just wanted to say i enjoyed this analysis, as lost highway is a film i saw in the mid nineties, but damned if it doesn’t pop into my head once a month or so, to this day!
thanks, Johnny —is all off the cuff, just for kicks. yeah, the film thorns in the brain…
I have a friend who’s a Maya Deren lecturer: she met Lynch and asked him about Lost Highway/Mullholland Drive and how they related to Deren’s work. Lynch apparently went to massive and somewhat clumsy lengths to play down any influence, which makes me suspect even more strongly that the lines between the work of these filmmakers is blurred.
thats a pet peeve of mine. when people confront filmmakers or artists with a statement about who their work references, as if they know more than the artists about their own work of art, or what it means to them. to me, its just playing the “name that reference” game in an attempt to show off how clever you are. at worst, it can be accusatory. “did you know you stole from maya deren? how do you account for that?”
everyone is influenced by everything they’ve seen in life. if it needs to be pointed out, fine. but it should be done in the spirit of a scholarly exchange of ideas, not a game of one-upmanship.
I think she’s more subtle than that, hence the anecdote— she was genuinely surprised. On the other hand I wasn’t there, and I tend to agree with you. Personally, I think Lynch is not doing any of his work in reference to anyone else. When there’s only a few good filmmakers in a given field, it’s always tempting to somehow class them together. But it’s bullshit, really. Much like my fugue theory.
That’s my thing with Lynch. He opens doors in walls I didn’t even know had doors, and then he walks away and leaves me in an open hallway filled with the threat of vague, languageless horror. After a while, I need to explain it to myself— just me, myself, an eye, mumbling to myself as I walk into a room filled with a family of giant rabbits (different film, same landscape).
yes, i agree. i feel lynch is a total original. the link between him and deren is slim at best, like creating a link between him and early surrealists. maybe its there and maybe it isnt, but one thing for sure, you cant reduce lynch’s work to a play of references.
>>Ambrose Pierce<<
Possibly just a typo, but it’s Bierce.
I’m more interested in finding out if this “evacuation and replacement of identities” is unique to the American outsider psyche up to a certain generation. Because that would explain why this comparison comes up a lot. No one’s biting: but they are living parallel experiences in some way (at least in terms of the non-linear narrative)— and that’s likely a by-product of their environment.
Or it might just be a situation where visitors to an alien planet observe that cars with flashing blue lights can be found at 90% of crash sites, and assume that they must in some way be causing the accidents.
Harry, yeah, you’re right. Typos abound. Apologies.
@T.252.AM: I think it’s natural for humans to have aversion to the idea of ‘fugue state,’ i.e. a situation where "extremes of stress can cause an individual to abandon all knowledge of their identity and run into (or out of) the world as either a projected, often idealized self, or simply as nobody, a shell of broken memory.’ There are some obvious links here between fugue (whether in music or in the psyche) and Stanislavsky and praxis.
A director was telling me the other day of his experience seeing the looks on the faces of actors who go through this process, one of sheer terror in a moment of not knowing who, or where, they are.
RE: what you term Lynch’s ‘melodic statements in the tonic key’ : a)Dick Laurent is Dead, b)I like to remember things my own way…How I remember them. Not necessarily the way they happened, and c)I told you I was here. Brilliant observation of Lynch’s use of dialogue in relation to structures of music.
RE: “The effect on the human brain of a fugue is such that it is not possible to identify any single element in isolation: but instead we receive the entire music as one entity, and are left with a general impression of having traveled through many doorways: and that is the exact experience of Lost Highway.” Again, brilliant observation. Lynch is particularly astute at giving audiences this sensation. The scene in ‘Twin Peaks, Fire Walk With Me,’ comes to mind, in which Special Agent Dale Cooper goes in and out of the red curtains, never able to find the exit. Always entering the same room, at one point he meets with Laura Palmer mouthing ‘Fire walk with me,’ in that particularly eerie backward-forward way of speaking.
Thank you for mentioning Maya Deren and ‘Meshes of the Afternoon.’ While the film may or may not have been important to Lynch, it is an important film, to my mind, in understanding Lynch’s work on yet another level, as it predates Lynch’s work, uses a similar narrative structure as you point out, says a lot about female desire and the female psyche in the same way that Lynch can speak about the male equivalents.
As you point out, “Both films focus on the nightmare as it is expressed in the elusive doubling of characters… the evacuation and replacement of identities, something that was also central to the voodoo ritual.” I think I can understand why the evacuation and replacement of identities was an important aspect of the voodoo religion as it was a meshing of both the Christian beliefs forced on the Haitian slaves and their more ancient African beliefs. Perhaps when these two structures of thought reached a pitch in the psyche of their practitioners they were able to find a release in the ‘evacuation and replacement of identity process’, thereby forming a more complete sense of self.
As to your question about whether this “evacuation and replacement of identities is unique to the American outsider psyche up to a certain generation” : because film was birthed in Hollywood, maybe there is something to be said about the American outsider perspective in specific relation to film itself, and in relation to both Maya Deren and David Lynch. Specifically in regards Deren, when making ‘Divine Horsemen: the Living Gods of Haiti’ she gave up filmmaking and joined the voodoo religion, perhaps due to suffering her own psychic split.
T
( unfinished, tentative exposition / theory )
S P O I L E R S T H R O U G H O U T
Proposition:
One of Lynch’s most accomplished and complete works, Lost Highway takes its trajectory from several ideas (and as always, his own sub[per]verted dreamscape).
Structurally, Lost Highway is incredibly complex, with multiple layers of meaning that interlock. On a basic level, the story of a man who murders his wife and is subsequently condemned to death row (and presumably the electric chair) draws a plot idea from the short story by Ambrose Pierce (1842 – disappeared 1914), “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” – a tale of a Confederate sympathizer during the American civil war sentenced to be hung by the neck for an attempted terrorist act, who hallucinates that he has freed himself at the moment of death and enters a non-temporal landscape of hyper-sensory experience.
The central character in Lost Highway is Fred Madison, a free jazz musician with uxoricidal tendencies, consumed by paranoia that his wife (Renee) is cheating on him. Playing with the idea of videotape, dissociative identity and memory paralysis (fugue state amnesia), Lynch leads us into a nightmare where Fred is arrested for murder, and is imprisoned. It is here that the film divides, and becomes the story of a projected idea of Fred’s self, a young mechanic named Pete Dayton, who embarks on an affair with a gangster’s porn slave, Alice Wakefield (played by the same actress as Renee, Patricia Arquette). This story eventually weaves its way back into the first and the whole film closes with the apparent electrocution of Fred whilst driving from a convoy of police cars down the lost highway at night. At various points we encounter a character (“The Mystery Man”), who directly confronts both Fred and Pete with suggestions of purgatory and guilt.
Throughout we have the idea of fugue (from the Latin, fuga, lit. ‘flight’) as central to an understanding of the film. A fugue state is a psychogenic disaster of the human mind, where extremes of stress or trauma cause an individual to abandon all knowledge of their identity and literally run into (or out of) the world as either a projected, often idealized self, or simply as nobody, a shell of broken memory.
The exposition of this story, however, is far more complex. Taking cue from a word play on “fugue”, Lynch plays with an alternative definition, which is fugue as it relates to music. Bearing in mind that the central character is introduced as a musician, it is of no coincidence that the plot and themes meander in a structure derived almost directly from the design of contrapuntal music.
A fugue traditionally opens with a melodic statement in the tonic key (“Dick Laurent is Dead”). After the statement of the subject, a second voice enters with the subject transposed to the dominant, which is known as the answer (the videotape).
While the answer is being stated, the voice in which the subject was previously heard continues with new material (“I like to remember things my own way…. How I remember them. Not necessarily the way they happened.”). This new material is reused in later statements of the subject, and is called the countersubject (phone call with the Mystery Man “I told you I was here.”).
Everything then moves in codettas and modulations and tiny increments to weave a tapestry of voices (I’ll map them and expand on this one lazy, rainy Sunday afternoon), and eventually concludes when all voices have given a statement (the penultimate scene of the film, where it transpires that it is in fact Fred who rang his own doorbell and announced that “Dick Laurent is Dead”). **(-see note below)
The effect on the human brain of a fugue is such that it is not possible to identify any single element in isolation: but instead we receive the entire music as one entity, and are left with a general impression of having traveled through many doorways: and that is the exact experience of Lost Highway.
On a final note, it’s perhaps important to recognize another influence on this work: that of Maya Deren, and her film “Meshes of the Afternoon.”
Maya Deren was a key figure in the development of the ‘New American Cinema’. Her influence extends to contemporary filmmakers like David Lynch, whose film Lost Highway (1997) pays homage to “Meshes of the Afternoon” in his experimentation with narration. Lynch adopts a similar spiraling narrative pattern, sets his film within an analogous location and establishes a mood of dread and paranoia, the result of constant surveillance. Both films focus on the nightmare as it is expressed in the elusive doubling of characters… the evacuation and replacement of identities, something that was also central to the voodoo ritual."
www.sensesofcinema.com
** I read somewhere that someone did actually buzz Lynch’s door, and speak these exact words through the intercom, which is where he got the name in the first place.