As for 4, much has been written, including how it links the film to VERTIGO, so I won't say much, except to question the irrealist reading of Lynch. FTR, I don't think Lynch is irrational, feeling-based, or some anti-metanarrative theorist. Sure, some people shift names, but do they shift identities? Betty loves Rita and Diane loves Camilla. Adam is a director and Adam is a director. Coco is an old Hollywood grand damme and she still seems to be as Adam's mother, Coco. The waitress at Winkie's is the same waitress, just with the name Diane shifting to Betty. Anyway, you get the point. When you have a dream of a loved one acting bizarrely, like I used to have of my sweet mother chasing me around with an axe in a cheap horror film, is the dream still bizarre if the dream doesn't connect up to reality? I'd say no. Likewise, the tragedy, and I think that's what Lynch has created, a tragedy brought on by Dianne's desire and leading Betty to her necessary conclusion, loses its impact if all segments of the film are merely unreal, competing realities. It's interesting that the most prominent interpretations I've seen all fall into the postmodern camp, but that's not the "conservative" one. Isn't it time that we simply recognize the anti-"metanarrative" reading as just another metanarrative. Come on, do we have to still live in 70s film theory?

Consider, further, number 5. Lynch plays on an old joke of his, and one of his most memorable scenes, by doing himself one better: he has del Rio playing herself, lipsyncing to her own song, a Spanish cover of Orbison. This joke loses much of its humor if (1) you fail to recognize the reality of del Rio, an actual person, (2) its connection to the very real oeuvre of Lynch and (3) how its reality might differ from the rest of the film. I note that Betty and Rita stop crying once del Rio falls to the floor, but the music keeps going. That's an odd reaction if everything is equally unreal. It's true that Lynch calls into question the reality of the "reality sequence" (the final 3rd), by putting in the dream characters of the Bum and the Blue-Haired Lady, but that doesn't mean that *within the film* there's not a reality which informs the dream within the film, only that the diegesis isn't reality, despite our emotional involvement, as the real del Rio can attest. Stripping that away, the film loses much of its emotive impact, just like Lynch's joke, and why the girls stop crying once the mechanism has been laid bare.

Does Lynch connect all of this in a purely rational, conscious way? Probably not. But, even if he's purely intuitively driven (which I think isn't very likely given all the puns, rhymes and connections that appear in his films), who's to say his intuitions aren't fairly rational, or coherent?