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Lost Highway

Lost Highway

By Ian Roberts • April 5th, 2013
DECONSTRUCTING CINEMA, PART 74: LOST HIGHWAY
October Films

Original release: January 25th, 1997
Running time: 135 minutes

Director: David Lynch
Writers: David Lynch, Barry Gifford
Composer: Angelo Badalamenti

Cast: Bill Pullman, Patricia Arquette, Michael Massee, Robert Blake, Balthazar Getty, Robert Loggia

The party 00:27:18 to 00:33:00

Deconstructing Cinema: One Scene At A Time, the complete series so far

Lost Highway

Everything appears normal. I’m upstairs in my old family home. I walk into my parent’s bedroom and hear a strange mooing noise. My throat contracts as I sense something alien, a body lying behind the bed. I can see its legs, its torso. It has no features, it has no face. I’m shaken from the dream but even before I’m awake I realise the mooing was my sleeping-self trying to scream.

I’ve never had a problem with dreams which are classically nightmarish – zombie invasions, rampant monsters, nuclear wars etc. My self-defence mechanism kicks, the dream takes the form of a horror film and I shift from protagonist to spectator. The bloodier and more disturbing it becomes, the more enjoyable I find it. The dreams that prove genuinely terrifying are those, like the example above, which sneak past my defences by concealing the macabre within the mundane.

When it comes to translating dream logic into the language of film, few directors are as fluent or adept as David Lynch. The protagonists in his triptych of death fantasies – Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive (2001) and Inland Empire (2006) – are all hopelessly trapped by guilt or tragedy and are moments away from their demise. The only escape route open to them is to dive into the realm of dreams and fantasies and yet, as they replay and attempt to rewrite the events which lead to their downfalls, their dreams are invaded and subverted by sinister forces from within their unconscious minds. The protagonists must face the truth or spend their final moments trying in vain to outrun their inner demons.

Lost Highway’s dreamer is Fred Madison and his dream takes the form of a Film Noir in which he plays the victim hero whilst his wife, Renee (Patricia Arquette), is cast as the femme fatale. When he attends a party being held by Andy (Michael Massee), the man he suspects is having an affair with Renee, Fred is confronted by a strange figure known only as the Mystery Man (Robert Blake).

Lost Highway

The scene starts with Andy entering the room and Renee drunkenly stumbling into his arms. She sends Fred to the bar and as he passes through the party his alienation from the other guests is signified by the expressionistic use of sound. Apart from when he speaks to the barman, we hear only the music being played in the room; the sound of the crowd has been removed completely.

Fred orders two double whiskeys and drinks them both. It’s at this moment the background music is replaced by a rumbling drone and, looking like a vampire from a silent movie, the Mystery Man appears and heads straight for Fred. During the ensuing conversation the Mystery Man is shot in extreme close up, as if he’s standing too close for Fred’s liking. After an uncomfortable pause, the Mystery Man states they’ve met before at Fred’s house. Fred, confused and defensive, denies this. The Mystery Man adds that Fred invited him into his home and, furthermore, he is there right now.

Fred chews this over for a few moments before delivering a measured response of ‘that’s fucking crazy, man’. The Mystery Man passes Fred a mobile phone and invites him to call his own number to speak to him. Fred eventually does so and, seemingly, the Mystery Man answers. In a fantastically chilling moment, when Fred asks ‘who are you?’ the Mystery Man and the voice on the phone laugh in perfect sync. The Mystery Man then informs Fred it’s been a pleasure. As he walks away, the background music and some crowd noise returns.

In keeping with this being Fred’s subjective re-imagining of the real party, the scene concludes with Fred grabbing Renee, heading for the door and bitterly remarking ‘we never should have come here in the first place’. By displaying he was in two places at once, the Mystery Man stresses Fred’s essential duality. The Fred we see is an innocent incarnation created in a moment of extreme stress by his dreaming self, a process which unwittingly also created the Mystery Man.

Lost Highway

The Mystery Man has his roots in the Gothic horror notion of ‘the double’, described by David Bunnell as ‘a reflection or shadow figure’. He’s no Dr Jekyll-style murderous incarnation of Fred though. Slavoj Zizek argues that the Mystery Man is a ‘neutral medium-observer, a blank screen which “objectively” registers Fred’s unacknowledged fantasmatic urges’. In psychoanalytical terms, this places the Mystery Man as a combination of the Jungian Shadow Self; the site of all our repressed and suppressed fears, and the Freudian Superego; an internal figure of authority which suppresses the animalistic urges of the id and drives the ego to act morally.

The Mystery Man’s small build and lack of facial hair (not even eyebrows) give him an asexual appearance and yet he plays a paternal role. He confronts Fred at the dreamed version of the party as it was directly after the real party that Fred carried out the terrible crime that he is trying so hard to escape from, the savage and sexualised killing of Renee.

Following on from the Mystery Man’s intervention, reality bleeds into the dream and Fred is arrested, convicted and sentenced to death for his wife’s murder. Most films would’ve almost run their course by this point but Lost Highway is just getting started. In one of Lynch’s most fantastic moments (and that’s fantastic in both senses of the word), Fred literally morphs into another character, Pete Dayton, whilst waiting on death row.

From here on in, Lost Highway is gloriously loopy and often shockingly violent as the characters cheat, double-cross and plunge ever deeper into the primal horrors of Fred’s unconscious mind. Whilst this is all great fun, it’s the restraint of the opening section, and the party scene in particular, which succeeds in communicating the kind of dream in which everything at first appears normal but, on closer inspection, the alien and uncanny are ever present. Or to put it another way, the moo-inducing nightmares in which you encounter the macabre concealed within the mundane.

SOURCES:
1. Charlene Bunnell. 1984/1996. ‘The Gothic: A Literary Genre’s Transition to Film’ in Planks of Reason – Essays on the Horror Film, ed. by Barry Keith Grant, (London: Scarecrow Press)
2. Slavoj Zizek, The Art of the Ridiculous Sublime: On David Lynch’s Lost Highway (Seattle: The Walter Chapin Simpson Center for the Humanities, 2002)

Lost Highway

Ian Roberts

Ian Roberts

After spending the last ten years playing in bands and promoting electronica nights in Winchester (Hampshire, UK), Ian combined his love of film and music by co-founding SuperCool Cinema, a pop-up cinema specialising in live soundtracking and double-bills of cult classics old and new.

SuperCool cinema’s modestly sized film blog has also enabled him to carry on writing since completing his Master of Arts in Film Studies, highlights of which include his epic thesis on 21st Century revenge cinema and leading a group reading of the opening twenty minutes of David Lynch’s Inland Empire.

Put a gun to his head and demand to know his favourite three films and he would say 2001: A Space Odyssey, Robocop and Fargo but then follow you around saying that he was maybe considering swapping Fargo for The Fly or Notorious until you got your gun out again.

You can follow Ian on Twitter at @SuperCoolCinema and on Facebook.

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