Watching Lynch’s movies is like conducting a science experiment; you know something is happening, but you can’t quite grasp why. Then, a cabin explodes… in reverse… What is going on eh?

Warning: This article contains violence, moderate sex, nudity and an awesome analysis.

Intention

This article will break down what happens in the movie (spoiler alert). In the breakdown, I’m going to highlight significant things in bold and I will refer to these later in the analysis.

It is well known that David Lynch prefers not to explain his movies. They are intentionally abstract, allowing viewers to develop a variety of interpretations. I have deliberately refrained from reading other essays and analyses about Lost Highway, as I want to avoid being influenced by others’ interpretations. Instead, I will share how the film resonates with me in my own mind. I cannot guarantee that my interpretation will be as strong as those of other writers, but this is my perspective, for what it’s worth.

Breakdown

“Lost Highway,” released in 1997, was written by David Lynch and Barry Gifford, and directed by David Lynch with music composed by Angelo Badalamenti. The story follows Fred Madison, a jazz saxophonist played by Bill Pullman, and his wife, Renee, portrayed by Patricia Arquette.

The scene opens with Fred smoking a cigarette, wearing a suspicious expression. Suddenly, the door buzzer sounds, and a voice informs Fred that Dick Laurent is dead. He then engages in a conversation with his wife, Renee. She is mysterious and beautiful, yet a sense of disconnect between them is palpable. There’s an air of untrustworthiness about her, which is conveyed through Patricia’s exceptional performance. She claims that she is going to stay in and read but Fred thinks this is funny, probably as its an unlikely thing for her to do.

Fred is on stage playing jazz saxophone in a dimly lit club. The music is frenetic and wild. I highly recommend checking out the full version of this track, “Red Bats With Teeth,” as it’s an absolute gem for jazz enthusiasts. The piece builds up slowly and has a gritty, grinding film noir edge.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YDMC2kNnIls

Fred comes home to find his wife asleep in bed. He looks at her with suspicion. In the morning, she discovers an envelope on the doorstep. Inside the envelope is a blank VHS tape with no note. They decide to play the tape, which turns out to be footage of the outside of their house. They wonder if it might be from a real estate agent.

Fred is lying in bed. His mind travels back to a moment during his performance at the club. He remembers seeing Renee leave with another man who we will discover later is called Andy.

After remembering this, Fred and Renee make love. Fred reaches his orgasm quickly and Renee taps his shoulder lightly adding, ‘It’s ok.’ You can see from Fred’s face the insecure feeling of being a man who has failed to satisfy his wife and a wild puzzling look flares up on his face.

This adds fire to his paranoia, doubt and jealousy. He lies back and tells her about a dream he had. In the dream, he is looking for her and when he finds her, it’s not actually her. Then, it’s as if he wakes up from a nightmare and turns to Renee, but it’s not Renee but the shape of Renee with the strange pale face of a man. A mystery man.

The next day, they find another VHS cassette, this time it has footage of inside their house and even of the two of them sleeping. Two detectives come to look at the tape, but they don’t have much to say, and they come across as clueless and incompetent. They check the security of the house and ask a few questions. One innocuous question leads to something revelatory. The detective asks if they have a video camera, and his wife says that Fred hates them. Fred adds, “I like to remember things my own way.” The detective is confused about what he means by this and asks him to clarify. Fred replies “How I remember them, not necessarily the way they happened.”

Fred and Renee are at a house party. Andy, the man from the club is there and Renee greets him in a friendly manner, possibly too friendly. Is she having an affair with him? She pleads with Fred to go and get another drink for her from the bar. Is this so she can be alone with Andy? Fred goes to the bar. While he is waiting, a mysterious man with a pale face approaches. He says to Fred, “We’ve met before, haven’t we?” Fred doesn’t think so and asks where. The mystery man replies, “At your house, don’t you remember?” The mystery man goes on to say, “As a matter of fact, I’m there right now.” He gives Fred his phone and asks him to call his house. Unbelievably the phone is picked up and a voice says, “I told you I was here.”

The man walks away, and Fred asks Andy who the man is. Andy thinks he is a friend of Dick Laurent. Fred asks Andy, “Dick Laurent is dead, isn’t he?” Andy is surprised by this and asks Fred how he knows this, and that he didn’t think he knew who Dick was. Fred admits he doesn’t know him, and he doesn’t know why he thinks that Dick is dead and seems very unsure of himself. Has he forgotten that the voice on the buzzer told him that Dick Laurent is dead?

They go home and Bill is worried that there is someone in the house, so he goes around checking. He then catches himself in the mirror and looks at himself as if he is studying a stranger. He then disappears into the darkness. He then finds another VHS tape and plays it. It’s just like the other tapes except this time the camera wanders down the corridor towards their bedroom. In the bedroom, Renee is dead on the floor with body parts strewn around the place. Fred is hovering over her with blood everywhere. Fred is shocked by this and then time jumps, and one of the detectives from earlier, punches him in the face, screaming ‘Killer”. Fred, fearful that he may have killed his wife says, “Please tell me I didn’t kill my wife.”

Fred is being escorted to a jail cell and we can hear a judge reading out his death sentence. While in jail, Fred complains of getting headaches. He sees a doctor who gives him a sleeping pill and he is sent back to the cell. Things get worse in the cell, and he starts calling for the guard, who comes but then ignores him. Fred starts to hallucinate in the cell and sees an exploding cabin in reverse. The same mystery man is there, near the cabin. Then Fred is in a car speeding on the highway and then suddenly stops in front of a young man, his family behind him screaming. Back in the cell, Fred is on the floor clutching his head. His movements are frantic and impossibly fast, indicating that something strange, perhaps supernatural is happening to him.

The next morning, the guard checks on Fred, but it’s not Fred, it’s the young man from Fred’s vision.  The prison faculty check the young man’s I.D. and find out that he is Pete Dayton played by Balthazar Getty. Pete Dayton is a 24-year-old who lives with his parents. He hasn’t done anything wrong, so they release him back to his parents.

Back at home, everything appears to be normal. His friends come over and ask him what happened the other night, but Pete gives a vague answer. They decide to go out. They go to a club and his girlfriend tries to find out more, but Pete says he doesn’t know what happened.

Pete goes back to work as a mechanic at a car shop. His boss is played by the legendary Richard Pryor. Sadly, this was Richard’s last appearance in a film. Richard had contracted multiple sclerosis in 1986.

A black car pulls into the car shop. A man named Mr. Eddy, played by Louis Eppolito, gives Pete a hug. It’s easy to tell that Mr. Eddy is a gangster of some kind and offers to help Pete if he has any trouble with anyone.

They go for a drive and Pete tweaks his engine. During the drive, an aggressive driver gives Mr. Eddy the finger. Mr. Eddy chases him down, pulls him out of the car and beats him up. Pete looks terrified from the ordeal. Best not to mess with Mr. Eddy right?

Back at the car shop, Mr Eddy offers Pete a porno tape which he declines. There are two detectives following Pete’s movements and they recognize Mr. Eddy, but they know him as Dick Laurent, not Mr. Eddy.

The next day, Pete is working under a car when the radio is blaring out the same music that Fred played in the club, Red Bats with Teeth. He gets agitated and gets up and turns it off.

Mr. Eddy pulls into the garage and in the passenger seat is a beautiful woman who is the doppelganger of Renee, except her name is Alice, also played by Patricia Arquette, and has peroxide blonde hair. Pete and Alice share a look and sparks fly. The scene is wonderfully underlined by Lou Reed’s ‘This Magic Moment’. This is a perfectly executed dreamlike scene with slow shots and an intense performance from both actors. I always look forward to watching this scene, it really does feel like a magic moment.

At night, Alice comes back to see Pete. They end up in a motel room and their affair is wild, passionate and there’s an unspoken spiritual connection. It feels like an out-of-this-world love. They meet up a few times and then she phones to cancel their meeting as Mr. Eddy wants to take her somewhere and adds that she thinks Mr. Eddy suspects something. The phone call sends Pete into a strange state; his vision is blurry and he is clearly anxious.

He quells his negative feelings by meeting up with his actual girlfriend, Sheila. Still, even after making love, he is anxious and tormented by Alice. A sense of insecurity looms and it reminds me of the look Fred had after he made love to Renee, emotionally twisted and confused.

Pete’s parents sit Pete down to tell him the police have been asking about ‘that night’. He says he still doesn’t remember anything. They tell him he came home with a strange man. Could this be the mystery man? At this point, Pete has a flashback of Renee’s dead body.

Pete meets up with Alice and Alice convinces Pete into robbing a guy who has ‘parties’ with girls. The money can help them to disappear together, away from Mr.Eddy. Pete reacts jealously to hearing about this guy and asks if she ‘partied’ with him. The insecurity again is reminiscent of Fred’s situation of losing his wife to another man. Alice tells the story of how she met Mr. Eddy.

At gunpoint, she is forced to strip for Mr. Eddy. What starts off, as a clumsy and timid strip, develops into a sexually charged performance with a dark, daring and dangerous side emerging out of Renee. I would assume that Pete hears how she was forced into it, but the audience get to see the reality, which is her embarking on an exciting moment that opens a dark sexual side to her personality.

She then says, ‘Shall I call Andy?’, this is the same Andy who is ‘friends’ with Renee. He agrees to the plan.

Pete goes home and Sheila is waiting. She’s hysterical and correctly assumes that he has been seeing another woman. His mom says there is a telephone call from a man. It’s Mr. Eddy. Mr. Eddy threatens and intimidates Pete. Then Mr. Eddy passes the phone to the mystery man. The mystery man also speaks cryptically and in an indirect but threatening manner. This scene is just terrifying. Mr. Eddy speaks calmly, continuously smiling and saying that he’s glad that Pete’s doing well. It’s a total headfuck.

It’s the night of the robbery and Pete slips through the backdoor as planned. As he walks into the living room, he sees a movie projector projecting a couple having sex. The performer is Alice. This is a huge headfuck for Pete, seeing the woman he is madly in love with and finding out that she isn’t the girl he thought she was. Then Andy appears and Pete knocks him out with a blunt object. Andy gets back up and leaps at him and crashes into a glass table, killing him. Pete says, “We killed him.” Alice, with cold indifference, says, “You killed him.” Alice doesn’t seem the same at this point. She is emotionally distant. After all, it was her plan to do the robbery. Was she just using him?

Pete looks at the sex scene still playing in the background. He then sees a picture on the mantelpiece. It’s a photo of Mr. Eddy, Renee, Alice and Andy. Pete starts to freak out and goes to the toilet but ends up somehow in a motel room corridor. When he reaches room 26 he opens the door to see two people having sex. The woman who resembles Alice a bit, speaks to him and says, “Did you want to ask me why?” Her tone of voice is mean and the question is meant to taunt him.

He leaves and returns downstairs to Alice. Alice says she has a friend who will help them and later adds that they live in the desert. The vision Fred has of an exploding cabin reappears. They arrive at the cabin and knock on the door, but no one is home. Alice says that they will have to wait. Pete for some reason asks, “Why me Alice? Why choose me?” She doesn’t answer. A haunting love song plays from the car radio, and they kiss, lit by car headlights. The whole scene is deeply intimate, and Pete says again and again, “I want you.” Each time he says it, he waits for her to say it back to him, but she doesn’t. Eventually, she answers, “You’ll never have me.” I love the music in this scene. It sounds like something from a Hammer Horror movie. Very gothic!

Then she stands up, looks back coldly at him and walks up to the cabin. When Pete gets up, it’s not Pete, it’s Fred.Fred sees the mystery man go inside the cabin. Fred gets dressed and goes into the cabin and asks, “Where is Alice.” The mystery man tells him that her name is Renee, not Alice and adds, “What the fuck is your name?” Fred, startled, runs off and starts driving.

Fred arrives at The Lost Highway Motel. Inside one of the rooms is Renee and Mr. Eddy, aka, Dick Laurent, having sex. Through a hotel window, Fred watches Renee leave. Then he knocks on Mr. Eddy’s door. He opens the door and Fred attacks him and throws him into his car boot (trunk, if you’re American). He drives out into the desert and opens the boot. Mr. Eddy attacks Fred. During the fight, a hand mysteriously comes out of nowhere offering a blade to Fred. Fred takes the blade and slices Mr. Eddy’s throat. Mr. Eddy looks at them and now the mystery man is standing next to Fred. Fred doesn’t appear to be surprised or confused about the mystery man’s presence. The mystery man gives Mr. Eddy a portable video player which shows glimpses of his affair with Renee, including the sex tapes made of Renee with different men. Then the mystery man shoots Mr. Eddy and hands the gun to Fred. The mystery man vanishes from sight. Was he even there at all?

Detectives surround Andy’s dead body. They notice the same photo Pete looked at earlier. This time the photo was different. Alice is missing from the photo. It’s just Dick Laurent, Renee and Andy. The cops mention that the crime scene is covered in Pete Dayton’s fingerprints.

It’s now the morning and Fred is outside his home. He pushes the door buzzer and says, “Dick Laurent is dead.” He then gets back into his car and a cop car chase ensues.

Fred is racing down the dark highway. As he drives, his face starts to twitch uncontrollably like he did before his transformation into Pete.

The movie ends. The credits roll, and the haunting voice of David Bowie is heard over the dark highway. It’s an amazing song from Bowie’s Outside album, ‘I’m Deranged.’

Analysis

First, as this film has an abstract nature to it, I will break down the movie into significant themes: Insecurity, dissociation, the supernatural and time.

Insecurity

This theme reappears throughout the film and is felt by Fred and Pete. Lynch and Gifford have almost concocted the most extreme scenario that would break anyone emotionally, to be gilted in a sordid manner by the love of your life. Fred and Pete have almost a parallel experience, they are in love with a mysterious and beautiful woman. In Fred’s case, there is suspicion right from the beginning that Renee is aloof or up to no good. With Pete, this comes later after a whirlwind passionate meeting with Alice.  

The importance of insecurity and other emotional elements feels to me to be at the heart of the movie. After all, it’s those feelings that ultimately drive him to murder his wife and then he dissociates from the experience, which we will talk about later.

At the club, he sees his wife leave suspiciously with another man, Andy. Then there’s the heartbreaking moment when he fails not only to please his wife in bed, but then she attempts to reassure him like a child, chipping away at his masculinity. It’s painful to watch. Then at the party, when he is sent away so she can be alone with Andy. Still, we are not sure that an affair is happening, we only have suspicions. I believe that Fred has more than just suspicion, he has that intuition you sometimes get when you have no evidence, you just know, you don’t know how or why, but you just know. I think this is what Fred has throughout the movie and this is shown through those long shots of Fred looking bemused, smoking cigarettes and staring into mirrors.

Then with Pete, he seems to have a parallel existence to Fred. When he has the phone call with Alice and she tells him that she can’t see him that night, he reacts badly. The love, lust or obsession he has with Alice, has caught him in a bind and now he’s like a trapped lamb, vulnerable. He tries to escape the vulnerability by having sex with his girlfriend, but it doesn’t work.

When Alice mentions partying with Andy, his intuition flares up and he wonders insecurely about the nature of their relationship.  When he discovers the sex movies, his fears are confirmed. A similar pain to Fred’s pain, to see the woman he loved in a sordid sexual reality with other men. Both men are crushed in basically the same way. Pete begins to realise that she is more than what he first thought, and he asks her “Why me, why choose me? This shows he has lost faith in the attraction. He wants to believe and hopes that she will tell him. He tells her over again, “I want you.” And then gets the biggest kick when she tells him that he will never have her. At this point, it’s a huge betrayal, and whatever he thought he had, has gone up in smoke. He just killed a man for her, and she doesn’t care. That’s assuming that Alice is even real, but we will come back to that.

Dissociation

Let us look at the Oxford dictionary definition of Dissociation:

‘separation of some aspects of mental functioning from conscious awareness, leading to a degree of mental dysfunction or to mental conditions including dissociative identity disorder.’

When Fred watches the VHS tape, he sees the murder of his wife rather than being consciously aware of it. He has to be shown it. Who filmed it? Is the tape real? I will come back to this as it fits under the topic of the supernatural.

Lynch talks in interviews about where some of his ideas came from. He says he was obsessed with the O.J. Simpson trial. He couldn’t believe how a person who murdered two people, could go on functioning, living every day with the knowledge of what he did; living a normal life, shopping, playing golf etc.

The dissociation in the film is a way of explaining how a person might separate the experience of murder in order to cope psychologically. Fred, under the stress and torment of a cheating spouse, has fragmented his mind. The murder wasn’t done by the conscious side of him but helped along by a darker aspect of himself. This idea of a darker self is supported by the ideas of Carl Jung’s shadow. The parts of ourselves we can’t accept, get suppressed and form part of the shadow. The strange man is either a projection of this shadow that enables him to follow through with the deed or anreal supernatural entity, that has been called to him through his desire to murder.

The Supernatural

It’s hard to understand and explain the impossible events in this movie, and this forces me to assume that they are supernatural in nature.

The videotapes are mysterious. I don’t believe that they are recorded by a human being. They must be supernatural because they are able to enter the house and even film a murder scene undetected. I would imagine that it is the mystery man who is the one filming and putting these tapes in front of Fred and Renee. This would explain how someone could enter undetected. Fred does mention that he turned off the alarm because it kept going off. Was the entity/ mystery man triggering it? Does the unconscious part of Fred i.e. his shadow, know what will happen and turns off the alarm on purpose, letting the entity invade his reality? Possibly. The meeting with the mystery man at the bar and the bizarre phone call to the same man in his home is hard to explain without a supernatural element. Unless this is all psychological, which it could be. Otherwise, the mystery man is an entity that wants to help Fred act upon his desire to murder his wife, which is something Fred cannot consciously accept. When the mystery man asks him to call him at his house, I believe that this is to show that the mystery man has been previously invited into his home through his unconscious desire to murder, while conscious Fred has no idea who this man is.

The transformation is certainly supernatural and hard to explain in real life. Why does the transformation happen? There is either a psychological or supernatural reason for Fred transforming into Pete Dayton. From a psychological point of view, his mind, being fragmented might be trying to run through scenarios that lead him to a better understanding of why Renee has betrayed him, and perhaps he does through Pete. Pete steals Alice off the actual man who stole Renee from him. By doing this he is actually balancing out the harm and pain inflicted on him and inflicting pain on to Dick Laurent/Mr. Eddy. Obviously, this goes horribly wrong as he is deceived by Alice. If the event is supernatural, the transformation could be to create a situation where he gets to repeat the cycle of chasing after a woman only to be destroyed by her. That would mean that the entity or mystery man, is there to enable his destructive tendencies and put him in a cycle of constant torment. Perhaps this is hell? Although I’m not keen on that idea.

Another supernatural element is the existence of Alice. One, is the fact she is a carbon copy of Renee which is difficult to understand how this can be. Two is that she disappears from the photo on Andy’s mantelpiece, suggesting that she might not even be real. Is Pete even real? Well, I think so because even the detectives acknowledge that Pete’s prints are all over the crime scene so he must be real. If Alice isn’t real, then she must be there just to torment Fred/Pete.

We see Pete transform into Fred at the end of the movie. The mystery man tells him that there is no such person as Alice, it’s Renee. The problem here is that Pete is a real person, so has Fred’s spirit somehow possessed Pete and then they are both experiencing the same events so as to punish, torment, or even teach them a lesson?

Time

There are some interesting anomalies in terms of time in the film. There is a strange time loop going on and this is evident when at the end of the movie, Fred tells Fred that Dick Laurent is dead. This is very confusing. Yes, Dick Laurent is dead, but it appears that we are now back at the start of the movie. So, Dick is both alive and dead. Again, as this is hard to accept in reality so for me it falls within the supernatural. I like the idea that Fred’s nightmare just continues on and on, like he is stuck in the reality of loving and losing the woman of his dreams in a vulnerable and emasculating manner. It reminds me of The Tibetan Book of The Dead which describes a state between death and rebirth called The Bardo, a place where you ascend through various realms that are like spiritual trials to challenge through.

I don’t think there is a real answer to what’s going on in this movie and I think that’s the best part of it. I’ve watched the film countless times and continued to think about it and have attempted to put the pieces together. That’s what is so great about David Lynch. His approach is so abstract that it leaves room for the audience to create their own interpretation.

Thanks Mr. Lynch!

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