But, we must backtrack a bit. In an earlier scene, Lynch shows us Betty auditioning for a soap opera. A television show whose script — in a practice session depicted just scenes earlier — Betty couldn’t help but laugh at for its cliché dialogue. Yet, when Betty reaches the studio and auditions for the scene, something altogether extraordinary happens. As she eases into the lines, the same ones we heard not ten minutes prior, with her acting partner, the scene takes on a new form. It’s made urgent, tragic, and seductive by their delivery; a sort of whispery, breathy longing saturates the dialogue.

At this point, Lynch has shown us that film can transform the trite into the tantalizing. Yet, it is only when we fast-forward to the hardest break in the film that we truly understand how film can accomplish this transformation. Though Lynch has already shown us this cinematic trick at least on two occasions by this point in the film, we are still entirely unprepared. At this point, Betty — actually Diane — wakes from her bizarre and terrifying nightmare to find that her life is askew. She is not a newly discovered actress, she is not the raven-black haired Rita’s partner, she is not living in her retired actress aunt’s LA apartment. Instead, she is stuck in a dingy, one bedroom flat that looks as though its entire interior is in the process of decay.

And, it is in this moment that we feel Lynch has revealed his final trick, clearly delineating the real from the surreal. The set-up, broken into dual parts by Club Silencio and the audition scenes, has led to the pay-off, as seemingly manifested in the waking from a dream.