Dissociation & Trauma in David Lynch’s ‘Lost Highway’
By: James Giles
Tags: Movies, Mental Health, Culture, Features, Film

“And your name? What the fuck is your name?”

But what happens next is a drastic reconfiguration of Fred’s personality, and further detachment from reality, that tellingly comes when Fred is to become fully accountable for his actions. While on death row, Fred has a breakdown in his cell, screaming and clutching his head while he has a vision of a burning cabin, before seeing the same dark highway from the opening, which here feels analogous to the River Lethe of Greek myth; translating literally as “forgetfulness” or “concealment”, the dead were said to travel the Lethe and drink it’s waters to erase their memories of Earthly life, on the way to reincarnation. This metaphor seems apt when, just before the vision ends, he sees a soon-to-be familiar young man at the road side.

The next morning when the guard checks on Fred, that young man, Pete Dayton, has appeared in Fred’s place. The police are baffled and with no explanation of how he got there, they release him. The life Pete leads represents a defensive shift of perspective on Fred’s part, with all the worst elements of his own personality projected onto others. Where Fred was a middle-aged jazz musician living a largely isolated life, Pete is blue collar worker with many friends and co-workers, a loving family and sexually voracious girlfriend.

He casts himself as the innocent, and everyone around him as dangerous or troublesome, his life becoming series of noir cliches that it expose it as a fantasy. His worst personality traits — his volatility, aggression and jealousy — the root of his irreconcilable issues, are divorced from him entirely, becoming embodied in the psychotic gangster Mr Eddy; an absurd encounter with a tailgater show just how hair-trigger his temper can be, and the below exchange exposes the depths of Fred’s jealously and possessiveness

Mr. Eddy: How you doin’ Pete?

Pete Dayton: Okay.

Mr. Eddy: I’m sure you noticed that girl that was with me the other day, good lookin’ blonde? She stayed in the car? Her name is Alice. I swear I love that girl to death. If I ever find out that somebody was making out with her, I’d take this… [he pulls out a pistol] …and shove it so far up his ass it would come out of his mouth. Then you know what I’d do

Pete Dayton: What?

Mr. Eddy: I’d blow his fuckin’ brains out.

Most disturbing is the way Fred recasts Renee as blonde femme fatale Alice, the sultry girlfriend of Mr Eddy, who starts an affair with Pete and draws him into a tangled mess of criminality and violence. He goes to lengths to cast her as someone dangerous, and whose mains traits are dishonesty and adultery, the things Fred perceives as Renee’s worst flaws.

Yet the more we learn about Renee/Alice, the more we understand how vulnerable and exploited she is. The story she tells of when she first arrived in town — about a job her friend Andy told her to audition for — is a nightmare vision of the kind of casting couch abuse stories that have become depressingly prevalent. She was forced to strip for Mr Eddy (whose actual name is Dick Laurent) at gunpoint while a room full of men gaze at her, and then coerced into a sexual relationship with him. In response to this, Pete only thinks of his own fragile ego, resentfully saying, “So, you liked it, huh?”, to the clearly distressed Alice.

Once Pete’s becomes more comfortable in his fantasy, a familiar face returns once again. After making plans with Alice to rob her pimp friend Andy and run away together, Pete receives a call from Mr. Eddy, who happens to be there with a friend:

Mr. Eddy: I’m really glad to know you’re doin okay. You’re *sure* you’re okay? Everything alright?

Pete: Yeah?

Mr. Eddy: I’m really glad to know you’re doin good, Pete. Hey, I want you to talk to a friend of mine.

Mystery Man: We’ve met before, haven’t we?

Pete Dayton: I don’t think so. Where is it you think we’ve met?

Mystery Man: At your house. Don’t you remember?

Pete Dayton: No. No, I don’t.

Mystery Man: In the East, the Far East, when a person is sentenced to death, they’re sent to a place where they can’t escape, never knowing when an executioner may step up behind them, and fire a bullet into the back of their head.

Pete Dayton: What’s going on?

Mystery Man: It’s been a pleasure talking to you.

The Mystery Man’s deeply sinister line about the Far East could be referring to Fred’s literal execution and death, which is possibly imminent, but metaphorically the ‘place where they can’t escape’ is likely Fred’s own mind and the ‘bullet into the back of their head’ the objective truth of situation. The Mystery Man is telling him that there is no way of fully escaping the truth within his own mind, and the physical and psychological consequences will eventually destroy him.

After this the Pete fantasy begins to unravel. He goes to meet Alice at the pimp’s house but is confronted by Andy, who after a scuffle, ends up impaled head first on a glass coffee table. The sickening head wound is a Lynch trademark, used in part to evoke a visceral physical horror, but also a visual metaphor for violent trauma as damage to the mind — moments later a bloody nosed Pete hallucinates Alice having sex with a faceless man, his sexual insecurity resurfacing again.

When they arrival in the desert, it’s the same cabin from Fred’s vision in prison. No one is there, so Pete and Alice have sex on the dusty plain, during which Pete repeatedly tells Alice he wants her, only for her to say afterwards, “You’ll never have me” — the resoluteness of her death finally hits him, and Pete turns back into Fred.

“You and me, mister… we can really out-ugly them son-of-a-bitches. Can’t we?”

Fred heads up to the cabin, only to be confronted again by the Mystery Man, this time holding a cam-corder, the connection between himself, the videotapes and what they represent confirmed. Fred asks where Alice is, only for the Mystery Man to tell him, “Her name is Renee. If she told you her name was Alice, she was lying”. He then aggressively shouts at Fred, “And you…what the fuck is your name?!” The Pete fantasy fully broken, Fred backs away terrified from the Mystery Man, who looms towards him recording the whole time — for Fred, the painful process of integration has began.

He goes after Mr Eddy and brutalises him, in events likely similar to what Fred has perpetrated on the real Dick Laurent; by the time he has finished, all that remains is Laurent’s Mercedes — emblematic of Mr Eddy’s temper and jealousy — now recognised by Fred (who drives it) as part of who he is. Assisting him is The Mystery Man, now standing side-by-side with Fred, the truth recognised as something familiar to him. The last shot is Fred barreling down the highway again, now pursued by the police, the awareness of his action’s consequences returning to him, perhaps. But it may already be too late, the loop seemingly returning back on itself, his fate left ambiguous.

At the heart of most magic tricks is a deception, and for Lynch dissociation is like a cruel sleight-of-hand that we play on ourselves, an illusion cast across the mind that we let ourselves believe. Although Lynch has said he does not believe pain is necessary to the human condition, he seems to accept it’s inevitability; at some point almost all of us will experience events so painful, so damaging, that we have difficulty reconciling them and dealing with their repercussions. The extreme acts that cause Fred’s trauma are in larger part to support the noir nature of the narrative, because ultimately the way he deals with it would be as troubling regardless of its nature.

What Lost Highway seems to say is that our trauma exists in and of ourselves, of our mind and soul, and the only successful way to deal with it is acceptance and integration. To dissociate from reality will not help you escape your trauma, only alter how you perceive it; it never truly goes away from Fred’s mind, only recedes briefly, before resurfacing as something more alien, frightening and difficult to understand than it already was, compounding the problem. To attempt to escape something that is you, that exists of you, will create a paradox, a fight against ever more divergent elements of yourself, the endless loop that we see Fred in. This is the true horror of Lost Highway — that our inability to process our own trauma may be the reason for our greatest fears and nightmares.