Following Lost Highway (1997)
Jade
The Lynchian Woman is often a femme fatale. In Lost Highway she is embodied by Patricia Arquette, playing both Renee Madison and Alice Wakefield. Everything about her evokes simultaneous mystery and allure; it is her inaccessibility that draws you in, and inspires fear. In the beginning scenes of the film, shadows drape all over the house (Alex points out that shadow itself is a kind of third character in the home). Renee Madison walks around the house wrapped in a long black satin robe and very tall heels. She sleeps in a bed of black satin. A stark contrast is created against her creamy white skin. Does Renee represent this blackness, is she of its party? In certain scenes, Fred reacts to her as if she is an embodied demon. Yet she is ultimately the victim of the shadows surrounding them.
Alex
Three movies we’ve analyzed so far: Metropolis, The Green Knight, and now Lost Highway. The primary female actress plays two starkly different characters in every film, to catastrophic effect (as far as the male protagonist is concerned). Lost Highway presents this in the most understandable terms out of all three: her changing roles are reflective of the changing inner world of the male hero. All three films being made by men, the woman represents then an extreme dramatization of the other. Otherness, desire, isolation, and union all find an ideal symbol for expression in the archetypal female (particularly in a strong, independently motivated female).
The dark mystery in a male-perspective story is often directly equated with the female, but Lost Highway presents darkness as a separate character (the Mystery Man, played by Robert Blake). Patricia Arquette then acts only as a trigger, or a portal to meeting this darkness. Fred Madison recognizes the basic mystery behind his wife’s unreadable expression, and is reminded of everything he doesn’t know about himself. I’m struck by how powerful the feminine portrayal is here: Renee and Alice both come through the entire storyline basically untouched, still completely independent players. Even being murdered by her husband doesn’t affect her sovereignty in any meaningful way, since her life apparently continues post-murder in a different person, with different hair and a different name.
Jade
The climax of the film happens at the Mystery Man’s cabin, where Arquette appears as Alice Wakefield, having sex with our transformed hero (Pete Dayton, played by Balthazar Getty)on the side of the highway. A dramatic 80s ballad blares and, surrounded by blackness, this couple is fully illuminated by the headlights of the car.
On one hand, the scene is excessive and cheesy. I am just waiting for it to end. But as the ballad blares on, and the camera still lingers on the illuminated bodies entwined, the viewer is forced to accept the scene; to continue watching at all, we must become totally immersed. Something powerful happens here: Arquette transforms from this cheesy sex object in a Hollywood scene into something far more ancient, a sort of Mother Goddess that is giving birth to Pete and killing him in the same act. When he tells her he wants her and she responds, “You’ll never have me” and walks away from him, she breaks our spell of immersion, our sense that we have finally made it to the part of the film that follows a plot that makes sense.
She viciously throws Pete and the audience out of the comfortable, romantic runaway-lovers storyline back into the chaos of a strange and supernatural plot. To walk away from him isn’t just denying him requited love or an orgasm; she throws him back into this state of neutralized experience; if she has by sex given birth and killed him in the same act, she now leaves him in a liminal state, neither living nor dead. Indeed, soon after he is transformed back into the hero’s first form, Fred Madison. Alice’s image is erased from the photograph in Andy’s home. The audience is left to question the reality of the entire experience.
Alex
The film begins with Fred Madison emerging from darkness, into an uncertain and frightening relationship with the shadows in his home, and with his own wife. The cause of this dread and of his own approaching crime is unknown.
I’d love to apply the most simple and human metaphor possible to this opaque and confounding plot: Lost Highway is expressing the journey of man as he emerges from night, with its paraphernalia of darkness, nightmares, Mystery Men and the primacy of inner emotional states, up into the glaring light of day, then back into night again. When the sun’s up, you have a dayjob. Your problems are physical problems, and they can be solved in the same manner. You have zero memory of the earth shaking events of the night before. But stability recedes with the sun. You sense the mystery again approaching, with all the weight of your inner riddles still unanswered. Thus in Lost Highway, the day-character of Pete Dayton experiences complete failure and loss in the conclusion of the highway sex scene, as his day-time abilities disappear and he is returned to the night-character of Fred Madison. But this time, Fred has the power of perspective, and experience, and will.
When the movie ends you are back to where Fred started, placed literally in that same moment of the timeline, yet we’ve now been given a complete build of the world he’s in. The audience, like Fred himself, has gained agency by traversing the labyrinthine plot as illuminated by Lynch.