If life puts you in the disquieting situation of having to travel between different worlds – and if possible, survive by mastering these passages – for Lynch, the theatre is one of these worlds. It is a world which, although placed under the enchanted auspices of the night, can be controlled.

Henry's private theatre with the singer in the radiator, the unlikely, old-fashioned club where Dorothy Vallens sings before a large 30s microphone, the roadhouse at Twin Peaks where Julee Cruise sings, these are the kinds of shows which Lynch wants for himself and us: a place where one can sit in ecstasy before a woman on a stage as she sings in a thin, fragile voice.

At the Silencio, the midnight vaudeville theatre – the latest of Lynch's luridly imagined night-clubs – where Betty and Rita find the blue box that matches Rita’s mysterious key, the star turn is "la Llorona de Los Angeles" a chanteuse who outdoes Dean Stockwell's performance of "In Dreams" by delivering an extraordinary mime in synch with a Spanish-language cover of Roy Orbison's "Crying" only to collapse half-way through as the track continues. Miming to playback, with its implications of willing surrender of one identity to usurp and yet undermine another, also features as the young film director Adam auditions actresses for his musical, by having them lip-synch a terrifyingly kitsch – Connie Steven's "Sixteen Reasons – Why I Love You." All this points to the way Betty is somehow forced to life-synch for Diane, or Diane dreams of a happier ending as Betty.

9. "Something I Can Never Have."

In Lynch's work every shot is considered not only in terms of how it can bemade visually and conceptually arresting, but also how to encode it with some sense of the whole. This involves attention to colour, texture, sound, mood and meaning, as well as performance.

For Deleuze, a "becoming" of the cinematic, then, is an exploration of the affective, processual, the dynamic and the aleatory vitalism of the forces felt across a variety of bodies. If we move away from thinking about "becoming" as a description of an entity, then the term enables a transformation from image, or concept, to affect. The "becoming" of cinema describes the affective process of the cinematic experience where the affective is constituted through the materiality of emotion, a material sense of depth and process, through affect and sensation.

All becomings are already molecular. That is because becoming is not to imitate or identify with something or someone. Nor is it to proportion formal relations. Neither of these two figures of analogy is applicable to becoming: neither the imitation of a subject or the proportionality of a form. Starting from the forms one has, the subject one is, the organs one has, or the functions one fulfils, becoming is to extract particles between which one establishes the relations of movement and rest, speed and slowness that are closest to what one is becoming, and through which one becomes. This is the sense in which becoming is the process of desire . . . Becoming is to emit particles that take on certain relations of movement and rest because they enter into a particular zone of proximity.
~~ Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari

The Deleuzo-Guattarian concept of "Body without Organs" (BwO) is an attempt to denaturalise the body. Rather than see the body as a corporeal element, Deleuze and Guattari describe the body as a set of variously informed "speeds" and "intensities". It is conceived in relation to other bodies, particles of other bodies or entities. Lynch has also talked about a concern with the speeds of the body and the speeds of space. He explains that a person can be fast or slow, just as a space can be fast or slow, or a range of perspectives in-between. That person will then interact with the space and time around him or her, a space and time which also have different "speeds". He then locates that metaphor to his visual language of film, and explores this interrelationality within the diegesis of his texts. He suggests that this relationship of speeds between "bodies" is what gives specific scenes in films that "unexplainable" intensity. An example he uses is the song sequence "In Dreams" in Blue Velvet.

The BwO is an abstract notion, a concept for thinking of the body as a limit, or a tendency – a becoming. The BwO is not a place, or a scene or an actual "body". The BwO is a field for the production of the process of desire. It is what Deleuze calls the "plane of consistency" or the "plane of immanence". Bodies are not stable units, but become elements in assemblage, fluid and mutable, constituting life through becoming. Becoming is a process of immanence, a description of aprocessual experience of the affect. Becomings are always specific movements, forms of rest, motion, speed, and slowness, points and flows of intensity. Such flows of intensity operate outside subjectivity through affect. Those affective processes at working the experience of the cinematic are thus effectuated through an unthought, through a plane of consistency, through the material of the body/mind. The unthought is experienced at a level of intensity, as becoming in a molecular connection beyond any notion of an individuated "body". This is what Lynch is trying to explain, that there are certain moments in certain sequences in films which have a specific intensity and an effect on the viewer that is almost inexplicable; indeed to explain it is to take something from it. A feeling resonates and reverberates between viewer and film in ways that cannot easily be articulated in language. The effects of such sequences are triggered by a specific equation of sounds, textures, spaces, rhythms and movements across that specific frame or series of frames.

Thus the affective level through mind and body functions alongside the emotional level imbricated through dialogue and narrativity. In terms of the "haecceity" of sensation the film works as a machinic opera, assembling consonants or dissonant rhythms, cadences as sequences which act as either vibration, resonance or an distension of forced movements.

10. "The Future?"

When the blue box is opened, Betty finds she is living a version of Diane's life and Rita has become movie star Camilla Rhodes.

Diane, Camilla's jealous lover, is upset when Adam and Camilla announce their engagement and hires a hit man to kill Camilla. The murderer promises to leave an ordinary blue key as a token that the kill has been carried out, but Diane – distressed by an imp-like couple who had befriended Betty on a plane to Los Angeles – commits suicide.

Betty's body works across the film as "figural", but also as a nomadic force or intensity.

[A] woman's body achieves a strange nomadism, which makes it cross ages, situations, places. The states of the body secrete the slow ceremony which joins together the corresponding attitudes and develops a female gest which overcomes the history of men and crisis of the world.
~~ Gilles Deleuze