The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
David Lynch · a film · 1997 · about 134 minutes · written with Barry Gifford
Mode
Noir and erotic thriller turned into a psychogenic fugue; a domestic horror, a gangster story and a dream of escape in one loop
Mythos
The double, one man who becomes another and returns and one woman who is two; the circle of damnation, the road that leads back to the door; a tempter with a camera
Phase
Three movements by protagonist: Fred to his cell, Pete from it, Fred again in the desert; framed by one sentence heard through an intercom inside and spoken into it from outside
Presentation
Feature film in colour, about 134 minutes, in English; Peter Deming’s photography of darkness, Angelo Badalamenti’s score with additional music by Trent Reznor, and songs; one actress in two roles, two actors in one
Register
From a black, near-silent house and a white face at a party to garage banter and a gangster’s roadside lecture; dread and grotesque comedy side by side
Scale
One mind, one marriage, one woman doubled, a crime and its economy, and a city seen as interiors
Governing Proposition
A saxophonist in Los Angeles who cannot bear what he has done, or the wife he could not possess, becomes in a death-row cell a younger man with another face, and the new life, sunlit and borrowed from noir, fails at the point where the old one did. The film opens and closes on one sentence spoken through one intercom, so that the escape is seen to return to its source. The wager is that an audience will live the fugue before it understands it, and the cost is a middle hour that the genre permits more than the fugue requires.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The film begins on a road at night. A yellow centre line rushes at the camera out of the dark, over and over, under David Bowie’s “I’m Deranged”, and the titles pass over it. Then a house in Los Angeles, and a man in it. Fred Madison, a saxophonist, played by Bill Pullman, sits in the half-dark, and the intercom by the door speaks: “Dick Laurent is dead.” The sentence opens the story, and Fred will say it himself, into the same intercom, from outside, at the end. Everything between is the road from one side of that door to the other.
The house is dark in a way that is a fact of the film’s making. Rooms open onto corners that vanish into black; faces surface from it and sink back. Fred and his wife Renee, played by Patricia Arquette with dark hair, live in it as a couple who cannot touch or talk. He plays a frantic solo at the Luna Lounge. He says, early, that he likes to remember things in his own way. Videotapes arrive: the first shows the outside of the house, the second its inside. Fred walks into the darkness of his own hallway until the black takes the frame.
David Lynch directed Lost Highway from a screenplay he wrote with Barry Gifford, as a CiBy 2000 and Asymmetrical production, and October Films released it in the United States in 1997. It runs about 134 minutes, in English. Peter Deming photographed it, Mary Sweeney edited it, and the score is Angelo Badalamenti’s, with additional music by Trent Reznor and songs by Bowie, This Mortal Coil, Lou Reed and Rammstein among others. It came after the commercial and critical failure of Lynch’s previous feature, in 1992. Most American reviewers rejected it on release, and it earned little.
Movement II
At Andy’s party a man with a white face, played by Robert Blake, comes up to Fred and tells him that he is at Fred’s house now. He hands Fred a telephone. Fred calls his own house, and the voice that answers is the same man’s, while the man stands in front of him. It is the hinge of the first movement and one of the most frightening scenes of its decade, made from a face, a manner and a telephone, and nothing in it is explained. The film never says who the Mystery Man is. He seems to belong to Fred more than to the world: a tempter or a recording angel, who later carries a video camera.
The third tape shows Fred over Renee’s body. He has not remembered it, and the film does not show it otherwise. The trial and the sentence pass in a few shots, procedure compressed, and Fred is in a cell on death row. The headache comes. His head shudders and blurs; a cabin in the desert explodes in reverse. In the morning the guard looks into the cell and finds a stranger there: a young man named Pete Dayton, played by Balthazar Getty.
The cut from Fred to Pete arrives without explanation, somewhere in the second quarter of the film, and the film changes its protagonist, actor and all. The makers used a clinical term for it, a psychogenic fugue, and told in order it would be that: a man who kills his wife, goes mad and imagines another life. Told as it is, the viewer lives the fugue. The new world is sunlit, and the viewer is relieved before he is suspicious, which is the dreamer’s own relief. The double is built, not cited: the lineage runs back through Vertigo and the Doppelgänger tales, through Persona, and through Buñuel’s two actresses for one woman, here turned inside out, one actress for two.
Movement III
Pete is a mechanic. He is released to his parents, who have seen something on the night he cannot remember and will not say what. Two detectives sit in a car outside the house. His world is lit evenly, the flat bright daylight of the Dayton yard, because it is a lie. At the garage Arnie, played by Richard Pryor, banters. When a saxophone solo comes over the garage radio it hurts Pete, and he turns it off. Pieces of the act leak into the new life this way, a sound, a headache, a face.
Mr. Eddy, a gangster, played by Robert Loggia and also called Dick Laurent, belongs to this sunlit world too. On a road he stops a tailgater and lectures him at the roadside, comedy and menace in one take. His mistress is Alice Wakefield, played by Arquette again, blonde. She wants Pete, and the affair begins: the younger, potent self and the woman who wants him, the second movement as the way Fred would remember things. The comedy runs beside it, the dreamer’s bravado, the same law in a lighter key.
Here the film gives most. Pete’s night out with Sheila and his friends, the detectives parked outside, the garage business with Arnie and the porn-film material at Andy’s each do one job, and several do it twice. The dream must run long enough to be believed, and the film’s length is not the fault; the duplication is. The middle hour borrows noir’s stock, the femme fatale and the fall guy, and uses it as material for an hour before it shows it to be a dream, and for that hour the form is a container more than an instrument. Getty is flat where Pete must be magnetic, the film goes slack between its set pieces, and several song cues are literal or of their year.
Movement IV
At Andy’s house there is a photograph: Mr. Eddy, Andy, and two women, Renee and Alice, side by side. Later one of the two women is gone from it. The porn-film material at Andy’s runs on past its use, Rammstein and Marilyn Manson over it, and those cues and some of the styling of the middle movement now read as the mid-nineties rather than as the dream. The photograph does not. It is the place where the second life admits that it was made from the first.
In the desert, in the headlights of a car, Alice and Pete lie together on the sand to This Mortal Coil’s “Song to the Siren”. It is the film’s one warm height, and the cold one follows at once. Alice gets up, tells Pete he will never have her, and walks into the cabin. The man who gets up from the sand is Fred. The Mystery Man waits with a video camera. The new life has failed at the point where the old one did: the woman cannot be possessed, and the man who wanted to possess her cannot bear it.
Under that lies the harder thing the film discloses, in image rather than in statement: the femme fatale is the jealous man’s invention, and the noir he dreams is his alibi. The film both exposes that fantasy and enjoys it. The exposure comes in a few minutes in the desert after an hour of indulgence, so that the truth is half dramatised as the thing it unmasks, and much of what the viewer carries out of the film is dread rather than understanding. The core holds: a man who cannot bear his act becomes another man, and fails the same way.
Movement V
Fred goes to the Lost Highway Hotel, in the desert, and Mr. Eddy is killed. Then Fred drives into the city to his own house, stands outside the door, presses the intercom and says the sentence: “Dick Laurent is dead.” The message he heard at the beginning was his own. He runs to his car and drives, and the last flight down the highway at night has Fred’s head shaking itself out of shape at the wheel. The yellow line rushes at the camera again under Bowie, and the titles return over it. The road leads back to the door, and from the door back onto the road.
The loop is the film’s form in one line, and it is the knowledge the form carries: the escape returns to its source. One law governs the black house and the sunlit garage, a mind making a world to escape its act, and every world it makes leaks the act back in. The law strains where the world outside Fred’s mind sees the change: the police watch Pete as a public fact, and his parents testify to it. Read as the fugue’s own law, they are part of the dream; read literally, they contradict it. The film permits both, and some of its gangster grotesque runs on genre rules rather than the dream’s. The questions it leaves stay open: who the Mystery Man is, whether Fred killed Renee or only the tape says so.
It has been argued since its release, by Slavoj Žižek in The Art of the Ridiculous Sublime (2000), in the clinical readings its makers’ term invited, and in an opera by Olga Neuwirth. Its standing rose after its first reception, and it has been present since on television, on video and in repertory, a cult presence more than the widest. Four years later Lynch made Mulholland Drive, which takes the two-part dream and the doubled woman further, and much of the attention this film invited went there. What it holds, it holds through one mind: a marriage, a possession, a crime and its economy, a family glimpsed and a state compressed into a trial. It ends where it began, on a road at night, the centre line coming on out of the dark.
Act III · The Twelve
Judged on structure, and the structure divides. Much of the film is paid for by its loop and resists the subtractive test: the message on the intercom, which Fred delivers to himself at the end; the three videotapes, outside the house, then inside, then Fred over Renee’s body; the photograph in which one of two women vanishes; the cabin that burns backwards; the saxophone that reaches Pete through a garage radio. The Mystery Man’s party cannot go. Much of the middle hour can. Pete’s night out with Sheila and his friends, the detectives parked outside the Dayton house, the garage business with Arnie and the porn-film material at Andy’s each do one job, and several do it twice. Length is not the charge; duplication is, and it holds the figure at the line.
Score: 7.5 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and in its core it holds: a man who cannot bear what he has done, or the woman he could not possess, makes himself into another man, and the new life fails at the point the old one did. Fred says early that he likes to remember things in his own way; the second movement is that way, a younger and potent self and a woman who wants him, and it ends in the desert with Alice telling Pete he will never have her. Beneath lies a harder claim, that the femme fatale is the jealous man’s invention. What holds the figure is how it is carried. The film exposes that fantasy and enjoys it at length, the exposure arrives in a few minutes after an hour of indulgence, and much of the power rests on dread.
Score: 7.7 / 10
Elevation is dreadful, and at its height it is very high. The Mystery Man at Andy’s party, the white face and the voice saying he is at Fred’s house now, and the call that proves it, is among the most frightening scenes in the cinema of its decade. Fred walks into the black of his own hallway until it takes him; the videotapes play on a small screen in a large dark room; Fred’s head shudders in the cell; Alice and Pete lie in the headlights on the desert sand to “Song to the Siren”, the one warm height. What holds the figure is frequency: through much of the middle hour the register drops to genre business and the gangster scenes run to pastiche, so that the heights stand at the two ends of the film with a long flat between them.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Myth built, on two patterns, and both bear load. The double: one man who becomes another and returns, one woman who is two, so that a single actress plays the wife who is killed and the mistress who cannot be had; the lineage runs through Vertigo and the Doppelgänger tales. The circle of damnation: the road that leads back to the door, the message a man sends himself, a tempter with a camera who seems to belong to Fred more than to the world. Without the loop and the double there is no film. What holds the figure is the working. The Mystery Man is felt as a figure more than worked through, and the second movement’s archetypes are noir’s own stock, the femme fatale and the fall guy, used as material for an hour before they are shown to be a dream.
Score: 8.0 / 10
The inheritance is film noir and the erotic thriller, Lynch’s own path through Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks, and the European film of doubled identity, Persona above all, with Buñuel’s two actresses for one woman in That Obscure Object of Desire turned inside out. The turn is large: a feature with a known cast changes its protagonist, actor and all, never explains the change, and closes on its own first line. The stake was real. It followed the commercial and critical failure of Lynch’s previous feature, in 1992; most American reviewers rejected it, and it earned little. What holds the figure is how much of the grammar was already Lynch’s proven manner, the dream logic, the doubled women, the grotesque comedy among dread, and that the middle movement’s genre surface is a path long walked.
Score: 8.1 / 10
Change the form and the film loses much of what it knows. Told in order, as a man who kills his wife, goes mad and imagines another life, it becomes a twist thriller with a clinical label. Told as it is, the viewer lives the fugue: the cut from Fred to Pete comes without explanation, the new world is sunlit, and the viewer is relieved before he is suspicious, which is the dreamer’s own relief. The Madison house, rooms whose corners vanish into black, is a mind that will not look; Pete’s world is lit evenly because it is a lie; the loop is the knowledge that the escape returns to its source. What holds the figure: the middle movement’s form is borrowed genre, used more than remade, and the film stays in it longer than the knowledge needs.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Evidence over twenty-nine years, and it is real. The film has been argued since its release: Slavoj Žižek’s The Art of the Ridiculous Sublime: On David Lynch’s Lost Highway (2000) reads it through fantasy and the Lacanian Real; the makers’ own term, a psychogenic fugue, has framed the clinical readings; Olga Neuwirth made an opera of it. Its questions stay open: who the Mystery Man is; whether Fred killed Renee or only the tape says so; why the police and Pete’s parents treat the change as a fact of the world. It yields on return in its rhymes of tape, intercom, telephone and photograph. What holds the figure: part of the return is a puzzle’s, which narrows as the fugue reading settles, and Mulholland Drive has since drawn off much of the attention this form invited.
Score: 7.9 / 10
The field is the cinema of the 1990s. The intrinsic force is real: the film showed that an American narrative feature could give its protagonist another body and carry on as the same mind, and that a noir could be a loop rather than a line, in a decade of puzzle films that mostly kept their solutions. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: delayed, and narrower than the force. Its plainest heir is Lynch’s own Mulholland Drive (2001), which stands at 8.8 and carries the two-part dream and the doubled woman further, so that part of the credit returns to the director rather than to this film. Beyond it the reach is diffuse: the mind-game films of the next decade, none of which can be named with confidence as its heir, and an opera. Delay, and reach lodged in a later and better film, hold the figure.
Score: 7.7 / 10
Survival is weighed on form, presence and fabric across twenty-nine years. The form survives whole: the film as released, in its theatrical cut. Presence is continuous since release, on television, on video and in repertory, with a standing that rose after a poor first reception; but it is a cult presence rather than the widest, the Lynch film people come to after Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive. The surface is partly fixed to 1997. The industrial-rock cues, Rammstein and Marilyn Manson over the porn-film sequence, and some of the styling of the middle movement now read as the mid-nineties, not as the dream. That is a charge on surface, and the narrower presence is a second. Both are mild, and together they hold the figure a step below the usual mark for its span.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Command of the medium, read to the anchors every desk shares, and the command is uneven. Where it holds, it bears weight: Peter Deming’s photography of darkness, interiors lit so that black is a substance and faces surface from it, then the flat daylight of the Dayton yard; a sound of low rumbles and wind that carries dread where nothing is shown, with Angelo Badalamenti’s score working beside it; Bill Pullman’s stillness and his frantic solo at the Luna Lounge; Patricia Arquette’s two women; Robert Blake’s Mystery Man, made from a face and a manner. The costs are several, and they hold the figure: Balthazar Getty is flat where Pete must be magnetic, the middle movement goes slack between its set pieces, several song cues are literal or dated, and the porn-film material is clumsily handled.
Score: 8.1 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the black, near-silent Madison house, where a husband and wife cannot speak, and the sunlit garage where Richard Pryor’s Arnie banters and Mr. Eddy lectures a tailgater at the roadside. One law governs both: a mind makes a world to escape its act, and every world it makes leaks the act back in. The saxophone on the radio, the photograph, Alice’s resemblance, the headache and the night Pete cannot remember obey it, and the comedy is the dreamer’s bravado, the same law in a lighter key. What holds the figure is strain. The police surveillance and the parents’ testimony treat the change as a public fact, which the law of the fugue does not quite govern, and some of the gangster grotesque runs on genre rules rather than the dream’s.
Score: 7.8 / 10
Judged on what a film of about 134 minutes holds. Consciousness is held deeply, in dissociation, guilt and the refusal of memory; marriage, in a couple who cannot touch or talk; sexuality and possession, in the double woman; crime and its economy, in Mr. Eddy’s pornography and Andy’s house; the family, in Pete’s parents and their silence about what they saw; the state, in the police, the trial and the sentence. All of it is held through one mind, and that holds the axis lowest: the family is a sketch, the state is procedure compressed into a few shots, labour is a garage, history and the sacred are absent, and Los Angeles, present in every frame, is seen as a set of interiors rather than a society.
Score: 6.8 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
7.9 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier III · Major
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 8.4, then The Sublime at 8.2, then The Swerve and The Made at 8.1. A film whole as released and continuously present for twenty-nine years, its standing risen from a poor first reception; heights of dread at the party, in the hallway, in the cell and on the highway; a feature with a known cast that changed its protagonist without explanation and closed on its own first line, after a failure and at real cost; and photography and sound that make darkness a substance.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 6.8: consciousness held deeply, and marriage, possession and crime held through one mind, with the family a sketch, the state a procedure compressed into a few shots, labour a garage, and history and the sacred absent. Below the rest, The Inevitable at 7.5, where the middle hour does its work twice, permitted by the genre it borrows more than compelled by the fugue; then The Unconcealment and Pressure on Tradition at 7.7, a truth half dramatised as the fantasy it unmasks, and a reach delayed and largely carried by a later film of the same director.
The Necessity Cap clears at 7.5 against a threshold of 7.5, exactly. The Coherence Floor clears: The Living Form at 8.0, The Made at 8.1, The Inner Law at 7.8, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on all five: The Imperishable at 8.4, The Swerve at 8.1, The Archetypal Deep at 8.0, The Unconcealment at 7.7 and Pressure on Tradition at 7.7 each fall short of the bar of 8.5. The Universal Minimum is met: of the eleven axes it covers none falls below 7.5, and The Inevitable meets the threshold exactly. The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 6.8. Four of the five summit conditions are met. The work stands where its aggregate places it: 7.9, in the band of Tier III, short of the 8.0 at which Tier IV begins and of the 9.0 that the summit requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Lost Highway as released in 1997, in its theatrical cut of about 134 minutes (some listings give 135), in English, from the yellow line of the opening titles to the yellow line of the closing ones: directed by David Lynch from a screenplay by Lynch and Barry Gifford, a CiBy 2000 and Asymmetrical production released in the United States by October Films, photographed by Peter Deming, edited by Mary Sweeney, with music by Angelo Badalamenti, additional music by Trent Reznor, and songs by David Bowie, This Mortal Coil, Lou Reed and Rammstein among others. No print, script or subtitle file was consulted. Later home-video issues are repair, not a different work, and are not judged. Dialogue is quoted only where its words are certain, in one line; other speech is described, and songs are named by title. The order and length of the scenes in the middle movement are not relied on, and the place of the hinge in the cell is given only as the second quarter of the running time. Figures and details that could not be verified, among them the month of release, the designer of the sets and costumes, the date of Olga Neuwirth’s opera, the history of any restoration, the box-office returns and the scene and shot counts, are not given.