On of many David Lynch's masterpieces, and my favorite one.

Rating: 8/10 (15 February 2016)

Diane (Naomi Watts) is a naive young woman who moves to Hollywood with dreams of becoming a movie star. She falls in love with a veteran actor, Camilla (Laura Harring), who brings her to glamorous industry parties and gets her bits and pieces of work. But Diane's just a casual fling, as she learns when she sees Camilla first get engaged to a man (Justin Theroux) and then move onto newer, younger mistresses. She has no intention of living with Diane or truly advancing her career -- so Diane hires a man (Mark Pellegrino) to kill her, and then kills herself.
Most of the runtime isn't in reality, but in Diane's fantasy before dying. At the very beginning, the camera lowers onto a pillow; everything from there until the end is in her dream. But it's not an "It was all a dream!" twist or something lame like that -- it's pretty explicit about being a dream, and the dream is a way to depict Diane's fantasy life falling apart as reality intrudes, and to have everything you see show emotion and fantasies rather than boring reality.
The dream begins with the hit on Camilla being carried out -- the guy up front pulls a gun. Then, miracle of miracles, a car crash saves her life, and kills her memory and personality. The amnesiac Camilla is a blank slate who is now reliant on Diane's care and has no connection to anyone but her. That's what Diane really wants, Camilla all to herself and all her rottenness gone, to not have to kill her.
There are two diner scenes. In reality, this is where Diane hired the hit-man. A man stares at her, she imagines he knows what he sees. So in Diane's dream, which tries to suppress all of this information, the man is talking to his therapist, talking about something evil exists at that diner, which he can't bear to look at in his dreams, and how a man was looking at him, making him feel guilty. Diane is bitter and twisted at this point, and jealous of the younger, still-upbeat, still-naive waitress Betty -- in her dream, she takes the name Betty.
If you watch the movie from this perspective, everything feels right; it retains the surreal mood of a dream, but the plot turns all fit into place. The dream is divided between these upbeat comedy sequences depicting Diane's fantasy -- Justin Theroux, who stole her SO, has his SO cheat on him (with Billy Ray Cyrus, for added humiliation) in a comical series of disasters, the hit men are inept, her auditions go amazingly -- and these very bleak, tense scenes where reality intrudes. The phone calls about missing girls, phone calls in her own voice, hearing that the movie will never get made because 'this is all bullshit.' The dream all comes breaking down when Diane discovers a corpse and finally remembers what the blue key is for (it's the sign the hit-man gives to indicate the completion of the job). The last thing you see in the dream is this extremely theatrical and beautifully-done concert performance being revealed as a tape playing over speakers, because none of this amazing stuff is real.
Then the whole spirit of the movie is compressed into one minute for the scene where Diane masturbates thinking about Camilla while crying her eyes out.