The filmed explained

I thought the same thing too for a while, but it doesn't make sense. briefly it seems as if it's all a dream, but then he once again snaps out of the latest hallucination and continues to be tortured.

It doesn't work unless you believe that his awakening toward the end of the film is a dream within a dream.

nice read. good stuff, man.

They mostly come out at night; mostly.

Good insights and interpretations, but I don't think the movie was all a dream. It looked to me that he drifted off into a dream partway through the torture scene, but it looked like he snapped back to reality toward the end. That's at least what it looked like to me.

Movie Reviews: cwyattfilm.blogspot.com

Thanks for this explanation, seems fairly logical to me.

I'm confused (as with many other people) with when he wakes up in bed after the first torture scene and he struggles to remember proposing marriage to her, then he closes his eyes and it goes back to the final scene.

Was he dreaming the torture scene or the scene in between when he wakes up in bed was just a memory recollection for the audience to see?

Have you ever had a really vivid nightmare? Woken up, recovered, gone back to sleep and had the nightmare pick up where it left off?

I have. Many, many times.

Thus, I think it's up to the viewer to decide which was the nightmare and which was real. There's actually more evidence to support Nightmare, rather than it being the normal 'over-analysis':

Some things I noticed:

* When he's at the bar, and the guy tells him about the hacked up bodies, he actually seems to see them and react to them. It's cut at the time to appear as if the idea is scaring him, but if you think of it as a dream, this makes more sense.

* When he talks to his very helpful friend he brings all his true fears to light out of character, about being old and washed up.

* Obviously, the most telling one is the bag that appears earlier. He'd have no knowledge of it.

* Second, the line about the garret wire in the dream, cutting through flesh and bone easily. Then it is repeated in the torture scene.

* The repeating of scenes slightly out of time index. He falls. He goes into a 'dream.' He falls again, reality picks back up. This indicates the dream happened not when he fell but in the middle.

* Again, this happens when he re-enters the torture scene. His son gets sprayed from behind. He wakes up (for real, if the theory of nightmare is right) then when he goes back to sleep, it starts over - from the point it left off.

* His behavior when waking up to find she has left him seems groggy, almost drugged. Disoriented and confused, to say the least.

* The fact at the end, she's basically talking to him with a broken neck doesn't seem too likely.

... everything before the sex scene at the hotel drops enough information (the burn marks on her legs, his friends suspension about her, his own ugly behavior, his huge doubts about the age gap, his being attracted to his son's possible girlfriend, etc.) to fuel everything that came later in the nightmare view. There's probably plenty more to point to nightmare, and more to point to reality, but honestly I can't easily swallow "director playing tricks" line of reasoning.

If he's showing us something that the main character cannot see, then indicating the main character knows about it without seeing it (exactly, not similar), I call BS on that one, artistic license be damned. You can't show someone a directly contradictory image, because that doesn't encourage a riddle, but rather, simply make an unsolvable paradox. That's a trick for "looking smarter than you are," and it's a trick I sadly think Lynch is guilty of time to time. However, I really believe they supported a nightmare theory on a lot of levels. I think the above analysis pointing out his terrible treatment of women, unintentional as it might be, is more the commentary than anything else.

Anyway, there's a lot of subtlety here, which I think is more in the foreground than ambivalence. The way they handled the one night stand with the secretary was extremely well done.

Have you guys ever thought that maybe in the beginning he sees her exactly how he wants to see her as this beautiful and fragile being. However after looking for her after their night at the hotel he seems to get a better grasp of her reality and the environment she has been exposed to. It only really kicks in once he gets poisoned by the drug though and that's why we flash into this dream-like sequence. But perhaps it isn't a dream but him realizing all the hints he missed, how she tells him about how she was abused as a child whereas I'm pretty sure she doesn't say that the first time around when we see them having dinner.

But then again; it's a movie and directors usually just want us to think and come up with these crazy ways of explaining the movie. I mean if they got you to think I guess the movie did what it was supposed to do.

I also think this film is a reflection on misuse of women. Aoyama really objectifies every woman he comes across or speaks about, even his late wife. Aoyama is the real monster here, and Asami some kind of impersonification of vengeance. I think the scene in the bar where Asami tells him she has been abused, was the reality. The altered scene we saw before was the memory of Aoyama, who just wasn't really listening to her: he only saw en heard what he wanted.

[deleted]