“Call me Coco, everybody does.”
This sentence is heard twice in the movie. Once when Coco,
the janitor, welcomes Diane to the condo and a second time when Coco as Adam’s
mother welcomes Diane at the engagement party.
But it is pronounced very differently between the dream part and the real part. Whereas Coco the janitor is friendly and warm towards Diane, Coco as Adam’s mum proves to be really cold and haughty, reproaching Diane her being late.
The answer to why the tone has changed in between lies precisely in this dramatic difference between Diane’s dream and the real life. Indeed, it happens very often when we dream that we kind of rearrange the reality, seeing ourselves as superheroes for instance. So, here, Diane has surely imagined Coco much nicer than what she is in the real life and “Call me Coco, everybody does” is probably just a sentence from Coco that she remembered and somehow triggered something in her dream.
Therefore, this sentence through the parallel it entails constitutes a real echo in Diane’s mind.
Cow boy scenes.
The cowboy is among the strangest characters in the whole movie. We see him
three times and each time, the scenes in which he appears are quite mysterious.
The first time we see him, he is talking to Adam on the height of L.A. by night with his “good ol’” southern twang and his big Stetson hat on. He is explaining Adam what a smart aleck he thinks he is and that he will see him one more time if he “does good” and twice more if he “does bad”. This scene, though really weird and obscure is also kind of funny because of the cowboy’s heavy southern accent and the smart-aleck part of it.
The second time we get to see him, he is waking up a girl, i.e. Diane, in a scene that constitutes the bridge between the pinkish part and the reality.
And then, we have a glimpse of him in the background at Adam and Camilla’s engagement party.
These scenes are very paradoxical in that that the first two are wrapped in mystery while the third one is really logical and simple.
We actually don’t know who this cowboy is, nor what role he plays and who he
plays it for. He doesn’t even have a name. He is just one among numerous echoes
in Diane’s dream. We can’t even tell whether she knows him because we can’t
guess whether Diane’s awakening is part of the reality or simply the end of
Diane’s dream.
However, the last scene just happens to tell the truth. Adam did good by
picking up the right girl at the casting (whether it be the blonde Camilla
Rhodes in Diane’s dream, or the brunette Camilla Rhodes in reality) and
so, he just sees him once more at the party where he is one of the guests.
Pool man scene.
In the pool man scene, Adam coming back earlier from work after the weird
meeting with the mafia toughies discovers his wife in bed with a beefy pool man.
And instead of feeling ashamed and apologizing for hurting him, she just yells
at him and blames him for getting home too early. So then, Adam snatches his
wife’s jewellery box and heads towards the garage where he stops in front of a
shelf from which he eventually takes a pink paint pot. Back in the kitchen, he
opens the box on the floor and pours the content of the paint pot into it. Very
soon after, he is quite severely beaten by the pool man, evidently a fictional
revenge invented by Diane for the way Adam, a successful director, has rejected
her in reality.
It’s striking how we can draw a parallel between this scene and the engagement party scene. Indeed, the way Diane is greeted there by Coco, the way she is made to feel out of place reminds us of the way Adam is received at home. There is a feeling of awkwardness both times. And apparently, his wife’s adultery has been going on for a while when Adam finds out about it.
We can compare Adam’s situation with the viewer’s, who has watched the movie for a while but doesn’t know yet how to discern what’s true and really happening from what’s wrong and simply illusions. Adam just found out about his wife and maybe the pink paint is just a warning towards the viewer, kind of a wake-up call by which Lynch gives a clue to the viewer: “Hey, don’t believe everything you have seen and will see in the pink part of this story! Until that moment Adam has lived in a lie and you’re watching lies too. Nothing here is real. Don’t make the same mistake as he did. The jewels –the meaningful parts of the story?– are buried in an illusive coat of pink paint.”