Ive been perusing my David Lynch movie collection (yes, partly inspired by the fact that Lost Highway was just on IFC) and am trying to go through and piece it together from top to bottom (i go through this curiously sppoky pahse very year about this time with this set of movies).

I believe that i understand the whole time shift thing where my main man had to go back into his own past to inspire himself to complete the murder he would commit.

And im trying to piece togehter the three way personality split thingy between bleach, black, and video guy. (i can see the twins being different sides of the same person but... what is video? protector? avenger?)

another thing i dont get is how bill pullman's life and (oh god whats his name?) can intermingle with each other easily, be seperate entities, yet be fully functional as their other charachters at the same time.


any comments? any new theories?

you cant tell me that there isnt SOMEBODY out there that has seen Lost Highway and have some theories about its trippyness?

I ran across an article about Lost Highway in a film journal a while back, and it suggested the idea that the movie deals with the nature of fantasy, specifically the Balathazar Getty character as the fantasy of the Bill Pullman one. You know, Pete has a reasonably comfortable life, family, girlfriend, and he has a successful sexual relationship with Alice, which Fred doesn't with Renee. I'm still not sure how a lot of the rest of the film fits in with this theory, but it's an interesting way to connect some of the elements, and it raises the question of just how much of this is going on only inside Fred's head (like how he says in the beginning that he likes to remember things his own way, not necessarily how they happened).

I have a similar annual cycle with these films, but I haven't seen Highway in a few months. In the last IFC Lynch run I got fixated on Wild at Heart instead - it's a bit easier to untangle than Lost Highway!

but getty's charachter doesn't in fact have a sucessful relationship with Alice. while they may be able to copulate in the physical sense, that quote "you'll never have me" is kindof indicative of the fact that neither Pullman nor Getty in either personality can handle the Ego/SuperEgo/Id entity that is Renee/Alice/VideoMan...

i wonder what the three of them in actuality were?

also notice that the picture that originaly showed Alice and Renee in the house in Bel Aire that Getty robbed (familiar, yes? from the party scene with Pullman and Renee), where the host that freaked out when Fred relayed that Dick Larant is dead is now missing a good portion of his bodily functions, is now only showing Alice...

and the phone call timing between VideoMan and himself with Dick Larant...

I guess I always took a more existential take on the film. . . as far as the whole "fantasy" theory goes, it's true that Alice's "You'll never have me" kind of destroys the fantasy, maybe just to show fantasy can't hold up to the reality of Fred's life and crimes. Maybe as far as the picture is concerned, Fred sees both Renee and Alice because he knows Renee at the same time he imagines a better version of his wife - and so Pete of course only sees Alice in the picure, since the fantasy he's living in denies Renee and Fred's problems with her. But you're right - there's a lot of other things to account for.

I think that as far as the medium of video is used in the film, it's the only objective viewpoint. It shows the way "things actually happened", such as Renee's murder, or Alice's porn film shown at the party (which seems to tell her situation with Larent wasn't as horrible as she told Pete it was) - everything else is subject to personal perspective and interpretation.

But as for the phone calls to and from the same people . . . I don't know how it's all supposed to work. I should probably watch the film again before I expound upon anything else.

alice, renee, and videoman...

they are never in the same frame or togther in any scene...

the closest they come is when fred and renee are at the party and videoman goes up the stairs as renee is at the bar

on the freudian psychology of the Triumvirate...

ego/superego/id
renee/videoman/alice

Freud would have had a field day with Lynch . . . or maybe it would have been the other way around.

freud and jung...

cause the Triumvirate is pretty obvious...

and Mr.Eddy/Dick Laurant is defeinitely inner/outer facades....