Identity Crises (Part 2 of 2)

On the Lost Highway

This is my interpretation of the 1997 David Lynch film, Lost Highway. It stars Bill Pullman, Patricia Arquette, Balthazar Getty, Robert Blake, and Robert Loggia. It’s my favorite Lynch movie, yet one that has been largely forgotten over the past 27 years. Here I will discuss the story’s hidden meanings and try to analyze its mysterious plot, something I’ve done over countless rewatches.

Spoiler Alert. Obviously, this article contains big fat spoilers for the movie Lost Highway. I implore you to watch it before you read on. If you’ve seen it and need a refresh, you can read the full synopsis here.

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. This is mine…

---

Musician Fred Madison (Pullman) is incredibly unhappy. Though he loves his beautiful wife Renee (Arquette), their marriage is cold and lifeless and reeks of divorce potential. As we watch them together, they almost feel like strangers under the same roof. Fred is unable to satisfy Renee in bed due to impotence (or perhaps premature ejaculation), and this fills him with feelings of inadequacy and self-hatred. He also has good reason to suspect Renee is cheating on him. She constantly feeds him lies and is involved in some shady business with her sleazy friend, Andy. Stirred by jealously and distrust, Fred’s hatred for himself slowly begins to redirect toward Renee. She has betrayed him, making a mockery of their marriage and breaking his heart.

The beginning of the film moves at a sluggish pace, casting the labyrinthine Madison house in heavy shadows as the camera goes in and out of focus. Dialogue is deliberately whispered and mumbled, and the music drones (the score’s composers include Trent Reznor, Barry Adamson, and long-time Lynch collaborator Angelo Badalamenti). All of this sets an uncomfortable mood, making us feel like a threat is around every corner. Lynch rarely uses jump scares though. Instead he creates dreadful phantasmagorias for his viewers to stew in, films that play out like actual nightmares, as Lost Highway definitely does. In the film’s early scenes, light, sound, and camera angles give nods to film noir and German expressionist movies (though Lost Highway is in color, it often feels like it’s in black and white, as Lynch originally planned to make it).

I believe all of this is symbolic. Fred’s exterior world is just as dark and confusing to him as his interior world. The house parallels the vicissitudes of his miserable life. He is so distraught and paranoid over Renee that he cannot focus on anything else, to the point of becoming lost in his own home. It’s as if he suffers from early onset dementia or Alzheimer's disease, which is interesting given what happens later, and given his dislike for video cameras. He says he hates them because he likes to remember things his own way, not necessarily the way they happened.

Which brings me to the mysterious video tapes placed on the Madison’s front porch. These have increasingly invasive footage of their home, including the most chilling one wherein the unknown cameraman has filmed the couple asleep in bed. The footage is always grainy and dark, reflecting the murky reality Fred is living in, a reality so painful he is trying to ignore it, preferring to see things his own way. But as much as he tries to deny the deterioration of his marriage by going with Renee to Andy’s party (where he first meets Robert Blake’s nameless character, listed only as “The Mystery Man” in the closing credits) and attempting some semblance of personal intimacy with her, the tapes just keep coming, reminding him of his unfortunate reality.

Adding to his dread is this the strange voice he heard on his front door intercom that simply told him “Dick Laurent is dead.” Fred doesn’t even know who came to his door to tell him this. It too is a mystery.

Ultimately, it’s the final video tape—the only one he watches without Renee—that reveals the darkest truth of all. The footage shows Fred having brutally murdered his wife (though its only shown in snippets, it’s the sort of kill you’d expect from a Terrifier movie) and he’s playing with her remains as if he’s totally lost his mind. And I’m about to argue that he has lost it.

Fred claims to have no memory of the murder. He even begs police to tell him he didn’t do it (again, he is preferring to remember things his own way, not how they happened). But this doesn’t stop him from being convicted and put on death row in a prison so grim it’s almost medieval. Now in isolation, Fred is forced to contemplate what he has done. This conjures up recollections of Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment and Hubert Selby Jr.’s cult classic The Room. Fred’s time in his cell is made to feel endless, and his life is now void of any exterior stimulation. He has only his own mind to retreat into. Fred has not admitted to the crime but also seems to have given up trying to convince anyone of his innocence—perhaps even himself. The harshest judge is his conscience, which continues to berate him. Because of this, he suffers intense headaches and insomnia that visits to the infirmary fail to cure. Fred has repeated visions of The Mystery Man and a burning cabin in the desert. One night, he begins shaking and screaming in his cell because the pain in his head is too tremendous to tolerate. When a guard goes to get him out the following morning, there is a man in Fred’s cell. . . but it is not Fred Madison.

This is where we get into some really spooky shit.

In Fred’s cell is a teenage boy named Pete Dayton (Getty). He’s not an inmate. He’s an innocent youth who doesn’t belong here and has no recollection of how he got in Fred’s cell. The baffled warden has no choice but to release Pete to the custody of his parents, and the boy returns home with them, goes back to his mechanic job, and hangs out with his friends and girlfriend, Sheila.

Here’s where my interpretation takes shape.

Fred never left his cell and Pete does not exist.

The terrible stress of all Fred has been through is more than he can take. Knowing he brutally murdered the only woman he can ever love, and that he will soon be executed for it, causes him not just to snap, but to mentally transform into a different version of himself—not the man Fred is, but the one he wants to be (or the way he wants to remember things).

This is a rare disorder known as a “psychogenic fugue,” a condition that occurs after emotional or psychological trauma and results in the loss of one’s personal past and identity. This isn’t just my speculation either. Lynch and Gifford have mentioned this condition regarding writing Lost Highway (I first read about it in an interview that was added to the screenplay when it was published in paperback in 1997).

Pete has his youth, something a man Fred’s age surely misses. He represents the clean slate Fred so desperately desires now that he has ruined his life. Pete has his loving parents, whereas Fred seemed totally without family (one can even assume that a man Fred’s age may have lost his parents by now). Pete has friends whereas Fred lived in involuntary isolation, even before he went to prison. Pete is also sexually virile, gets laid a lot, and pleases his lovers— things Fred miserably failed at. Most of all, Pete is innocent, whereas Fred is not. Pete is what Fred wants to be mixed with what he used to be, a version of himself seen through rose-tinted glasses, part distant memory and part grandiose fantasy. Though Fred is still physically sitting on death row, he escapes into the muddied corridors of his mind to protect himself from himself. But the bitch of it is, Fred doesn’t realize this at all, and Pete, who believes himself to be a real person, is facing a long, dark road to the truth—a lost highway, if you will.

For you see, Fred’s conscience will not allow him to hide in his utopian dream world for long. Hints of Fred’s reality begin seeping into Pete’s world, fracturing its foundation. When another mechanic is playing music on the radio, it’s the same song Fred performed at the night club. Of course, Pete hates it. It even makes his head hurt. This is because he subconsciously knows the song was created by his true self. It’s guilt trying to force him to remember not just who he is, but what he is—a murderer.

Still he presses on with the façade, and as a result, Pete’s world begins to deteriorate, with things getting exponentially worse when Alice Wakefield comes into his life. She is the girlfriend of ruthless gangster and pornographer Mr. Eddy (Loggia), whom Pete does auto repair for. She is also a dead ringer for Renee (Arquette plays both roles), only her hair has changed to blonde from brunette. The two begin a secret affair, much to their grave danger.

Just like Pete and Fred, Alice represents the version of Renee that Fred always wanted mixed with some of whom Renee was before they were married; or at least, who Fred thought she was. Perhaps this is what the change of hair color signifies—light replacing dark, innocence replacing corruption, good replacing evil. Whether real or imagined, this variant of his wife is the woman Fred loves, for she is much preferable to the cold, distant Renee. Alice flirts with him, smiles at him, likes him. They even have incredible sex. Their relationship evolves quickly, and Pete/Fred falls madly in love with her. But once again, Fred’s guilt and horror over what he’s done in real life begins to erode the fantasy world.

That’s where The Mystery Man comes in. He is the physical embodiment of Fred’s guilty conscience, always reminding Fred of the bitter truth. This conscience is sadistic, for The Mystery Man also represents the evil within Fred that drove him to kill his wife, something he’s tried to deny. This is why The Mystery Man carries a video camera. He refuses to let Fred remember things his own way, refuses to let Fred hide inside of Pete and for the dead Renee to be replaced by a living Alice. He clearly tells Fred this later in the film, asking him “and just what the fuck is your name?” and telling Fred “Her name is not Alice. It’s Renee. If she told you it was Alice, she’s lying.”

As the fantasy realm begins its inexorable disintegration, Alice begins acting more like Renee. She becomes cold and manipulative, and Pete discovers she’s involved with criminal pornographers, including Andy, a man from Fred and Renee’s real world. The gangster Mr. Eddy also goes by the name Dick Laurent (whom Fred was told was dead in his reality). Alice convinces Pete they need to rob Andy so they can get enough money to leave town for good and she can escape the clutches of the jealous Mr. Eddy (much like Fred wanted to get Renee away from Andy and Laurent). Things go wrong during a home invasion, and Andy ends up dead. When Pete laments that they killed him, Alice tells Pete that he killed Andy on his own. She takes no responsibility for what’s happened. Just as Renee’s lies led Fred to murder, Alice’s manipulations have caused Pete to kill too.

Pete begins having flashes of reality—Fred’s reality. They hammer his mind, giving him horrible headaches and blurring his vision, just like Fred experienced during his mental transformation into Pete. Though he doesn’t realize it yet, Pete is learning that his identity is a hallucination, a fact that threatens to not just tear him apart but erase him completely.  

In one the film’s most chilling moments, Pete sees a photo in Andy’s house of Renee and Alice together. He asks Alice if both women are her. This is because Fred never really knew his real wife. She was living a secret life that excluded him. Of all the mysteries he’s encountered, she was always the puzzle he couldn’t solve. Alice tells Pete that only the blonde in the photo is her but does not explain the brunette doppelganger. Even in Fred’s imaginary world, his wife continues to lie to him and hurt him. And the Pete façade cannot hold up in the face of Renee’s cruelty.

We’re given many other clues that Pete is merely a figment of Fred’s tortured psyche. His girlfriend Shelia (who may represent a girlfriend Fred had in the past whom he dumped in favor of Renee, and he now regrets doing so) demands Pete’s parents tell him the truth about what is going on. They refuse, even when Pete tries to drag it out of them. The memories of Fred’s parents are just as disturbed by what Fred has done as his real parents either are or would have been. He has disappointed and hurt them, as he seems to do to everyone he loves. Pete’s father (his model for masculinity as a child), is particularly distressed, underlining Fred’s feelings of inadequacy as a man and his failure as a son, husband, and potential father himself.

Other clues are revealed by the actions of The Mystery Man. The things he says and does throughout the story may make little sense at the time, but they’re links in the chain of Fred’s undoing. Early in the film, when Fred first meets him, The Mystery Man says they’ve met before at Fred’s house and is surprised Fred doesn’t remember. This is because The Mystery Man is Fred’s capacity for evil, his dark side, which has been growing stronger as Renee continues to humiliate him and push his love away. The Mystery Man is inside Fred’s house while simultaneously talking to Fred at Andy’s party, because no matter where Fred tries to hide, the horrible inevitably of Renee’s pending murder is waiting for him.

The finale to Lost Highway is truly chilling. Pete and Alice escape to the desert, and as they make love in the sand, he tells her repeatedly that he wants her. They’re already having sex, so Pete doesn’t mean he “wants her” carnally. This is Pete/Fred telling Alice that she is all he’s ever wanted. She is the version of Renee he has always loved, but he’s about to discover that Alice is merely a dream girl and always has been. He has continuously built Renee up in his mind to be someone more wonderful and perfect for him than she really was. So when he tells Alice he wants her, she responds by whispering this vicious line in his ear:

“You can never have me.”

Alice rises off Pete and enters the very shack Fred saw in his visions while in prison. And when Pete stands up, he has physically transformed back into Fred. The dream is over, the fantasy broken, the fugue complete. Alice/Renee’s words have cemented it—Fred cannot change things no matter what world he is living in. The horror of reality has just come crashing down upon him. The shack burns, permanently erasing Alice, reminding Fred that Renee is dead and never coming back, all because of him. The Mystery Man appears and confronts Fred with a video camera, forcing him to see who he really is—death row prisoner and wife-killer, Fred Madison.

But there remain other dark truths for Fred to own up to. With the help of The Mystery Man (who is part of Fred, after all), Fred murders Mr. Eddy, just as surely as Fred killed the real Mr. Eddy, Dick Laurent, in reality, because he suspected Laurent’s henchman Andy of getting Renee involved in porn. In Fred’s dream world, Alice was forced into pornography, but the real Renee went willingly, which is why Alice/Renee mocks Pete when he discovers her having sex with someone else on camera, saying “don’t you wanna ask me why?” while laughing at him, emasculating him and breaking his heart. This too plays into Fred’s feelings of sexual inadequacy. He couldn’t please his wife, so she not only turned to another man for sexual pleasure but entered the world of aberrant, underground porn (and possibly even snuff) to satisfy her carnal desires the way her husband never could.

After Laurent is killed by Fred (along with his inner demon, The Mystery Man), he goes home and whispers into the intercom “Dick Laurent is dead”, which he heard in the beginning of the movie. This is because Fred is suffering in an infinite loop, reliving his violent revenge against his wife and the men who corrupted her. When he first heard these words on his intercom, it was because he knew, deep down, that Dick Laurent was going to die by his hand. He’d already decided it. This cue marked the beginning of his murder spree. First, he assassinated Dick Laurent and Andy, then returned home to kill and mutilate Renee.

Now that he is confronted by these blunt truths, Fred has no more use for Pete, who loses his very existence. Though Fred is still tumbling through a dream world of his own creation, he remains his true self, the Fred Madison he can no longer escape from. His conscience won’t allow him to be at peace anymore, so he tries to run from it, driving down that lost highway. Fred is pursued by police because deep down he knows he’s still in the prison, and that truth has finally bled into his fantasy. The presence of police represents punishment and assures Fred’s guilt. Reality has stripped his dreamworld of all its appeal, leaving a black void. There is only the dark, lonesome highway he’s traveling on, a road to nowhere.

Fred shakes violently in the driver’s seat because he’s not in a car at all. Lights flash and Fred screams because he is actually in the electric chair. This is the one final truth his delusional mind is fighting against, and ultimately, it fails, as Fred is finally executed.

---

I believe Lost Highway is one of the best horror films ever made about identity. It does not end with some weak “it was all a dream” copout. It’s much more cerebral and complex than that. The story preys upon our anxieties and feelings of inadequacy and reopens the wounds we carry due to those who broke our hearts. Attacking the id, it completely severs the line between fantasy and reality, reminding us that madness can afflict us at any time. This movie is a surreal nightmare, ripe with bloodcurdling imagery and an ever-increasing sense of dread. I consider it artistic horror done right because it succeeds at terrifying the viewer even when they don’t fully understand why they’re scared. Horror stories should be mysterious at the start. Sometimes what you don’t know is more unsettling than what you do, and what you don’t understand at first haunts you long after you’ve experienced it as you try to solve the story’s brain teasers.   

I hope you’ll consider my interpretation when you revisit the film. I assure you it’s worth revisiting for horror fans, even if it didn’t work for you the first time around, and by keeping in mind all I’ve told you here, the movie won’t be as befuddling. You might be surprised by how clear and straightforward it will appear now that you’re in the right headspace—Fred’s.

Dick Laurent is dead. So is Renee.

Pete isn’t real and neither is Alice.

Fred Madison has merely gone down the lost highway of himself.