Produced in 1997, The Lost Highway could be called prophecy of Mulholland Drive, the latter practically repeating the idea, and, to a smaller extent, the structure of its predecessor. Though built upon different life situations and employing different types of characters, The Lost Highway is still the dramatization of a guilty man’s subconsciousness at work. Involved into a love “triangle” (just like in Mulholland Drive), the main character kills his wife and her lover, is arrested and charged in the murders. The murderer waiting for his turn in the “death row”, his consciousness refuses to acknowledge the guilt and prefers to form its own version of events, in which the displacement, replacement, and identification appear in one or another way. However, everything, like in Mulholland Drive, ends up in the murderer’s accepting his own guilt.
Unlike Mulholland Drive, Lost Highway is quite fragmented and incoherent. The former having a more or less clear division into real and unreal events, the latter represents a mixture of both, in which it is quite difficult to distinguish between the real and the imaginary. Quite a valuable help to the audience is, like in Mulholland Drive, provided by Lynch himself, in the shape of his usual symbolic characters and images. In Lost Highway, instead of Mulholland Drive’s Cowboy and Dan (who was a personification of Diane’s guilt), the viewer sees the Mystery Man as a personification of Fred’s jealousy; instead of the box and the key and the sophisticated performance of Club Silencio, the viewer is assisted by video-tape recordings – the source of truthful information among Fred’s stream-of-consciousness visions.
The tradition of personifying a part of a character’s personality was started by Lynch in Twin Peaks, if not earlier; Bob, the dreadful grey-haired creature, served to personify the evil part of human nature, the spirit that drove Leland Palmer into sexual abuse of his daughter Laura. Moreover, returning to Freud’s writings, I will allow myself to state that Bob is also a perfect dramatization of Mortido – Freud’s idea of the aspiration to death that makes every human being aggressive, unreliable, and full of destructive tendencies. “Bob” as dramatization of Mortido is no more applicable to Leland Palmer’s character; it can, though, be applied to the image of Laura Palmer combining two disparate natures: a beauty queen, the best student, a friend to old helpless people – and a drug abuser without any distinct moral framework regarding sexual relationships.
As to the video-camera that the viewer comes across in Lost Highway – it is Lynch’s beloved technique used to remind his audience of voyeurism as the best and the only way to reveal truth otherwise securely hidden from everyone. In Blue Velvet, the main character learns about the dark “backstage” life in his town when hiding in someone else’s closet, and in Twin Peaks, Audrey Horne puts herself wise to her father’s real self when peeping through a whole in his office’s wall.
Analysing Lynch’s films one by one, as they appear on the screens of movie-theatres, from the very first to the latest one, the viewer will notice that every following film is a continuation of the previous one and of the whole idea, which, in Lynch’s case, is an “ode” to the human mind and subconsciousness as a part of it. Even though Mulholland Drive seems to be perfect in terms of dramatizing the mind’s function, the old saying that “there is always room for improvement” should be remembered. And it has a fair amount of sense to wait for some developments in the sphere of psychiatry first, for they are sure to provide Lynch with a new portion of inspiration, and his viewer – with a spectacle even more perfect than Mulholland Drive.