10 Film Directors Who Used The Same Ending Twice
4. Identity Evaporates In A Fever Dream - David Lynch
The Original
It's fair to say that most of David Lynch's films feature a parade of twisted characters spread across a surreal, often dreamlike tableau, though his 1997 film Lost Highway took this to especially challenging ends with its famously opaque - some might say incoherent - narrative.
The film is concerned primarily with the notion of identity, as musician Fred Madison (Bill Pullman) is imprisoned for murder and inexplicably transforms into a mechanic called Pete Dayton (Balthazar Getty) mid-way through the movie.
At the end, however, Pete turns back into Fred, leaves himself the intercom message "Dick Laurent is dead" heard at the start of the movie, and finally leads the police on a merry highway chase.
Though Lynch has never confirmed the explicit meaning of the ending, one of the more popular readings is that the latter half of the film is Fred's fantasy as he sits on death row, and the feverish, white-hued final images are in fact Fred being executed via electrocution in jail.
The Repeat
Lynch's masterpiece Mulholland Drive similarly sees its protagonist disappear down a rabbit-hole of soupy identity by film's end.
Much like Lost Highway, one of the prevailing theories is that the film is separated into two halves of reality and fantasy, albeit in this case the two halves are flipped.
The earlier portion of the film centered around Betty (Naomi Watts) and Rita (Laura Elena Harring) is believed to be the dream of failed actress Diane Selwyn (also Watts), who is Mulholland Drive's real protagonist.
In the film's final sequence, she's faced with the cold reality that she had actress Camilla Rhodes (also Harring) killed, and promptly shoots herself dead.
Though Lynch goes about telling these stories in different ways, both endings see the protagonists forced to confront their duelling realities in deeply terrifying ways.