VIDEOTAPE 1
[Insert videotape. Press play.]
A black road stretching into an even blacker night, leather-dark and eternal, its yellow lines sinuously snake-spined outward into some terrible infinity.
A pensive, unpleasant man looks into a bedroom mirror, staring into his reflection, an empty double made up of intersecting light and glass and nothing besides, grimacing as if repulsed by what he sees.
A whisper, a growl, a warning, a lament, a promise, a clue, a prophecy, a prologue, a mystery—“Dick Laurent is dead.”
[Press stop. fast-forward. play.]
A whisper, a growl, a warning, a lament, a promise, a clue, a prophecy, an epilogue, a mystery—“Dick Laurent is dead.”
A pensive, unpleasant man looks into a rearview mirror, staring into his reflection, an empty double made up of intersecting light and glass and nothing besides, grimacing as if repulsed by what he sees.
A black road stretching into an even blacker night, leather-dark and eternal, its yellow lines sinuously snake-spined outward into some terrible infinity.
[Tape ends. Auto-rewinds. Plays again.]
These are the first and last scenes in Lost Highway. Between those repetitions lies a vast, violent interzone of carnality and fear, of inescapable guilt and shamefucked cowardice, of gruesome insecurity and uncontrollable rage, of memory and fantasy, of women in trouble and the troubled men who haunt them. A bloodjaculate phantasmagoria that portraits an imprisoned murderer’s recursive psychosexual death dream(s), David Lynch’s 1997 black metal opus is purest film noir as stretched through the wormhole of The Twilight Zone, in which all roads lead nowhere and doom headlights everything and the broken lines of the highway recur eternally into a braid that serves as hangman’s noose. It is (somehow) Lynch’s darkest film, and also (again, somehow) his most viciously sex-swallowed and unrepentantly extreme in its surrealistic vivisection of abyssal human depravity. It charts not just the kind of female desire that transcends from simple, libidinal aching into levels of inchoate and insatiable lust, but, most important, it tracks the small, twitched feelings of masculine insecurity about such sexuality that metastasize into murderous bloodletting on a scale unimaginable.
Lost Highway is also, in myriad ways, a kind of thematic and aesthetic Rosetta stone to nearly all Lynch’s films that would come after, a summation of all those that came before it and, in terms of the shape and scope of his body of cinematic work, the most important film of his career.
[Press stop. eject.]
VIDEOTAPE 2
[Insert videotape. Press play.]
Despite being a film with the terror-hummed premise of unhappily-married couple Fred and Renee Madison (an unnervingly sour Bill Pullman and a hypnotic Patricia Arquette) receiving a mysterious series of videotapes filmed from the point of view of someone entering their home at night and recording them as they sleep, despite an abrupt halfway-point reveal that Renee has been murdered and Fred sentenced to death for the killing, despite an unexplained blue storm of Lynch’s beloved electricity replacing Fred in his prison cell with the also unexplained dim, handsomely reptilian twenty-four-year-old auto mechanic Pete Dayton (Balthazar Getty), despite Pete quickly falling into a sensuous doppelgängland pulp tale as old as time in which he befriends a volcanically violent older gangster named Mr. Eddy (Robert Loggia) and begins a life-risking sexual affair with Mr. Eddy’s mol, Alice (again, somehow, Patricia Arquette, now blonde instead of Renee’s Bettie Page’d brunette), despite Alice pulling Pete into a porno holocaust of a murder plot that ends with a double-cross, a desert hotel that doubles as a purgatorial inferno of wanton and quenchless fucklust, and a dreamlike denouement revealing the film’s structure to be a Möbius-stripped reincarnoir never ending, the infamous Lost Highway’s most famous and frightening scene is one of startling quietude and conversation.
A Hollywood Hills pool party hosted by Renee’s handsy, smarmcharmer friend, Andy (Michael Massee). In it, Fred—a sullen, jealous man and successful jazz saxophonist—grimly attends with Renee, about whom he seethes when she (drunkenly draped upon Andy’s arm) dismisses him to get more drinks. As his quiet fury at Renee reaches its peak, Fred matches eyes with a strange figure across the room. Dressed all in black—black velvet shirt with black stripes and black pants—and his face slathered a stark corpsewhite, the figure approaches Fred as the party’s soundtrack (appropriately, the burlesque lounge–jazz of Barry Adamson’s “Something Wicked This Way Comes”) drops to silence. His toothy smile a horrible, frozen rictus slung below two unblinking eyes like some kind of ghoulish, Cenobitten Alfred E. Neuman, he is the Mystery Man (Robert Blake—who, four years later, was tried for the murder of his wife and acquitted under dubious circumstances).
The Mystery Man insists they’ve met before, inside Fred’s home, where he claims Fred has invited him in the past. Confused and clueless, Fred denies ever meeting him. The Mystery Man hands him a phone, demanding Fred dial his own phone number—and on the other end, the Mystery Man answers from inside Fred’s home, while also standing before him.
Contained within this strange, horrifying moment of nerve-gnawing quiet and Lynchian surreality is a small detail, easily subsumed by the horror-film blackness that surrounds it. When the Mystery Man hands Fred his cell phone, Lynch briefly cuts to an insert close-up of Fred’s right hand. Between the saxophonist’s thumb and forefinger is a small tattoo: a black crescent, its horns pointed downward, and just beneath it, a small dot. A musical symbol: fermata.
[Press pause.]
A fermata is a notation indicating to musicians that a musical note should be extended far beyond its intended length in order to draw out tension. A pause. Meaning “to stay.” To distort time and the space it creates. To draw out the tension like a blade. Until it cuts.
[Press rewind. play.]
Lynch and his Lost Highway cowriter Barry Gifford (the monolithically gifted noir writer whose book Wild at Heart Lynch adapted in 1990) introduce Fred and Renee within the claustrophobe confines of their physics-defying home, a place of oppressive, womb-like walls and impossibly long hallways stretching forever into yawning blackness. Theirs is a home of suffocating tension and terror, not of the surreal but of the far too ordinary: this is a haunted house, haunted by a dead marriage and the rotting cavity at its center, Fred, and the threat of domestic violence that amasses around him. An unsettlingly fermata of agonizing, escalating pressure exists between these two, as Renee steps gently throughout her own home and Fred interrogates her every movement with his eyes, his questions, his suspicions. When she opts to stay home during one of his gigs, that night Fred unleashes a frenzied fermata of rage and grief and terror from his tenor sax during the show, his insecurities about the fidelity of the woman he’s pushed away consuming his brain like hungry fire ants. And when he calls her after the set and the phone goes unanswered, his face is consumed with a bloodied red light before fading into black.
Nights later, Fred and Renee lovelessly, dutifully fuck. From some netherworldly distance, almost like a memory, or the imposition of a fantasy, This Mortal Coil’s mournful “Song to the Siren” is heard weaving in and out of the scene, as if a lost soul was soundtracking his haunted recollection of this moment with a song that once mattered to him. Fred collapses atop an unmoved Renee, unable to please her, unable to please even himself, so crushed within the gravity well of his anxious insecurities about his wife’s desires and sexuality that his very own lusts invert to impotent fear and rage. And when Renee attempts to comfort Fred, gently patting his back and whispering “it’s OK,” what’s left of his manhood literally and figuratively shrivels away from her body, from her sex, and the shame that floods into Fred’s features hardens into cold hate.
[Press pause.]
Lynch and Gifford cowrote the script to Lost Highway throughout 1995. As they did, American culture—and their script—became infected to the marrow with the O. J. Simpson trial. The paranoid, jealous, and obsessive Simpson had been accused of so savagely murdering his ex-wife Nicole Brown that when her body was discovered (due to a number of barking dogs during the killing), she was nearly beheaded, and Lynch later admitted to being fascinated with the vacuous, blank-faced man at the trial’s center. How could someone who’d tried to escape California with an armada of police cruisers chasing him after the murder continually profess his innocence? How could a man allegedly cut so viciously into another human being’s body—especially that of a loved one—and then attempt to convince the world, and most especially himself, that he was not responsible? And where, exactly, would that kind of man’s mind force itself to hide from the truth, from the consequences, from himself and his own memories in order to go on after what he’d done?
[Press play.]
Throughout Lost Highway’s first hour, during which Fred tries to enforce a kind of banal normalcy and domesticity upon the stilted, dream-frothed life he and Renee share, several disturbances increasingly erupt, puncturing the ether of their strange, almost anti-real existence. An unseen man at their front door says into their intercom, “Dick Laurent is dead,” then disappears. Fred sees the Mystery Man’s pallid face superimposed upon Renee’s and staring blankly back at him (. . . “you invited me” . . .). Clouds of smoke puncture the veil of their living room. An unknown dog’s bark repeatedly travels, ghostly, into their home from some unseen place (. . . due to a number of barking dogs during the killing . . .).
The couple then receives three videotapes, delivered anonymously to their front door over several days. Tapes pressing into their lives like intrusive thoughts that refuse erasure. The first video holds within its static-snowed and warp-waved lines a slow push-in from the street to their front door. The second tape presses inward, into their home, filming the Madisons as they sleep. During a police investigation that follows, the couple confirm to investigators that they don’t own a video camera, as Fred hates them. “I like to remember things my own way,” he mutters. “Not necessarily the way they happened.”
When the third videotape comes, Fred cannot find Renee to watch it with him. Wearing the exact same clothes as the Mystery Man (. . . black velvet shirt with black stripes and black pants . . .), he watches in queasy horror as the gleefully dancing pixels reveal a naked Fred kneeling over Renee’s dead, bisected body—she’s cut in half like that ultimate avatar of ugly mystery and male sexual violence that haunts so much of Lynch’s work, the Black Dahlia. The Madisons’ bedroom, where Renee once consoled Fred for his inadequacies, is now a gore-gushed constellation of her dismembered body and all it contained.
It is as if Fred’s statement to the police that he refuses to own a video camera because they recall events “the way they happened” establishes a cosmology within Lost Highway—that what is seen on the three videotapes is “reality.” And it is as if Fred’s dismissal of video cameras, his insistence on remembering things “my own way,” indicates a mind that refuses to acknowledge that reality.
It is as if Fred’s is a mind that, when confronted with the putridity of his guilt and his gut-sucking memories of murder, retreats within itself. And it is as if he has created a false narrative of normalcy, in which Renee is still alive, they are still together.
And it is as if Fred’s own intrusive memories, like three videotapes from his wretched mind, blur together to tell another story, the real story of what happened, puncturing the unreal fermata of this wished-for life. It is as if Fred—so pathetic that even in this self-made fantasy, he and Renee still circle one another like frightened, hateful animals spiraling deathward rather than happily coexisting—must retreat even further into himself in order to escape himself, a mental highway as ouroboros into the lightless desert that rots within him.
[Press pause.]
In what may be the only “real” sequence in Lost Highway, Fred is seen in a slate-gray prison, rendered diminutive by slate-gray walls against a slate-gray floor as he sits in his slate-gray cell in his slate-gray prison uniform. Above him, he stares out the heavily barred skylight at the electric-blue storm of the sky, his cell’s only window and its only amenity, the locus of his endless attention.
Before that, in Fred and Renee’s living room, Fred repeatedly looks up to the skylight in the ceiling as if surprised to see it there and the dreamy electric blue it reveals, as if it had never been there before, as if it is intruding from some other place, some other time, some other life, like a voice puncturing a dream.
After that, in the bedroom of the auto mechanic Pete Dayton, a bedroom of the exact same size and layout as Fred’s prison cell, Pete stares upward at a ceiling light that’s crackling and encased in electric-blue glass, a nightmare of dying bugs buzzing against the hot bulb, a thousand little deaths that seem to puncture his world and hint at something just beyond.
[Press play.]
Pete’s is a pulp-swooned world riddled with bad-boy noir clichés, a world into which he is seemingly, suddenly reborn (“it’s like starting a new life,” Lynch noted in an interview). He’s young, handsome, and virile, almost eternally sheathed in a motorcycle jacket and a thick, dark shock of full curly hair, possessing a masculine grace that allows him an easy facility with fixing cars and fucking women. He’s a man’s man for whom women’s legs spread easily, hungrily, eager to take him and be taken by him to the point of near parody. This includes his young girlfriend, Sheila (Natasha Gregson Wagner, whose mother, actress Natalie Wood, was killed under deeply mysterious circumstances after an argument with her husband, Robert Wagner), who, with her dark hair and uneven teeth, resembles a younger, more easygoing and demure Renee.
Pete is an older man’s dream of what it would be like to be young again. His jarringly sudden and unexplained takeover of Fred’s cell and the film’s second half plays like a puerile Fred fantasy, all quietly macho and potent juvenilia, prowling Los Angeles leather-clad and behind the wheel of a thick, black, humming 1967 Plymouth Belvedere (when not whipsawing between traffic on a no-fuckaround-shit Harley Davidson Electra Glide) without a care in the world, every woman trembling for his touch, just as every machine obeys it.
Pete’s power with automobiles earns him the respect of the local gangster Mr. Eddy, another totem of masculine capability—albeit a masculinity prismed through brutal violence, such as when Mr. Eddy savagely beats a tailgater on Mulholland Drive and then explains to him the safe rules of the road. He also makes clear to Pete his sexual voraciousness, matched only by his willingness to kill anyone who touches his woman. Unlike Fred, Mr. Eddy is capable and confident and will mercilessly confront any man who tempts his woman to stray. Like Pete, Mr. Eddy is the kind of man Fred wishes he could be.
Mr. Eddy’s woman is Alice Wakefield, a curvy, carnivorously carnal animal seeking constant sexual gratification, powerfully magnet-drawn to sex like the sweat-stuck pull of skin against leather in a backseat fuck. Within minutes of meeting Pete, she seduces him after he works on her car, launching a series of hotel trysts in which Alice—a woman with Renee’s face and body but a hothouse rapacious desire for only Pete, the star of this story—repeatedly risks everything up to and including her life just to be sexually possessed by this man.
Even then, though, lost within the film noir fantasia about the swing-dick hotshot who balls the Big Man’s girl, Fred’s fear and memory and truth ripple across this illusory world like electric currents. A radio in Pete’s garage blasts out Fred’s screetching sax fermata from his concert earlier in the film. The LAPD begins following and closing in around Pete like a vise, still unsure as to how he appeared in the now-missing Fred’s cell. Sheila abandons him after suspecting that he’s cheated. Mr. Eddy, with the Mystery Man at his side, calls Pete and intimates he knows about the affair with Alice, while the Mystery Man insists that he and Pete have met before.
As before, the dream begins to disintegrate. As before, escape from self becomes the only option, and Alice suggests to Pete they rob Andy’s house to finance their escape from Mr. Eddy. Pete’s eyes, though, grow cataractous with Fred’s insecurities—when Alice reveals to Pete that Mr. Eddy once forced her at gunpoint to fuck, Pete’s imagined version of this confession evolves from Alice trembling naked in fear to kneeling before Mr. Eddy, thick-lipped and aroused. Later, at Andy’s, Pete finds professional pornographic films starring Alice, produced by Mr. Eddy and Andy—the very same trio he also discovers inexplicably in a photograph with Renee. Alice and Renee, together, a loop drawing tight into an inescapable knot.
[Press pause.]
A fermata is a notation indicating to musicians that a musical note should be extended far beyond its intended length in order to draw out tension. A pause. Meaning “to stay.” To distort time and the space it creates. To draw out the tension like a blade. Until it cuts.
[Press play.]
Time and space begin to fold inward on one another, a Euclidian gangbang of nightmare logic overwhelming the rules and laws of physics, blood suddenly gushing from Pete’s nose as Andy’s hallways Möbius-twist into the corridors of “the Lost Highway Hotel” in the arid-desert nowhere of Death Valley, and a hotel-room doorway blasts open to reveal a woman being rhythmically fucked from behind by a faceless man in a room swirling with hellish inferno light so furiously red that while the woman’s face is seen to be Alice’s or Renee’s, her hair color is so blindingly obscured that it could be one or the other, or both, but it doesn’t really matter, does it, they are one and the same now in Pete’s (Fred’s) eyes and Pete (Fred) flees back downstairs to Andy’s home, to Alice (Renee), and they escape out to the desert where they fuck slow-motion and glorious in the hazy heavenlight of a 1965 cherry-red Ford Mustang’s headlamps, the sound of “Song to the Siren” consuming everything like one last romantic wished-for fantasy before Alice (Renee) growls to Pete (Fred), “You will never have me,” and disappears into the desert darkness forever, and when this man stands he is now just Fred again as all veils begin to fall and he returns to the hotel, where Renee has just left after ravenously fucking her lover Dick Laurent (Mr. Eddy), whom Fred—so fucking pathetic and twisted and fearful of a woman’s powerful lust that he envisions Laurent (Eddy) and Renee fucking while they watch an actual snuff film—brings to the Mystery Man so that the Mystery Man may kill him, because not even in this horrid half dream is Fred potent enough to do even that, and then Fred flees, panics and returns to his old home long enough to hit the buzzer and announce “Dick Laurent is dead” before driving fast down the highway, a phalanx of police cruisers chasing him O. J. Simpson–style as perhaps they did in another life, Fred’s real life, the loop coming round to the same place again as his head begins to alight with electricity of rebirth or awakening or perhaps the electric chair he’s sentenced to or maybe just the electric blue of his cell’s skylight waking him up once again only so that he may hide to dream again—
[Press stop. eject.]
VIDEOTAPE 3
[Insert videotape. Press play.]
In the immediate years after the 1991 backlash to the uneven second season of Twin Peaks, and the almost total critical and commercial rejection of the masterpiece Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me in 1992, the mid-1990s were hard years for David Lynch, with studios treating him as an unnecessary risk and pop culture viewing him as an exhausting has-been who’d reached the outer limits of his abilities as an artist and purveyor of a pop surrealism deemed increasingly kitsch and empty. When finally given the opportunity to make another film in the late ’90s, Lynch had the chance to win back critics and audiences alike with something more palatable, more surface, more normal, and reinstate himself into the cultural consciousness.
Instead, he made Lost Highway.
[Press pause.]
In what was perhaps the most crucial pivot point of his career, of his art life, at the midlife age of fifty, Lynch made a film—one so hated, dismissed, and misunderstood in its time—that functioned as both summation and prediction, serving as both the climactic Big Crunch of his cinematic work to that point and the Big Bang of the filmography that would come after. Less a highway than an ouroborol roundelay that rebelled against anyone’s expectations other than his own. With it, Lynch had the chance to mute and malleate his precious art into something, well, less than that, and he refused. Instead, it is the film whose stylistic and artistic innovations developed the cinegrammar used in (and trained audiences for) the intricate, tricky brilliance of works to come like Mulholland Drive, Inland Empire, and the indelible third season of Twin Peaks.
Indeed, at least two of the greatest works of visual arts of the twenty-first century were born screaming from Lost Highway’s spinning whirlpool. What is Mulholland Drive but the story of an LA artist who becomes sexually obsessed with a brunette-turned-blonde, kills her, and hides within a dream that collapses soon thereafter? So too with the third season of Twin Peaks—in its eleventh episode, one character inquires to another about the appearance of the fermata symbol on a mystical map, with the other gravely warning, “You don’t ever want to know about that.” Additionally, Lost Highway is the film in which Lynch first truly began to bend time in on itself, both in his willingness to stretch out scenes in patience-testing fermatas that changed how we experience cinema as well as in his efforts to deconstruct time as the fundamental concept of our existence. It is the film that further pushed Lynch into the exploration of dreams, and the first to thematically pose Twin Peaks’ (and perhaps Lynch’s) ultimate query: “Who is the dreamer?”
All of these things, big and small, were found upon this lost highway.
[Press play.]
If so many of David Lynch’s works are acts of staggering empathy that center “a woman in trouble”—be it Blue Velvet, or Wild at Heart, or Twin Peaks and Fire Walk with Me, or Mulholland Drive, or Inland Empire—perhaps what made Lost Highway so difficult to love upon its release, such the dark, resistant gem of Lynch’s filmography, is its visceral inversion of Lynch’s traditional subject matter. It does not seek to locate the women in trouble as much as it aims to diagnose the malignant source of that trouble, and why it exists, and where it comes from. It is the film that attempts to answer Blue Velvet’s question of why there are men like Velvet’s Frank Booth (and Mr. Eddy, and Fred), tracing their monstrosity back to its origin: fear. The fear of rejection, of humiliation, of inadequacy. Lost Highway does not validate those fears, nor does it empathize with them; rather, within its schismic surrealism and synapse-twisted storytelling, it provides a cold, brutal understanding of its monsters, and the unforgivable ugliness that motors them. It provides a necessary counterpoint to Lynch’s lifelong empathetic investigation into the mysteries of darkness, a world of dangerous men and women in danger, a world of monsters, a world in which one prison guard will gesture to a cell block and note, “That wife killer’s looking pretty fucked up,” and his partner will ask, simply, “Which one?”
Refusing to pursue any other road than his own, Lynch crafted a film that gathered so many of the tropes of his work that preceded it—the noir and genre references, the strangeness, the dark sexuality, the women in trouble, the bad men—and designed for them heightened and exploded themes and aesthetics that would define so much of the second half of his filmography: The elliptical malleability of dreams and time and what it is to be lost in the hellish intersection of both, and the repetitious looping of that hell into a time warp without end.
[Tape ends. Auto-rewinds. Plays again.]
Important to remember upon this road never ending, though, is Lynch’s own admonition: “Keep your eye on the doughnut, rather than the hole.” Perhaps it’s better to eyeball the ouroboros, then, rather than the fermata it forever snakes around.
In the end, while it may be that the fermata is the key—or at least a key—to understanding David Lynch’s film Lost Highway, it is Lost Highway that remains the key to understanding the films of David Lynch. 
Travis Woods lives and writes in Los Angeles. As a teen, he stole the Corvette of a WBO world heavyweight boxing champion. He has a dog and a tattoo of Elliott Gould smoking. Bob Dylan once clapped him on the back and whispered something incomprehensible. He always keeps a Jim Thompson paperback in his back pocket and a karambit knife in his boot. These are the only interesting things about him.
Illustration: Tom Ralston
