Rita Takes Her Name off a Poster on the Wall

01  The Poster and the Gesture

She has just survived a car crash on Mulholland Drive, walked down into the city in shock, and hidden herself in an empty apartment. She does not know who she is. When Naomi Watts's Betty asks for a name, the woman played by Laura Harring glances at a movie poster on the bathroom wall, reads the word printed across it, and says: Rita. The poster is for Gilda, the 1946 Columbia noir in which Rita Hayworth plays a nightclub singer who performs the striptease number "Put the Blame on Mame" and is punished, endlessly, for being desired.

Lynch shoots the moment without irony or sleight of hand. The camera lets you see the poster. The reference is planted in plain sight, and you are meant to catch it.

02  What Gilda Carries into the Room

Gilda is built around a woman who is watched, wanted, and structurally helpless despite appearing to hold all the power in the room. The men in the film manage her, punish her for their own obsessions, and ultimately claim her. Hayworth's performance is one of the great pieces of Hollywood self-display: a woman playing a woman who is performing for men who will not let her stop performing.

That is the weight the name "Rita" brings with it into Mulholland Drive. Harring's character has no history she can access, no identity she did not borrow from a wall. She is, from the moment she takes the name, a construction — someone else's image, someone else's movie, worn like clothing over a blank. The film's first half gives her warmth and mystery; its second half suggests, in readings developed by critics including Jonathan Rosenbaum, that the warmth was itself a fabrication, a dream of the person Betty needed Rita to be.

03  A Character Who Names Herself After a Performance

The self-naming from a poster is an unusually blunt move for a director often associated with withholding. Lynch built the original 1999 ABC pilot around what felt like a genre mystery — who is this woman, where did she come from — and the Gilda poster plants a quiet answer in the room before the question has properly formed. Rita is not a person with a history; she is a role someone stepped into because it was there on the wall.

Harring had done substantial work in American television before the film, and her physical presence — dark hair, red lips, the kind of screen glamour that belongs to an older Hollywood register — makes the Gilda reference legible without being labored. She does not look like a television character who wandered in from 1999. She looks like something from the archive that has been reactivated.

04  The Logic of the Borrowed Name

There is a version of this detail that reads as dream logic: in dreams, identities are provisional and interchangeable, and borrowing a name off a wall is exactly the kind of thing a dreaming mind does without finding it strange. There is another version in which it is the Hollywood machine reading itself — a woman with no autonomous existence picking the nearest available image and wearing it, because the industry has no other template to offer.

Both readings are consistent with the same gesture, which is part of how Mulholland Drive works. The poster is real, the name is borrowed, and the film's second half will charge the borrowing with a cost that the first half's warmth carefully conceals. Rita names herself after a woman who was controlled and punished. That is either the dream reaching for comfort, or the film telling you something early that you will only understand later.

The poster stays on the bathroom wall. Lynch keeps it in frame. He put it there.