Contrary to what many may thing a completely coherent film....

Rating: 10/10 (14 January 2002)

...though admittedly only after the second viewing.
The first time round I was left feeling like I had been in the presence of brilliance, but not quite figured out why? There was a nagging feeling that (perhaps unlike some of Lynch's work) that there was one piece missing and all would fall into place.
That piece fell between the two viewings and the second time round I was taken with how explicit and consistent the film was.
SPOILER ALERT (not that if you have got this far it will be much of a spoiler - I must be repeating what others have said)
It's not just the facile, Dallasesque explanation of "it was all a dream" and that's why it was weird. Rather it this realisation brings a profound logic to all the film. Lynch does give you clues. After the titles, the camera zooms in on a red pillow - two thirds of the way through Diane wakes up on the same red pillow. In between, we have the crazy, but real world of dreams, where things are impossibly good, or impossibly bad and all sorts of people and things are juxtaposed in odd ways. What follows (including some flashbacks) then makes perfect sense - yes, some things are out of sequential order, but Lynch provided clues to the timing - presence or absence of the ashtray, the appearance of the blue key. It's complicated, but then so are people's emotions and memories in times of severe stress and remorse (what Diane is going through).
Every element of the dream (with possibly the exception of the grotesque man behind the diner - see later) appears in its real context and we she how Diane's troubled psyche has assembled the pieces. IMO the only thing that happens after she wakes up is the extended scene of her in her robe in her apartment - ending in the denouement. The flashbacks were all prior to her waking and thus her dream.
Back to the man at the back of the diner - my take? The man who dies is representative of Diane's innocence or possibly sanity which when confronted by the ugly deed she had commissioned dies. Why pick on the random guy from her diner conversation with the hit man? Well I have no idea, but haven't we all experienced such random associations in dreams. One thing I though was a work of true brilliance was the way in which how Lynch represented a dream was so close to my own (rather less colourful) experience of dreams.
Yes, it was a satire on the dreams of Hollywood, but to me at least it was a bit more fundamental than that - a treatise on the human spirit and its occasional collapse into oblivion - a more universal theme.
Before I get RSI I'll sign off and finished by commending this film to any viewer who wants to be stimulated, challenged and have to think a bit - surely quite a lot of what film is meant to be about!