David Lynch’s Lost Highway is a nightmarish noir about jealousy, repressed guilt and murder. As with many of the director’s best films it exists in an unsettling world between reality and a dream where events are not all they seem and a rigid internal logic is forsaken for a descent into the damaged mind of the film’s protagonist. Lost Highway, along with Eraserhead, might be the closest Lynch has ever come to making an out and out horror film. This is a foreboding and ominous work that is as gripping as it is bewildering.

As with much of the director’s work this is a hard film to explain and categorise. It is a film to be experienced first-hand with its…

What does the Black Lodge see when it sees us? A labyrinth of doors and exits? Loops and circuits in spacetime fissured and joined, continuous until discontinuous, unidentical at every point yet self-similar? A network to transit, an environment in which to be and to become.

What is noir? Like, what does it do and how does it do it? Noir is about unequal informatics, of landscapes that shift and dissolve based upon their inhabitants and their relative positioning to each other. Noir is the set-up and the execution of the set-up. The set-up necessarily precedes those who enter into it but the set-up is not a set-up until someone wanders in to activate it as such. Noir is a…

It seems that there are at least two ways to enjoy a David Lynch film. One is to expect it to make sense and do everything you can to analyze the shit out of it until it does. The other is to just revel in the weirdness and the creativity and not worry about making all the pieces fit together.

On my first watch of Lost Highway, I can't possibly put into words what the fuck happened. I feel like there are things I implicitly understood about the narrative and the connection between the two halves of the film, but what I took away from it was a wordless feeling of unease and anxiety. I don't want to think about…

I wake up. I'm sweating. Lost. Confused. Annoyed. The walls are plastered with red. I hate red. The room is small, or at least I think it is. It's getting tighter the more I observe, crashing in on itself in a claustrophobic fashion. The radio is blaring, showcasing a constant thunder of cool ass tunes that correspond with the lightning storm outside. In spite of all the feverish mayhem, I happened to notice someone. His coat was the same color as the cheap paint, already having loose stitches just like the chipping boundaries of the room. He was standing in the corner. He didn't seem to care about me. He was screaming at the top of his lungs straight into…

If Eraserhead is Lynch coming to terms with parenthood, Blue Velvet with the end of innocence, then Lost Highway would be about women. Made in a time where Lynch has just broken off with Rosellini, this film has a theme of Fred Madison's (played by Bill Pullman) attempt to understand women, particularly ones in both his life and what can be perceived as his fantasy or dream. While not as utterly confusing as Inland Empire nor as intricately constructed as Mulholland Drive, Lost Highway is honestly an extremely riveting film with elements of both noir and the supernatural, having gone through 45 minutes of this movie when I thought about 15 minutes of it had only passed.

The phone call…