Please read the entry below, and answer the questions posed to you in the comments. Then, read Slavoj Žižek's essay The Art of the Ridiculous Sublime: On David Lynch's Lost Highway, which you can find here. Note: you don't need to read the editor's introduction; Žižek's essay itself is found on pp.9-48 of the PDF. I will post an entry on Žižek's essay with questions for you within the next day.
David Lynch achieved the height of his mainstream success with the 1990-91 T.V. series Twin Peaks. Twin Peaks - a dark, surreal soap opera revolving initially around the mystery of the brutal rape and murder of a small-town homecoming queen, Laura Palmer - was explosively popular. At its inception, it was a poorly advertised mid-season replacement. However, it rapidly moved to the center of the media spotlight, in large part due to the storm of speculation about its central mystery on online message boards. Its serialized narrative prefigured the renaissance, in the last ten years, of serialized dramatic television in the U.S. And, it was one of the first examples of a pop culture phenomenon that gained currency, not through traditional media channels, but over the internet, which was still in its infancy.
However, the popular decline of the series was as rapid as its ascent. By the middle of the second season, ratings had declined precipitously. And finally, the dramatic financial and critical failure of Lynch's cinematic prequel to the series - Fire Walk With Me - transformed him overnight into an entertainment industry pariah.
Fortunately for Lynch, he still had a three film contract with the French production company Studio Canal. Initially, because of the failure of Fire Walk With Me, Studio Canal dragged their feet on funding another Lynch film. However, in 1995 they finally funded the filming of Lost Highway.
One of Lynch's aims was to create a film with the structure of a moebius strip: a three dimensional loop with only one side. Like James Joyce's novel Finnegans Wake - which begins in the middle of a sentence that is the continuation of its last, incomplete sentence - the film has the structure of a closed circle. That is, we begin the film with Fred Madison, who is smoking a cigarette and hears the intercom buzzer for his house. When he pushes the button to listen, he hears the mysterious words "Dick Laurent is dead", and as he rushes over to the window to see who is at his door, he hears the sounds of tires screeching and sirens blaring, only to look out the window and see nothing.
 |
| Fred hears himself at the intercom |
Then, at the end of the film, we see that the voice at the intercom was none other than Fred's own: he stops by his own house and utters these words into his intercom, after which he screeches off in his car followed by a police car.
 |
| Fred has a psychogenic fugue on death row |
What drives Fred to become another person is his brutal murder of his wife Renee, modeled after the unsolved 'Black Dahlia' murder in 1947 - in which a woman named Elizabeth Short was found sliced clean in half at the waist.
In the first portion of the film, we witness the drab, alienated marriage of Fred and his gorgeous but disaffected wife Renee. Fred, a jazz musician, secretly suspects his wife of infidelity. His sense of powerlessness is further punctuated by his sexual inadequacy. In a sex scene designed to evoke the polar opposite of eroticism, Fred has sex with Renee as the Cocteau Twins' "Song to the Siren" plays dimly in the background. He finishes prematurely, and gets a patronizing pat on the back from Renee as she whispers to him "It's okay" while chilling horror drones play on the soundtrack.
Fred is driven to murder Renee in the horrifying manner of the Black Dahlia, and while he is in his cell on death row, he transforms into Pete Dayton. Pete is a fantasy version of Fred: a James Dean stereotype - young and virile; with a leather jacket, sports car, and motorcycle.
However, even in his psychogenic fantasy as Pete, Fred's obsession with Renee and her power over him return in the form of Alice Wakefield, a onetime prostitute and porn star who is the girlfriend of a notorious organized crime boss and pornographer. With virtually no pretext, Alice seduces Pete, and for a brief time, Fred can experience her lust for him and his own virility with her in a way he never enjoyed with Renee. At certain moments, his fantasy wavers and reality threatens to intrude: Pete hears Fred's avant-garde jazz music while working on a car; looks in the mirror as if the face he sees is unfamiliar and strange; and has flashes of the bloody dismembered corpse of Renee. Still, while he is in the throes of his affair with Alice, the fantasy sustains him.
However, what was once an obstacle internal to the relationship is, in this new fantasy scenario, transformed into an external one: the violently jealous gangster Dick Laurent/Mr Eddie.
Soon after Pete and Alice begin their liaison, Mr. Eddie catches on, and Pete and Alice flee for their lives. Alice hatches up a plot to rob a man who works for Mr. Eddie: Andy. Here, as Pete once again finds himself helpless before Renee/Alice, who now transforms into a murderously manipulative femme fatale, Fred's fantasy begins to unravel. Andy has already appeared as Renee's friend, who Fred fantasizes is cuckolding him while he plays jazz at a club. When Pete and Alice rob and accidentally kill Andy, Pete sees Renee and Alice side by side in a photograph, and haplessly asks "Is that you? Are both of them you?" Instantly, he feels a searing pain in his head (just as Fred did on death row), and when he goes to the bathroom to recover, he encounters a third, nightmarishly red third version of Renee/Alice being fucked a tergo and mocking him.
Alice and Pete drive into the Inland Empire to sell what they've stolen from the dead Andy to a fence. When they get to the mysterious cabin in the desert, they make love on the ground - just as Fred and Renee did, to the ethereal ballad "Song to the Siren". Pete repeats over and over again "I want you" to Alice, and in poignant moment, Alice whispers into his ear "You'll never have me" and abandons him.
It's at this point that the fantasy begins decisively falling apart. Pete transforms back into Fred, who makes a last-ditch effort to both maintain the fantasy that it is an external impediment that blocks his access to Renee/Alice, and to get rid of this impediment. He kidnaps Mr. Eddie and murders him in the desert. At the end, he is pursued by the police, and we get a repeat of the fugue scene in his prison cell: his head shakes violence and he howls wildly amidst smoke and strange flashes of light. Perhaps he is finally reverting back to Fred and exiting the fantasy. Perhaps he is convulsing on the electric chair. Perhaps both.
What complicates this already strange narrative is that Lynch makes it all the more strange by adding quasi-supernatural elements and uncanny repetitions. Most important of these is the character billed in the credits as the Mystery Man.
In the first portion of the film, Fred and Renee receive a mysterious series of videotapes on their doorstep, in which are depicted first the front of their house, then the interior, then finally the horrifying spectacle of Fred kneeling over Renee's dismembered corpse. This function of observer is occupied by the Mystery Man, who can (like demons in many folklore traditions) be in two places at once, and serves as both malevolent but also disinterested reporter of the events taking place.
Further, there are a dizzying array of repetitions and reflections that make the relationship between the two stories - that of Fred and Renee, and that of Pete and Alice - highly ambiguous. Shots, lines, and characters are repeated uncannily, without completely clear designations of which, if any, are original/real, and which are simulacra/illusions.
This technique of the quasi-supernaturalization of human, all-too-human horror and malevolence goes all the way back to Lynch's first feature film, Eraserhead, in which a young man, Henry Spencer, faces a failed romantic relationship and the prospect of single fatherhood to a monstrous child in a barren, post-industrial hell landscape. Here are some of the iconic images from that film:
 |
| Henry Spencer from Eraserhead |
 |
| Henry meets the 'Lady in the Radiator' |
 |
| Henry flees the horrors of single fatherhood by murdering his monstrous child |
In the aforementioned Twin Peaks, the specter of the evil that can cause an adored father to rape, mutilate, and murder his own daughter is rendered as the demonic BOB, harbinger of evil from the mysterious Black Lodge.
 |
| BOB and Agent Cooper in the Black Lodge |
The invocation of the supernatural or near-supernatural has made many critics compare Lynch's films with horror film at its best. However, while in typical horror films the threat is always external - a genuinely supernatural or psychotic Other - in Lynch the forces that haunt the narrative and drive characters to unspeakable evil always hover in an ambiguous space the external and the internal, the real and the fantastic.
Jeongmin: What similarities and differences are there between the character(s) of Renee and Alice and the classic film noir femme fatale? Please use examples from the film to substantiate your claims.
ReplyDeleteTo answer this, I would like to follow Janey Place’s flow of argument in “Women in Film Noir” in order to explain Renee and Alice’s both similarity and difference with the classic femme fatale figures, or “dark women”. However, keep in mind in advance that the scenes I would like to use usually include both similarity and differences.
DeleteAccording to Janey Place, femme fatale is the sexually aggressive woman with sexual strength, which is what males fear. Femme fatale is who is sometimes powerful to the level of being destructive, which is a socially unacceptable archetype, but (or hence) imaged in the film noirs to first, respond to the repressed need (expressing male’s fear of female’s sexual power) and second, the need to express the dominant ideology (that it should be controlled or destroyed at the end). Place’s claim is that, in comparison to the angelic, feeble female figures in the 1940s, these dark women have access to their own sexuality, hence unlocking the sexual power. Here, Renee and Alice of the “Lost Highway” seem to fit into this category of being a female with sexual power. Although the intensity of the show of power is different, the doubled male protagonist (Fred and Pete) are both powerless in front of their sexuality: Renee’s naked body allures Fred, but he finishes the intercourse prematurely. Alice actively allures Pete to touch the sexualized parts of her body, but Pete ends up becoming the dupe to help her run away from Mr. Eddy, not being able to ever “having” or controlling her fully. In this sense, both Renee and Alice seem like femme fatales who are sexual powerful under the male gaze.
(continued in the next reply, due to the space restraint)
This comment has been removed by the author.
DeleteHowever, what they do with their sexuality and the results of their action are different from classic film noirs. According to Janey Place’s claim, the classic film noirs often try to deliver the “lesson”. There is a concept of “spider woman”, who weaves web to kill the victim but renders herself also the prey of the same false value system. In other words, the femme fatale with sexual power in the classic film noirs usually results in her own destruction because of it, which is the tendency that consolidates patriarchal demand. However, Renee and Alice both does not seem to repeat this image of the classic film noir in different sense.
DeleteWhen it comes to Renee, she has the sexual power to make the male counterpart fear her (take a look at the scene where the camera zooms her hand patting Fred). She is not devoting to him, rather disinterested, which is also a big no-no, a fearful original sin from the perspective of the males in the film noir (and perhaps in the social reality reflected in the film as well). However, she is different from the classic film noir archetype of femme fatale because she does not actively deceive Fred. Rather, it is only inside Fred’s psyche that he is suspicious of her infidelity. In this sense, Lynch’s version of femme fatale, Renee, is a destructive femme fatale not because she deceives and uses Fred for her gain, but because the male “imagines” and fears her to be destructive. Although she is left immobile like other classic film noir femme fatales’ usual end, it is not because she immorally used up her sexuality too much, but because the male thought that way. Femme fatale has always been powerful only under the sexualizing male gaze. However, the male gaze was not that explicit because of the blurring effect from the females’ active engagement in deception. However, it is impressive how Lynch twists the femme fatale image, showing how femme fatales are fatal only under the male gaze and male fears.
Alice is even one step more complicatedly different from the classic film noirs. She is imaged as a violent aggressor (leaving Pete at her gunpoint), not to mention her being extremely sexually powerful, mesmerizing Pete, which makes her like usual femme fatales. Also, unlike Renee and alike classic femme fatale, she does manipulate Pete for her own emancipation from pornographic industry and Eddy. However, the result part is different from the classic ones: she does not get destroyed. This is because, first, Alice is not an obstacle in the second intimate relationship, Mr. Eddy was (comparing to the first couple, when Fred killed Renee because she seemed like the obstacle for having her). Hence, Fred (now slowly turning back into the real body) kills Mr. Eddy, not Alice. Second, and more importantly, Alice is the ultimate version of fundamental fantasy anyways. She is the “imagined version” even more than Renee was. As the rebound from a disinterested and unfathomable Renee, Fred turns into Pete and acquires this ultimate version of fantasized female who explicitly tells him what she wants, but she makes him powerless yet again, even more destructing him. And, unlike classic film noir plots, this unaccepted female archetype cannot be killed and destroyed, exactly because she is only the fantasy. As a result, the sexual power of the female never ends up being controlled. This, in a way, puts the male protagonist, not the female, in the utmost state of powerlessness, destruction and a sense of being lost, which is depicted through the first and the last scene of madly driving through the “lost highway”.
Daisy: In the film, we get two characters played by Patricia Arquette, each of whom exemplifies a different style of femininity. What do you think is the significance of this fact? Is there anything interesting about cinematic representations of femininity to be found in the comparison and contrast of these two figures?
ReplyDeleteBoth characters, Renee and Alice are played by the same actress and in a way are the same person. Renee is the real person, a distant, expressionless brunette that is cold towards her husband. She does not seem to be very affectionate and passionate with Fred, or at least that is the way Fred remembers her. On the other hand Alice, the blonde one, is smiley and attentive and seems to be full of life comparing to Renee. Perhaps Alice is the way Fred would like Renee to be, a lot more loving and interested in him just like an ideal woman should. However the above mentioned traits are more applicable to women’s attitude towards Fred/Pete rather than personality traits. In reality women seem to be similar in many ways. Both are attractive, both of them act in the seductive manner and undress very casually, which suits their porn-star past. The two represent femininity in a much objectified way, as if a woman is a thing that exists purely to satisfy male sexual desire. They also perfectly match the description of a typical femme fatale from film noir genre; charming, seductive and mysterious they lead a man to committing something dangerous in return for their affection. Furthermore, when we are first introduced to Alice she appears to be more traditionally feminine (loving woman that is dependent on her man) however further in the movie she becomes more controlling and turns out to be not as submissive, perhaps due the fact that Fred comes closer to reality and his lack of desired domination over his wife.
DeleteJohn: Lynch makes an obvious reference to "Vertigo" in having a single actress - Patricia Arquette - play two characters who are (or may be) one and the same person. Please compare the use of this technique in "Vertigo" and "Lost Highway", especially with reference to the themes of love, femininity, and/or male desire.
ReplyDeleteAs in “Vertigo”, the main female role is played by the same actress (Madeline/Judy in Vertigo and Alice/Renee in Lost Highway); thereby, hinting at the possibility of the two characters may be one and the same. Both films use this technique in a similar fashion: to show the male main character’s desire to regain their masculinity. In both films, the male protagonists experience a loss of control: Madeline’s death in “Vertigo” and Fred’s inability to sexually satisfy Renee in “Lost Highway”, which leads to a loss of masculinity. Similarly, both male characters then recreate the woman they lost but in a way that is simultaneously different. In both cases, masculinity/femininity is not necessarily the biological sex of the character but the relationship association that the masculine has over the feminine. In the case of Madeline and Judy, Scottie recreates Judy in a way so she looks like Madeline but is also subservient to Scottie’s whims. While Scottie could not control Madeline’s behavior, he could control Judy. And by shaping Judy, who was physically reminiscent of Madeline, into something he could control, he was able to assert his authority over “Judy/Madeline”. Likewise, in the “Lost Highway”, Fred was unable to sexually satisfy Renee and was, therefore, emasculated. By reimagining himself into someone younger, and more “virile” he is able to reassert his masculinity by engaging in a wide range of sexual activities to the extent he, “got more ass than a toilet seat”. Fred, as is younger projection (Pete), is able to satisfy his desire and lust for Alice, who is a mirror image of Renee, in a way that he was previously unable; enabling him to regain his masculinity. By reimaging the female characters, the both male protagonists are able to reassert their sexual dominance, and control; thereby, reaffirm their masculinity to themselves in their imagination. However, in both scenarios, the fictitious re-creation of the women that robbed them of their masculinity, only served to sate their desire for control and, in the end, made it clear that in the end, as Alice said, “You’ll never have me.”
DeleteYe Rim: Just as Lynch has one actresses play a character who may or may not be the same person, he has two different actors - Bill Pullman and Balthazar Getty - play two characters who may or may not be the same person. What do you think is the significance of this technique? And, how would you compare and contrast its use with the use of the same technique in "That Obscure Object of Desire"?
ReplyDeleteIn "Lost Highway (1998)," the two actors, Bill Pullman and Balthazar Getty respectvely play Fred Madion and Pete Dayton, the apparently antithetical foils whose congruence the audience is uncertain about. In the response, I argue that not only the two mentioned above but also Robert Blake as the Mystery Man altogether represent the disconcerted identities of a single protagonist, Fred Madison, to challenge the audience with psychoanalytic suspense and mystery. To explain, Fred is the ego, distressed and sexually emasculated by his aloof wife, Renee. Mortified in the death row, he temporarily and megalomaniacally formulates his superego, Pete . A stereotypical bad boy trope, Madison under the illusion of being Pete-both in appearance and demeanor- is able to attain everything he was deprived of as Fred: trim appearance, swagger, and sexual prowess over Alice, Renee's blonde, imaginative counterpart. The Mystery Man, lastly, constitutes Fred's id, for his identity remains vague throughout the diegesis, with his moral values highly ambivalent.
DeleteInitially, the visualization of the protagonist's fractured identities confound the viewers, for the latter struggles to configure how Pete suddenly finds himself in the death row in place of Fred, whether Fred and Pete-and their lovers- are essentially same beings, and how the Mystery Man omnisciently oversees every diegetic incidents. Thus, Lynch, by installing three different actors for a single character, burdens the audience throughout the film to rationally rearrange the plot. This task the director readily assists by deploying recurring tropes that reinvoke the segments of disconnected filmic sequences. For instance, the visions of Fred murduring Renee persists even when Pete takes over the misc-en-scene. Fred's spontaneous delirium in the death row returns to haunt Pete. Whereas Pete does not resemble Fred, Renee and Alice look the same, except for their hair colors (with the latter's blonde hair color,traditionally representing promiscuity than dark hair). Lastly, the Mystery Man sustains his omnipresence throughout the plot, appearing as a morally ambivalent, disinterested spectator to Fred's impotent reality and Pete's fantasy world-terrifying Fred in the former while vindicating Pete in the latter. The audience, as the film proceeds, hitherto gradually unravels and rejonts the seemingly incoherent narrative by attempting to mentally re-wind and reintegrate the uncanny overlaps between Pete's variegated personas.
DeleteLynch's suspense-evoking technique recalls that in the film discussed earlier, "That Obscure Object of Desire (1977)." Both films ambush the audience with sudden twists, in which dual depictions of a single character renders the readers in confusion. In the vicious cycle of illusory comfort and backlash, the diegetic characters in the two film noirs blindly struggle with their essential impotence to their fated deaths. However, whereas "That Obscure Object of Desire" employs two different actresses for one woman, "Lost Highway" depicts multiple actors to depict different personas that may or may not be the same beings. What is the thematic signifcance of this differece, in terms of film noir's specific characteristics? First, the difference lies in the subjectivity of each duality/multiplicity of diegetic characters. For one thing, the former film, by allowing two different actresses to co-exist and altercate as the same Conchita, oscillates Matthieu's voyeuristic gaze. Until the end, the viewers are left uncertain whether Conchita can be subjected under the male protagonist's persistent gaze. On the other hand, David Lynch separates the SUBJECT of voyeurism into different personas, each played by different actors; it should be noted that such trope of duality cruelly points out that regardless of the extent of aggressivity and virility in each embodiment of masculine gazes, the object of the desire is not even obscure, but completely unattainable-for Renee/Alice is played by a same actress. Also, whereas Matthieu's pursuit of Conchita despite her mercurial nature leads to the turbulent lovers' untimely deaths, Fred's imagined transformations endow him an ephemeral, delusory haven from his impotence and later, execution on electric chair.
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteChristine: As I discussed in my post, Lynch uses imagery and themes that are quasi-supernatural throughout "Lost Highway". What is the significance of this, do you think? Please cite examples from the film in your discussion.
ReplyDeleteFirst, I think that it adds to the film noir feel that the movie has. In previous noir films that we watched there was instances of reflection and repetition, and in the case of Vertigo there was also a seemingly supernatural force involved. In Lost Highway, the way that Fred is supernaturally turned into Pete and takes on his life shows this same "reflection", as he is destroyed by Alice/Renee in both instances, and many parts of the dialogue are the same as well. This transformation may also embody the emotions and psychogenic fugue from the trauma that Fred goes through, as does the mystery man. In order to fully understand the turmoil of the "hero" in this film, supernatural elements are added to physically represent the phycological.
DeleteIn the case of the Mystery Man, he also adds a type of third party perspective or gaze to the film. We get to see things through his "eyes" by the use of the video camera. During the film, Fred states that he prefers to remember things how he wants and not so much as they actually happened. The Mystery Man gives us a glimpse into the events that happened as well, from either a more subjective view perhaps, or perhaps from the jealous lens of Fred's inner turmoil.
These supernatural elements add another layer of ambiguity to the film. The viewer cannot be sure what is real and what is fake, and the sort of vagueness that the film has makes you feel trapped and on edge for most of the film. This uncertainty adds a lot to the film by creating an unknowing sympathy to the "hero", as we feel the same ambiguity that he does. Again, this is the same ambiguity found in film noir, adding to its place in the genre.
Nancy: Besides using the character type of the femme fatale, "Lost Highway" deploys many other of the techniques of film noir. Please compare and contrast "Lost Highway" with the classic films noirs we watched and discussed, with reference to these techniques.
ReplyDeleteThe aspect of what reality is being shown is one factor that can be seen in both Lost Highway and That Obscure Object of Desire. The reason being, in both films there is a character that perceives to be seeing reality happening in front of their eyes when actually, something is changed. For example, in Lost Highway, Fred is put on the death row when he has a psychogenic fugue and imagines himself to be a young, slick man named Pete. From these two points of view the audience is able to get a glimpse of what most probably is Fred’s wish of what his life should be like in comparison to the old one he lived. Nevertheless, the character that plays the role of Renee’s replacement, Alice, is somewhat the same as Renee and gives off an image that bring Pete to remember his deceased wife Renee and reminisce what crime he committed. Showing two “realities” gets the audience to ponder what the protagonist’s real motifs are and what is it he truly wants to achieve.
DeleteOn the other hand, in the film That Obscure Object of Desire, the femme fatale Conchita is played by two actresses who interchange throughout the film with the male protagonist not taking notice that they are two different women. I claim that the reason behind Mathieu not being able to notice the difference between the two women was because he was choosing what he wanted to see. Conchita though meant to be one woman, had two actresses playing the role giving her an extraordinary double personality in a way. Mathieu was oblivious of this as for many other events that occurred around him. This sense of living in a world with the perfect woman for him, Mathieu forgot all about looking between the lines of a woman’s image and seeing what lies beneath all the aesthetic beauty leading him to his downfall.
In this sense, both male protagonists from these films seem to come to a downfall at the end of the film due to their imagination and wishful thinking of what their reality truly is.