Collaborative Interpretation of Lost Highway

From Lost Highway

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Directed by David Lynch
Written by David Lynch, Barry Gifford
Starring Patricia Arquette, Bill Pullman, Balthazar Getty, Robert Blake, Robert Loggia, et al
Music by Angelo Badalamenti, Trent Reznor, Barry Adamson, et al
Produced by Deepak Nayar, Mary Sweeney, Tom Sternberg
Distributed by October Films
Runtime 135 min.
Aspect Ratio 2.35:1
MPAA Rating R for bizarre violent and sexual content, and for strong language
Filming locales Los Angeles, CA; Barstow, CA; Death Vally Junction, CA
Filming dates Sep. 1995 - Feb. 1996
Release dates Jan. - Apr. 1997
Budget $15,000,000 (estimated)
IMDb Listing and DVD Comparison

Contents

Introduction and General Overview

In a note at the beginning of the screenplay, David Lynch described Lost Highway in what reads like a series of taglines:

"A 21st Century Noir Horror Film.
A graphic investigation into parallel identity crises.
A world where time is dangerously out of control.
A terrifying ride down the lost highway."

Lost Highway is a dark and erotic psychological thriller that explores themes of infidelity, jealousy, and violence. It is an example of contemporary film noir combined with surreal images and plot developments.

Linear plot outline in three parts

Lost Highway can be described as having three parts.

  1. In the first part, Lost Highway introduces jazz musician Fred Madison and his wife, who are played by Bill Pullman and Patricia Arquette. Though no acts of infidelity are shown to the audience, Fred is portrayed as fearing that Renee is cheating on him. And though Fred does not express his sexual anxieties, a tense and uncomfortable sex scene portrays Fred as fearing that Renee does not want him and that he does not satisfy her. The first segment of Lost Highway ends with Fred murdering Renee and mysteriously transforming into another man, Pete Dayton, in his jail cell.

  2. In the second part, Pete Dayton, a young auto mechanic played by Balthazar Getty, has a passionate sexual affair with a woman named Alice Wakefield, played by Patricia Arquette. However, Alice is virtually under the possession of a powerful and violent mafia-boss-like man named Dick Laurent, a.k.a. Mr. Eddy, played by Robert Loggia, though Alice and Mr. Eddy are not married. Moreover, Alice is portrayed as a pornographic actress and as using sex for personal gain. The second segment of Lost Highway ends with Alice defying Pete's desire to possess her and Pete transforming back into Fred Madison.

  3. In the third, and shortest, part, which may or may not a remembering of earlier events, Fred finds Renee and Dick Laurent together, having sex, at the "Lost Highway" hotel. As well, it is now Renee who is shown in a pornographic film. The film ends with Fred murdering Laurent and driving into the desert in flight from the police.

General overview

One way to present a general overview of Lost Highway, without committing to a single theory of "what really happened," is to say that Lost Highway unfolds and explores the inner workings of Fred Madison's fears and fantasies regarding his wife Renee. Fred’s fantasies and fears are full of contradictions, but they play themselves out in the following ways:

  • Fred murders Renee (first portrayed in Fred's dream, prior to the murder)
  • he is her virile lover and she cannot get enough of him (as portrayed through Pete Dayton and Alice)
  • she is possessed by another man (Mr. Eddy) and she is a whore (as depicted through her relationship to Andy, the pornographic filmmaker)
  • he finds her with another man and kills him (this happens twice: Pete finds Alice with Andy, and Fred finds Renee with Laurent)
  • she eludes his possession (Pete: "I want you Alice." / Alice: "You’ll never have me.")

Another way to present a general overview of Lost Highway is to say that it is a "metafilm," that is, a film about film. More specifically, Lost Highway uses non-linear narratives to examine multiple facets of a prototypical film scenario: the adulterous wife and the jealous husband.

Theories of Lost Highway

At the most general level, theories of Lost Highway as a whole diverge over questions about "what really happened."

Two questions in particular serve to differentiate several different approaches to interpreting the film.

  1. Does Fred transform into Pete in his jail cell, or does Fred imagine transforming into Pete?
  2. If one interprets Fred’s transformation into Pete as imagined, then a subsequent question arises: did Fred actually Andy and Laurent, or did Fred imagine these murders.

Depending on how one answers the above questions, the following interpretive approaches emerge:

  • Fred imagines transforming into Pete, and:
    • Fred actually murdered both Laurent and Andy: Fred murders Laurent, then Renee, then Andy. Then he imagines transforming into Pete, but the repressed realities of his past begin to creep back in. The chronology for triple-homicide is as follows: Fred murders Laurent prior to the scenes we see at the beginning of the film, and he murders Renee and Andy after Andy’s party.
    • Fred actually murdered Laurent and imagines murdering Andy: Fred murders Laurent and Renee, imagines transforming into Pete and killing Andy, then the repressed realities of his past begin to creep back in.
    • Fred actually murdered Andy and imagines murdering Laurent: Fred murders Renee and Andy, and then works through his repressed suspicions and desires via his fantasies, though he never actually caught Renee with anyone and he never killed a man named Dick Laurent.
    • Fred imagines murdering Andy and imagines murdering Laurent: Fred murders Renee, imagines transforming into Pete, and then works through his repressed suspicions and desires via his fantasies, though he never actually killed Laurent or Andy.
  • Fred transform into Pete in his jail cell, and the scenes are left in the chronological order in which they appear in the film: Fred murders Renee, transforms into Pete, becomes Alice’s lover, kills Andy, is rejected by Alice, turns back into Fred, catches Renee with Laurent, then kills Laurent. This interpretation cannot pretend to be realistic. Rather, it lets the film play out the surreal realization of Fred’s contradictory fears and fantasies about Renee, pushing them to their "logical", but contradictory, conclusions. This sort of surrealist interpretation is made possible by the fact that Lost Highway, unlike Wizard of Oz, It's A Wonderful Life, and countless other films, provides no definitive "return to reality" after entering an imagined or alternate world.

Mobius Strip

A mobius strip is continuous one-sided surface made by taking a regular two-sided strip (of paper, for example), turning one end upside down, and attaching it to the other end. One can now trace a continuous line beginning anywhere on the strip and return to the starting point, having traversed both sides of what had been a two-sided strip.

At the end of Lost Highway, Fred returns to the beginning of the film ("Dick Laurent is dead."), having traversed a parallel identity. Fred's journey can thus be seen as having the structure of a mobius strip.

Additional Internal Links

Screenplay

  • Paperback: Lynch, David and Barry Gifford, Lost Highway, Faber and Faber (1997) (ISBN 0571191509). The book also includes a 15 page interview of Lynch by Chris Rodley.

Published works and film reviews

  • The Art of the Ridiculous Sublime: On David Lynch's Lost Highway, (ISBN 0295979259) by Slavoj Zizek, 2000.
  • Numerous essays and reviews are available at City of Absurdity

External Links

Retrieved from "http://editthis.info/lost_highway/Collaborative_Interpretation_of_Lost_Highway"
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