As a half-Irish man, you’d think I would’ve spent St. Patrick’s Day boiling cabbage and pouring Guinness from 11am on. As a horror fanatic, you’d think I would’ve gone shamrocks-deep into a Leprechaun movie marathon. But alas, for thou art not so—to (poorly) quote John Donne. Instead, I spent it thinking about identity crises in the world of horror, with particular focus on 20th century cinema.
Spoiler Alert. This article contains big fat spoilers for the movies Lost Highway and Angel Heart, and smaller spoilers for the following films: In the Mouth of Madness, Raising Cain, Identity, Jacob’s Ladder, Split, Total Recall, Coherence, Time Crimes, Triangle, and Donnie Darko.
What I’m talking about here is a concept that has long petrified me, perhaps before all others—the complete loss of one’s identity. This differs from the De Palma-esque psychological conditions found in much of the genre’s thrillers, such as dissociative identity disorder, schizophrenia, or bipolar disorder 1. These medical conditions are usually exploited by creators for the sake of having a character with multiple personalities (or in some cases, characters undergoing a sexual identity crisis), as in Raising Cain, Identity, or Split. Instead, what I mean is not knowing who you are. It is the sudden realization that everything you thought you knew about yourself and your world is all a lie and perhaps always has been. You’re not the person you thought you were. Your history is a falsehood or dream or maybe even technologically implanted. Your very id was constructed by manipulation, imagination, or some unknown, supernatural occurrence. You simply are not you.
I find this possibility acutely terrifying.
I first encountered this concept in entertainment form when I saw the spectacular Angel Heart at the age of fifteen. I was spellbound by this tale of voodoo set in 1955. In it, a private investigator named Harry Angel (Mickey Rourke) is hired by a mysterious businessman (Robert De Niro) to locate forgotten crooner Johnny Favorite. HUMUNGOUS SPOILER ALERT: by the end of the film we, as well as Harry Angel, discover that he is Johnny Favorite and always has been. But much like the Halloween legend of Stingy Jack, he sold his soul for stardom and then tricked the Devil when it was time for his soul to be collected, using New Orleans voodoo and plain old murder to implant his soul into the body of a young man he sacrificed. It’s the twist ending to beat all twist endings, and I haven’t even revealed the most disturbing parts of that twist.
Angel Heart is directed by Alan Parker, who also gave us Pink Floyd’s The Wall. It was based on the 1978 novel Falling Angel by William Hjortsberg, who also wrote Gray Matters, an excellent story about human consciousness being kept alive in computers, nearly forty years before Black Mirror’s much celebrated “San Junipero” episode. Regarding Falling Angel, it’s a damn good novel, but this is a rare case of the movie being even better than the book.
Other films that dabble in this concept include Total Recall, Jacob’s Ladder and my beloved In the Mouth of Madness, a film that was a monumental influence on me as a seventeen-year-old aspiring horror writer. It’s no surprise that the plot of Total Recall revolves around it. Author Philip K. Dick (whose short story “We Can Remember it for You Wholesale” was the basis for Total Recall) was notoriously paranoid and suffered delusions relating to his identity. Similarly, we have many scary movies where characters meet multiple versions of themselves in metaverses or time travel loops, such as Coherence, Time Crimes, Donnie Darko, and Triangle. These are all exceptional films that dip a toe into astrophysics to instill terror in the viewer, a rarely-used trope I believe we first saw utilized well in John Carpenter’s Prince of Darkness, which in itself was inspired by Quartermass and the Pit (the brain child of science fiction scribe Nigel Kneale, whom Carpenter hired to write the original screenplay for Halloween III: Season of the Witch, before the notoriously cantankerous Kneale demanded his name be taken off the film because he hated it so much).
But the movie I want to talk about is a different collaboration between an established novelist and director of scary movies—the surrealist thriller Lost Highway (1997), directed by David Lynch from a screenplay by Lynch and Barry Gifford (author of Night People and Perdita Durango). As fans of each other’s work, the two had previously collaborated on the delightfully absurd Wild at Heart, which was adapted from Gifford’s novel and stars the always entertaining Nicolas Cage. With Lost Highway, the duo went much darker and more nebulous, with a solid cast including Bill Pullman, Patricia Arquette (at her absolute sexiest, I must add), Balthazar Getty, Robert Loggia, Gary Busey, and Robert Blake—shortly before the actor went on trial for his wife’s murder (he was acquitted). It also features an eclectic cast in its supporting roles, including long-time Lynch collaborator Jack Nance, rock icons Henry Rollins and Marilyn Manson, and comedy legend Richard Pryor in his final film appearance. So yeah, the cast is crazy, but nowhere near as crazy as the movie itself.
If you’ve not seen Lost Highway, you should watch it before you read the following. But I also must warn you that you’ll be viewing a movie that won’t make much sense the first time you see it. This is because it’s not so much a movie as it is an artistic horror experience, like the film equivalent to a late-in-his-career Scott Walker album. Lynch has said the movie is open to interpretation. He’s always been secretive about the hidden meanings behind his work, beginning with his film debut, Eraserhead, in 1977. Gifford—perhaps because he’s a writer—says Lost Highway is a fluid story, just not a straightforward one. I think Lynch writes better when he collaborates (take the exceptional ’90s series Twin Peaks, which he cocreated with author Mark Frost). When left alone, Lynch’s screenplays are so vague and confounding that even the actors starring in the movies have no idea what is going on. Inland Empire and Mulholland Drive are glaring examples of a nonsensical plot, which is why I don’t care for them. At least with Eraserhead, one can make the obvious assumption that it is about the fear of parenthood, even if not every aspect of the movie can be satisfactorily decoded. I don’t like inconclusive storytelling. Some call it post-modern surrealism or arthouse, but really it’s just weird for the sake of being weird.
I was just nineteen-years-old when Lost Highway came out. At the time, I was obsessed with dark indie films and directors like David Lynch and Jim Jarmusch (though I have never liked Alejandro Jodorowsky, the king of weird just for the sake of weird). I loved Lost Highway the first time I saw it, but I also went into it wanting to love it because I was such a big Lynch fan. I will admit the film confused me, but that just made me even more obsessed with it and determined to unscramble the mystery of its narrative. I watched it repeatedly, studying it, analyzing it. I discussed it with friends and customers who came into the video store I worked at. Most people didn’t like it at all. Film critics Siskel and Ebert gave the film “two thumbs down”, which actually pleased Lynch (he even pushed for this to be put on the movie poster, but the studio denied his request). But I noticed that even the people who liked Lost Highway, including other die-hard Lynch fans, couldn’t really explain the plot. Many had theories and ideas, but while some of them made sense they didn’t serve as stepping stones to a cohesive conclusion, but rather as philosophical speculations that only raised further questions.
Those of you who’ve seen the movie may need a refresh on what happens in it, seeing as it came out 27 years ago. I don’t plan to write out a full synopsis, only explain it. So if you haven’t watched it recently, here’s a link to the plot’s basic breakdown.
As I said before, this movie is a piece of horror art. You must look at it the way you would a painting hanging in the Louvre, listen to it as you would an experimental record, and read it like poetry.
Lynch claims the movie is open to interpretation.
Here is mine… continued in part 2 of this article.
When it came out on video, a friend and I watched Lost Highway every day for a week bouncing theories off one another, but we never felt we understood the meaning of the film. I've seen it many, many times. I'll be reading part two of this article to see what your interpretation is.
I think I watched Angel Heart at age 14-15 too, and I was fascinated and horrified, the twist just devasted me, feeling bad for Harry when he finally realised what he done.
Most of the movies you mentioned are favourites of mine. Watching Lost Highway in the cinema i was mesmerised but also confused, when the credits rolled I was shocked, but I adored it, despite not really understanding it.
Looking forward to reading part 2