early automobiles

His films obsessively feature automobiles as symbols of American identity, danger, and the dark underbelly of modernity, particularly in Mulholland Drive and Wild at Heart.

He used cars as central metaphors for modern alienation and capitalism, most famously in Week End where an automobile journey becomes a descent into societal chaos.

His German Expressionist masterpieces like Metropolis and M captured early industrial modernity and the automobile as a symbol of technological progress and social change.