OTR Comment - April, 2004

A regular moviegoer speaks a language whose core components are typically employed without question, much in the way we might learn to speak English without understanding what a participle is. In David Lynch’s movies, the constructed element of supposedly natural sound is something the director often plays with. Lynch’s characters tend to question the source of noises which impinge upon their lives, feeling that ‘normal’ sounds like a dog barking or a telephone ringing have been carefully placed by a malevolent outside force (which, of course, in the shape of the director, they have).  This can create a sensation of paranoia for character and audience alike.  Understanding how Lynch uses sound in this manner can highlight aspects of what he is trying to do in his movies, particularly in the case of Lost Highway (1997), which cannot be fully understood without reference to these techniques. 

It is worth mentioning, briefly, two major ways in which Lost Highway is typically ‘read’ by its viewers. Firstly, as with Mulholland Dr. and perhaps Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, the film can be seen as an attempt to depict through celluloid the experience of descending into madness under extreme psychological trauma (and interviews with co-writer Barry Gifford suggest at least he felt this was the intended meaning of the movie).  In this interpretation, Bill Pullman’s character Fred Madison retreats into a delusory utopia in his prison cell: a desperate attempt to repress the knowledge that he violently murdered his wife in a maddened rage brought on by sexual impotence and the fear that she was committing adultery. But the occluded motifs that populate the fantasy world created by Fred, where he has reinvented himself as the young and virile Pete Dayton (played by Balthazar Getty), are generated from the material of Fred’s unconscious memory, and the associations tied to these distorted chromata cannot but pull him back to the consequences of his former actions. The fantasy descends into nightmare as the artificial logic of the constructed and imaginary cannot hold together, and the ‘reality’ of his actions inevitably re-emerges.

More ambitiously, the film’s structure suggests that Lynch may have been trying to experiment with a story that winds itself around to the point at which it began. Most commonly analogised to a Möbius strip, the lost highway down which we drive at the start and end of the movie (to the accompaniment of David Bowie’s spooky yet adrenal ‘I’m Deranged’), is therefore less a set of bookends for a neatly contained story in the traditional movie style (the dead body in Sunset Blvd. and similar devices in a thousand movies since) than a sign we have travelled back to where we came from – only to continue driving. In this sense, Bill Pullman’s Fred Madison is as much a fantastical, delusory creation of an emotionally disturbed Pete Dayton (who commits murder for the love of a woman whose true motives he comes to doubt) as the other way around. (Or even, like waking up as a bug in Kafka’s Metamorphosis, the transformation that took place may have to be accepted as the reality of the film world: just ‘what happens’ in Lynchlandia.) To see how structurally solid this is, one need only notice that the movie could begin with at least two other points in the story, loop round to the same point, and still be mistaken for a more or less conventional narrative: namely, the scene in the prison cell in which Madison transforms into Dayton; and the later scene in the desert when the opposite transubstantiation occurs. This is a far more challenging and disturbing effort than Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, Mulholland Dr., or the first way of reading of Lost Highway, then, because it endeavours to create a sensation of paranoid schizophrenia through the process of engagement with the audience, rather than in the interaction between the characters in the movie (observed by a safe, external, popcorn-munching viewer). In this sense, it is explicitly in the style of Kafka, both in the manner in which Lynch uses particular disorienting devices to make the viewer feel uncomfortable (such as rapid, erratic transitions between daytime and night), and because – exactly like The Trial – the physical order of the events, the way in which the film has been laid out for the audience, seems itself open to reinterpretation. The audience is encouraged to accept what was previously only surrealistic metaphor as a possible reality, to engage with its memory of the film as it unfolds, and to question its own state of mind. That the texture of the film and specific visual elements recur from former Lynch movies also helps to place the meaning of the piece beyond the bounds of the single movie alone and instead in the juxtaposition left behind in the mind of the witness. The most terrifying culmination of this sensation comes during the late scene in the desert, where the white-faced Mystery Man, played by Robert Blake, literally turns a handheld video camera upon the audience and advances, staring directly into your eyes – and it is your sanity, rather than Fred Madison’s, you feel is being called into doubt.

Either way, crucial to the film’s internal logic are the musical effects that draw the audience into the delusory worlds of Dayton/Madison. Most noticeable at first is the ostentatious thrash and heavy metal music, tracks from Nine Inch Nails, Marilyn Manson, Smashing Pumpkins, Lou Reed.  These mark points of dramatic tension, most shockingly when Rammstein’s goth-Nazi gruntings accompany Pete Dayton into Andy’s mansion, where he finds a large projector screen showing black-and-white footage of his new lover being vigorously humped from behind by a stranger. Presumably, they also occasion the lack of subtlety objected to by reviewers when it was first released. These Trent Reznor-selected ‘soundtrack pieces’ fit the mood, but are the most conventional of sonic techniques used. More integral to the overall strategy of the film is the deeper use of sounds, presumably engineered in close collaboration with Lynch’s longtime musical co-conspirator Angelo Badalamenti, to provide an aural counterpoint to the visual themes of the film – particularly through effects of disorientation, recurrence and hypnosis.

Sounds find themselves repeated in different stages of the film and catalyse the emotional trials through which the two lead males pass. In particular, the discordant free jazz music played by Fred Madison on his saxophone as he declines into insanity contrasts with the harmonic revving of Mr. Eddie’s car after it was tuned by ace-mechanic Pete Dayton. Madison’s opposite number returns conventionally non-musical things to a state of harmony whilst Madison breaks normally melodic things into the chaos of noise. And when the troublesome free jazz music returns on a radio played by one of Dayton’s associates while Pete is working on a car in the garage, Dayton is challenged and disoriented by its simultaneous alienness and familiarity to the point of having to turn the radio off. This disorientating recurrence matches the uncomfortable rediscovery of the blank cassette, and other repeated visual and scriptural motif such as head-wounds, nosebleeds, doppelganger characters and re-uttered phrases. (The Mystery Man’s half-question, “We’ve met before, haven’t we?”, is the effect raised to the power of three: an observation of Fred Madison’s experience in the film, of our experience watching it, and itself a spooky recurrent event.) Other sounds intrude upon the safe world the characters try to inhabit as well: dogs barking, door buzzers, the threatening burn of white noise on the video cassettes, the oppressive, mosquito buzzing of the round electric light in the prison cell (refracted later as the burning sun in the desert) – and the quality of these noises shows how each one has been carefully chosen and placed by Lynch to distract our focus from a comfortable narrative fiction in which everything has an internal and contained cause and effect.  This matches the juxtaposition of people and objects in the visual frame, which is also carefully engineered to cause us to doubt the naturalness of their arrangement. The ringing of the telephones and doorbells, often by unknown and unseen strangers, just won’t go away – one can even identify the two, slightly separated ringing tones of the telephone’s bell if one listens carefully in stereo, such is the quality of the recording and the focused attention it demands.

At the same time, enduring long, low, beatless chords played throughout almost the entire movie – typically below the level of conscious observation – act much like a mantra to try to induce an altered mental state in the viewer and recollect the alternative hypnosis of the open road, the pulse of the markings, the central dotted line advancing toward you relentlessly and repetitiously. (Anyone who disputes the intent of this technique should take a long journey in a car at night and think again.) The effect is similar to the manner in which Rachmaninov gently rocks between two close harmonies across piano, strings and wind instruments in his Third Piano Concerto in order to achieve a trancelike, hallucinatory effect. When one considers that Rachmaninov was also criticised for external effect-based ostentation in his works as cataclysmic noises elsewhere intruded upon the hypnotic internal logic of the composition, perhaps the analogy is strengthened. Although a quotation attributed to Lynch that he considered Lost Highway a ‘psychogenic fugue’ suggests he had another musical form than the concerto in mind, it nonetheless indicates that the effect Rachmaninov is achieving and that which Lynch is trying for through the limits and possibilities of his own medium is not wholly dissimilar. It also affirms the centrality of the musical experience of the movie, and perhaps what Lynch is trying to get to more generally. The fugue is explicitly a form in which two or more themes are contrasted, varied and recapitulated, and so in this sense it is not hard to see Pullman and Getty as themselves thematic components set out by the film to be played with. It is also a form whose maestro, Bach, used mercilessly to experiment with inverted, distorted and recurrent motives for musical effect. Listen to the film again, and see what you think.