The direct time-image is the phantom which has always haunted the
cinema, but it took modern cinema to give a body to this phantom.
Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image1
David Lynchs 1997
film Lost Highway is haunted by the specter of Alfred Hitchcocks
Vertigo (1958), itself a ghost story on many levels.2
In Lost Highway, the spectralizing effects of recording and
communication devices are rendered in graphic form; characters get
lost in the medium, in the delay of the lost time. No
longer simply the art of the index, Lost Highway puts the virtual
observer into the scene, and characters are caught in the movement
of affect, a vertigo of suspense that is not simply epistemological
in nature. Inspired by the spiral form that dominates Hitchcocks
masterpiece, Lost Highway explores the effects of living in
a world characterized by paramnesia. A form of déjà
vu, paramnesia is a disjunction of sensation and perception, in
which one has the inescapable sense of having already lived a moment
in time, of being a witness to ones life. Consider Gilles Deleuzes
description of the crystal image, a key element of the time-image
in Deleuzes analysis of cinema. The crystal image is an indivisible
unity of an actual image and its virtual image:
The present
is the actual image, and its contemporaneous past is the virtual image,
the image in a mirror. According to [Henri] Bergson, paramnesia (the
illusion of déjà vu or already having been there) simply
makes this obvious point perceptible: there is a recollection of the
present, contemporaneous with the present itself, as closely coupled
as a role to an actor. Our actual existence, then whilst it
is unrolled in time, duplicates itself alongside a virtual existence,
a mirror image.3
The effect of this doubling
is manifestly uncanny; as Bergson goes on to describe it: whoever
becomes conscious of the continual duplicating of his present into
perception and recollection will compare himself to an actor playing
his part automatically, listening to himself and beholding himself
playing.4 Like Hitchcock,
whose greatness, and also violence, in a sense, was to adapt characters
to the situation of the camera, David Lynch is one of the great thinkers
of the relationship between recording mediums and the human form.
Lost Highway takes to extreme Deleuzes contention that
in the time-image, the hero records rather than reacts.5
Lynch explores this on a literal level, examining the effect of recording
devices and communication mediums, and insisting on the uncomfortable
fit between them and the human form. In Lynchs films, technologies
have an anamorphic effect on the body; that is to say, they
do not metamorphize the body into a new, completed form, but
de-figure itvisibly and aurally.6
As such, even the most familiar technologies, such as electricity
or the telephone are rendered in such a way as to highlight their
dirtinessto make visible what we have become accustomed
to ignoring. Electricity has a presence in Lynchs work, not
merely as a conduit or medium, but as a deforming element. In Lost
Highway, the operation of technology is constantly made manifest,
in two main ways: one, through temporal delay, such as the intercom
message that gets lost in the medium for the length of
the film, and two, through a noisy or dirty quality, where
an image on a video screen competes for significance with the static
between pictures, and where the failures of technology
figure the brutal reshaping of the human form. Like a skipping record,
Lynchs films suggest that these aspects of technology are not
mere annoyances.7
Also like a skipping record,
these failures generate a field of doubles and repetition,
but in the sense of Deleuzian repetition, which requires a rethinking
of medium. In calling attention to the medium, there is not an unmasking
of illusion, but a stretching of the frequently overlooked transition
and change that these mediums entail. Repetition highlights the temporal
element of medium that is usually condensed or ignored, and makes
it the agent of repetition with a difference. In Lost Highway,
repetition takes the form of a loop that marks the indeterminate quality
of change. In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze notes that
what is repeated in repetition is difference itself: A bare,
material repetition (repetition of same) appears only in the sense
that another repetition is disguised within it, constituting it and
constituting itself in disguising itself.8
The double, then, is not defined by resemblance or the same, but by
masked difference as an affect of time. When in Lost
Highway Patricia Arquette appears as Alice for the first time,
but after already having appeared as Renée, thus embodying
her second character, the static of Arquettes presence creates
a ripple effect in the film. A clichéd use of slow
motion highlights the slowness and weightiness of her actions. As
she steps out of a car, the soundtrack resonates with a sense of familiarity
and disquiet. Lou Reed performs a tight, minimalist version of the
Drifters hit This Magic Moment. The song is recognizable
at once, but also strangely unfamiliar and newly inflected. It is
literally a magic moment, so different and so new, but
like any other. This uncanny repetition with its uncertain
temporality is characteristic of the film as a whole, and Arquette
as a bad copyan unfaithful woman, but also insufficiently
disguised in her dual roleembodies Deleuzes notion of
the simulacrum as the repetition of difference.
The type of repetition
this film explores through the doublings of character, the use of
recording and communication devices and a thickness of mood that elicits
a sense of déjà vu, are all means of exploring
a temporality characteristic of the age of mechanical and electronic
recording devices. Not yet the digital, the violent transformations
of memory, experience and paramnesia involve a stretching of time
that is repeated even as it is lived. Using the incapacitated Scottie
character in Vertigo as an example, Deleuze asks If one
of Hitchcocks innovations was to implicate the spectator in
the film, did not the characters themselves have to be capablein
a more or less obvious mannerof being assimilated to spectators?:
Deleuze describes this as being prey to a vision, where
seeing, far from being an exercise of power and knowledge, instead
renders the viewer passive.9
Hitchcock
had begun the inversion of this point of view by including the viewer
in the film. But it is now that the identification is actually inverted:
the character has become a kind of viewer. He shifts, runs and becomes
animated in vain, the situation he is in outstrips his motor capacities
on all sides, and makes him see and hear what is no longer subject
to the rules of a response or action. He records rather than reacts.
He is prey to a vision, pursued by it or pursuing it, rather than
engaged in an action.10
In Vertigo, Scottie
has been cited by Laura Mulvey and others as an example of sadistic
vision, the mastery of scopophiliac, who subjects Judy (Kim Novak)
to his gaze.11 However, Scottie
is just as clearly prey to a vision, in this case of time
and memory, a vertiginous spiral beyond his diagnosed acrophobia that
puts him beside himself.
The effect of this doubled
temporality in Lost Highway is conveyed through a thickness
of mood. Slow motion has frequently been used as a cinematic trope
for memory. Lynch evokes the distortion of image and sound that slow
motion entails, without actually using it. The result is to make every
action in the filmnew to the spectator and narratively to the
charactersseem repeated and already heavy with the past. This
oneiric quality is as much responsible for the effect of a temporal
loop as the narrative structure of the film. When characters become
witnesses to their own existence, Deleuze says: everything remains
real, but between the reality of setting and that of motor action
there is no longer a motor extension established, but rather a dreamlike
connection through the intermediary of the sense organs, as
if the action floats in the situation.12
In the suspense of the situation, then, there is also a continual
movement, a vivid relation of reversibility and indeterminacy, a vertigo
of suspense.
While Vertigo makes
dramatic use of special effects and animation, such as in the opening
credits and in Scotties dream sequence to graphically highlight
the temporality of the loop that infuses the film, Lynchs own
looping of Vertigo turns towards a highlighting of the devices
themselves. The film opens and closes with a message relayed through
an intercom: Dick Laurant is dead. The message is the
moment when the snake bites its own tail, an act of sending that rebounds
on itself, embodying the delay of lost time and generating
a field of doubles and repetition. In Lynchs film, death tends
to engender not only decomposition, but recomposition as well. In
her article, Meditation on Violence, Lesley Stern notes
the double force of film, both to transmit something that is
red hot but also to deaden and embalm. Stern rethinks
this contradiction, arguing not that film kills reality,
but that this second element refers to the articulation of a death
threat, of enacting a death drive":
If the cinema
does not simply reconstitute a presence of bodies, but if it participates
in genesis of the bodily then it can also dismember bodies, disperse
bodily fragments like Actaeon torn limb from limb by his own hounds
and scattered in pieces through time and space. Moreover, the film
itself can materialize as a body of sorts, a body that bleedsmetaphorically,
but with sensible effects, producing for instance sensations of illness,
fear, ecstasy. Making a film, then, involves the risk that in generating
the thrilling and ecstatic you will go beyond the pleasure principle
and encounter a death threat.13
The film addresses the
effect of reproductive technologies of film and video to loosen
our moorings, to put us in two (or more) places at once, confronted
with the self. When characters become spectators and vice versa, the
temporality of the film continually loops back on itself in a cycle
of composition and decomposition.
Pete and Re-Pete
Lost Highway has
been described as a 21st century noir horror film, a graphic
investigation into parallel identity crises, a world where time is
dangerously out of control, a psychogenic fugue.14
It begins with the story of Fred Madison, a jazz musician who may
or may not have killed his wife; however, from very early on in the
film, the narrative is disrupted by a continual infolding and reversibility
of events, as time and space are layered over each other with a carnal
density. Fred and Renee Madison live in Los Angeles; they begin receiving
anonymous videotapes. Each tape repeats the shots of the previous
tape, and penetrates further into the Madison home, tracing its way
through the living room, down the hallway, along a curtain and finally
into the bedroom, where initially Renee and Fred can be seen in bed.
The audience has already seen this same interior progression of shots,
during Freds description of a dream he had. They phone the police,
who ask if they own a video camera. Renee replies, No, Fred
hates them. Fred elaborates: I like to remember things
my own way":
Al (detective):
What do you mean by that?
Fred: How I remember them. Not necessarily the way they happened.
While Freds comment
seems to align video images with an objective and factual truth (how
they really happened) that is opposed to subjective, personal
memory (how I remember them), and while this distinction
will be a part of Freds psychoses, the film continually undermines
this very distinction. It suggests instead the generative nature of
recording devices that makes a singular return to the truth (the past)
impossible. Unlike Vertigo, where the truth about
Judy/ Madelines double identity is revealed when Scotties
memories finally match up with a real event via a necklace Judy wears,
but which he remembers from Madeline, that moment never comes in Lost
Highway.
Fred receives a final videotape,
which ends with quick but explicit shots of Renees seemingly
dead body next to their bed, and Fred screaming (soundlessly) into
the camera. Fred is arrested and sentenced to death, but cannot recall
what happened. One night in his cell, he undergoes a radical transformation;
suffering physical agony, hallucinating a vision of a cabin in the
desert, he suffers some sort of electrical seizure and finds himself
riding down the lost highway of the films title. He pulls over
and encounters Pete Dayton, a younger man who through a simple double
exposure becomes displaced in time and space. The next morning, prison
guards discover Pete in the place of Fred, and are forced to release
him with no idea where Fred has gone to. From this point on, the film
seems to restart, centered on Pete.
No one is certain about
what happened; Pete suffers from continuous headaches, blurred vision
and hallucinations, but doesnt remember that night. He goes
about his life, returning to his mechanics job. One day, his
rich and shady patron, Mr. Eddy (who is also Dick Laurant) shows up,
in fine noir tradition with his moll in tow, and the woman is none
other thanwell, who is it? The audience identifies her as both
Patricia Arquette and as Renee, Fred Madisons wife, but she
is clearly someone else, a blond instead of a brunette, named Alice.
For the audience, the doubled
presence of Patricia Arquettes body produces what Jean Louis
Comolli calls denegationthe audience knows and doesnt
know, we recognize at once the character and the body of the actress.
In his article Historical Fiction: A Body Too Much, Comolli
addresses the question of how one believes in the illusion
of cinema. He takes as his subject historical film, which has as its
unique problematic not only convincing the audience of the believability
of its characters, but has the added challenge of trying to overcome
the interference of a pre-established referent in the audiences
mind. In non-historical films, Comolli writes that the character
reaches us as a bodily effect in the image, with the actors
body appearing first only as an empty mask, which the character gradually
comes to inhabit.15 The knowledge
that the character has at best a spectral possession of the actors
body is not a problem for the audience, Comolli suggests; we accept
this with boredom.16
With historical fiction, there is the problem of a body too
much. The actors body as an empty mask is at odds with
the referentiality of the historical body, a problem that can only
be resolved by making the actors body into such a problem that
it pushes the question of how do we believe in the fictional
effects of film to the limit, thus producing a kind of pleasure:
This boring
knowledge has to be lost as soon as possible and the rules played.
The certainty we always have, bearing it in mind, that the spectacle
is not life nor the film reality, that the actor is not the character
and that if we are there as spectators it is because we know it is
a simulacrum, is a certainty we have to be able to doubt.17
For Comolli, that doubt
is less uncanny than annoying, like a brief blur in the image that
must be exorcised.
The more difficult it is
to believe, the more it is worth managing to do so. Comolli
argues that the spectator is never fooled, despite the extremes to
which he or she is pushed. In Comollis example of Pierre Renoir
as Louis XVI, this ghostly effect produces a discomfort both in the
actor and in the spectators, to the point that spectators both on
and offscreen wish fervently for the body to disappear: Far
and near, here and there, double inscription of the spectators
place in the auditorium and in the scene.18
For Comolli, however, the effects of this double inscription, of this
denegation to infinity remain untheorized, merely an interesting
effect. What happens to the spectator in the face of this static?
Comolli identifies the indeterminacy, but in the end can only align
himself with the spectatorial wish: may it disappear!19
This works conveniently in the case of Renoir as Louis XVI, but in
the case of Alice and Renee this indetermination is ultimately unresolved.
Pushed beyond the unsatisfying thud of Judys body at the end
of Vertigo, Alice/Renee/Arquette creates a generative ghosting
that refuses to disappear, and spreads throughout the film as a whole.
In this way, the body of the actress also highlights the disquieting
status of the indexical trace. The index is the trace of a past event,
the guarantor that an event actually took place. Yet it is also a
profoundly troubling sign; in the case of Arquettes doubled
body, the referentiality of the index gets displaced temporally. Comollis
may it disappear! is answered instead by an unsettling
and uncanny repetition. Identification becomes impossible; there is
no recuperative moment for the spectator in this instance.
Once they meet, Pete and
Alice begin having an affair. When it becomes clear the psychotically
dangerous Mr. Eddy knows what is going on, Alice suggests to Pete
that they rob a friend of hers and use the money to run away. When
Pete shows up at the scene of the crime, he is confused and angered
by Alices seduction of the intended victim, and his headaches
and hallucinations return full force. At one point, he sees a photo
of both Alice and Renee, and asks in his confusion, Is that
you? Are both of them you? Alice, refusing mystery, points to
her image and answers Thats me. The photo for the
first time brings together the taboo image of Renee and Alice together.
For Pete, the result is an intensification of his headache and a bleeding
nose. Until this point, it has been possible that what weve
been seeing has taken place inside Freds head, however,
faced with the indexical proof of the photo, the distinction between
interior and exterior for Pete begins to blur. Pete and Alice flee
into the desert. They make love, there is another transformation,
and suddenly Fred is back.
Alice leaves Fred on the
sand, telling him youll never have me. She walks
into the beach house, and when Fred follows, he finds only the mystery
man inside. Fred flees down the highway to the Lost Highway hotel,
where he finds Renee making love to Mr. Eddy. He kidnaps and eventually
kills Mr. Eddy with the help of the mystery man. Renees fate
is unresolved. At the end of the film, Fred drives back to his home,
where he presses the intercom button and tells himself the message
that opened the film: Dick Laurant is dead. He then flees
once again, chased by the police, back onto the lost highway, where
once again he seems to transform. The film ends where it begins, going
nowhere.
As throughout the film,
the message got lost somewhere in the space of the the intercom, and
recording and communication devices are continually undermined in
their immediacy. There is an ongoing attempt to materialize the lost
time of recording and registration, which bleeds out of these devices
and saturates the film as a whole. The film stretches out perception,
pulling it like a rubber band that never quite snaps back into place.
In this way, and through the theme of the condemned man on death row,
Lost Highway evokes the short film An Occurrence at Owl Creek
Bridge, in which the moment between the drop of the prisoner from
the scaffolding until the crack of the neck is stretched into a half
hour long hallucination of escape and the possibility of a life.20
Only here, the crack of the neck never comes. In Lost Highway,
there is only the nauseating feeling of adrenaline stretched beyond
the moment of flight, the threat disseminated and suspended.
There is no better image
for the temporal structure of the film than the very first scene.
There is no fade in; flashing yellow lines slice the black screen
in half. The lost highway itself opens before us, the yellow lines
the only color in the dark night, the road only illuminated a few
metres ahead of the car. It is a visceral image; from the start there
is a strong sense of danger and potential, that something is about
to happen, but the total lack of context keeps you from knowing what
it could be. The road suggests that it is leading somewhere, but the
headlights illuminate only what it directly in front of the car. The
flashing yellow lines are discontinuous, like the frames of a film,
flickering, but their constant repetition evokes a powerful sense
of continuity as well. In many ways, this scene exemplifies what Melissa
McMahon describes as the long take as repetition: a repeated
return to the object, beyond the length of time needed for recognition,
which destabilizes its initial determination.21
Again and again in Lost Highway we will see this kind of look
on everyday objects which exceed their own representation, but also
on the repeated body of the actress as two characters, where the repeated
body brings the thing to an essential singularity, endlessly
referring to other descriptions. It becomes what McMahon calls a literal
image:
The literal
image, the most clear, obvious and emphatica simple act of showingis
also inextricably opaque because it refuses the sensory-motor link
of abstraction, explanation or generalization. The image and the body
is uncertain because it maintains itself in a space outside its determination
in action, a space of infinite possibility, of the forces of grace
or chance. This is not the secrecy of a dark interior, hidden so that
it can all the better be inferred or perceived, the secret of a content
within form, but a sort of unfolding or unraveling of the opposition
between interior and exterior across a surface plane, across time,
defying the depths of secrecy to create an impenetrability of the
surface.22
McMahon distinguishes here
between representation, which requires a (hierarchical) distinction
between original and copy which produces only a false movement, and
Deleuzian repetition as that which does away with this distinction
and thus allows for real movement, in this way destabilizing effect
of looking.
The sense of urgency and
rush, anxiety even before a cause is established, is eventually undercut
by a slackening, an over-familiarity. The road races beneath the car,
but the landscape never changes. The soundtrack is hard and pulsating,
fast and rhythmic, but the beat is overcome as the languid voice of
David Bowie floats in the air: funny how secrets travel.
The urgency is still there, underpinning the scene but it is inaccessible
under the hypnotic voice. Lost Highway is a film about the
way secrets travel between the audience and the film, without being
revealed or resolved. It locates secrets not in a depth to be plumbed
or brought to light, but in an impenetrability of the
surface. David Rodowick describes affect in relation to virtual conjunctions
as abject in the sense of objectless emotion or feeling.23
This opening scene illustrates this sense: while we can identify elements
that contribute to this feeling, the experience of the scene exceeds
any cause. We have no object for our emotion, but similarly we do
not properly have a subject either.
A Psychogenic Fugue
In Lynchs film, inconsistencies
of plot and narrative teleology are belied by a consistency, almost
in the sense of a thickness, of mood. Many of the characters seem
to be continually in the grip of déjà vu, and although
this is all unfolding for the audience for the first time, we share
in that sensation. Characters are slow to move, slow to speak; we
can see time developing in their bodies. They speak their lines as
though theyve said them before, as though they are being spoken
by the lines. In this "21st century film noir, the mystery
lies less in figuring out which is the original and which is the bad
copy than in the generative effects of doubling and repetition. These
characters evoke a sense of déjà vu in the audience,
through their doubled presence and through a reflection on the film
medium itself.
There is a character in
the film described in the credits as The Mystery Man,
whom Lynch describes as a hair of an abstraction.24
The description suits the film as a whole, encapsulating the ephermerality
and mystery, especially of the narrative, while still insisting on
its material status, as incarnated. In the same way as a single hair
can today provide information about the perpetrator of a crimecan
provide enough evidence to convictwithout ever revealing the
entire story or even the motivation in certainty, Lost Highway
deals with a mystery that is felt rather than revealed, which saturates
the characters, settings, and spectators without ever being fully
actualized. The mystery man, with his face made up like a mask, is
a figure of crossing in the film, appearing in both realities unchanged.
He literally embodies the delay of lost time, a figure of terror and
uncertainty at once. At one point in the film, he hands Fred a phone
at a party: Fred phones his own home, only to be answered by the mystery
man, who stands in front of him, in both places at once In this scene,
he is in two places at once, physically and telephysically present.
His approach causes the surrounding sounds of the party to fall away,
almost as if he and Fred were now moving at a different rate of time.
There is an association of the mystery man with the undeath, the suspension
of recording and communication devices in the film. This undeath is
associated with distortions of space and time, with reversibility.
With the mystery man, one type of suspensenarrative suspense,
Freds growing suspicion of Renee and his surveillance of her
at the partybecomes a kind of epistemological suspense. How
did you do that? he asks, but also what is the mystery
man? the audience wonders. The voice on the phone gains its
effect from being at once non-diegetic and un-localizable, and spectrally
embodied by the mystery man. Writers on early cinema have noted the
parallels between the scientific, evidentiary nature of filmic perception,
and its uncanny side effects. This comes to be in the hair of
the abstraction of the mystery manthe literalization of
spectrality.
This affect of time, both
literal and spectral, is conveyed through the paranoia of the first
third of the film, through characters, setting and tone. The first
third is remarkable for its stillness, quiet and pacing. It is excruciatingly
uncomfortable to watch, and yet not much happens. Most of it takes
place in Renee and Freds home, an unheimlich or uncanny
space if there ever was one. In his essay on the uncanny, Freud notes
that heimlich, homely or familiar, also comes to mean its opposite:
secret, hidden. Unheimlich is not simply a state then, or a quality,
but specifically a quality in motion, a quality that developsit
is all that should have remained hidden, but has come to light.25
The uncanny is also closely related to a sense of repetition; in the
first third of the film, this is most clearly demonstrated through
the unheimlich effect of a long take as repetition, where the most
banal and everyday objects, such as chairs, are subjected to such
a bland and yet relentless stare that their functionality falls away.
Designed for human use, something else is revealed during these long
takes, an inhuman quality, a different kind of recording, a gathering
of impressions. In the Madison home, the space is unremarkable, rooms
are quite barren, there is no obvious visual sense of things being
hidden or concealed, but the very familiarity and exposure itself
becomes uncanny through compression and repetition. The spaces are
all decorated in earth tones, and are shot in such a way that they
are overly intimatehallways seem to lead nowhere, entrances
are compressed into the space, the geography of the house is uncertain,
the lack of doors makes it all the more claustrophobic. Hallways are
treated as either dead spaces, lit so that they are merely black gaps
between rooms, with no sense of transition, or singular spaces that
are unconnected from the rest of the house.
Hallways are thus homologous
to the lost time of recording and communication devices.
Rather than functioning as sensory-motor linkages, they become disrupted
and sites of the dual unfolding of time described above. There are
two matched scenes in the film, one with Fred and one with Pete, which
take place in a darkened hallway. The man stands, seemingly uncertain
of what to do, and then moves ever so slightly into the frame, so
that we become aware that what we had seen was a mirror image. This
image suggests a disconnect between self and simulacrum, that becomes
explicitly connected to electricity in the film. Fred and Pete both
become, to an extent, lost in the medium. Although on the surface,
Lost Highway is set as a Manichean structure, with two worlds,
one light and one dark, as this mirror image suggests, duality is
an insufficient concept for understanding the film. The hallway functionally
literalizes the lost time of recording devices (as transition), but
it does so in a way to solicit attention to the virtual perspectives,
not the actualized outcome of the image. The encounter with the mirror
takes place in no-place, the atopia of electricity, like the intercom
message delayed for the length of the film, where the trace and medium
no longer serve to explain the effect. The trace is belied by the
mirror image, in which near perfect resemblance leaves absolutely
no mark, and the medium mocked by the hallways that go nowhere, that
are nowhere.
Lynch highlights the presence
of electricity in order to bring attention to the medium itself. Frequently,
the sound in Lynchs films is characterized by a low buzzing,
as though all the noises we tune out in daily life were intimately
evident. In the opening scene, thick with silence, Fred suddenly hears
a loud buzzing on the intercom, and answers it to hear a voice say
Dick Laurant is dead. He passes to the windows to see
who is speaking but no one is there. As we discover at the end of
the film, it is Fred himself who sends this message. It is in this
obsession with the effects of medium that I believe Lynchs films
tend to move beyond the time-image as Deleuze formulates it. In a
sense all of Lynchs films are lost in the medium
in both a narrative and aesthetic/structural sense; although this
is often associated with electronic medium of image and sound in Lynchs
film, I dont think the line is simply that between film and
video.26 Although Fred seems
to anticipate the message he receives, pressing the listen
button without ever asking who is there, he apparently can make no
sense of the message, and does not seem to know who Dick Laurent is.
Freds break, and
the appearance of Pete, can be justified as a mental break,
with the next section of the film taking place, as it were, in
Freds mind as he seeks to escape his terrible crime. In
the same way that Renees supposed infidelity is played out in
the film as potentially only a figment of Freds imagination,
it is possible to see that his mind could take him elsewhere as he
sits on death row. Chris Rodley describes Patricia Arquettes
understanding of the film:
Arquettes
own rationale for Lost Highway goes something like this: a
man murders his wife because he thinks shes being unfaithful.
He cant deal with the consequences of his actions and has a
kind of breakdown. In this breakdown he tries to imagine a better
life for himself, but hes so fucked up that even this imaginary
life goes wrong. The mistrust and madness in him are so deep that
even his fantasies end in a nightmare.27
But while this explains
in some way the narrative break, it is ultimately dissatisfying, not
because of some other truth behind it, but because it fails to do
justice to the experience of the film. In Vertigo, the
film feels the way it does and has the effect it does because of the
oneiric quality that saturates it. Only when the dream is broken does
the action pick up again. For Deleuze, this is why Vertigo
is a hinge between the action-image and the time-image. In Lost
Highway, though, it is impossible to ascribe any part of film
to the realm of day. Regardless of narrative explanation, the film
resists with a spiral form that refuses again and again the return
to action. Recall that Deleuze writes of the hero of the time-image
that he records rather than reacts. One could say this
about Fred, that the events hes been part of are engraved
on him, recorded on him like a song on a record, like an image on
a videotape, and he is played over and over again. Freds passivity
derives from this; not that he is a victim, but that he is stuck in
the lost time of recording.
If in Hitchcock characters
become suspended by becoming voyants et non plus actants,
in Lost Highway, there is a materialization of the effect of
looking and of articulation with mechanical and electronic devices
that demands a different materialization. Hitchcock anticipates this
with the theme of death and rememberment in Vertigo; Lynch
intensifies this in a reaction against the clean disappearance
of the virtual image. In effect, in some ways Lynch takes us through
a crisis of the time image and it is around the notion
of the simulacrum and doubles that this achieves its interest and
force. By thickening out the space of the carnal density and electronic
stretchiness of vision and sound, Lynch puts perception itself
into crisis. Lynch pushes indiscernability to an essential singularity
precisely through repetition and bad copies. Arquette describes Lost
Highway as a mans fantasy escape gone wrong, where even
his fantasies are faithless. But that is exactly the point. Alice/
Renee are both bad copies, in the Deleuzian sense of the simulacrumfaithless
to their origins and engendering yet more copies. The copy evokes
the loop, but always with a difference.
When Fred drives home to
send himself the message, too late, that Dick Laurant is dead,
its not quite a vicious circle; Fred flees the house and once
more heads down the lost highway. Has the film ended where it began,
or are we still lost in the space of transmission, of the message
lost in the intercom that lets Fred be in two places at once, never
coinciding with himself?
In Deleuzes cinema
books, as well as in his rethinking of the simulacrum, it is the question
of referentiality that is rendered unimportant. The supposed crisis
of the image generated by the digital revolution can easily be overstated.
If the significance of repetition is masked difference,
then even a medium like film, maybe especially a medium like film
produces the reality effect through this sense of difference, not
through its proximity to the real. Or if it is proximity, it is a
proximity of the splitting of time. The spiral structure of Lost
Highway reflects this, and in the attempt to materialize the delay
of lost time generated by electricity, recording devices, the elements
of telepresence that stretch and pull on the tug of ordinary
reality there is the movement of masked difference, the vitality
of repetition. The association of the mystery man with these devices,
his ability to dematerialize and rematerialize and to change the frequency
of the world around him, emphasizes this. If he has no double, the
only character with one name, one identity by means of his lack of
identity it is because he already embodies the repetition of film.
Alanna Thain is currently
completing her PhD in the Program in Literature at Duke University.
Her main areas of interest are cinema, visual culture, theories of
the body, affect and movement, which she is exploring in her dissertations
entitled "Suspended (Re)Animations: Immediation and Body Doubles
in Cinema", as well as in her work as a filmmaker. At the moment,
she is fascinated by all forms of the double, especially in the cinema
of doubled lives, synthespians and zombies. She can be reached at
athain@duke.edu.
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