Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train (1953) and Lynch's Mulholland Drive (2001) are films where there is a paranoiac hero or heroine in a nightmare landscape. The elements of film noir combined with this paranoiac hero/heroine create, these two films, into masterpieces.
             Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train contains the paranoiac hero named Bruno Antony. At the very start of the film, he makes an extraordinary deal with Guy Haines to switch murders. Guy will kill his father and Bruno will kill Guy's wife. Guy, the professional tennis player, briefly jokes about the offer, but Bruno believes they agreed on the plan. In the New York Time's review stated "...he doesn't even wait for the tennis star to agree to the scheme..." The murder took place in an amusement park, which has a symbolic connection to a child's mind that is part of Bruno's mind. The wife, Miriam, was pregnant which heightens the irony of the situation, since Bruno is also killing a child while doing this murder and Bruno himself is "child minded". When the drunk on the train could not help Guy in his situation, since everyone now thinks Guy killed his wife because he has a motive, I felt sorry for him. When Bruno threatens that he will use his lighter as evidence to frame the whole murder on Guy, this increases the sorrow for Guy. The tennis match and the scene of Bruno getting back the lighter fallen in the sewer, causes the audience to be on their feet, because of the fast cuts going back and forth in the scenes. Then it all comes down to the amusement park again, where Guy meets Bruno with the final fight scene on the merry-go-around. The spinning of the merry-go-around symbolizes the childhood conflict that rest inside of Bruno, which ultimately puts Bruno to his death. Robert Walker performance made Bruno seem life-like which added to the intensity of the movie also referred by Kael. He says, "...What we re...