Repetition and Recapitulation in Lost Highway

What, if anything, do the detectives experience the second time through?

You ask, in Sam Hill, how?

How does a Möbius strip tiese itself in nots?

How Should a Person Be in two places at once?

Putting truth and untruth together a shot may be made at what this hybrid actually was like to look at, like when Rebeca saw a stranger in me, suggesting we’d become someone I am not, a wigged murderer with the temerity to ask, “What the fuck is your name?” an Alice in WONDERLAND wearing glass heels in a film about pornography’s perils, a Mystery Woman in our own Holmes.

Meanwhile, “The Zombies are standing about talking. ‘Beautiful day.’ ‘Certainly is’.”

In Asking the Wrong Questions: Reiteration and Doubling in David Lynch’s Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive, and Inland Empire Simon Lovat writes,

Lost Highway resembles a Möbius strip, a one-sided surface created from a rectangle with two surfaces, twisted through one hundred and eighty degrees and joined at the ends. On one side is Fred, on the other Pete. Their separate surfaces become one in this hellish, endless loop from which Fred/Pete can never escape. Fred is destined forever to warn himself that “Dick Laurent is dead” via the intercom at the front entrance to his house, while at the same time another instance of Fred-in-the-past, located inside the house, is destined never to comprehend this message, and to repeat the cycle endlessly, making the same mistakes and ending with the same result. This constitutes a time paradox, because it is an iterative temporal loop.

Lovat leaves out the detectives, whose stale LANGOLIERSian dialog suggests their own strange spun-off loop understood only retroactively. These tedious procedural advancers of the eternal and infernal plot who arrest the original incomprehending Fred, but also recognize Renee as Fred Madison’s wife and must deterministically chase what’s later-destined.

The circular thesis of the camRicouer can seem artificial when “time becomes human time to the extent that it is organised after the manner of a narrative; narrative, in turn, is meaningful to the extent that it portrays the features of temporal experience.”[5]

Balthazar Getty, son of kidnapped Little Paul, cousin to THE EVIL WITHIN’s Andrew Getty, is meaningful only as a projection of the once-imprisoned Fred’s desire to “remember things [his] own way. How [he] remembered them. Not necessarily how they happened.”

Patricia Arquette portrays the pretty features of both murdered Renee and sexually-available Alice. All very veiled and good until Renee and Alice appear in the unfacts of the same photograph while Rammstein does their take on John Updike’s Heirate Mich, on his theme of the boundary curve of the entwined.

“Is that you? Are you both of them?” asks projected Pete.

Kill us IN COLD BLOOD once, shame on you.

“We have met before haven’t we? […] At your house don’t you remember?” hisses the Mystery Man. “As a matter of fact, I’m there right now.” We have been accursed before. We have been accused of forgetting a face. We have been accused of playing Satan Summing Up His Legions while summoning the Blakean demon, whom Martha P. Nochimson styles, “an agent from beyond the marketplace, whose malign, indeed obscene, intent is to keep Fred and everyone else mired in the lies and illusions of the plane of everyday transactions,” in whom Slavoj Žižek sees, “the ultimate horror of the Other who has a direct access to our (the subject’s) fundamental fantasy […] a being of asexualized, childishly neutral knowledge.”

“You like pornos? Give you a boner?” asks Mr. Eddie, asking like the Internet insinuated itself when AOL Online arrived in the male. The deserted dwelling burns in reverse. The self is blurred with the other as a result of what’s been summoned. Mired we’ll be until we accept the mystery of dual occupancy. Killed IN COLD BLOOD twice, there’s insight into alterity. Todd McGowan writes in Cinema Journal,

Not only does fantasy offer us the images of ourselves as we want to be, it is also the basis for our sense of being situated in a “real world” rather than a mysterious one plagued by uncertainty. […] When we traverse the fantasy we desire without hope, because we realize that the Other’s “mystery” is simply the expression of our own inescapable deadlock. […] Lost Highway […] suggests a way of experiencing film as such—by refusing the phantasmic illusion of depth that filmic narratives provide and, instead, comporting ourselves towards the void that fantasy obscures.

When a void-comported psyche confronts the inescapable deadlock of being a wife-murderer, window smasher, or worse, modern jazz musician, we start ourselves to solipsistic bifurcation. One half suffers migraines in a PRISONERSCINEMA while on the superfluidous side we drink a lilac broth of florid ideation, living out a counterfactual LIFE OF PI’s protention to see our children still birthed by doulaism before they wake.

“The zombie hero Gris Grue said: ‘There are good zombies and bad zombies, as there are good and bad ordinary men.”

Nochimson describes this pitiful paring of our particle position in Lynch Swerves: Uncertainty From Lost Highway To Inland Empire,

Non-locality in Lost Highway creates a provocative and cinematically revolutionary interplay between what is possible and what is impossible and what it means to refuse to recognize boundless possibility. […]

What Lynch shows us is that it isn’t the strange events that lead to unfortunate consequences, but a marketplace habit of seeking certainty where there is none.

We only think we are making the right moves. Each eye still prefers to “remember things my own way, not necessarily the way they happened, but how I remember them,” amidst “the abundance of references to means of media and communication in […]: video tapes, camcorders, cell phones, the intercom. The whole movie, as it seems, is penetrated by a kind of communicational electrosmog, and somehow all of these devices are related to very strange and mysterious powers.”[1]

We seek certainties in camcordance with how we remembered, not necessarily how things happened. We’ve read a story called Entropy. We know we will die, that hour blood must run cold, though we’re not sure why. That’s why our dwelling is furnished sparsely as Fred Arctor’s. We’ve readied it to burn with less fuel for the backward fire. It is only a recording of the family home we once dwelled wherein. Rendering every tchotchke and Little Kickers jersey wastes bandwidth. The observer can fill in the blanks with their own viewing habits. MacLeod has his own ideas where I go when he turns off the lights. He never wonders who might be instantiated and who might only be revisioning The Long Way Home from a PRISONERSCINEMA cellular network.

Nochimson discusses the particular superposition where sexual projections shower in bangs and black silk bathrobes for reasons irreducible,

Alice and Renee, as sexualized objects, are “she” and “they” at the same time […] This quantum image poetically serves Lynch well here because at the same time it suggests the instability of bodies in the marketplace and the interchangeability of women as objects of desire under the conditions of the marketplace.

A ringing telephone alerts the film literate that lines of communication are closed. The VHS tapes of Fred Arctors’ home need to be CACHEd upon their ARRIVAL. Lacking the kindness to look both backwards and forwards, Fred and Renee forget to rewind. We won’t make that mistake again. They speak tersely and meaninglessly to each other like teledildonics conference attendees who can’t live with themselves; the telenovelic detective going through the recurrent motions, practically Hector fresh out of the Time Tub, can’t believe they even sleep in the same bedroom.

Sometimes conflict under black satin sheets is alluring. Sometimes it is as awful as the dumpster bum behind your Wernicke’s. Sometimes it is The Mystery Man whispering of your dreams at a Winkie’s where the waitress shares your name and offers only soft boiled egg. Sometimes “relationships of time […] cannot be seen in the represented object and do not allow themselves to be reduced to the present.”[2] Sometimes the video STALKER’s camera movements resemble the camera movements in Fred’s dream of killing Renee, causing co-workers to whisper about what model of Ray-Bans MacLeod wore when last they saw him, eighteen months before any Stories could be told of his arrest.

Did those lenses capture the dismissive yet maternal “It’s okay, It’s okay,” Renee affords Fred upon his early-ejaculatory or else flaccid dysarthriac pull-out? How magic remains the moment when Renee, with her “seemingly solidly fleshy breasts” as Nochimson describes their “exaggerated imagery,” patronizingly pats the back of this eager-to-ejaculate jazz trumpeteer? Did those sunglasses see Alice looking at AU HASARD BALTHAZAR Getty when he says “Why me Alice, why choose me?” and she responds, “You still want me, don’t you Pete? More than ever?” before informing an imprisoned psyche projected by and into another’s pain that, “You’ll never have me.” For MacLeod, this is what Instagram is like.

“If a bad zombie gets you, he will make you walk past a beautiful breast without even noticing.”

It’s the same filtered photo of fear. Acausality is the pain….Patricia Arquette’s features are the same, even if the minor chipping of her perfect Arquettean centrals is a little more advanced as Alice in This Magic Moment when Pete meets her at Richard Pryor’s auto body shop. This Magic Moment at the freebase burn ward is “so different and so new/unlike any other” in qualia. These ecstases succeed all Renee endured of Fred’s underwhelming modern jizz emissions yet failure does not fade away.

That’s why a boyish Balthazar projection getting, ahem, “more pussy than a toilet seat” needs Fred’s jazz off the radio: its measures section off his own sexual aptitude, similarly, MacLeod suggests, to how the seminal vesicle is depressed by the rectum, forcing Jack ‘Nonce’ Nance to outline the oneiric and ejaculic boundaries cruelly as any Club Silencio M.C.: “What did you change it for? I liked that. I liked that,” further forcing the snuff porno procuring and autoerotic Dick Laurent to realize something is wrong, “I don’t like the sound of something.”

There is a Hollywood Sunset. There was This Magic Moment. After admitting I’m Deranged, what sounds and songs are there for time? All beauty is ineffable. Why sing a single song? Why watch a movie only to be frightened by Badalementian Mysteries of Love, you rightly ask, Rebeca Rabbit. The weal of dusk over Lake Ontario is no more recognizable a melody than what Chinese hackers Wrapped In Plastic of a network’s weakly-secured IP. 

Los Angeles dawns vignette our dream. We realize we’re no longer projected but projecting. There is only one moment with the wrong woman and it is the perfect “Heidegger and Mallick” superimposition synthesized with all the screaming fights so SUDDENLY, LAST SUMMER. The bass intensivisity of my flaccid dysarthria perceived as base insensitivity in our MESHES OF THE AFTERNOON. Before the accident Rebeca and I would say, “Heidegger and Malick, Heidegger and Malick” and analyze its phonemes’ appeal. How to descend tactfully from rapture? Fred kills. His future already a thing of the past, Fred lives in the unreal conditional of how it might have all gone. We try not to stay in any one place for too long. We try to stay in more places than one at once. We came to keep an open mind but in the McLeod we find ourselves confined within a cinematic antirealist perspective.

Loving the wrong woman in destitute Times We’ve Known and bodies we’ve instantiated while saying with ever-less-certainty “This is the girl” is symptomatic of what Nochimson calls an “abundance of meaning overwhelmed by its solipsistic emptiness,” which we knew well in our TBI-resultant diagnoses of “sexual arousal disorder; orgasmic disorder; sexual pain disorder; trouble with turn taking or topic selection in conversations; problems with changes in tone, pitch or emphasis to express emotions; attitudes or subtle differences in meaning; difficulty understanding nonverbal signals; trouble reading cues from listeners; trouble starting or stopping conversations; double vision like Betty and Diane; bitter tastes and bad smells; itching skin.”

The resultant look upon Rebeca’s face suggesting, “There’s no way this can possibly work going forward but I’m going to try, for a while anyway, because of the ‘Heidegger and Malick’ singsong moments, even if those moments will never occur organically again and we’ll just flog every last ounce of joy from the old moments until they mock the joy that was.”

Nose bleeds a-deux are an insistent trauma, the parallel suffering of subjective projections where MacLeod and myself thought ourselves innocent as Balthazar Getty out of jail, non-biological sons of the consummate victims of greed self-replicating as JPG or self-instantiating as GPTIII. This victim mentality invited The Mystery Man in from the cold and into our unrealistic boudoir. Where he lies linens tatter. The cabin of The Fence burns back time, vicereversing thereout. The tchotchkes go unrendered. The Little Kickers backstory never gets written. Hence even what stounds of Something Wicked This Way Comes becomes only an edit. Our bandwidth orients towards Virtual Reality Porn’s Dark Room, the recrimination and regret Nochimson knows The Mystery Man traffics in,

Like the ringmaster in a carnival of fools, the Mystery Man is always present to stir up anxiety when, under the pressure of uncertainty, finitude breaks, goes into superposition, or undergoes some other change that contradicts the illusion of a definite, bounded world. He agitates behind the maelstrom of names and identities. He feeds and feeds off of the characters’ desperation to maintain the marketplace illusions of solidity.

I hate the Mystery Man for what he’s done to us. I am wearied by maelstrom. I’m sorry we let the lies in. May our alpha-numeric names and strict identities stand stark naked before the Mystery Man’s camcorder. He might not like that. Let him be afraid of us for once. Perhaps this is the unpaid debt the Mystery Woman prescribed in INLAND EMPIRE. Perhaps here’s the magic.

Years later, Lynch would make MULHOLLAND DRIVE, and then INLAND EMPIRE, retrospecting upon what’s Strange That Lovat Does in our PERFORMANCE of self-identity,

Literalized by Rita in Mulholland Drive, the trilogy asks us the unsettling question “who would you be without your story?” The answer? No one at all, because “self” is ultimately performative and narrated. We may wish to dispute this. “Here I am; things have happened to me,” we might argue. But this position can be attacked from at least two quarters: neuroscience and non-duality. 

“What the fuck is your name?” the Mystery Man asks Fred once Dick Laurent is DEAD AGAIN.

Like a film, the self is an illusory text, narrated by nobody. There is no a priori narrator. Who would that be? And who could possibly be narrating the narrator’s story? This way lies infinite regress, reflexivity en abyme. In fact, it is the narration itself that we misperceive as a coherent, existing self.

This reflexivity is abysmal. “In the darkened pool the gaze does not return in a familiar form; it reveals instead an abyssal twilit blue, which colours both the dawn and dusk of the spiriting night. The image of no thing returns. Reflection is shattered against the impersonal, against the impassive shade of a pure opening or cleft in beings.[3]”

This reflexivity is abyssal when facing Herzogenrath: “The Moebius Strip subverts the normal, i.e. Euclidian way of spatial (and, ultimately: temporal) representation, seemingly having two sides, but in fact having only one. At one point the two sides can be clearly distinguished, but when you traverse the strip as a whole, the two sides are experienced as being continuous.”[4]

This intersubjectivity is dismal for The Savage Detectives who chase Fred again, interview Fred again, punch Fred again, knowing all these times that if philosophical zombies are conceivable, then they are possible.

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[1] Berndt Herzogenrath, On the Lost Highway: Lynch and Lacan, Cinema and Cultural Pathology

[2] Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time Image

[3] Nick Land, Narcissism and Dispersion in Heidegger’s 1953 Trakl Interpretation

[4] Berndt Herzogenrath, On the Lost Highway: Lynch and Lacan, Cinema and Cultural Pathology

[5] Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative