The Endless Highway

1997's Lost Highway is probably about a conflict between perception and reality. I say probably because the one thing everyone agrees on about it is that it's open to interpretation. In fact, it demands interpretation if you want it to be coherent at all. Which, honestly, it doesn't need to be. You know you can enjoy a movie for mood and aesthetic alone and Lost Highway certainly fits the bill.

I've certainly interpreted it plenty of times over the years but great art is always alive, always ready to twist around and change on you. The movie's different because I'm different, to paraphrase Bruce Willis' character in 12 Monkeys when he was watching Vertigo. It's impossible for me to watch Lost Highway now without thinking about surveillance culture in Japan, where I've lived for the past five years. While stalking and illegally recording people are both crimes in Japan, the punishments for them are often light and meaningless and camera technology has advanced and proliferated so rapidly as to be beyond anyone's control. It's not just men secretly recording women, either. Camera technology is advancing in a collective culture for which people maintaining a communal perspective on the activities of one another was already fundamental. The existence of love hotels is testimony to this fact. A dating couple can't expect privacy in their own homes thanks to the constant presence of gossiping neighbours. Even at the love hotels themselves, doors lock guests in when other guests are in the hall, because even there there's a chance of gossiping witnesses.

In light of this, it's hardly surprising that kids are increasingly saying they want to be VTubers, Virtual YouTubers, when they grow up. Why devote yourself to this life where your community is constantly poised to reduce you to walking meat when you can create a beautiful artificial life, tailored entirely to your tastes?

That brings me back to Fred Madison. Every interpretation of Lost Highway highlights that line, early on, when he's asked why he hates video cameras. "I like to remember things my own way . . . How I remembered them. Not necessarily the way they happened." The common interpretation of the film is that the reason the events it depicts are filled with logical problems is that we're seeing Fred's distorted memory. The video tapes that mysteriously turn up on Fred and Renee's doorstep force Fred to see the reality that he would prefer to avoid in favour of his creative memories.

One question I rarely see addressed is over the identity of the person behind the camera. Most people, myself included, assume it's the "Mystery Man" played by Robert Blake, an apparently supernatural entity who demonstrates his ability to be in two places at once or appear and disappear at will. Some people interpret the Mystery Man as a manifestation of Fred's conscience. But if the video tapes are meant to represent unfiltered reality, that can't be true. I generally feel the Mystery Man is meant to be an actual demon, possibly from the Black Lodge if Lost Highway is set in the same world as Twin Peaks. Another thing people tend not to talk about is Marilyn Manson's cameo in the film's climax, surprising considering how significantly the film frames the scene. When Mr. Eddie asks, "What do you guys want?" it's video of the snuff film in which Manson is apparently killed that the Mystery Man shows Mr. Eddie in response. After this, the Mystery Man, not Fred, shoots and kills Mr. Eddie. My interpretation has long been that Manson's character is another demon and the Mystery Man is seeking revenge for his death, using Fred Madison as an instrument of that revenge. Consider how visually similar Manson and the Mystery Man are. Both have shaved eyebrows, white face paint, and dyed black hair.

The Mystery Man may not be merely a symbol within the story but you could take him as one in the more traditional sense of storytelling. He's a demon like Saint Augustine talked about, one feeding a perspective of violence to Fred, pulling at a thread in Fred's psyche. Another thing I'm surprised people don't talk about is just how violently Renee is murdered. Director David Lynch said that he was inspired by the O.J. Simpson trial and Simpson's murder of his ex-wife, Nicole Brown. Brown was murdered very violently, stabbed multiple times and her throat so deeply gashed as to nearly decapitate her. That's still not even close to what was done to Renee who in the video is shown to be torn in half, her entrails stretched across the floor, and her leg and arms severed. How and why Fred did this are two questions I'd think everyone would be asking.

The woman being torn in half is likely to remind anyone aware of Hollywood history of the infamous Black Dahlia murder. Elizabeth Short was similarly mutilated though her murderer went to the further extremes of leaving her body naked in a public place and carving a Glasgow smile on her face. It's hard not to see the Dahlia murder as a form of demented artistic expression in which the killer used Elizabeth Short's body to make something new. The act itself seems not only to be a denial of Short's dignity and desires but a comment on that denial. He reduced her to meat and a parody of woman, a parody of the idea that a human being can be anything more than meat.

As Shakespeare's King Lear put it;

O, reason not the need! Our basest beggars
Are in the poorest thing superfluous.
Allow not nature more than nature needs,
Man’s life is cheap as beast’s. Thou art a lady;
If only to go warm were gorgeous,
Why, nature needs not what thou gorgeous wear’st,
Which scarcely keeps thee warm.

Lost Highway is bookended by "I'm Deranged", a song by David Bowie from his Outside concept album which tells the story of a future where artists frequently kill and mutilate people as a form of artistic expression. So I think it's reasonable to assume this was on Lynch's mind.

The video of Fred with Renee's mutilated body is not just forcing Fred into a perspective, it's forcing Renee into one, too. In reality, a human being is blood, flesh, and bone. It's in our minds that we have more than nature needs, where we create personae and sort the narratives of our lives. Some people interpret Fred's preference for subjective reality as an inherently bad thing but David Lynch did not share this view. In an interview about the film, Lynch said,

"So it just shows you how you remember things is not necessarily the way it actually happened. But it's the way you remember it and it's maybe even more valid than the actual thing in some ways." Fred is unbalanced and subject to "psychogenic fugues". But his mind is also the one that perceives the beautiful "This Magic Moment" sequence and the "Song to the Siren" sequence, both cases where Renee, in the form of a character named Alice, is at the centre of exceptionally beautiful filmmaking. The mind may be led astray, but it's also what ennobles our existence. When one considers that, it makes sense that the Mystery Man is both the agent of objective reality and Fred and Renee's ultimate destruction.