Dreaming of Lost Highway

“I like to remember things my own way,” says saxophonist Fred under questioning from the police. They have come to his LA home to investigate who is delivering creepy surveillance VHS tapes. Fred is ostensibly the victim here, but something about him courts their suspicion. My own way to remember Lost Highway – over the decade since I first saw it – foregrounded Bill Pullman as Fred with his lantern jaw and sceptical expressions, a soothing and solid presence in the realm of the uncanny.

I had forgotten that Lost Highway was so dark. I had forgotten about Patricia Arquette, more sex slave than femme fatale, moving naked through an infinite night bound to gangster Mr Eddy (a Frank Booth type) and his pornographer associates. The cameo by and metal soundtrack featuring Marilyn Manson (since accused of the most sadistic sexual violence) amps up the claustrophobic sense that those flashing yellow lines mark a highway to hell.

Hell was the last thing on my mind the day after David Lynch died when I experienced something as close to pure vibrant consciousness as ever before. Sitting on an overland train (the Suffragette Line to Barking Riverside) my mind – previously in knots about a relationship over which I had lost control – suddenly loosened to grasp that everyone else on my carriage – the lady reading, the man bent over his phone – was experiencing or had experienced some version of whatever was happening inside of me. My wretched self-absorption was replaced by a sense of belonging.

This taste of the unified field that David Lynch preached as part of a transcendental meditation practice had caused me to forget that his work also contains an impenetrable blackness. Later that night Lost Highway entered my soft, trusting brain like an assassin. Afterwards my sleep was tainted and awful. I woke up terrified that I no longer had access to a peaceful unconscious. Of my dreams, I could recall only a beautiful woman whose calculating romantic decisions made us want to destroy her. There was a bowl of cranberries – so acrid as to be repulsive.

Cranberry red pales against the wet ruby of lipstick and head wounds. Fred and his siren wife Renee (Arquette) attend a party hosted by a man who will later bleed out on his own glass table. Fred has long since watched Renee through a depersonalised gaze. Soon he will be arrested for her murder, time will start looping and identities will start splitting apart from themselves.

A sign of things to come occurs during the most famously unsettling moment in all of Lynch’s cinema. It is a signal from the body and felt in the body that the laws of physics no longer apply, much less the laws of decency, kindness or love. Fred is approached by a Mystery Man  and it all goes very cold as Lynch’s favourite drone sound (apparently modelled on B52 bombers) overpowers the party music. “I play the devil, I think,” actor Robert Blake told a talk-show host. The devil is in kabuki make-up: a white powdered face, red lips curved in a cruel smile, side-parted black hair and pointy ears.  David Lynch found the ears magical: That’s lovely, you won’t have to act at all.

“That’s fucking crazy man,” is Fred’s response when the Mystery Man says he’s at his house right now. Bill Pullman told an interviewer that this is one of his favourite lines of dialogue. Of course. It’s a normal response to batshit creepiness. His look of HEH? is what I remember so well from a decade ago. Why did my memory hold onto this vibe as representative of a film full of the kind of quicksand despair that can ruin your mind? It is both a bind and a blessing to remember things your own way. Maybe some scenes are supposed to be forgotten so that we can return to our everyday life absolved of what we saw, recalling it only in the odd shudder that makes us grateful to be here and not on the lost highway.

To commemorate the life and creative legacy of the peerless filmmaker David Lynch, Little White Lies has brought together writers and artists who loved him to create ‘In Heaven Everything Is Fine‘: a series celebrating his work. We asked participants to respond to a Lynch project however they saw fit – the results were haunting, profound, and illuminating.