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Funny How Secrets Travel: David Lynchs Lost Highway
by Alanna Thain
© 2004
The direct time-image is the phantom which has always
haunted the cinema, but it took modern cinema to give a
body to this phantom. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The
Time-Image
1
David Lynchs 1997 film Lost Highway is haunted by the specter of
Alfred Hitchcocks Vertigo (1958), itself a ghost story on many levels.
2
In Lost Highway, the spectralizing effects of recording and
communication devices are rendered in graphic form; characters get
lost in the medium, in the delay of the lost time. No longer simply the
art of the index, Lost Highway puts the virtual observer into the scene,
and characters are caught in the movement of affect, a vertigo of
suspense that is not simply epistemological in nature. Inspired by the
spiral form that dominates Hitchcocks masterpiece, Lost Highway
explores the effects of living in a world characterized by paramnesia.
A form of déjà vu, paramnesia is a disjunction of sensation and
perception, in which one has the inescapable sense of having already
lived a moment in time, of being a witness to ones life. Consider Gilles
Deleuzes description of the crystal image, a key element of the time-
image in Deleuzes analysis of cinema. The crystal image is an
indivisible unity of an actual image and its virtual image:
The present is the actual image, and its
contemporaneous past is the virtual image, the image in
a mirror. According to [Henri] Bergson, paramnesia (the
illusion of déjà vu or already having been there) simply
makes this obvious point perceptible: there is a
recollection of the present, contemporaneous with the
present itself, as closely coupled as a role to an actor.
Our actual existence, then whilst it is unrolled in time,
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duplicates itself alongside a virtual existence, a mirror
image.3
The effect of this doubling is manifestly uncanny; as Bergson goes on
to describe it: whoever becomes conscious of the continual
duplicating of his present into perception and recollection will compare
himself to an actor playing his part automatically, listening to himself
and beholding himself playing.
4 Like Hitchcock, whose greatness,
and also violence, in a sense, was to adapt characters to the situation
of the camera, David Lynch is one of the great thinkers of the
relationship between recording mediums and the human form. Lost
Highway takes to extreme Deleuzes contention that in the time-image,
the hero records rather than reacts.
5 Lynch explores this on a literal
level, examining the effect of recording devices and communication
mediums, and insisting on the uncomfortable fit between them and
the human form. In Lynchs films, technologies have an anamorphic
effect on the body; that is to say, they do not metamorphize the body
into a new, completed form, but de-figure itvisibly and aurally.
6 As
such, even the most familiar technologies, such as electricity or the
telephone are rendered in such a way as to highlight their dirtinessto
make visible what we have become accustomed to ignoring.
Electricity has a presence in Lynchs work, not merely as a conduit or
medium, but as a deforming element. In Lost Highway, the operation
of technology is constantly made manifest, in two main ways: one,
through temporal delay, such as the intercom message that gets lost
in the medium for the length of the film, and two, through a noisy or
dirty quality, where an image on a video screen competes for
significance with the static between pictures, and where the failures of
technology figure the brutal reshaping of the human form. Like a
skipping record, Lynchs films suggest that these aspects of
technology are not mere annoyances.
7
Also like a skipping record, these failures generate a field of doubles
and repetition, but in the sense of Deleuzian repetition, which requires
a rethinking of medium. In calling attention to the medium, there is not
an unmasking of illusion, but a stretching of the frequently overlooked
transition and change that these mediums entail. Repetition highlights
the temporal element of medium that is usually condensed or ignored,
and makes it the agent of repetition with a difference. In Lost
Highway, repetition takes the form of a loop that marks the
indeterminate quality of change. In Difference and Repetition,
Deleuze notes that what is repeated in repetition is difference itself: A
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bare, material repetition (repetition of same) appears only in the
sense that another repetition is disguised within it, constituting it and
constituting itself in disguising itself.8 The double, then, is not defined
by resemblance or the same, but by masked difference as an affect of
time. When in Lost Highway Patricia Arquette appears as Alice for the
first time, but after already having appeared as Renée, thus
embodying her second character, the static of Arquettes presence
creates a ripple effect in the film. A clichéd use of slow motion
highlights the slowness and weightiness of her actions. As she steps
out of a car, the soundtrack resonates with a sense of familiarity and
disquiet. Lou Reed performs a tight, minimalist version of the Drifters
hit This Magic Moment. The song is recognizable at once, but also
strangely unfamiliar and newly inflected. It is literally a magic moment,
so different and so new, but like any other. This uncanny repetition
with its uncertain temporality is characteristic of the film as a whole,
and Arquette as a bad copyan unfaithful woman, but also insufficiently
disguised in her dual roleembodies Deleuzes notion of the
simulacrum as the repetition of difference.
The type of repetition this film explores through the doublings of
character, the use of recording and communication devices and a
thickness of mood that elicits a sense of déjà vu, are all means of
exploring a temporality characteristic of the age of mechanical and
electronic recording devices. Not yet the digital, the violent
transformations of memory, experience and paramnesia involve a
stretching of time that is repeated even as it is lived. Using the
incapacitated Scottie character in Vertigo as an example, Deleuze
asks If one of Hitchcocks innovations was to implicate the spectator in
the film, did not the characters themselves have to be capablein a
more or less obvious mannerof being assimilated to spectators?:
Deleuze describes this as being prey to a vision, where seeing, far
from being an exercise of power and knowledge, instead renders the
viewer passive.
9
Hitchcock had begun the inversion of this point of view
by including the viewer in the film. But it is now that the
identification is actually inverted: the character has
become a kind of viewer. He shifts, runs and becomes
animated in vain, the situation he is in outstrips his motor
capacities on all sides, and makes him see and hear
what is no longer subject to the rules of a response or
action. He records rather than reacts. He is prey to a
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vision, pursued by it or pursuing it, rather than engaged
in an action.10
In Vertigo, Scottie has been cited by Laura Mulvey and others as an
example of sadistic vision, the mastery of scopophiliac, who subjects
Judy (Kim Novak) to his gaze.11 However, Scottie is just as clearly
prey to a vision, in this case of time and memory, a vertiginous spiral
beyond his diagnosed acrophobia that puts him beside himself.
The effect of this doubled temporality in Lost Highway is conveyed
through a thickness of mood. Slow motion has frequently been used
as a cinematic trope for memory. Lynch evokes the distortion of
image and sound that slow motion entails, without actually using it.
The result is to make every action in the filmnew to the spectator and
narratively to the charactersseem repeated and already heavy with
the past. This oneiric quality is as much responsible for the effect of a
temporal loop as the narrative structure of the film. When characters
become witnesses to their own existence, Deleuze says: everything
remains real, but between the reality of setting and that of motor
action there is no longer a motor extension established, but rather a
dreamlike connection through the intermediary of the sense organs,
as if the action floats in the situation.
12 In the suspense of the
situation, then, there is also a continual movement, a vivid relation of
reversibility and indeterminacy, a vertigo of suspense.
While Vertigo makes dramatic use of special effects and animation,
such as in the opening credits and in Scotties dream sequence to
graphically highlight the temporality of the loop that infuses the film,
Lynchs own looping of Vertigo turns towards a highlighting of the
devices themselves. The film opens and closes with a message
relayed through an intercom: Dick Laurant is dead. The message is
the moment when the snake bites its own tail, an act of sending that
rebounds on itself, embodying the delay of lost time and generating a
field of doubles and repetition. In Lynchs film, death tends to
engender not only decomposition, but recomposition as well. In her
article, Meditation on Violence, Lesley Stern notes the double force of
film, both to transmit something that is red hot but also to deaden and
embalm. Stern rethinks this contradiction, arguing not that film kills
reality, but that this second element refers to the articulation of a
death threat, of enacting a death drive":
If the cinema does not simply reconstitute a presence of
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bodies, but if it participates in genesis of the bodily then it
can also dismember bodies, disperse bodily fragments
like Actaeon torn limb from limb by his own hounds and
scattered in pieces through time and space. Moreover,
the film itself can materialize as a body of sorts, a body
that bleedsmetaphorically, but with sensible effects,
producing for instance sensations of illness, fear,
ecstasy. Making a film, then, involves the risk that in
generating the thrilling and ecstatic you will go beyond
the pleasure principle and encounter a death threat.13
The film addresses the effect of reproductive technologies of film and
video to loosen our moorings, to put us in two (or more) places at
once, confronted with the self. When characters become spectators
and vice versa, the temporality of the film continually loops back on
itself in a cycle of composition and decomposition.
Pete and Re-Pete
Lost Highway has been described as a 21st century noir horror film, a
graphic investigation into parallel identity crises, a world where time is
dangerously out of control, a psychogenic fugue.
14 It begins with the
story of Fred Madison, a jazz musician who may or may not have
killed his wife; however, from very early on in the film, the narrative is
disrupted by a continual infolding and reversibility of events, as time
and space are layered over each other with a carnal density. Fred and
Renee Madison live in Los Angeles; they begin receiving anonymous
videotapes. Each tape repeats the shots of the previous tape, and
penetrates further into the Madison home, tracing its way through the
living room, down the hallway, along a curtain and finally into the
bedroom, where initially Renee and Fred can be seen in bed. The
audience has already seen this same interior progression of shots,
during Freds description of a dream he had. They phone the police,
who ask if they own a video camera. Renee replies, No, Fred hates
them. Fred elaborates: I like to remember things my own way":
Al (detective): What do you mean by that?
Fred: How I remember them. Not necessarily the way
they happened.
While Freds comment seems to align video images with an objective
and factual truth (how they really happened) that is opposed to
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subjective, personal memory (how I remember them), and while this
distinction will be a part of Freds psychoses, the film continually
undermines this very distinction. It suggests instead the generative
nature of recording devices that makes a singular return to the truth
(the past) impossible. Unlike Vertigo, where the truth about Judy/
Madelines double identity is revealed when Scotties memories finally
match up with a real event via a necklace Judy wears, but which he
remembers from Madeline, that moment never comes in Lost
Highway.
Fred receives a final videotape, which ends with quick but explicit
shots of Renees seemingly dead body next to their bed, and Fred
screaming (soundlessly) into the camera. Fred is arrested and
sentenced to death, but cannot recall what happened. One night in his
cell, he undergoes a radical transformation; suffering physical agony,
hallucinating a vision of a cabin in the desert, he suffers some sort of
electrical seizure and finds himself riding down the lost highway of the
films title. He pulls over and encounters Pete Dayton, a younger man
who through a simple double exposure becomes displaced in time
and space. The next morning, prison guards discover Pete in the
place of Fred, and are forced to release him with no idea where Fred
has gone to. From this point on, the film seems to restart, centered on
Pete.
No one is certain about what happened; Pete suffers from continuous
headaches, blurred vision and hallucinations, but doesnt remember
that night. He goes about his life, returning to his mechanics job. One
day, his rich and shady patron, Mr. Eddy (who is also Dick Laurant)
shows up, in fine noir tradition with his moll in tow, and the woman is
none other thanwell, who is it? The audience identifies her as both
Patricia Arquette and as Renee, Fred Madisons wife, but she is
clearly someone else, a blond instead of a brunette, named Alice.
For the audience, the doubled presence of Patricia Arquettes body
produces what Jean Louis Comolli calls denegationthe audience
knows and doesnt know, we recognize at once the character and the
body of the actress. In his article Historical Fiction: A Body Too Much,
Comolli addresses the question of how one believes in the illusion of
cinema. He takes as his subject historical film, which has as its unique
problematic not only convincing the audience of the believability of its
characters, but has the added challenge of trying to overcome the
interference of a pre-established referent in the audiences mind. In
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non-historical films, Comolli writes that the character reaches us as a
bodily effect in the image, with the actors body appearing first only as
an empty mask, which the character gradually comes to inhabit.15
The knowledge that the character has at best a spectral possession of
the actors body is not a problem for the audience, Comolli suggests;
we accept this with boredom.
16 With historical fiction, there is the
problem of a body too much. The actors body as an empty mask is at
odds with the referentiality of the historical body, a problem that can
only be resolved by making the actors body into such a problem that it
pushes the question of how do we believe in the fictional effects of
film to the limit, thus producing a kind of pleasure:
This boring knowledge has to be lost as soon as possible
and the rules played. The certainty we always have,
bearing it in mind, that the spectacle is not life nor the
film reality, that the actor is not the character and that if
we are there as spectators it is because we know it is a
simulacrum, is a certainty we have to be able to doubt.
17
For Comolli, that doubt is less uncanny than annoying, like a brief blur
in the image that must be exorcised.
The more difficult it is to believe, the more it is worth managing to do
so. Comolli argues that the spectator is never fooled, despite the
extremes to which he or she is pushed. In Comollis example of Pierre
Renoir as Louis XVI, this ghostly effect produces a discomfort both in
the actor and in the spectators, to the point that spectators both on
and offscreen wish fervently for the body to disappear: Far and near,
here and there, double inscription of the spectators place in the
auditorium and in the scene.
18 For Comolli, however, the effects of
this double inscription, of this denegation to infinity remain
untheorized, merely an interesting effect. What happens to the
spectator in the face of this static? Comolli identifies the
indeterminacy, but in the end can only align himself with the
spectatorial wish: may it disappear!
19 This works conveniently in the
case of Renoir as Louis XVI, but in the case of Alice and Renee this
indetermination is ultimately unresolved. Pushed beyond the
unsatisfying thud of Judys body at the end of Vertigo, Alice/Renee/
Arquette creates a generative ghosting that refuses to disappear, and
spreads throughout the film as a whole. In this way, the body of the
actress also highlights the disquieting status of the indexical trace.
The index is the trace of a past event, the guarantor that an event
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actually took place. Yet it is also a profoundly troubling sign; in the
case of Arquettes doubled body, the referentiality of the index gets
displaced temporally. Comollis may it disappear! is answered instead
by an unsettling and uncanny repetition. Identification becomes
impossible; there is no recuperative moment for the spectator in this
instance.
Once they meet, Pete and Alice begin having an affair. When it
becomes clear the psychotically dangerous Mr. Eddy knows what is
going on, Alice suggests to Pete that they rob a friend of hers and use
the money to run away. When Pete shows up at the scene of the
crime, he is confused and angered by Alices seduction of the
intended victim, and his headaches and hallucinations return full
force. At one point, he sees a photo of both Alice and Renee, and
asks in his confusion, Is that you? Are both of them you? Alice,
refusing mystery, points to her image and answers Thats me. The
photo for the first time brings together the taboo image of Renee and
Alice together. For Pete, the result is an intensification of his
headache and a bleeding nose. Until this point, it has been possible
that what weve been seeing has taken place inside Freds head,
however, faced with the indexical proof of the photo, the distinction
between interior and exterior for Pete begins to blur. Pete and Alice
flee into the desert. They make love, there is another transformation,
and suddenly Fred is back.
Alice leaves Fred on the sand, telling him youll never have me. She
walks into the beach house, and when Fred follows, he finds only the
mystery man inside. Fred flees down the highway to the Lost Highway
hotel, where he finds Renee making love to Mr. Eddy. He kidnaps and
eventually kills Mr. Eddy with the help of the mystery man. Renees
fate is unresolved. At the end of the film, Fred drives back to his
home, where he presses the intercom button and tells himself the
message that opened the film: Dick Laurant is dead. He then flees
once again, chased by the police, back onto the lost highway, where
once again he seems to transform. The film ends where it begins,
going nowhere.
As throughout the film, the message got lost somewhere in the space
of the the intercom, and recording and communication devices are
continually undermined in their immediacy. There is an ongoing
attempt to materialize the lost time of recording and registration,
which bleeds out of these devices and saturates the film as a whole.
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The film stretches out perception, pulling it like a rubber band that
never quite snaps back into place. In this way, and through the theme
of the condemned man on death row, Lost Highway evokes the short
film An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, in which the moment
between the drop of the prisoner from the scaffolding until the crack of
the neck is stretched into a half hour long hallucination of escape and
the possibility of a life.20 Only here, the crack of the neck never
comes. In Lost Highway, there is only the nauseating feeling of
adrenaline stretched beyond the moment of flight, the threat
disseminated and suspended.
There is no better image for the temporal structure of the film than the
very first scene. There is no fade in; flashing yellow lines slice the
black screen in half. The lost highway itself opens before us, the
yellow lines the only color in the dark night, the road only illuminated a
few metres ahead of the car. It is a visceral image; from the start there
is a strong sense of danger and potential, that something is about to
happen, but the total lack of context keeps you from knowing what it
could be. The road suggests that it is leading somewhere, but the
headlights illuminate only what it directly in front of the car. The
flashing yellow lines are discontinuous, like the frames of a film,
flickering, but their constant repetition evokes a powerful sense of
continuity as well. In many ways, this scene exemplifies what Melissa
McMahon describes as the long take as repetition: a repeated return
to the object, beyond the length of time needed for recognition, which
destabilizes its initial determination.21 Again and again in Lost
Highway we will see this kind of look on everyday objects which
exceed their own representation, but also on the repeated body of the
actress as two characters, where the repeated body brings the thing
to an essential singularity, endlessly referring to other descriptions. It
becomes what McMahon calls a literal image:
The literal image, the most clear, obvious and emphatica
simple act of showingis also inextricably opaque because
it refuses the sensory-motor link of abstraction,
explanation or generalization. The image and the body is
uncertain because it maintains itself in a space outside
its determination in action, a space of infinite possibility,
of the forces of grace or chance. This is not the secrecy
of a dark interior, hidden so that it can all the better be
inferred or perceived, the secret of a content within form,
but a sort of unfolding or unraveling of the opposition
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between interior and exterior across a surface plane,
across time, defying the depths of secrecy to create an
impenetrability of the surface.22
McMahon distinguishes here between representation, which requires
a (hierarchical) distinction between original and copy which produces
only a false movement, and Deleuzian repetition as that which does
away with this distinction and thus allows for real movement, in this
way destabilizing effect of looking.
The sense of urgency and rush, anxiety even before a cause is
established, is eventually undercut by a slackening, an over-
familiarity. The road races beneath the car, but the landscape never
changes. The soundtrack is hard and pulsating, fast and rhythmic, but
the beat is overcome as the languid voice of David Bowie floats in the
air: funny how secrets travel. The urgency is still there, underpinning
the scene but it is inaccessible under the hypnotic voice. Lost
Highway is a film about the way secrets travel between the audience
and the film, without being revealed or resolved. It locates secrets not
in a depth to be plumbed or brought to light, but in an impenetrability
of the surface. David Rodowick describes affect in relation to virtual
conjunctions as abject in the sense of objectless emotion or feeling.
23
This opening scene illustrates this sense: while we can identify
elements that contribute to this feeling, the experience of the scene
exceeds any cause. We have no object for our emotion, but similarly
we do not properly have a subject either.
A Psychogenic Fugue
In Lynchs film, inconsistencies of plot and narrative teleology are
belied by a consistency, almost in the sense of a thickness, of mood.
Many of the characters seem to be continually in the grip of déjà vu,
and although this is all unfolding for the audience for the first time, we
share in that sensation. Characters are slow to move, slow to speak;
we can see time developing in their bodies. They speak their lines as
though theyve said them before, as though they are being spoken by
the lines. In this "21st century film noir, the mystery lies less in figuring
out which is the original and which is the bad copy than in the
generative effects of doubling and repetition. These characters evoke
a sense of déjà vu in the audience, through their doubled presence
and through a reflection on the film medium itself.
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There is a character in the film described in the credits as The
Mystery Man, whom Lynch describes as a hair of an abstraction.24
The description suits the film as a whole, encapsulating the
ephermerality and mystery, especially of the narrative, while still
insisting on its material status, as incarnated. In the same way as a
single hair can today provide information about the perpetrator of a
crimecan provide enough evidence to convictwithout ever revealing
the entire story or even the motivation in certainty, Lost Highway
deals with a mystery that is felt rather than revealed, which saturates
the characters, settings, and spectators without ever being fully
actualized. The mystery man, with his face made up like a mask, is a
figure of crossing in the film, appearing in both realities unchanged.
He literally embodies the delay of lost time, a figure of terror and
uncertainty at once. At one point in the film, he hands Fred a phone at
a party: Fred phones his own home, only to be answered by the
mystery man, who stands in front of him, in both places at once In this
scene, he is in two places at once, physically and telephysically
present. His approach causes the surrounding sounds of the party to
fall away, almost as if he and Fred were now moving at a different
rate of time. There is an association of the mystery man with the
undeath, the suspension of recording and communication devices in
the film. This undeath is associated with distortions of space and time,
with reversibility. With the mystery man, one type of
suspensenarrative suspense, Freds growing suspicion of Renee and
his surveillance of her at the partybecomes a kind of epistemological
suspense. How did you do that? he asks, but also what is the mystery
man? the audience wonders. The voice on the phone gains its effect
from being at once non-diegetic and un-localizable, and spectrally
embodied by the mystery man. Writers on early cinema have noted
the parallels between the scientific, evidentiary nature of filmic
perception, and its uncanny side effects. This comes to be in the hair
of the abstraction of the mystery manthe literalization of spectrality.
This affect of time, both literal and spectral, is conveyed through the
paranoia of the first third of the film, through characters, setting and
tone. The first third is remarkable for its stillness, quiet and pacing. It
is excruciatingly uncomfortable to watch, and yet not much happens.
Most of it takes place in Renee and Freds home, an unheimlich or
uncanny space if there ever was one. In his essay on the uncanny,
Freud notes that heimlich, homely or familiar, also comes to mean its
opposite: secret, hidden. Unheimlich is not simply a state then, or a
quality, but specifically a quality in motion, a quality that developsit is
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all that should have remained hidden, but has come to light.25 The
uncanny is also closely related to a sense of repetition; in the first
third of the film, this is most clearly demonstrated through the
unheimlich effect of a long take as repetition, where the most banal
and everyday objects, such as chairs, are subjected to such a bland
and yet relentless stare that their functionality falls away. Designed for
human use, something else is revealed during these long takes, an
inhuman quality, a different kind of recording, a gathering of
impressions. In the Madison home, the space is unremarkable, rooms
are quite barren, there is no obvious visual sense of things being
hidden or concealed, but the very familiarity and exposure itself
becomes uncanny through compression and repetition. The spaces
are all decorated in earth tones, and are shot in such a way that they
are overly intimatehallways seem to lead nowhere, entrances are
compressed into the space, the geography of the house is uncertain,
the lack of doors makes it all the more claustrophobic. Hallways are
treated as either dead spaces, lit so that they are merely black gaps
between rooms, with no sense of transition, or singular spaces that
are unconnected from the rest of the house.
Hallways are thus homologous to the lost time of recording and
communication devices. Rather than functioning as sensory-motor
linkages, they become disrupted and sites of the dual unfolding of
time described above. There are two matched scenes in the film, one
with Fred and one with Pete, which take place in a darkened hallway.
The man stands, seemingly uncertain of what to do, and then moves
ever so slightly into the frame, so that we become aware that what we
had seen was a mirror image. This image suggests a disconnect
between self and simulacrum, that becomes explicitly connected to
electricity in the film. Fred and Pete both become, to an extent, lost in
the medium. Although on the surface, Lost Highway is set as a
Manichean structure, with two worlds, one light and one dark, as this
mirror image suggests, duality is an insufficient concept for
understanding the film. The hallway functionally literalizes the lost
time of recording devices (as transition), but it does so in a way to
solicit attention to the virtual perspectives, not the actualized outcome
of the image. The encounter with the mirror takes place in no-place,
the atopia of electricity, like the intercom message delayed for the
length of the film, where the trace and medium no longer serve to
explain the effect. The trace is belied by the mirror image, in which
near perfect resemblance leaves absolutely no mark, and the medium
mocked by the hallways that go nowhere, that are nowhere.
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Lynch highlights the presence of electricity in order to bring attention
to the medium itself. Frequently, the sound in Lynchs films is
characterized by a low buzzing, as though all the noises we tune out
in daily life were intimately evident. In the opening scene, thick with
silence, Fred suddenly hears a loud buzzing on the intercom, and
answers it to hear a voice say Dick Laurant is dead. He passes to the
windows to see who is speaking but no one is there. As we discover
at the end of the film, it is Fred himself who sends this message. It is
in this obsession with the effects of medium that I believe Lynchs films
tend to move beyond the time-image as Deleuze formulates it. In a
sense all of Lynchs films are lost in the medium in both a narrative
and aesthetic/structural sense; although this is often associated with
electronic medium of image and sound in Lynchs film, I dont think the
line is simply that between film and video.
26 Although Fred seems to
anticipate the message he receives, pressing the listen button without
ever asking who is there, he apparently can make no sense of the
message, and does not seem to know who Dick Laurent is.
Freds break, and the appearance of Pete, can be justified as a mental
break, with the next section of the film taking place, as it were, in
Freds mind as he seeks to escape his terrible crime. In the same way
that Renees supposed infidelity is played out in the film as potentially
only a figment of Freds imagination, it is possible to see that his mind
could take him elsewhere as he sits on death row. Chris Rodley
describes Patricia Arquettes understanding of the film:
Arquettes own rationale for Lost Highway goes
something like this: a man murders his wife because he
thinks shes being unfaithful. He cant deal with the
consequences of his actions and has a kind of
breakdown. In this breakdown he tries to imagine a
better life for himself, but hes so fucked up that even this
imaginary life goes wrong. The mistrust and madness in
him are so deep that even his fantasies end in a
nightmare.
27
But while this explains in some way the narrative break, it is ultimately
dissatisfying, not because of some other truth behind it, but because it
fails to do justice to the experience of the film. In Vertigo, the film feels
the way it does and has the effect it does because of the oneiric
quality that saturates it. Only when the dream is broken does the
action pick up again. For Deleuze, this is why Vertigo is a hinge
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between the action-image and the time-image. In Lost Highway,
though, it is impossible to ascribe any part of film to the realm of day.
Regardless of narrative explanation, the film resists with a spiral form
that refuses again and again the return to action. Recall that Deleuze
writes of the hero of the time-image that he records rather than reacts.
One could say this about Fred, that the events hes been part of are
engraved on him, recorded on him like a song on a record, like an
image on a videotape, and he is played over and over again. Freds
passivity derives from this; not that he is a victim, but that he is stuck
in the lost time of recording.
If in Hitchcock characters become suspended by becoming voyants et
non plus actants, in Lost Highway, there is a materialization of the
effect of looking and of articulation with mechanical and electronic
devices that demands a different materialization. Hitchcock
anticipates this with the theme of death and rememberment in
Vertigo; Lynch intensifies this in a reaction against the clean
disappearance of the virtual image. In effect, in some ways Lynch
takes us through a crisis of the time image and it is around the notion
of the simulacrum and doubles that this achieves its interest and
force. By thickening out the space of the carnal density and electronic
stretchiness of vision and sound, Lynch puts perception itself into
crisis. Lynch pushes indiscernability to an essential singularity
precisely through repetition and bad copies. Arquette describes Lost
Highway as a mans fantasy escape gone wrong, where even his
fantasies are faithless. But that is exactly the point. Alice/ Renee are
both bad copies, in the Deleuzian sense of the simulacrumfaithless to
their origins and engendering yet more copies. The copy evokes the
loop, but always with a difference.
When Fred drives home to send himself the message, too late, that
Dick Laurant is dead, its not quite a vicious circle; Fred flees the
house and once more heads down the lost highway. Has the film
ended where it began, or are we still lost in the space of transmission,
of the message lost in the intercom that lets Fred be in two places at
once, never coinciding with himself?
In Deleuzes cinema books, as well as in his rethinking of the
simulacrum, it is the question of referentiality that is rendered
unimportant. The supposed crisis of the image generated by the
digital revolution can easily be overstated. If the significance of
repetition is masked difference, then even a medium like film, maybe
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especially a medium like film produces the reality effect through this
sense of difference, not through its proximity to the real. Or if it is
proximity, it is a proximity of the splitting of time. The spiral structure
of Lost Highway reflects this, and in the attempt to materialize the
delay of lost time generated by electricity, recording devices, the
elements of telepresence that stretch and pull on the tug of ordinary
reality there is the movement of masked difference, the vitality of
repetition. The association of the mystery man with these devices, his
ability to dematerialize and rematerialize and to change the frequency
of the world around him, emphasizes this. If he has no double, the
only character with one name, one identity by means of his lack of
identity it is because he already embodies the repetition of film.
Alanna Thain is currently completing her PhD in the Program in
Literature at Duke University. Her main areas of interest are cinema,
visual culture, theories of the body, affect and movement, which she
is exploring in her dissertations entitled "Suspended (Re)Animations:
Immediation and Body Doubles in Cinema", as well as in her work as
a filmmaker. At the moment, she is fascinated by all forms of the
double, especially in the cinema of doubled lives, synthespians and
zombies. She can be reached at
1. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and
Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 41.
2. David Lynch, Lost Highway 35 mm, 135 min., Ciby-2000, USA/France, 1997
and Alfred Hitchcock, Vertigo 35mm, 129 min., Paramount, USA, 1958.
3. Deleuze, Cinema 2, 79.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid, 3.
6. By anamorphic, I do not mean to refer strictly to anamorphic lens, for
example, but use the term in the broader sense of distortion.
7. Lynch uses the skipping record during the murder of Maddy (Sheryl Lee),
Laura Palmers (also Sheryl Lee) cousin, in Twin Peaks. It is another
instance in which the failures of technology, not their unbridled success,
becomes associated with repetition, doubling and a temporal loop.
8. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York:
Columbia UP, 1994), 21.
9. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson
and Barbara Habberjam, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
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1986), 205.
10. Deleuze, Cinema 2, 3, my italics.
11. Laura Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures, (Bloomington: Indiana UP,
1989), 23.
12. Ibid, 3.
13. Lesley Stern, Meditation on Violence, in Kiss Me Deadly: Feminism and
Cinema for the Moment, ed. Laleen Jayamanne, (Sydney: Power
Publication, 1995), 254.
14. Chris Rodley, Lynch on Lynch, (Boston: Faber and Faber, 1997) xviii.
15. Jean Louis Comolli, Historical Fiction: A Body Too Much in Screen 19.2
(Summer 1978) trans. Ben Brewster, 43.
16. Ibid.
17. Ibid, 45-6.
18. Ibid, 50.
19. Ibid, 50.
20. An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, dir. Robert Enrico (1962). An excised
scene found in the original script also suggests a connection with An
Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge. The scene takes place immediately after
Freds trial and conviction; in it, two beautiful young women discuss the case
while shopping for lingerie. The debate the relative merits of hanging versus
the firing squad as a way for a convicted killer to die.
Marian: So youd rather be hung, huh?
They both giggle at the obvious joke.
Raquel: Absolutelysoon as your neck snaps, you black out. It might take a
while for the body to die, but you wouldnt feel it. (37)
Freds break with reality has often been interpreted as a flight from his
impending doom; the scenes cut in the original script would have made
Freds situation clearer and more obvious to the viewer.
21. Melissa McMahon, Fourth person singularBecoming ordinary and the void in
the critical body filmic in Jayamanne ed., 137.
22. Ibid, 137-8.
23. David Rodowick, Gilles Deleuze
s Time Machine, (Durham: Duke UP, 1997),
64.
24. Rodley, 229.
25. Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny in Psychological Writings and Letters. Sander
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Gilman, ed. Trans. Alix Strachey (New York: Continuum, 1995), 126.
26. Nor is this a distinction between the analog and digital, which is sometimes
mapped onto the distinction between film and video especially around the
question of virtual reality. Brian Massumi (in Parables for the Virtual:
Movement, Affect, Sensation, Durham: Duke UP, 2002) points out that
Equating the digital with the virtual confuses the really apparitional with the
artificial (137). Laura Marks in The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema,
Embodiment and the Senses (Durham: Duke UP, 2000) also makes a useful
distinction between indexical and non-indexical practices, rather than
indexical and non-indexical media.
27. Rodley, 232.
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