David Lynch
Strade Perdute

The moment comes in the life of every inhabitant of the earth who has lived from the mid-20th century onwards when they try to engage with the vast and labyrinthine world of contemporary culture, and inevitably encounter David Lynch. The first reaction is shock. And it is the same for everyone. Then follows frustration, disorientation, and sometimes ejaculation, but for our purposes, we stop at the shock of facing something we have never seen or heard before, but which attracts us, like a complex, elusive, beautiful woman might. Then one decides to tread, in the face of the subsequent inevitable and endless discussions about the Montana director, one of the three paths that unfold before us. The first is rejection: not for me/too cerebral/taking the piss. The second is false adoration: but what images/chills you to the bone/ignores the plot/it's beautiful because it's incomprehensible. The third path is taken by a category of people who, having seen a Lynch film, ponder it for three days, watch it a second or third time, find an unlit bulb over their heads, light it, and provide their own interpretation of the film. I did not follow the first path. Nor the second.

One must necessarily start from the realization that everything that happens might as well not have happened, and nothing would change. Lynch eviscerates the concept of plot and that of reality. All that matters is man, who creates, destroys, invents, dreams, erases, distorts real life, without thereby denying the presence of a plot or sense of things: he simply changes the perspective plane. Time is annihilated on an "absolute relativity": in Lost Highways time is zero, everything happens at the same instant it is imagined. Reality lives as it is experienced by man, just as the saxophonist Fred Madison, the film's protagonist, does not own video cameras or cameras because he loves to relive moments of his life in the way he remembers them. The jealousy for his wife Renee, a woman who, in addition to having a great behind, also seems to hide a not entirely clear past, lends an unhealthy, disturbing aspect to their marital relationship, which is clearly explicated in his sexual impotence. His jealousy is compounded by a series of equally shady characters (but whose darkness could just as well have been spawned from Fred's mind) emerging from the woman's past, like Andy, who invites both spouses to his California poolside party. The disturbing little man Fred encounters at the party is a physical representation, a concept-to-person transfer, of the protagonist's morbid jealousy, which has already insinuated itself into the recesses of his mind, into his "home." The mysterious man asks Fred to call his own home, to show him that he is there even while standing in front of him. Fred calls and the strange being answers from the Madison house, even though he is standing there in the flesh. When Fred tries to have sexual intercourse with Renee, he sees the features of the party's little man on her face: he sees nothing else in Renee but his own jealousy, his own anger, his own frustration, his own inability to reach her.

In the meantime, the couple begins receiving a series of strange images filmed anonymously inside their decaying villa. Fred Madison starts frequently turning his head upward, as if to seek the help of the forces of reason that are slowly abandoning him. A gesture he will often repeat throughout the film. On the last night of vague rationality, Fred enters through a dark passage in the walls of his house to watch the latest anonymous video received, in which the image, after traveling through the corridors of his villa to the bedroom, shows the saxophonist who has massacred and dismembered his wife's body, of which he feeds in a fit of brutality. He finds himself directly in jail for uxoricide. The videos, of course, were not sent by anyone. They are nothing more than a strategy of the protagonist's mind to indirectly reach murder, as in a dream where one's actions are split from one's will (at least the conscious one). In reality, the act of cannibalism is symbolically the ultimate fusion of two bodies; it is the possession of another entity within oneself, just as killing is the possibility to intervene in another being's life, to overwhelm its existence. Fred dismembers his wife (but he may have only imagined it; it is the unconscious will that counts here) to possess, at least once, its essence. But it is not enough.

Fred's thirst is not quenched. New impulses emerge from the depths of his mind, and the constraint of prison becomes unbearable. To overcome it, the protagonist's mind conceives a psychological transfer, thanks to which Fred literally transforms into the young mechanic Pete Dayton. Unlike Fred, Pete is a womanizer, is considered the best at his job in town, explodes with sexual power and, above all, is free. Fred-Pete's goal now is Renee's past, who in turn, in the protagonist's mind, changes her appearance through a transfer, so that the remaining rational forces in the protagonist's brain can accept the continuation of the story. Now she is Alice, and she is blonde. And above all, she is with Dick Laurent, a name already heard during the film. He, whose death was announced to Fred by intercom in the film's opening minutes, was a friend of Andy, about whom the protagonist had strange forebodings. Now here he is, as Fred wants him to be: a sleazy and cynical fat gangster, who has dealings in the porn world. Pete takes care of his car and, of course, has a sexual affair with his wife, whom he loves and, in a sense, has always loved. Alice tells him about her past, about how she was forcibly made to shoot hard films with Dick Laurent. She suggests to the young man to steal money from her friend Andy's house, the same one Fred was so jealous of, and the plan succeeds even with the killing of the homeowner. Here Pete finds a photo depicting Renee and Alice (Patricia Arquette brunette and blonde) together and feels dizzy. These are the first signs of rationality that try to emerge to save the protagonist from total madness. However, the two manage to escape into the desert and to recede to a fence, in a house already visited by Fred with his mind. Before entering, Pete and Alice make love at the foot of the car, in the desert, but at the height of the climax, she whispers in his ear: "You’ll never have me." Pete fails where Fred had failed. He could not possess his beloved, and he never will. Fred's morbid love, an absolute, infinite love, clashes with the wall erected by his beloved, who is a finite, relative, mortal being. Fred's failure reflects the failure of man's struggle against his mortal nature. Fred's love is not of this world.

Now Pete no longer needs to exist. Getting up, the car's headlights illuminate Fred once again, who now has only one goal left: to kill Dick Laurent, his rival, whether real or imagined. It doesn't matter. The fence to which Alice was bringing Pete was none other than the mysterious little man we know as the personification of jealousy. And indeed, Fred cannot help but start from there to go and kidnap Laurent, who is struck and thrown into the trunk. It is jealousy, in the end, that provides Fred with the weapon to kill Dick Laurent. The protagonist now, pursued by the police, returns home and buzzes himself in to warn himself of the rival's death. Only in the finale, therefore, is the structure of the film revealed to be circular, with the same event opening and closing the plot. Everything that has happened in the meantime has no temporal relevance: Dick Laurent died the same instant Fred's subconscious embarked on the dark journey in pursuit of the possession of his woman. But man is not given to own anything. Fred resumes his journey pursued by the police, that is, by his rationality. A road opens before him in the meanders of the irrational, on which he will attempt, with sweet desperation, to reclaim his infinite.