Lost Highway's Plot

[Tony Elias]

I think Thomas kind of has it right as far as the underlying "reality" to
the film, in that it isn't merely a hotchpotch of random assosciation and
image meant merely to confuse or be cool and weird. Lynch's games with
alternate identities point to the limitations in our conceptualizations of
identity and reality and how dealing with greif, trauma, suspicion and
jealousy,  doesn't occur in some Cartesian mode of transparent
self-reflexive thought but in a dialogue between parts of your identity, not
merely with your sub-conscious but with the external imaginary figures that
have been created for the purpose. Gifford's 'explanation' through the
narrative of metamorphosis is a great way to look at it, but metamorphosis
as a constantly occuring situation, rather than some random and decisive
moment where you lose touch with "reality" and "sanity" and become an out of
touch nutcase that is no longer with it.

Fred sez: "I like to remember things my way" but so do all people. We "see"
things our own way and then we keep them as memories, not as  hermetically
sealed moments unnaffacted by later viewings and re-memberings. I think this
is indicated by the fact that there exists no decisive "break" in Fred's
personality - the first scene of the film, in which he receives the message
over his intercom that "Dick Laurent is dead" - a message we find at the end
of the film that he has given himself describes either the multiplicity of
personalities that make up identity, or Lynch playing around with time, in
the sense that it's a message from a future self. 

Either way, the estimation that this film is merely "another weird Lynch
nightmare" seems way off the point. The brilliance of this film, and Lynch's
work generally (a fan) is the way he brings out the fragility of 'reality'
'identity' 'perception' and all the those 'stable' props and foundations we
take ourselves to be standing on. Lynch's film is highly structured, it's
surreal in the sense that it doesn't offer us false or irreal
representations of the world but ones which are "beyond real" and made up of
the very stuff which constitutes reality, the same lapses, reworkings of
perception and memory enfigured by a  highly dramatic (cinematic) narrative
- a murder.
To claim that Lost Highway presents no "underlying reality" presupposes,
first of all that such a thing exists & to claim that it does just misses
the point.