In the Flesh: Lost Highway

A man in the throes of delusion, a tulpa living out the addled thoughts that birthed it, a midlife crisis turned rancid and folded back in on itself through occult body-snatching — there are a thousand ways to interpret the house of dust and shadow that is Lost Highway, a film in which every home we see resembles a cold, sterile dentist’s waiting room and every person we meet conceals secrets which multiply, divide, metastasize past the point of comprehension. Fred Madison (Bill Pullman) suspects his wife Renee (Patricia Arquette) is cheating on him, and from this banal anxiety unfolds a series of contradictory and overlapping stories. Fred murders Renee. Fred reincarnates himself as Pete Dayton (Balthazar Getty), a young mechanic infatuated with Alice (Patricia Arquette), the comare of gangster Mr. Eddy (Robert Loggia) and a near-exact double of Renee. Alice double-crosses Pete in classic noir fashion (Out of the Past is everywhere in this film, along with The Third Man) and Fred replaces Pete. There’s a shack at the heart of America that is always burning and always un-burning.

The plot, such as it is, isn’t really the point. The eerie sense of dislocation, the pervading feeling of crushing, terrible guilt — these things drive Lynch’s film. A close watch begins to unpick the dream logic behind its events. What transpires after Fred murders Renee can be read as a fantasy of innocence, Fred reimagining himself as younger and more naive, helpless before Renee’s wiles and ignorant of her background in pornography with Mr. Eddy, who in Fred’s first life is the porn producer Dick Laurent. He refuses the pornographic videotape Mr. Eddy offers him. He blushes and stammers his way through an affair with Alice, and is caught flat-footed by her disregard for him. Crass and wicked, Alice vanishes mid-lovemaking in the desolate emptiness of the desert, reversing the paradigm of victimhood and power established in the film’s first act. It’s then that Fred returns, and shortly thereafter that we learn it was Fred himself who killed Dick Laurent, Fred who videotaped himself and his wife asleep in their bed, who crept in silence through their house, double-bodied through some existential act of will, and played voyeur and murderer both even as he imagined himself a victim.

Unable to integrate the divergent facets of his existence, Fred ends the film screaming and spasming behind the wheel of his car as smoke pours from his body. The highway stretches on ahead of him inexorably into darkness. Police swarm after. Perhaps the loop will close. Perhaps he’ll wake up next to Renee the next morning, head pounding, skin slick with sweat. Perhaps the Mystery Man (Robert Blake) is his accomplice, or his future projected self in the same way that Pete is his own idealized past. That Pete’s story bears so many similarities to Lynch’s earlier Blue Velvet, the innocent teen love interest contrasted against a ruthless gangster’s girlfriend, the reckoning with manhood and our culture’s expectations of its ugliness, the sharp cleavage between how we understand ourselves and how the people around us perceive us, can hardly be an accident. Lynch is working and reworking the same themes here, but his voice and style have matured. He’s able to put us into something that both is and isn’t happening, a movie that exists in a state of self-denial, and with dextrous ease he leaves us to figure it out for ourselves.

This piece was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Without the labor of the writers and actors currently on strike,the series being covered here wouldn't exist.