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Betty is an annoyingly perky Hollywood hopeful. Rita is an amnesiac who crawls out of a limo involved in an accident - narrowly avoiding being murdered by its driver. The two meet when Rita sneaks into Betty's aunt's house. The two fall in love, with Betty and Rita turning into detectives in the Nancy-Frew mould to uncover Rita's true identity. Meanwhile, a director is intimidated into casting a starlet named Camilla in his new movie. Betty, who appears more blonde than Sandra Dee, manages to blow everybody away with her screen test.

And then, it begins to go awry. The movie changes gears - the scenes seem more dream like and illogical, but Lynch gives us more clues. And most importantly, the characters seem to change identities completely. Rita becomes the much-desired Camilla. The much-desired Betty becomes the blowsy Diane, a one-time Hollywood hopeful whose dream ended when she lost a part to Camilla. Although still dream-like, the latter part of the film is so bleak and dispiriting that we're supposed to think it a dream more routed in reality than the beginning - with Betty's hopes and dreams becoming Diane's unachievable desires. In the second part of the film, Camilla is Diane's former lover - an affair that Diane is incapable of maintaining in her imagination (even the dream Camilla dumps Diane; when Camilla and Diane meet again, it's at dinner party where Camilla and Adam are about to announce their engagement). Diane's home is an empty husk - she lives alone and never seems to leave, except when she brings a wad of cash and Camilla's picture to a hitman. Between the dreams of hope that open this flick and the nightmares of memories that won't die in the latter half, the characters seem menaced by a blue box. (IMNSHO, the box symbolizes TV, a wasteland for those who couldn't match their dreams for movie stardom - the big plot and character shift occurs when Rita opens the box, and is sucked inside; Because Lynch makes MD an obvious elegy to a lost Hollywood, TV becomes an obvious avatar of its demise and its character's pain).

Though cryptic, it's not quite incomprehensible, and you and your friends can probably come up with dozens of your own spins on this flick's loopy twists (and you should bring along a friend - loneliness becomes very palpable here). Despite the film's consistently cryptic and creepy atmosphere, Lynch manages to work some real pain out of his dreamy characters. My favorite scene is the dinner-party scene in which we see Diane become a seemingly bottomless reservoir of pity (we see how unreachable Camilla has become to her, and we also learn that it was Camilla who essentially beat Diane to stardom). Lynch has managed to bring some of the pathos of "The Straight Story" to his trademark world of nightmares and all-nite-diners.

In interviews, David Lynch has professed a great interest in transcendental meditation. He has some familiarity with Eastern religions and philosophy, and I think it's the key to the film.

I have this sneaking suspicion that the frightening bum that appears early in the film is the Hindu god Kali, who is sort of the embodiment of the apocalypse. Kali's name means Black Time, and whenever Kali appears, all the things that separate us as individuals, such as height, width, depth, and any sense of space and time, are destroyed. Kali is sweet oblivion.

If the bum is Kali, then this character isn't just a plot device--the bum is the WHOLE plot.

Because if the bum is Kali, then suddenly the whole film makes sense. Identities are not permanently affixed to characters. The temporal logic of "this happened, then this happened next" goes out the window. It's irrelevant because linear time no longer exists. The distinction between dream and reality--a pretty important one in any definition of sanity--is also irrelevant. In the presence of Kali, in Black Time, there is no such distinction.

Mind-wobbling stuff, to be sure. And there's a second huge hint that Lynch leaves us: it's no accident that this film is set in Hollywood, and features Naomi Watts, who's an actress in a Lynch film playing an actress auditioning for a film. The playful rehearsal with her girlfriend of a banal scene turns, quite startlingly, into a riveting, intense audition for a third-rate film. On one hand, this is a clever comment on the skill of a good actress, the ephemerality of identity in Hollywood,etc. On the other, it just reinforces the notion of Kali's power--that any body can inhabit any identity at any moment, and that the moment itself, coming from a script, isn't even a real moment in time, but a frozen one, that can be called upon whenever and wherever it serves a purpose.

This is why any attempt at unravelling this film to find a linear plot, with linear logic, and assign identities to characters or even bodies, is an exasperating, futile effort. It's Western thinking in a film where the operative ideas are all Eastern and unfamiliar to the West.

Of course, this also lets Lynch off the hook for plot, logic, character development, any kind of sense whatsoever. So is it a great film? I say yes, because it stays in the mind and evokes feeling--something that Lost Highway, which dabbled with similar themes, failed to do. I think it's his best work since Blue Velvet, which also rejected overt explication, and in doing so, haunted the viewer.

If you can give up the urge to approach this film like a Rubik's cube, and for two hours of your life, just GO with it, you just might become entranced with this film. Good stuff.