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.