David Lynch’s ‘Lost Highway’ is a film
most famous for its surreal visuals, its disjointed
scenes and… not exactly being forthcoming
when it comes to meaning or interpretation.
While it can be roughly said to be about a
man who, having been arrested for the murder
of his wife, inexplicably transforms into
someone else entirely – that’s about as
far as a synopsis goes, so the immense volume
of critical analysis and theory that has surrounded
the film since its release doesn’t come
as much of a surprise – but what fascinated
me when I first saw this film wasn’t so
much in the narrative or style, but simply
the way it introduces us to the idea of filmed
images – a way that manages to be as mundane
as it is sinister. When Fred and Renee start
receiving anonymous tapes, showing the outside
and then the inside of their house, we are
suddenly made aware of the invasive and powerful
implications in the very act of watching.
Lost Highway never gives any explanation for
the tapes, or for anything actually – like
I said before, that’s kind of its thing
– but its lack of coherence, while frustrating,
reveals that what we are seeing is in fact
not a fixed narrative at all but is instead
a kind of visualisation of more emotional
processes, and so the crucial understanding
here is that the film isn’t so much concerned
with reality or the truth as it is with perception
and perspective.
In what is arguably the most revealing dialogue,
about both the tapes and the film as a whole,
Fred, when explaining his dislike of video
cameras, admits (I like to remember things
my own way. How I remembered them, not necessarily
the way they happened.) This is commonly interpreted
as evidence for the tapes being a symbol of
reality, confronting Fred with the desires
and insecurities he has suppressed. After
all, this makes the most sense narratively:
the tapes show Fred killing Renee and, while
he has no memory of this, it does seem to
be what happened. I mean, we saw it, right?
But what if the relationship between the recorded
image and reality isn’t so straightforward?
Connecting the tapes with reality, and subsequently
the events of the film as mostly fabrication,
might provide a much sought after ‘answer’
to one the film’s many questions
but to criticise
Fred for 'remembering things his own way',
as this interpretation implies, would be to
dismiss how our perception and experience,
reflects in everything we remember, in how
we're able to see the world. You know, 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.
But even so, what’s the difficulty in conflating
video and reality? Well, a recurring phenomenon
in Lost Highway is the act of being in two
places at once - or perhaps in Fred and Pete’s
case, one place twice? – but it is in this
way that it reveals the hidden condition of
filmed images. There’s a great short story
by Jorge Luis Borges, ‘On Exactitude in Science'
that was actually used by philosopher
Jean Baudrillard in his theory of ‘Simulacra and Simulation’
to explain this very occurrence.
It’s a brief tale of a map so detailed that
it becomes coextensive with its territory,
completely covering and engulfing the city
it was originally meant to describe, and it
carries the uncanny suggestion of a model
evolving to a state of being indistinguishable
from its original. Or, to put it visually,
Rene Magritte’s painting ‘The Treachery
of Images’ shows us an image of a pipe and
famously states ‘This is not a pipe’,
confronting the way we talk about images with
acceptance, how we treat the image as the
object when it is in fact not the object at
all – this is not a pipe, this is an image
of a pipe.
Lost Highway deals with this doubling throughout
the film – Rene and Alice are two characters
played by one actor – Fred and Pete are
either one character played by two actors,
or two characters who act as one person – Dick
Laurent becomes Mr. Eddy – the Mystery Man
talks to Fred in person and, simultaneously,
over the phone and, in the end, it’s revealed
that the cryptic message Fred hears over the
intercom was in fact spoken by Fred himself.
No character is singular, in the same way
that no film image is ever singular. Like
Borges’ obsessive cartography, the film
image may seem indistinguishable from reality,
but it only creates a copy of what it films,
a representation that can never quite replicate
the original and so can never be considered
entirely truthful.
But if the tape isn’t the truth, then what
is it? Well, there’s actually another set
of anonymous tapes that might help answer
this question. Michael Haneke’s ‘Cache’
starts with a surprisingly familiar premise:
a wealthy couple receive anonymous tapes of
their house that grow increasingly menacing
– but these similarities aren’t so important
here, rather just what it reveals about cameras,
film and perception just from its opening scene.
This at first appears to be an establishing
shot, but it’s drawn out far longer than
we've come to expect from cinema. This is
because the scene is not establishing a setting
at all, but is actually establishing a point
of view. This technical confusion between
establishing shot and point of view shot sets
up what is essentially a confusion of identity
and perspective. We are posed with the question,
“whose point of view is this? Whose perspective
are we seeing?”, but we’re not given an
answer. Instead of following the cinematic
rule showing the looker after the object,
there is no reverse shot as we are so used to seeing.
The looker is never revealed and so there is no answer,
no pay off, but what there is, is a revelation
of how we might read subjective images as
objective.
It’s easy to assume that video is objective
- that it must show events “the way they
happened” – we believe that Fred killed
Rene because we saw it on video – but when
we’ve witnessed so many doubles, how can
we be sure that this is Fred, how can we be
sure of anything we’ve seen, even on tape?
An assertion of individual experience begins
to emerge through questioning the capacity
of film as a medium of documentation, acknowledging
the fabricated condition of its product but
recognising how, like Borges' extensive map
of the Empire, this fabrication can come to
supplant reality. When Fred declares “I
want to remember things my way”, he identifies
a contemporary state of anguish surrounding
identity, fearing that the multiple doubles
created in images make it increasingly difficult
to be sure of who we are as we are filtered
through different perspectives.
(And your name. What the fuck is your name?)
This brings us back to what is ultimately being asked throughout the film – whose perspective
are we seeing? Is the opening act distorted by Fred’s perception, is what follows only his fantasy, can anything,
even the videotapes, be considered objective truth? In a way, as with the mystery videographer in Cache, we
spend the entire film waiting for this reveal,
this reverse shot, but we never get a conclusive answer.
But maybe this is because there was
never one perspective to begin with. Instead,
Instead, ‘Lost Highway’ offers a negotiation of
the images and influences that invisibly shape
identity – who we are, who we want to be,
or what we fear we might become.
We like to think of the camera as something
that reveals and that has an inherent objectivity,
but, despite Jean-Luc Goddard’s famous and
temptingly quotable belief that “film is
truth 24 x a second”, the very medium of
film is built on deception. Fred’s view
of video cameras does not have to be an admission
of denial but can extend to a deeply held
anxiety around the notion of identity, and
it is this fear, rather than truth, that is
reflected in the tapes. The footage in Lost
Highway is shown as black and white, grainy,
unclear – giving the impression of something
that, like memory, like identity, is always
incomplete and always changing. Everything
is susceptible to manipulation. No matter
how objective, impartial and truthful recorded
images may appear, we are reminded of the
impossibility of capturing a complete picture,
and that there is always something else, someone else,
behind the camera.
Hey guys, thanks for watching my first video essay. I wanted to do Lost Highway first because it's one of
the films that got me interested in film, so I hope you enjoyed this video and I hope you found it interesting.
I hoping to do these roughly every two weeks so if
you have any thoughts or any advice please
let me know down in the comments, and if you'd
like to keep up with new videos please subscribe.
