Lost Highway (film) genre neo-noir
Themes
Although Lost Highway is generally classified as a neo-noir film, the film borrows elements from other genres, including German Expressionism and French New Wave. The terms psychological thriller and horror film have also been used to describe its narrative elements. Writing for the Australian Metro Magazine, Thomas Caldwell described Fred Madison as "a typical film noir hero, inhabiting a doomed and desolate world characterised by an excess of sexuality, darkness and violence." Another film noir feature that is present in the film is the femme fatale (Alice Wakefield), who misleads Pete Dayton into dangerous situations. The film was also noted for its graphic violence and sexual themes. Lynch defended these images, stating that he was simply being honest with his own ideas for the film.Some of the film's themes and ideas had been explored before: the 1945 film Detour also focuses on a disturbed nightclub musician. The film's setting and mysterious recorded messages were seen as a reference to the 1955 film Kiss Me Deadly, while its nightmarish atmosphere has been compared to Maya Deren's 1943 short film Meshes of the Afternoon. Like Alfred Hitchcock's 1958 film Vertigo, the film examines male obsessions with women, who merely represent emotions that relate to them. Lynch has described the film as a "psychogenic fugue" and insisted that, while Lost Highway is about "identity", the film is very abstract and can be interpreted in different ways. He does not favor advancing a specific interpretation and said that the film leaves viewers to interpret events as they choose. Gifford, however, thinks that the film offers a rational explanation to its surreal events. According to him, Fred Madison is experiencing a psychogenic fugue, which is manifested when he transforms into Pete. Some viewers think that the film is a homage to Ambrose Bierce's 1890 short story "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge".The film's circular narrative has been likened to a Möbius strip. Cultural critic Slavoj Žižek felt that this circularity is analogous to a psychoanalytic process. According to him, "there is a symptomatic key phrase (as in all of Lynch's films) that always returns as an insistent, traumatic, and indecipherable message (the Real), and there is a temporal loop, as with analysis, where the protagonist at first fails to encounter the self, but in the end is able to pronounce the symptom consciously as his own." This implies that Fred's madness is so powerful that even the fantasy where he sees himself as Pete ultimately dissolves and ends in a nightmare. He also interprets the film's bipartite structure as exploiting "the opposition of two horrors: the phantasmatic horror of the nightmarish noir universe of perverse sex, betrayal, and murder, and the (perhaps much more unsettling) despair of our drab, alienated daily life of impotence and distrust."
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