How I understood it was: at the beginning of the movie the guy says that he likes to remember things his way, not how they actually happened, that suggests that his story is unreliable.
He kills is wife because she was cheating and gets caught and sentenced to death.
He then hallucinates a delusion where he actually is an entirely different guy (he turns into another person while in the cell and gets released) with some parallels with the true story. This guy is cooler, a prodigy mechanic, a womanizer, and his rival is an insane mobster. In his delusion he kills a pimp who worked for the mobster and that’s how the police find him and chase after him. In the final scene he is running away driving in the night, but from his point of view we see the sparks from the electric chair, suggesting he never left the cell.
Apparently you aren’t alone in this interpretation: some critics compared the film to the ‘An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge’ story. Lynch himself described it as a ‘psychogenic fugue’.
However, I prefer a more literal, though not more realistic, interpretation: that the events happened approximately as they’re shown. This is in large part because best surrealism, in my opinion, presents a world that lives by its own rules, which may or may not resemble our reality close enough. This is how things are with J.G. Ballard, David Cronenberg, Murakami, and Kobo Abe to some extent; and Piotr Kamler to a lesser extent but in the other direction. And I also consider the ‘it was all a dream’ trick rather cheap (even though it works occasionally).
With this approach, the Creepy Dude would be an outside intrusion, similar to the evil from the Black Lodge in original ‘Twin Peaks’. He puts Lone Starr into the Möbius time loop and leads him to kill a guy, of whom Starr wouldn’t even have heard otherwise.
Lynch, in his typical manner, didn’t discount this hypothesis either:
When asked by an interviewer in 1997 whether Pullman’s character is “trapped in [a] time loop, doomed to repeat his murders and mistakes forever and ever”, Lynch replied, “Well, maybe not forever and ever, but you can see how it would be a struggle. Yeah, that’s it”. He assented to a comparison with the Buddhist conception of reincarnation, elaborating that “it’s a fragment of the story. It’s not so much a circle as like a spiral that comes around, the next loop a little bit higher than the one that precedes it”.
It would also be somewhat supported by the behavior of policemen and the mechanic guy’s parents, who are outside Lone Starr’s immediate experience in the mechanic guy’s timeline, but get to live through the events.
I might need a rewatch, but I don’t think that was what happened in ‘Lost Highway’.
Check out ‘Inland Empire’ for hardcore Lynchean shenanigans.
How I understood it was: at the beginning of the movie the guy says that he likes to remember things his way, not how they actually happened, that suggests that his story is unreliable. He kills is wife because she was cheating and gets caught and sentenced to death. He then hallucinates a delusion where he actually is an entirely different guy (he turns into another person while in the cell and gets released) with some parallels with the true story. This guy is cooler, a prodigy mechanic, a womanizer, and his rival is an insane mobster. In his delusion he kills a pimp who worked for the mobster and that’s how the police find him and chase after him. In the final scene he is running away driving in the night, but from his point of view we see the sparks from the electric chair, suggesting he never left the cell.
Apparently you aren’t alone in this interpretation: some critics compared the film to the ‘An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge’ story. Lynch himself described it as a ‘psychogenic fugue’.
However, I prefer a more literal, though not more realistic, interpretation: that the events happened approximately as they’re shown. This is in large part because best surrealism, in my opinion, presents a world that lives by its own rules, which may or may not resemble our reality close enough. This is how things are with J.G. Ballard, David Cronenberg, Murakami, and Kobo Abe to some extent; and Piotr Kamler to a lesser extent but in the other direction. And I also consider the ‘it was all a dream’ trick rather cheap (even though it works occasionally).
With this approach, the Creepy Dude would be an outside intrusion, similar to the evil from the Black Lodge in original ‘Twin Peaks’. He puts Lone Starr into the Möbius time loop and leads him to kill a guy, of whom Starr wouldn’t even have heard otherwise.
Lynch, in his typical manner, didn’t discount this hypothesis either:
It would also be somewhat supported by the behavior of policemen and the mechanic guy’s parents, who are outside Lone Starr’s immediate experience in the mechanic guy’s timeline, but get to live through the events.
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