Time For A(nother) Deconstruction of David Lynch’s Lost Highway [SPOILERS?]
By: Richard Altman
Tags: David Lynch, Marshall Mcluhan, Quantum Mechanics, Kafka, Lost Highway

When Arnie (Richard Pryor far right above screenshot) is on the phone telling whoever is on the line/info.supernatural.highway:

“There’s 9 people down here, you can ask 7 of them, if you get that price from one of them, I’ll let you ask the other 2.”

Made me think of …

If you play the ¼ length ‘harmonic’ (standing wave node) on a string, you’ll hear the octave, because the ¼ and ¾ fractions(=waves) ‘reduce’ to ½, whereas if you shorten that same string to that length (by pressing behind the fifth fret on your guitar neck), you’ll hear the perfect fourth. — 8lake

Maybe Fred’s sax solo is the premonition of redemption out of his labyrinthian derangement? The sax performance is so clearly a musical interpretation of Fred’s atomization, music that by the same Möbius logic…. indefinitely reverberates long after we think it’s over.

A resistance to the disappearance of mechanical scale by the electric, the etherealization of hardware into software, this could be the major moral of the movie. Perhaps the Mystery Message of the light at night at Fred’s place, maybe that set off those false alarms.

Brother Franz was also on the Lost Highway shooting script (screenshot credit)

Lynch himself, told Nochimson (end of article), I think, (it may have been Chris Rodley), that if Fred had a long enough time to drai (my Yiddish word,) around in the story of Lost Highway, he’d find a happy ending. Sure enough he will, it’s impossible for him not to, within that Seven-Up of possibilities.

….ways that multiply the possibilities exponentially. A metaphor Lynch used when speaking to me that envisions many possible worlds as bubbles from a freshly opened can of Seven-Up …— David Lynch Swerves: Uncertainty from Lost Highway to Inland Empire by Martha Nochimson, page 145.

“How can one discover the principle of human identity amidst lineal sequences of moments? The self is obliged, such is the discontinuity of these typographic moments, “each time to forget itself in order to re-invent itself, to reinvent itself in order to regain interest in itself, in short to effect a mocking simulacrum of continued creation, thanks to which it believes it will escape the authentication of its nothingness, and out of its nothingness refashion a reality.” — page 249, The Gutenberg Galaxy by Herbert Marshall “I Am A Winnipigeon” McLuhan (1962).

You can read about The Femme Fatal of Deep Dell and its truly, honestly, riveting stuff, plausible even, but so what? Its all doomed to be redeemed……..eventually. There will be another form of eventually as well, in that, after redemption, various déjà vu(s) via some kind of blockchain of tolerable aggravation, a.k.a, technological extensions of human sensory environs, resulting in an axiomatic symbiosis of intertwined material spirituality iz experienced. Humpty Dumpty shattering cuz of print and coming back together thru the integrated circuit, over and over, on a Lost Highway.

Here’s McLuhan explaining the meaning of Humpty Dumpty: (the meaning of the movie itself)

A magazine is a storehouse of ammunition as well. When the pitch of this wall achieves a certain gradient, Humpty-Dumpty tumbles off the wall. Humpty-Dumpty is the mask of the integral and ordered unity of tradition (and the structured sensorium) that recurrently crashes with the advent of major technological change. The fragments are reassembled through the flowing energies of the “heroine” A.L.P. (Anna Livia Plurabelle from Finnegans Wake)— page 99, From Cliché To Archetype by Marshall McLuhan with Wilfred Watson (1971).

We have a ‘storehouse’ of experiences, they can go well in one way, and be terrible another, as mentioned in the above quote. A ‘gradient’ is reached, could be unassuming or obvious and afterward nothing is the same. Another Lost Information Superhighway, I know, corny, it’s true though, the network effects, the baggage of a global distraction began in earnest with the Napsterization of the music industry, and those bits, that Kafkaesque metamorphosis of Hardware to Software continues to come for every single mechanical context, till it can’t. Whatever nanoscale we arrive at, there’s more than likely an entirely unknown interval whose resonating pattern remains an asymptote forever. Perspective is everything.

“…(the) encryption algorithm used to protect camera images was weak and susceptible to interference. There was no way for the authority to prove the integrity of the images, so it lost by default. For some time after it was unable to enforce camera-based fines.” — from on article on digital speed cameras by Ken Munro called Lost Highway

Fred does get his happy ending. See, we don’t know if he killed Renée, we see he kills Mr. Eddy, but as we all know, can really know if what we’re seeing is true? What if we’re seeing what Fred remembers? Not what actually happened? Since the audience is the detective tasked with these mysteries.

Such strategies circumvent the “lost highways” which are critical for cortical development but are absent in the adult. These new approaches may provide for the possibility of meaningful clinical regeneration of elements of cortical circuitry lost to trauma —Lost highway(s): barriers to postnatal cortical neurogenesis and implications for brain repair, Aslam Abbasi Akhtar and Joshua J. Breunig

Cop Pause by Steven Bochco

No. We can actually thank Mystery Man for Fred’s happy ending. During the Driver Down sequence, as our Musical Hero is deranging down the highway, live action role playing his sax solo from the Luna Lounge, recall that Fred has a closed eye, fermata tattoo on his hand. The solo eventually has a calming reverberating ending, in this ending are all the possible colours in which to fade into and out of.

Or.

Maybe it was Utah.