Mystery Man

From Lost Highway

Observations

• Fred first sees the Mystery Man immediately after Fred describes his dream to Renee, in which Fred appears to attack Renee.
• At Andy’s party, when the Mystery Man tells Fred "We've met before... at your house."
• The Mystery Man is portrayed as being capable of bilocation, being in two places at once: inside Fred's house at the same time that he is at Andy's party.
• When Fred asks "How d'you get inside my house?", the Mystery Man replies "You invited me. It is not my custom to go where I'm not wanted."
• When Fred asks, "Who are you?", the Mystery Man replies with a sinister laugh.
• Referring to the Mystery Man, Fred asks Andy, "Who's the guy on the stairs? The guy in black?" Andy replies, "I don't know his name. He's a friend of Dick Laurent's, I think."
• The Mystery Man inhabits a cabin that burns backwards.
• The Mystery Man appears in Fred's vision of the cabin immediately before Fred transforms into Pete.
• When Mr. Eddy calls Pete on the phone, he introduces the Mystery Man as "a friend of mine."
• The beginning of the Mystery Man's conversation with Pete is identical to his conversation with Fred at Andy's party: "We've met before, haven't we?"/"I don't think so. Where was it you think we met?"/"At your house. Don't you remember?"/"No, no I don't." The Mystery Man's last line in both conversations is also identical: "It's been a pleasure talking to you."
• Alice tells Pete they are going to the Mystery Man’s cabin in order to meet a fence who will take the goods and car stolen from Andy and give them money and passports. The Mystery Man is a fence, or black market go-between, who receives and sells stolen goods on the black market.
• Pete transforms back into Fred at the Mystery Man's cabin.
• The Mystery Man is portrayed as being capable of teleportation, moving immediately from Andy's car to the cabin porch.
• The Mystery Man chases Fred carrying a video camera whose staticky, black and white images are the same as those from the videotapes left at Fred and Renee's house. Interpretation: The Mystery Man is the source of the videotapes.

Mystery Man as a surreal devil figure

One interprtation of the Mystery Man is that he is a sort of surreal devil figure, who brings Fred's only partially conscious fears and fantasies to their full realization, and who does so by means of a swapping of identites and bodies.

Notice that a "fence," in the sense of a physical boundary, separates yet connects two spaces, just as a "fence," in the sense of a black market dealer, serves as an intermediary or bridge between buyers and sellers of stolen goods. Similarly, the Mystery Man can be seen as an intermediary or bridge between the two worlds of Fred-and-Renee and Pete-and-Alice.

According to this interpretation, it is by way of the Mystery Man that Fred transforms into Pete (after having a vision of the the Mystery Man at his cabin), and it is at the Mystery Man’s cabin, an in-between space, that Pete turns back into Fred. Thus, the Mystery Man enables the transitions between Fred and Pete.

Taking this view, the Mystery Man's role can be seen as a sort devil figure who enables Fred’s innermost fears and fantasies to be realized, fears and fantasies that Fred cannot even admit to himself. The repressed fantasy of murdering Renee, expressed in Fred’s dream, is the Mystery Man’s invitation, but the fantasy of murdering Renee is bound up with a whole host of other fears and desires: Fred fears that she is a whore and that she is possessed by another man; Fred wishes that he could be her virile lover and that she desired him; Fred fears catching her with another man but also fantasizes killing him; Fred fears having Renee reject and elude his possessive grasp.

The Mystery Man allows all these things to come about, revealing along the way that the fantasy of being her virile lover is a lie driven by the truth that she eludes his possession (see the relevant section of Narrative Method and Plot Development above).