Barbelith Underground > Film, TV & Theatre

I saw the film again yesterday, for the second time, and I was really feeling it this time. Here's my view of what happened.

None of the movie is "real." The opening with the endlessly repeating road is a visual representation of the Mystery Man's lines about the man waiting to be killed, but never knowing when it's going to come. Fred is going down this road, without the knowledge of when he'll be killed, it looks the same, and goes nowhere, but he has to keep going down it.

However, in reality, Fred is actually waiting to be electrocuted. Much like Mulholland Drive, these fantasies take place in the moment before the protagonist dies.

So, the first chunk of the movie is the first fantasy Fred creates. This is based mainly on his real home life. He has his happy marriage at first, but it starts to come apart, becuase of his suspicions that Renee is cheating on him, just as it did in real life. The party is a magnification of his suspicion, as his wife's friend becomes the person she's having an affair with.

He can no longer perform in bed, becuase the fantasy is dead. He sees the tape, which is his real memory intruding in to the fantasy explicitly. So, this fantasy gets worse, the real world starts to intrude, and he winds up in a cell, basically back where he was in reality.

We see the burning house in reverse motion, become whole again.
And this brings us into the second, more complex fantasy sequence. Having accepted that Renee is an adulterer, Fred/Pete decides to cast himself in the role of the person she will go with.

I'm not sure exactly where the Gary Busey family comes from, but I'd imagine that Fred is more comfortable with Renee being with someone she wasn't actually with in real life. And also, I'd imagine that that simple life holds some lure for Fred after the ordeal he's been through. At first, he imagines himself into the relationship with Sheila, and creates his bunch of friends. But, gradually Renee comes back in to his life in the form of Alice. Like in real life, and the first dream, he finds himself drawn to her, and, being a fantasy, he ends up in the affair with her.

In addition to Pete as an alter ego, Mr. Eddy in this segment of the film serves as something of an alter ego for Fred. Fred is the raging, protective husband, whose wife always slips away from him. Fred's fear of his own rage is reflected in the tailgating scene. Mr. Eddy is drawn to Pete because they are aspects of the same person.

However, the fantasy starts to corrode. Rather than just being the trophy wife of Mr. Eddy, Alice's past starts to come to the fore. The strip at gunpoint is Fred's fear of what Alice used to do, and Dick Laurant/Eddy and Andy are the people he fears she was associated with.

I'm of the idea that the entire porn and gunpoint strip thing is an exaggerated version of what really happened. I'm not even sure if she really did cheat on him, but he blows it way out of proportion. He assumes the worst about her, that she was involved in these really bizarre porn projects, and not only that, she liked it. Once he realizes this, the fantasy Alice is dead, and as a result, she has been removed from the picture.

Sidenote, this part of the film reminded me quite a bit of The Invisibles, and the Quimper porn videos. Eddy's creepiness in creating the porn is how I imagine Quimper in the last issue of volume I.

So, Fred goes back to the source of the fantasy, the house in the desert. He has sex with Alice, and at this point, the fantasy completely falls apart, and in the place where the construction of the Pete personality began, it falls apart, and Fred is back to his old self. Since Alice has become Renee, there is no need for Fred to be Pete.

The end of the film represents Fred going through some of the loose ends of his mind. I see the Lost Highway hotel as representative of his mind, and behind each door are all his fears, and problems.

Before he can move on, Fred must kill Dick Laurant, and symbolically get revenge for his wife's philandering. So, he kills him, and then goes back to his house, to complete the loop. Without Dick Laurant, he really has no purpose anymore, and with the end bearing down on him, he begins to drive, and it's on the lost highway that he is finally electrocuted, and his journey ends.

The thing I'm still working out is the place of the Mystery Man in all this. I see him as an ultra-dimensional entity that is helping Fred come to terms with what has happened, as a result allowing him to die. At the party, he instills Fred with the sense of paranoia that ultimately leads to the first fantasy being destroyed. He's there at the end to help Fred question his identity, and then he's there when he kills Dick Laurant, which is the final thing he has to do to move on. He's possibly an element of his mind that is designed to make him realize the truth, and come to terms with death.

So, excellent film. A very challenging film, but in the end I prefer Mulholland Drive, which feels like the perfection of the dream/fantasy concept, and then wrapped in a much cooler exterior. The psuedo 50's stuff is more interesting than the slightly more generic ambience of LH. Still, it's a phenomenal film, and quite underrated.