She's the same one who switched apartments with Diane Selwyn, the corpse (who is a third actress, neither Naomi Watts or the woman who was Betty the waitress.)

We don't know what really happened; if they really switched apartments, or if, as the Lost on Mulholland crew speculates, Diane and DeRosa were lovers (I don't think there's enough evidence to prove that, btw.)

One, are we supposed to believe the corpse is the woman Diane's alter ego would lay the blame on for putting a hit out on Camilla?

And two, because detectives are looking for Diane, as DeRosa reminds her, is this why she dreams of Betty and Rita solving a mystery?

in diane's "dream"(by that i mean the interpetation that roughly the first two thirds of MD is a dream of diane's) when she and rita meet derosa at sierra bonita, there seems to be little recognition or even importance between derosa and betty. in this way i can see how that translates to the "reality" of just being neighbors who have switched apartments, probably had been better friends in the past(why else would derosa put up with the ruse and help diane?) but are now pulling apart. what troubles me is two things: first, the attitude that diane has when derosa has picked up the box and is looking around for anything else of hers. shes more than snippy to a person who is helping her hide from the police. yet the scene plays out like a couple breaking up. that incongruency is what keeps me from thinking they were only friends. second: the last item derosa takes is the piano ashtray(and by doing so reveals the blue key that is the undoing of diane)
yet that ashtray is present the last time diane and camilla are together, their break-up in fact. unless that diane/camilla scene is pure fantasy instead of flashback, somehow derosa and diane had to be sharing space. if diane moved after putting the hit on camilla, then where does the flashback take place? how would diane already have the piano ashtray in apt#17, ostensibly before switching apartments?
sorry if im a bit scattershot, these are points still unresovled for me in MD(tho maybe i like it that way).
as to the mystery of the dream, i always took it to be diane's way of asuaging the guilt and anger she has for camilla. by being betty, and basically defining rita, a woman who doesnt know who she is, she finally has control of the relationship(and the movie biz). both of which she lacks in what are the seemingly more realistic last third of the film.
wow, wrote way more than i planned to. do you buy any of this, angel?
ok goodnight all

.

So they switched apartments for a reason other than to help Diane evade the police. As an aside, I think DeRosa might be in the dark about the hit and is giving the cops the blow-off in good faith. (We don't even know she's even blowing them off. For all we know, she sent the cops over to 17, too.)

The DeRosa/Diane backstory they offer on LOM there is that DeRosa was a Camilla substitute that came in handy when things started heating up with Adam and Camilla, which would explain the presence of the piano ashtray in the "Go Get Some" scene.

Diane could also have started moving her things into 12 before the switch, or even borrowed the ashtray after the switch if DeRosa didn't leave it there while visiting --- I prefer the simplest explanations.

LOM also suggests, as you mentioned JFK, that Go Get Some and the breakup might be a fantasy; Diane was never with Camilla, she just wanted her and her success, and DeRosa could have been the lover in reality.

I could see Diane being utterly delusional about her affair with her movie star friend, which would be a reason for having the object of her obsession killed. In this scenario, masturbating with deeply ingrained false memories of a breakup in her mind would show how imbalanced she is. She had, after all, just woken up from a the erotic Betty/Rita dream in which she had total control over her.

And the apartment switch happened for unclear reasons... (and there are two stories, so there may well be two reasons!)

I havent worked it out, either!

i didnt know about the lost on mulholland dr. page! thanks angel!
im going to have to explore it, then i will see if i have anything of interest to post.

Lost on Mulholland is ridiculously in-depth. Hours and hours of reading material. Only the links to the discussion are dead now. It almost makes it pointless to discuss anywhere else because any angle you could possibly imagine has already been covered there!

I think it's worth dredging a lot of those topics up again, a million years later.

MD still offers more subject matter up for debate than IE.

thats what you said. not definitive. i agree on yr point that if we're looking for definitive, concrete, logical(even if its surrealist logic) sense, then MD is closer to that than IE(tho MD still has its wormholes too). but if you are making the analogy toward the god question, wouldnt an unprovable thing be more debatable than something upon which one can eventually reach a definitive answer?

this reminds me of the niels bohr quote in response to einstein
einstein:"god doesnt play dice"
bohr:"dont tell god what to do!"

I guess that depends on the kind of person you are (or if you're in the mood to argue round in circles getting nowhere)

Watching the hooker scene in MTTH.  It's funny watching them all try to steal the scene from eachother by laughing and screaming as loud as they can.

i didnt mean to imply that kind of discussion. we are veering off into philosophy here. first you said MD has more debatable material than IE, then i made a bad pun, while still voicing my positive view of IE(tho i truely didnt mean that one or the other is more worthy of debate, only that IE has divided its viewers even more than mulholland drive has), then you brought in the word "definitively", which was not a qualifier in the post i orginally respond too. that was my main charge. also, you are using "more" in the sentence "MD still offers more subject matter up for debate than IE", in two ways, both somewhat ambiguously. one, as better and more fruitful for study because of the known outcome of gaining something, and two, also in the quantitive sense. that there is more to study in MD because in debating IE, we will only go in circles. and in this i disagree. but that is another thread.
im just being a ligustic bitch here, i apologize, its a hangup i have. no worries in your regard.

why i am getting double posts i have no idea. thats like 3 time in a week. and i know i single clicked. hmm.

why do we all assume they switched aparments? that happens in the "dream". instead couldnt derosa be living somewhere else, not in another apartment? the one which we are led to believe was diane's apartment because those detectives were looking for her there. and that she left for different reasons? she had been living with diane based on the piano ashtray's presence in the make out/break up scene diane seems to be thinking about while making coffee. but she could be fantasizing, tho i doubt it. as disjunct as the third act of MD is, it is the reality of diane, not the fantasy of betty. so diane was cheating on derosa with camilla at the apartment. maybe part of why they(diane and derosa) broke up? also note that she is coming by to pick up the "rest of her stuff", which means she left in a hurry. that is not what one does normally, generally speaking. BUT then the police are going to derosa looking for diane somewhere else, not in the apartment she's in. unless the apartment is in derosa's name. but they know derosa knows diane, right? well this is turning into speculation here, but i think we have to keep in mind that MD is two worlds, connected and overlapping yes, but warped from each other. is any of this making sense?