Dissociation & Trauma in David Lynch’s ‘Lost Highway’
“And the rain sets in… it’s the angel man… I’m deranged…”
Is there some terrible trauma that David Lynch is trying to escape from? And does he believe his Hollywood success is just a dream, a fugue state, from which he’ll eventually wake up from into some nightmare reality? Dissociation has become such a key theme for Lynch over the last 20 years, it’s hard not to wonder.
A psychological term covering a variety of experiences, “dissociation” is characterised by detachment from reality. It ranges from mild states such as daydreaming (a common stress-coping mechanism and an often acknowledged source of ideas for Lynch) to pathological disorders such as dissociative identity disorder — where multiple personality states co-exist and identity becomes fragmented. A common causal factor among pathological disorders is trauma, damage caused to the mind by overwhelmingly stressful events, and the difficulty fully integrating our emotional responses to them.
Many of Lynch’s characters display characteristics of dissociation. Much of Mulholland Drive (2001) plays out like a psychogenic fugue, experienced by Diane (Naomi Watts), who after a series of traumatic episodes — that include a failed career, a romantic betrayal and murder — re-imagines herself as the successful and desirable Betty. The truth of her situation (clues to which are littered throughout her fugue state) comes crashing down during the final act and Diane, overwhelmed by grief and shame, commits suicide.
In Twin Peaks (1990–92, 2017) the splintered psyche of Dale Cooper (Kyle Mclachlan), and it’s many iterations are the result of compound trauma caused by Cooper’s failure to protect the women he loves. Each identity brings him a greater detachment from a sense of time and self-consciousness, the classic symptoms of dissociative identity disorder. Although the clinical definition of these disorders unlikely enters his conscious thought process, Lynch’s expressionistic take on how trauma effects our relationship between reality and identity has become one of his defining themes.
Lost Highway (1997), Lynch’s amphetamine flavoured noir, sees the director at his most oblique since Eraserhead (1977). Outwardly, it’s styled as a classically fatalistic thriller with Faustian overtones, and is aesthetically influenced by some of Lynch’s acknowledged favourites — including Kiss Me Deadly (1955), Carnival of Souls (1962) and Meshes of the Afternoon (1943). But it also shares a similar psychological subtext: the impact of trauma on the human psyche.
It’s the story of jazz musician Fred Maddison (Bill Pullman) who, upon discovering his girlfriend Renee (Patricia Arquette) has made a porno and been forced into a sexual relationship with the director, kills her and the two men involved in a jealous rage. Unable to process this, he begins suffer increasingly severe detachment from reality. His memory becomes unreliable, familiar spaces become clouded to his perception, and before long he loses any sense of himself, projecting his issues and fears onto others, and eventually believing he is someone else altogether. But the objective truth proves immutable, stalking him through his mind like a mysterious stranger that is both familiar and uncanny, determined to remind Fred who he is.
“I like to remember things my own way…not necessarily the way they happened.”
Where we find Fred at the beginning of Lost Highway is indicative of where he is mentally throughout: alone and in the dark. The architecture of his home is symptomatic of Fred’s own interiority — small windows that limit the view and shadowy transitional spaces between rooms represent his inability to see the full picture, and the abstract angles Lynch shoots the main living space from reflect how distorted his perception of reality is becoming.
The bedroom acts an entry point to Fred’s subconscious, an internal space as indicated by classic Lynchian symbolism, the red velvet drapes; here Fred’s inner fears are exposed to himself. He dreams of being in their home, unable to find Renee but hearing her voice — when he does find her, Fred describes her as someone who looks Renee but isn’t. Later we hear a story recalling Renee’s past, the probable catalyst for Fred’s actions, and the dream symbolises his inability to reconcile who she is with who he idealised her to be. After telling her about the dream, they have sex but Renee seems disinterested and Fred is unable to climax, a manifestation of his sexual insecurity that permeates the narrative.
Fred and Renee are being menaced by a series of voyeuristic videotapes, a new one arriving every morning — each shows some footage inside of their home, someone looking around with an unknown sense of purpose. When detectives come to investigate, they ask if the couple own a video camera, and Renee says no because Fred hates them, to which he complacently adds “I like to remember things my own way. How I remember them. Not necessarily the way they happened”. The tapes are eventually shown to represent the truth finding it’s way to the surface of Fred’s mind, each one bringing him closer to full recall of the traumatic events.
“We’ve met before, haven’t we?”
At a Hollywood party, Fred is annoyed by Renee drunkenly flirty (his insecurity again on display), and heads to the bar. Here he first encounters a person referred to only as “The Mystery Man”. Appearing from thin air, dressed head-to-toe in black and pale as a ghost, The Mystery Man stares at Fred for a moment, before walking up to him and speaking softly, with sense of familiarity:
Mystery Man: We’ve met before, haven’t we?
Fred: I don’t think so. Where was it you think we met?
Mystery Man: At your house. Don’t you remember?
Fred: No. No, I don’t. Are you sure?
Mystery Man: Of course. As a matter of fact, I’m there right now.
Fred: What do you mean? You’re where right now?
Mystery Man: At your house.
Fred: That’s fucking crazy, man.
Mystery Man: Call Me. Dial your number. Go ahead.
[Fred dials the number and the Mystery Man answers]
Mystery Man: [over the phone] I told you I was here.
Fred: [alarmed] How’d you do that?
Mystery Man: Ask me.
Fred: [angrily into the phone] How did you get inside my house?
Mystery Man: You invited me. It is not my custom to go where I am not wanted.
Fred: [into the phone] Who are you?
[Both Mystery Men laugh]
Mystery Man: It’s been a pleasure talking to you
This scene drips with the otherworldly menace Lynch has been perfecting for years; a seemingly innocuous event is turned upside down by the sudden appearance of an uncanny visitor, displaced from Space and Time, that somehow knows every dark and intimate detail about you, and can wield the power of past and future knowledge. When The Mystery Man laughs the same laugh, over the phone and in person simultaneously, the rug is violently pulled out from under Fred.
More than an encroachment of the otherworldly into the mundane, the Mystery Man represents an intrusion of the subconscious truth into Fred’s conscious distorted reality, the truth he is deliberately avoiding. Cinematically he is influenced by “The Man”, the ubiquitous ghoul who pursues Mary Henry throughout Carnival of Souls, as she struggles to navigate her way through what is seemingly her purgatory; in the end, a pale version of Mary is seen dancing with him, suggesting she eventually embraces the truth she has died.
Like Mary, Fred exists in an in-between space, the static between reality and his own mind. Although the Mystery Man seems malevolent, he appears this way because Fred is both trying to remember, and terrified of what he’ll recall; as Mystery Man says, he is in Fred’s home, a manifestation of his psychological space, because he was invited. Dissociation can often stem from this core conflict in the mind, between the need to accept the truth for emotional growth and well-being, and the desire to deny it and it’s painful repercussions.
After the Mystery Man has made himself apparent, this conflict in Fred seems to come to a head — he receives the final videotape, which shows him kneeling at their bedside, and screaming manically, next to the bloody, dismembered remains of Renee. The scene literally smash cuts to Fred being brutally interrogated by police and then sentenced to death. Once the Mystery Man has appeared physically to Fred, the truth outs and the reality of the situation becomes (seemingly) inescapable.
“And your name? What the fuck is your name?”
But what happens next is a drastic reconfiguration of Fred’s personality, and further detachment from reality, that tellingly comes when Fred is to become fully accountable for his actions. While on death row, Fred has a breakdown in his cell, screaming and clutching his head while he has a vision of a burning cabin, before seeing the same dark highway from the opening, which here feels analogous to the River Lethe of Greek myth; translating literally as “forgetfulness” or “concealment”, the dead were said to travel the Lethe and drink it’s waters to erase their memories of Earthly life, on the way to reincarnation. This metaphor seems apt when, just before the vision ends, he sees a soon-to-be familiar young man at the road side.
The next morning when the guard checks on Fred, that young man, Pete Dayton, has appeared in Fred’s place. The police are baffled and with no explanation of how he got there, they release him. The life Pete leads represents a defensive shift of perspective on Fred’s part, with all the worst elements of his own personality projected onto others. Where Fred was a middle-aged jazz musician living a largely isolated life, Pete is blue collar worker with many friends and co-workers, a loving family and sexually voracious girlfriend.
He casts himself as the innocent, and everyone around him as dangerous or troublesome, his life becoming series of noir cliches that it expose it as a fantasy. His worst personality traits — his volatility, aggression and jealousy — the root of his irreconcilable issues, are divorced from him entirely, becoming embodied in the psychotic gangster Mr Eddy; an absurd encounter with a tailgater show just how hair-trigger his temper can be, and the below exchange exposes the depths of Fred’s jealously and possessiveness
Mr. Eddy: How you doin’ Pete?
Pete Dayton: Okay.
Mr. Eddy: I’m sure you noticed that girl that was with me the other day, good lookin’ blonde? She stayed in the car? Her name is Alice. I swear I love that girl to death. If I ever find out that somebody was making out with her, I’d take this… [he pulls out a pistol] …and shove it so far up his ass it would come out of his mouth. Then you know what I’d do
Pete Dayton: What?
Mr. Eddy: I’d blow his fuckin’ brains out.
Most disturbing is the way Fred recasts Renee as blonde femme fatale Alice, the sultry girlfriend of Mr Eddy, who starts an affair with Pete and draws him into a tangled mess of criminality and violence. He goes to lengths to cast her as someone dangerous, and whose mains traits are dishonesty and adultery, the things Fred perceives as Renee’s worst flaws.
Yet the more we learn about Renee/Alice, the more we understand how vulnerable and exploited she is. The story she tells of when she first arrived in town — about a job her friend Andy told her to audition for — is a nightmare vision of the kind of casting couch abuse stories that have become depressingly prevalent. She was forced to strip for Mr Eddy (whose actual name is Dick Laurent) at gunpoint while a room full of men gaze at her, and then coerced into a sexual relationship with him. In response to this, Pete only thinks of his own fragile ego, resentfully saying, “So, you liked it, huh?”, to the clearly distressed Alice.
Once Pete’s becomes more comfortable in his fantasy, a familiar face returns once again. After making plans with Alice to rob her pimp friend Andy and run away together, Pete receives a call from Mr. Eddy, who happens to be there with a friend:
Mr. Eddy: I’m really glad to know you’re doin okay. You’re *sure* you’re okay? Everything alright?
Pete: Yeah?
Mr. Eddy: I’m really glad to know you’re doin good, Pete. Hey, I want you to talk to a friend of mine.
Mystery Man: We’ve met before, haven’t we?
Pete Dayton: I don’t think so. Where is it you think we’ve met?
Mystery Man: At your house. Don’t you remember?
Pete Dayton: No. No, I don’t.
Mystery Man: In the East, the Far East, when a person is sentenced to death, they’re sent to a place where they can’t escape, never knowing when an executioner may step up behind them, and fire a bullet into the back of their head.
Pete Dayton: What’s going on?
Mystery Man: It’s been a pleasure talking to you.
The Mystery Man’s deeply sinister line about the Far East could be referring to Fred’s literal execution and death, which is possibly imminent, but metaphorically the ‘place where they can’t escape’ is likely Fred’s own mind and the ‘bullet into the back of their head’ the objective truth of situation. The Mystery Man is telling him that there is no way of fully escaping the truth within his own mind, and the physical and psychological consequences will eventually destroy him.
After this the Pete fantasy begins to unravel. He goes to meet Alice at the pimp’s house but is confronted by Andy, who after a scuffle, ends up impaled head first on a glass coffee table. The sickening head wound is a Lynch trademark, used in part to evoke a visceral physical horror, but also a visual metaphor for violent trauma as damage to the mind — moments later a bloody nosed Pete hallucinates Alice having sex with a faceless man, his sexual insecurity resurfacing again.
When they arrival in the desert, it’s the same cabin from Fred’s vision in prison. No one is there, so Pete and Alice have sex on the dusty plain, during which Pete repeatedly tells Alice he wants her, only for her to say afterwards, “You’ll never have me” — the resoluteness of her death finally hits him, and Pete turns back into Fred.
“You and me, mister… we can really out-ugly them son-of-a-bitches. Can’t we?”
Fred heads up to the cabin, only to be confronted again by the Mystery Man, this time holding a cam-corder, the connection between himself, the videotapes and what they represent confirmed. Fred asks where Alice is, only for the Mystery Man to tell him, “Her name is Renee. If she told you her name was Alice, she was lying”. He then aggressively shouts at Fred, “And you…what the fuck is your name?!” The Pete fantasy fully broken, Fred backs away terrified from the Mystery Man, who looms towards him recording the whole time — for Fred, the painful process of integration has began.
He goes after Mr Eddy and brutalises him, in events likely similar to what Fred has perpetrated on the real Dick Laurent; by the time he has finished, all that remains is Laurent’s Mercedes — emblematic of Mr Eddy’s temper and jealousy — now recognised by Fred (who drives it) as part of who he is. Assisting him is The Mystery Man, now standing side-by-side with Fred, the truth recognised as something familiar to him. The last shot is Fred barreling down the highway again, now pursued by the police, the awareness of his action’s consequences returning to him, perhaps. But it may already be too late, the loop seemingly returning back on itself, his fate left ambiguous.
At the heart of most magic tricks is a deception, and for Lynch dissociation is like a cruel sleight-of-hand that we play on ourselves, an illusion cast across the mind that we let ourselves believe. Although Lynch has said he does not believe pain is necessary to the human condition, he seems to accept it’s inevitability; at some point almost all of us will experience events so painful, so damaging, that we have difficulty reconciling them and dealing with their repercussions. The extreme acts that cause Fred’s trauma are in larger part to support the noir nature of the narrative, because ultimately the way he deals with it would be as troubling regardless of its nature.
What Lost Highway seems to say is that our trauma exists in and of ourselves, of our mind and soul, and the only successful way to deal with it is acceptance and integration. To dissociate from reality will not help you escape your trauma, only alter how you perceive it; it never truly goes away from Fred’s mind, only recedes briefly, before resurfacing as something more alien, frightening and difficult to understand than it already was, compounding the problem. To attempt to escape something that is you, that exists of you, will create a paradox, a fight against ever more divergent elements of yourself, the endless loop that we see Fred in. This is the true horror of Lost Highway — that our inability to process our own trauma may be the reason for our greatest fears and nightmares.
