Lost Highway
Director: David Lynch
1997 USA
Jazz saxophonist Fred Madison receives a message on his intercom: “Dick Laurent is dead.” He and his wife Renee receive a couple of anonymous videotapes which show home footage of their apartment, and of them sleeping. Madison secretly suspects Renee of having an affair. At the party of drug dealer Andy, he has a bizarre encounter with a Mystery Man, in which he is instructed to phone his own home, only to find the Mystery Man, while still physically present at the party, answers the phone. Fred seemingly kills his wife, and is sentence to the death chair. In his prison cell the next day, the guard finds not Fred, but Pete Dayton, a car mechanic. When Dayton is released, he meets Alice Wakefield, the mistress of gangster Mr. Eddie. He embarks on a passionate affair with Alice, and they agree to con a pornographer for whom Alice once did work for. It turns out to be Andy. After successfully robbing and unintentionally killing Andy, and on the way out of town, the two stop by a deserted hut, where Alice disappears and Pete transforms into Fred Madison. Fred and meets the Mystery Man, and together they kill Mr. Eddie. The next morning, Fred, followed by the police, presumably after him for the killing of Andy, leaves a message at his own intercom: “Dick Laurent is dead.”

In the early days of narrative cinema, there was a problem with even the most simple of edits: the cut away, wherein one shot is replaced with another shot, which at first appears to be unrelated. It is only in the context of this transition that these separate shots form a meaning intelligible to the audience. In Lost Highway, however, precisely the opposite is true. When, a third into the movie, Fred Madison transforms into an entirely different character Pete Dayton, it confuses the viewer. Proceedings are given even more complexity when Pete, our new protagonist in the narrative’s discourse, meets Alice Wakefield, played by the same actress as Fred’s wife Renee, Patricia Arquette. When the cops, who have just released an innocent Pete from jail, reveal that his gangster associate Mr. Eddie is in fact Dick Laurent, things become even more confusing. And when, by the end of the film, Pete has transformed back to Fred, and Mr. Eddie into Dick Laurent (not to mention an appearance by Andy in both parallel narratives), viewers could well be throwing in the towel.

This is, then, no conventional work. Lynch employs Brechtian techniques in a meandering plot which deals, essentially, with questions of identity and character crises. When trying to justify the over-elaborate, dense narrative of his Mulholland Dr. (2001) on the Region 2 DVD, Lynch hints that questions of identity are part of everyday life, and we all have to deal with it. This contemporary noir, with its convoluted character-switching and circular narrative, may be taken as a film which labours a point which could easily be dealt with in less tortuous circumstances. But there is a fitting quote from one of Lynch’s influences, to counter this point, and the director may even have paraphrased it himself at one point or another. “In order to convey fact, you can only ever so do through distortion,” so painter Francis Bacon was announced. Here, in Lost Highway, the distortion becomes, oddly, the only way to get Lynch’s message across.

Told, as ever, as a brooding Lynchian nightmare, with Peter Deming’s camera accentuating the alarming reds and stark Baconesque yellows and pinks of the characters’ spacious, minimalist apartments, Highway starts as a conventional film noir before turning into a disturbing, often frightening mystery, slowly unfolding itself into an even deeper, denser world of mistrust and suspicion. The opening third, in which Fred and wife Renee receive a series of mysterious videos of footage of themselves sleeping in their bedroom, comprises a succession of short, disjointed scenes made all the more strained by the editing: a slow train of fade to blacks, as if to suggest falling in and out of consciousness, dreaminess, a state of nightmare. Lynch’s camera lingers on the dark corners of rooms, wanting, but scared to, explore them further. In contrast, the part in the film dealing with Pete’s decline into lustful desire for mistress Alice is more wordy and, to perhaps seem as far away from Fred’s opening character arc as possible, told with more purpose.

That Fred and Pete are the same characters has widely been argued, and to valid extent. But what if we, as an audience by now used almost too used to the language of film, and immune to its potential to create new, innovative sparks in its mechanics, are taking it for granted that, as the same characters crop up in each of the film’s parallel narratives, they must belong in the same world? What if, when we cut away to Pete’s story, we have been taken to a whole new world which only looks the same as that in which Fred was jailed? Looking at the film in this way, taking one world as some kind of reality and the other as a dream, each separate story, even when morphing into one, as it seems to do in the latter stages, can now be enjoyed for what it is. Or indeed, the two narratives could well be two cogs on the same wheel, and the film itself is, in true Lynch fashion, an inescapable nightmare for all, with characters taking on the names of others. Or rather, this is a kaleidoscopic precursor for Cronenberg’s A History of Violence (2005), a film which deals with masculine wish-fulfilment to transform into an alter-ego in order to cope with the boredom of life. Here we have the predominant characters all with their own alter egos; Fred and Pete, Renee and Alice, Mr. Eddie and Dick Laurent, and, it could even be argued, the Mystery Man and Andy.

From whose point, then, is this nightmare told? An obvious answer would be Fred’s. It has been debated that the second half of the film is merely Fred convincing himself, through an extended fantasy in which he is Pete Dayton, of his own innocence in his wife’s murder. But the film could equally be regarded as from Pete’s point of view, with Fred the fictional character. But to ask these questions is to not necessarily seek an answer; indeed, when watching Lost Highway, you get the feeling that Lynch is simply exploring ideas here: masculine doubt (both Fred and Pete have problems finishing during sex), identity crises and, to study the haunting surface level of the film, nightmares and their connection to memory and the unconscious.

Thanks for reading,
Mick