the vanishing of Rita into the blue box.
- (kar)
Thread: I found the key piece of puzzle - (kar)
"Rita
has been remade to look like Betty, to become Betty, so there is no reason in
the dream for Betty to remain. She disappears just before Rita uses the key to
unlock the box - another representation, interestingly, unification, of two part
becoming one, and in the process completing one quest and opening up another deeper
one.
What Diane is left with, when her dreams and fantasies have lost their power, is
anger bitterness and despair. Diane has tried to escape into another reality,
but in the end she is forced to accept who she is. When the blue box is opened,
it's empty except for a black void that engulfs the screen just as the void in
Diane's soul has engulfed her."
The
Betty persona cannot face the moment that the key and the box are finally present together. Together they represent the knowledge of the horrible act that has condemned Diane to a guilt-ridden existence.
Betty, who represents Diane's innocence, cannot survive this truth. Certainly opening the box which represents this truth would have destroyed
her. But the innocence of Betty was destroyed even before the moment the box was opened. This is because when she brought the blue box into the bedroom she immediately put it onto the bed. This connection to the bed forces Betty to confront the other awful truth that was exposed in
Club Silencio. The electrifying scene of her going through spasms as she is
being raped as a child is what destroyed Diane's innocence long ago.
However, the Rita persona did not represent innocence, so Rita does not disappear initially like Betty. But Rita does represent
Camilla, the person that Diane paid a
hitman to have killed.
Rita has only enemies left in the world of Diane's fantasy. To her, there is no real alternative to opening up the blue box, because there is no other place to go, and her only hope is that the blue box will show her something that might save her.
However,
the blue key was the secret token that would be left for Diane to find, probably behind the
Winkie's, when the deed was done. This means that the secret inside the blue box that is opened by the blue key, involves the realization that Camilla is no more. So, when Rita opens up the box and sees nothingness, she seems to be sucked into it. Then when the box falls to the ground, we see that it is still empty. Thus, Rita follows Camilla's fate as she is finally eliminated. The box has taken her out of the picture of the fantasy world in Diane's open mind.
- (Alan Shaw)
The most interesting example of this unbreakable cycle of dreams
- the idea that reality is as empty as dreams - is embodied by the blue box. The mysterious blue box in Mulholland
Drive seems to represent the answers to the
film's puzzles. Rita finds the key in her purse while looking for her identity; she believes the box it opens will contain the answer. However as the camera travels inside the box we see it contains nothing. At the end of the film, the
monster behind
Winkie's is seen contemplating the box before he throws it down with the rest of his garbage; it seems to mean nothing. The problem of the small, square blue box is compounded by the existence of a second blue box in Mulholland Drive. Betty decides to hide
Rita's purse, money and blue key, representing the mystery of identity, within a tall, cylindrical hat box: yet another blue box. After the scene at Club Silencio, Rita retrieves the key from the blue hat box and uses it to open the square blue box. Lynch is demonstrating that the box cannot hold all the answers, it merely poses more
questions. - (John DeCarli)
The blue box is a detail which comes straight out of the work of French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, a major influence for Lynch. Lacan describes this exactly: "Suppose you're dreaming about yourself disguised as your desired self/other and you open a box with a key to find only darkness, your dream will collapse, and you'll wake up to find your real self. That's the situation as it occurs in dreams. But when you're not dreaming, and you open that same box, your psychosis has just killed you." - (shonagon53-1)
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At the end of the movie when Diane
reaches into her nightstand drawer to grab the gun there appears to be a
blue box in the drawer alongside the gun. Does Diane have some kind of
mundane blue box of her own, perhaps a jewelry box, music box, or a stash
box; something that she just incorporated into her fantasy like the address
book and blue key? Perhaps it contains mementos of her affair with Camilla? -
In the opening scene right before the camera zooms in on the pillow it seems to focus on the area of the floor where the blue box later disappears at Havenhurst.
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Note: Rita's purse contained the blue key. Betty's purse contained the blue box.
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The jitterbuggers dance before a blue screen, while Betty comes forward flanked by the old couple. The old couple later crawl out of the blue box to collect Diane. Does it mean the jitterbug plays out inside the blue box? Is the blue box a gateway to the underworld? »more