Lynch’s heroines wonderfully manifest the influences of forties and post-war Hollywood iconography. The beautiful and voluptuous Laura Elena Harring - who reminds us of Isabella Rossellini - exhudes film noir loveliness and is endowed with the preferred body of a Hollywood which embraced an excessive, hyper-real womanliness. She also represents a kind of comatose cool. Suffering from amnesia, this brunette victim of that thwarted murder attempt and over-kill accident on Mulholland Drive chooses the name Rita after glimpsing the image of Rita Hayworth on a poster for Gilda, the ultimate film noir heroine. “Rita” ’s amnesia is, of course, a black joke on a Hollywood which erases women’s identities. In wide-eyed wonderment and despair, she confesses, “I don’t know who I am. I don’t know my name”. Female blankness was a sensual preference of post-war Hollywood and Harring delivers the lines with the prerequisite spaciness. Equally evoking Ava Gardner, Harring’s Rita also has a Monroesque sexuality, at once open and insensible. She is a “broad” Sinatra would have loved.

Her physical and mythical antithesis, Naomi Watts young blonde woman is initially introduced as bright-eyed and optimistic as the archetypal Doris Day. This is Betty, the discarded and degraded Diane’s desirable double. She is Diane’s dreamed self. In accordance with classic Hollywood codes, Betty’s fairness mythically signifies sweetness and light. She is also more femme enfant than femme fatale. We see Betty arriving at LA Airport, wearing a permanent smile and a pink cardigan, the archetypal actress-model in search of Hollywood stardom. The young woman is accompanied by an apparently sympathetic old couple whom we see wish Betty luck only to then see them laugh - in sinister and hilarious mute mode - at the naive would-be star in their black limousine. However, it will soon become apparent that Betty is not an innocent abroad. Her excessive sunniness is matched by a delicately crazed narcissism brilliantly expressed by Watts. Her slim, blonde elegance and assertiveness recall a knowing Hitchcockian heroine. When Betty discovers the amnesiac brunette Rita hiding in her aunts’ apartment on Havernhurst where she will stay while the older woman - yet another actress - is on location, she revels in the detective role of helping Rita find her identity. She is excited by Rita’s dilemma, spurring her on with “C’mon, it’ll be just like the movies. We’ll pretend to be someone else”. At first fearful of the extraordinary discovery of a gangster’s ransom of cash, fifty grand, and a fantastic blue key in Rita’s purse, it is Betty who initiates the action, phoning the police anonymously from Winkies on Sunset Boulevard to find out if there was an accident on Mulholland Drive and taking Rita to the house of a Diane Selwyn, a name Rita remembers and believes to be her own after gazing at the name tag of a pretty waitress with blonde hair called Diane serving them.