Psychogenic fugue

From Lost Highway

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Parallels to Lost Highway: psychogenic fugue

Lost Highway employs psychogenic fugue in the psychological sense, but only in a loose sense.

Strictly speaking, what happens to Fred Madison cannot be described as a case of psychogenic fugue. That is, if Fred is interpreted as being locked in a jail cell while imagining or believing that he is Pete Dayton working at Arnie’s garage, etc., then Fred's condition does not correspond to the diagnostic definitions of psychogenic fugue, which do not involve a loss of perceptual contact with one's surroundings or the psychological hallucination of alternative surroundings. If Fred's experience is interpreted in the above manner, his condition does not correspond to dissociative fugue or any other clinically recognized dissociative disorder. This, however, does not rule out interpreting Fred's transformation into Pete as a psychological or fantasy experience.

In a loose sense, the narrative of Lost Highway is similar to cases of psychogenic fugue in several respects. Similar to psychogenic fugue, the transition from the world of Fred and Renee to the world of Pete and Alice is triggered by traumatic, stressful events that Fred wish to deny; it is manifested as a form of wish fulfillment; and it is accompanied by the amnesic forgetting of the past and the assumption of a new identity. Also similar to psychogenic fugue, the identities of Fred and Renee return when elements of the forgotten past resurface and when the new identities are revealed as false.

Parallels to Lost Highway: musical fugue

The film also employs fugue in the musical sense, though the use of fugue seems to have been only partially intended. In the interview with Chris Rodley, Lynch addresses fugue in the musical sense.

Chris Rodley: More revealing than "psychogenic" - which basically means "having an origin in the mind" - the the definition of "fugue". Although it's primarily a musical term, it completely describes the picture: one theme starts and is taken up by a second theme in answer. And the term is used to describe a form of amnesia, which is a flight from reality. Don't both definitions perfectly describe the complex relationship between Fred and Pete?
David Lynch: Exactly. That's why I think they called it a "psychogenic fugue" because it goes from one thing, segues to another, and then I think it comes back again. And so it is "Lost Highway". And whether those people who have this illness come back again or not, or how long the fugue lasts, I don't know. But it gets pretty crazy with two themes churning, finding a way to separate and then come back together again.
Chris Rodley: You could therefore describe "Lost Highway" uniquely as a film that truly echoes a musical term. A real musical! Did you and Angelo Badalamenti discuss the score in terms of a fugue?
David Lynch: We never really got into that. Fugues make me feel insane. I can only listen to a certain amount of a fugue and then I feel like I'm gonna blow up from the inside out. You don't want to stay in your body. Or you'd want to if your body wasn't doing what it was doing. But I'd like to see Angelo do a fugue on a pipe organ, you know? [Laughs]

A fugue elaborates a set of variations on a musical theme. A fugue introduces a musical theme, develops the theme by repeating and modifying it elements, and ends by returning to the theme in its original key.

• Exposition: The section of the fugue that introduces the theme is called the "exposition."
• Middle entries: The following sections that develop the theme are called "episodes" and "middle entries." Various techniques can be used to modify the original theme, such as "inversion" (inverting all interval values, for example, a fourth up becomes a fourth down), "augmentation" and "dimunition" (respectively, lengthening or shortening the lengths of all notes), and retrograde (playing the melody backwards).
• Final entry: The subsequent section, which is sometimes the final section, is called the "final entry." The final entry presents a final statement of the theme in its original key as introduced in the exposition.
• Coda: Fugues often include a brief "coda." Any material that follows the final statement of the theme is considered to be the coda.

Lost Highway's central thematic elements can be interpreted as being the psychological dynamics of Fred’s relationship to Renee. Lost Highway can be interpreted as repeating and modifying these elements in much the same way a fugue does, complete with three main sections and possibly a coda:

• Exposition (from the beginning of the film to Fred’s transformation into Pete)
• Middle entries (ending with Pete’s transformation back into Fred)
• Final (ending with Fred's line "Dick Laurent is dead.")
• Coda (from Fred's line "Dick Laurent is dead." to the end of the film)

Lost Highway introduces its themes via the relationship between Fred and Renee, repeats, modifies, and develops them through the relationship between Pete and Alice, and then recapitulates them in a final entry that returns to the relationship between Fred and Renee.

Lost Highway is like a fugue not only in its overall structure but also in its technique of repeating and recontextualizing specific images, pieces of music, and lines of dialogue: see Scene Analyses.