"Lost Highway"

It's a common occurrence in discussions of David Lynch films that their bizarre and inexplicable elements are interpreted as dreams or delusions on the part of one of the characters. In Mulholland Drive, Diane Selwyn fantasises that she's Betty Elms; in Inland Empire Nikki Grace gets lost in the fictional world of the film she is preparing to star in; perhaps all of Twin Peaks is a dream of Laura Palmer's, or Dale Cooper's, or someone. While these interpretations are, I would say, entirely valid, I've always found them a bit boring.

The same is true of his 1997 film Lost Highway, which as of time of writing I recently rewatched at a local retro cinema. The film, this interpretation goes, is a delusion or a coping mechanism on the part of death row inmate Fred Madison, who murders his wife out of suspicion that she's being unfaithful, and then reimagines himself as young mechanic Pete Dayton, his wife as a mobster's femme fatale mistress, and his fate not the consequences of his own misdeeds but the result of a criminal conspiracy beyond his control. This narrative is perhaps all being played out during his own demise in the electric chair.

Perhaps the best or at least the most useful analysis of Lynch I've ever encountered was at an academic conference in 2018 at which a speaker opined that Lynch's films are, at least as far as their relationship with their creator goes, all surface. This is to say that what you see is what you get in Lynch films; he isn't hiding something from the viewer and expecting them to decipher it. Rather, what occurs onscreen, no matter how bizarre or inexplicable, is precisely what happens in the story. David Roche argues that Lynch's films "frustrate the spectator’s need for a rational diegesis by playing on the spectator’s mistake that narration is synonymous with diegesis [...] narration prevails over diegesis, the order of events in chronological time". Thus the film's interior world is only ever want the film presents it as being, regardless of whether those things relate to each other in a wholly rational fashion. This is not really surprising even if unconventional; the film's diegetic world does not really exist and what we are shown in the film is all that it really is. There is no particular reason that things in the film are obliged to follow the same logic as the "real" world.

Roche presents the "bliss" of Lynch films then as being that the role of "detective", of mystery-solver, is devolved upon the audience, who can and over the years have derived much from wrestling with the inexplicable elements of his films and trying to make sense of them. Hence the interpretation that most of the film is Fred Madison's delusion, which explains away anything which is otherwise impossible to explain. But the surface reading takes a different approach by proposing, again with reference to this relationship between narration and diegesis, that what we see in the film is exactly what happens, and yet this also closely relates to the concept of dreaming.

At least one neuroscientific explanation for dreaming, as far as I'm aware, holds that during sleep the often unrelated or at least unrealistic images that emerge in our minds are given the illusion of narrative logic by the hippocampus, the part of the brain which allows us to interpret our experiences in a cause-and-effect manner. This explains the phenomenon that dreams so often make perfect sense to our sleeping minds but are quickly identified as absurd once we wake. Lynch is a master of conveying this experience through the art of cinema, by having enough connections between things that on one level we interpret them as making sense, but also enough inconsistencies that on another we perceive them as incoherent and illogical. The tension between these two opposed elements is why Lynch films are so effective at simulating the experience of having a dream, as they create the feeling that things make sense when they actually don't, at least not fully. And just as so much of dreaming seems to be made up of semi-random combinations of emotion, memory and imagination given the illusion of narrative, without the kinds of hidden meanings that mysticist dream analysis likes to assert, the bizarre and inexplicable events in Lynch's films are not necessarily as rife with hidden mystery as many viewers might wish them to be, but rather semi-random inclusions that Lynch thought were powerful, interesting or amusing without needing to have some obscured significance that he has deliberately hidden from his audience. The title itself is that: a phrase Lynch read in one of co-writer Barry Gifford's novels and simply liked the sound of.

Both times I have watched Lost Highway I found myself much more inclined towards this what-you-see-is-what-you-get reading of the film. I interpreted it quite straightforwardly as a film about a man who turns into another man while in a prison cell, lives that man's life for a time while having a relationship with a doppelgänger of the first man's wife, and then transforms back into the first man at the end. Why do any of these things happen? Not for any particular reason; they simply do. None of this is to say that the film isn't about jealousy, or violence, or the cruelty, futility and self-destructiveness of possessive and insecure men's efforts to control or dominate women, or about the seedy goings-on behind closed doors among the rich and powerful of Los Angeles, or how guilty people rationalise their crimes and construct false identities, because of course it's still about any and all of these things. It just doesn't have to be Fred Madison's dream. Again, that doesn't mean that it isn't like a dream, because I would argue that a consistent theme of many of Lynch's films is that waking life and having a dream aren't always that different.

This comes with a host of other impressions I have received both times I've watched the film that differ a bit from a conventional reading. For instance, in both of my viewings I got the feeling that Renee's murder never actually happened: that it was staged, or took place in some other "reality", or whatever, and the fact that we cut from Fred viewing the tape of the murder (who was filming it?) to his interrogation to his incarceration suggests him being swallowed up into whatever story the maker of the video tapes was trying to impose upon him or, more generally, the narrative trajectory the film had decided to take him on. Note that we only see a few frames of footage depicting the crime scene outside of the tape. Fred sees a video of himself having murdered his wife and then, suddenly, he's in jail for his wife's murder. It is very difficult to draw a line between Fred's life, his memories, the story being created by the video tapes, and the story of the film itself.

Similarly, it always seemed that Pete Dayton had a bizarre kind of binary existence, namely that he himself and his world (his house, his job, his parents, his friends, Sheila, and so on) all already existed and that yet somehow they were dreamed into existence the instant he swapped places with Fred, or Fred became him, or whatever, at the same time. Where does Fred go when he either becomes Pete or Pete takes his place? The police very much seem to view them as distinct people; we can boringly explain this as Fred's delusion, or accept that there are things going on that do not follow the rules of reason, logic or causality and thus cannot be explained. Note that this does not mean that they are "supernatural" in the traditional sense. They are simply inexplicable; fiction allows that. We never find out what happened the night Pete took Fred's place in the prison; whatever it was, Pete's father refuses to say. Seemingly it was too horrible or insane to tell. Does Pete not remember what happened that night, or does he not remember his life at all because he didn't exist until the moment he took Fred's place, or both? Where does Pete go when he turns back into Fred, or Fred takes his place, or whatever happens? And was Pete just some poor unfortunate whose fate became tied to Fred's by sheer random bad luck, or because of his and Fred's respective connections to Mr Eddy and Dick Laurent, who may or may not be the same person? Or is he just the person Fred wishes he was, until his insecurities about his wife reassert themselves? I find myself preferring an explanation in which he is all of these things at once.

Finally, there's the Mystery Man, who obviously occupies a similar space in Lynch's oeuvre to the various Lodge entities from Twin Peaks, the Man Behind Winkies and the Cowboy from Mulholland Drive and the Phantom from Inland Empire. I can accept that he's a manifestation of Fred's insecurities while also being prepared to believe that he's some kind of teleporting bilocating enforcer for Eddy/Laurent who later betrays him, and maybe he's also Alice, who is sort of also Renee while sort of also not. Eddy/Laurent may also be two different people, or one man going by two names, or a person who Fred only knows as a name for whom he concocts a character in his delusion. I think I always sort of thought that the Pete part of the story took part in a different "world" to the Fred part, divided by age and class and the structure of the story itself, and that "Mr Eddy" was the Pete version of Laurent, while also known as Laurent to the detectives, who seem to exist in both Fred's world and Pete's. More accurately, Fred's world and Pete's world are two different worlds which are also the same world at the same time, and the Mystery Man is in both of them.

Maybe it all comes down to Renee and Alice, who, as I said above, are sort of the same person while also sort of not. We can interpret Alice as the manifestation of Fred's insecurities about his wife, but she's also the figure whose power lies in the fact that Fred can't control her, as much as he wants to; he may kill her (or just fantasise about doing it; who knows) but he can never "have" her. She is her own person and no amount of jealousy, suspicion, insecurity or abuse will ever change that. Because Fred's problems lie within himself, nothing he does to or with Renee can ever change them or make them go away. As Pete becomes infected with Fred's insecurities in the course of his relationship with Alice, Alice changes. She may have been performing the whole time, or she may have become distant and mocking because that is what she becomes in intermixing with Fred's/Pete's insecurities. All Fred can do is take out his anger on Eddy/Laurent; Alice vanishes and/or is subsumed back into the character of Renee, who is in fact still alive and leaves the movie after being with Laurent. I see Pete almost as a victim of Fred's failings as time passes and he falls more and more under Fred's shadow until Fred returns to take his place.

As such I would argue that interpretations of Lost Highway that see it just as Fred's dream have missed the point a bit. It's not that it is a dream, it's that it's like a dream. Reality itself does not follow the kind of diegesis that a piece of fiction does, and much of Lynch's work has brought this into focus. It's the experience that matters, the sense of things that have significance regardless of whether they follow the cause-and-effect logic of a traditional narrative. For our minds interpret these things as connected regardless of whether they are in a manner which makes sense in waking life. A film does not need to present things in this manner to have impact; indeed not doing so may be more powerful, with the right approach.