And do you know what "the world" is to me? Shall I show it to you in my mirror? This world: a monster of energy, without beginning, without end... enclosed by "nothingness" as by a boundary... blessing itself as that which must return eternally, as a becoming that knows no satiety, no disgust, no weariness... this, my Dionysian world, the eternally self-creating, the eternally self-destroying... without goal, unless the joy of the circle is itself a goal.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Will to Power
Oh, I'd give anything to get out of Oz altogether; but which is the way back to Kansas?
Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz
Entering the Lynchian universe is like entering a body. It requires the delicate negotiation of a series of tunnels: garden hose, throat, hallway, telephone cord, umbilical cord, eustachian tube; passageways that link one of his films to the next, that lead from one ear out the other, across film genres and histories, across green lawns and trailer parks. One finds here a hell as familiar as our own, a wax world whose lines and forms are forever melting, where each object slowly transforms into its opposite, and where all things, even the most irreconcilable, are bound by a labyrinth of intricate web-like relations. For years, critics have been treating the patient with psychoanalysis and scolding Lynch for his incorrect politics, but little attention has been given to the visual philosophy he has been projecting across the cinema screen. His work has offended equally reactionary conservative and political liberal. My intention is not to venerate Lynch for either of these two dominant positions, for that would be to rob him of one of his highest achievements; rather I would like to interpret his most recent film Lost Highway in relation to narrative and critical philosophy in order to bring a different lens to bear on the works of Lynch, but more broadly as an occasion to question the relation of narrative to film.
Lost Highway opens and concludes with an image of the road, or more specifically, of the yellow dotted-line, a vertical axis, flickering rapidly by in the darkness. It is in this image, which appears througout what is otherwise "not" explicitly a road film the moment someone enters a car or takes a pertinent passage from one point to another, that the metamorphic play of the film commences. It is in this metaphor that all films become road films. The image is familar. It has recurred throughout Lynch's films since Blue Velvet (1986), when the reference to America's classic road film The Wizard of Oz (1939) and its yellow brick road first began.1 This reference comes out of the closet in Lynch's explicit road film Wild at Heart (1990), where the wicked witch travels by broom alongside the escaping lovers and Lulu clicks her ruby slippers in vain in a roadside motel in Big Tuna. Somewhere in the transition from Dorothy to Lulu and from Emerald City to Big Tuna, a hammer blow has landed, a mask cracked, a veil torn away. Lost Highway is the receding reflection of that laughing veil in the rear-view-mirror, before its uncanny double emerges ahead in the distance. Driving is the sound of tearing cloth.
In speaking of Lynch's virtuoso use of sound, Michel Chion demands that we listen to Lynch's films, but that we listen with our eyes.2 In a similar spirit I would like to suggest that we think philosophy when we watch Lynch's films, but that we think it with our eyes and ears. One of the best legacies of the critiques of metaphysics has been the insistence on thinking Being not in the form of an Aristotelian logic of stable identity, a conception more suitable to the interests of addressing experience and creative forms. Lynch's films show not only that the ontological and epistemological appear, but that they must appear in particular styles. Just as painting, film, and literature have been understood within national contexts, there has always been a very particular American metaphysics, with its very particular American dualisms. There was always something paradoxical about cornfed Dorothy, with the bows straddling her curly brown pigtails and those glittery ruby pumps loaded with enough power to send her hurtling down the yellow highway. It is at this nexus, this position where violence meets tenderness, waking meets dream, blond meets brunette, lipstick meets blood, where something very sweet and innocuous becomes something very sick and degrading, at the very border where opposites become both discrete and indistinguishable, that Lynch enters with his particular reading and rewriting of this American metaphysics. Obscenity is one of the key ingredients in turning over the soil.
The American landscape was always well-mapped for metaphysical and theological metaphor. A nation founded on a journey West, an escape through the desert of adversity toward the promised land of a mythic California. The wagons that bulldozed across native soil, stopping only to wipe the blood and flesh off their wheels, marked the highway, and dusty earth became asphalt not long before Bob Hope, Bing Crosby and Dorothy Lamour hit the road and borke into song.3 The road has always been the chief vehicle for its unraveling. The many metaphors that meet at these intersections on the road include narrative, desire, interpretation, and the film reels themselves. Lost Highway takes the road film on toll further around the loop to reveal the mad dislocation that was already implicit in the American journey.
The Lost Highway narrative is cyclical as opposed to circular or linear. It takes just over two hours to arrive back at the place where it began, but its second beginning arrives not as a final destination or return to center, but as another gesture of transit. Its ideal presentation would be an endless loop in a theater in which spectators could enter at any moment during the cycle and leave at any point,4 keenly conscious both that the film will begin again and again and that we can never step twice into the same river. As such, both beginning and ending become arbitrary markers on a narrative road not unlike history, seasonal change, and the body itself. And film and narrative become something beastly and inorganically alive.
By foregrounding narrative, Lost Highway also foregrounds the accompanying philosophical problems implicit in the movement of thought and and signification: reflexivity and duality, mirroring and doubling. In correspondence with my emphasis on narrative, I will first broadly lay out the three dominant parts of the narrative. Each of these parts and their relations serves to complicate the traditional notion of time as a forward progression consisting of three dimensions-past, present, and future, as well as the traditional notion of narrative as a self-enclosed structure consisting of plot, drama, and closure. The present needs the future to determine its own past, which is oddly also its future.
The first world encountered in this film is enveloped in the mood of suspicion, silence, clues that have no meaning and acts that have no agent. A sax player named Fred/Bill Pullman hears a strange message on his home intercom informing him that Dick Laurent is dead. But who is Dick Laurent? He looks out the window but there is no one. He and his wife Renee/Patricia Arquette occupy their Los Angeles home like mutual suspects, double agents in a film noir script. He feels that he is not quite himself and that his wife is unfamiliar. Their silence locates the infinity between each unique, isolated individual. Each word that passes between them roars out into a void like a lighthouse beacon.
On three successive days they find an anonymous unmarked envelope containing a video on their front steps. The first day they watch the video together and it seems that a terrible secret involving one of them is about to be revealed to the other. But the first video is not yet narrative. It is merely a single shot of the exterior of their home. One the second day, they watch with horror as narrative develops. The camera repeats the the first image and follows with a second shot that has entered their interior, traveling up their staircase and into their bedroom where it looks down from an unlikely angle at the two of them sleeping. After informing the police, they attend a party where Fred is approached by a sinister and ghastly man in black who claims to be both at the party and inside Fred's house simultaneously. When Fred resists the impossible, the Nameless Man pulls out a cellular phone and insists that he call to verify. When the Nameless Man answers on the other end followed by an echoing double laugh, Fred flees for home with Renee. This dialogue between Fred and the Nameless Man is one of several scenes throughout the film in which all exterior action and sound is suspended, placing the foreground into an ominous, displaced space of time.
On the third day, the anonymous package has lost its sinister edge and become simply routine. Fred casually flicks the tape into the VCR before his wife can respond to his "aren't you going to watch the tape, honey?" To his horrified surprise the final image discloses a scene of himself over the bloody dismembered body of his wife. "Noooo" he screams, but yes, he's tried, condemned to death, and locked in a cell. His casual gesture becomes a causal one.
In his cell Fred suffers from excruciating head pain coupled with black-and-white memories of the murder scene that simply correspond to the video sequence. Documentary "truth" becomes memory as doubt and forgetting. One night he reaches unbearable levels of pain and sees frantic images of the yellow dotted lines of the highway, a stranger approaching the road, and a windowless house in the desert that explodes into a fiery mass and then miraculously implodes back into its original form. This is the scene of the first exchange.
The following morning it is not Fred who sits in the cell. He has been replaced by a gentle young man named Pete/Balthazar Getty, who shows marks of a forgotten violence on his face and is uncertain how he got there or why. Pete is released to his parents, his mechanics job, and his girlfriend, but he is not quite himself. At the auto shop, Pete's most devoted patron, Mr. Eddy/Robert Loggia, leader of an underground sex ring, pays him a visit one day in his black Cadillac convertible accompanied by a blond bombshell named Alice who bears an uncanny resemblance to the dark haired Renee. Pete's first vision of Alice, emerging like a myth from the black Cadillac, is one of Lynch's privileged moments, a break into dream-time, music-time, enacting a moment of falling, in love, into an insatiable pursuit, a bottomless darkness, and into the web of the femme fatale. Their clandestine affair will slowly develop across a series of nights of hotel sex under the eyes of two laws: the police investigators and the sinister threat of Mr. Eddy and his friend the Nameless Man. As in Wild at Heart, repeated episodes of gratifying sex merely highlight the perpetual gnaw, the itch that can never be scratched away.
As the threat encroaches the lovers are driven into flight. Alice concocts a plot whereby they will rob her pimp and flee with the cash. At the appointed time, Pete enters the pimp's home and is accosted by an enormous obscene screen image of the naked Alice being fucked to the sound of German industrial music. His head hurts, he is ill, transformation is in the air. They accidentally murder the pimp and hit the road, but not before he glimpses a photo of Alice and Renee, blond and brunette, side by side in the same frame with the ring boys. Something is amiss, a mystery beckons to be resolved. Alice leads him to the house of a fence who will buy their goods, and oddly it is the same desolate house in the desert from Fred's mind. No one is home. They make love and when he cries out to her in anguish that he wants her, she says in a roaring whisper "you will never have me," then walks toward the house and enters, becoming the receding destination of desire incarnate. The house is once again the site of exchange.
Pete transforms into Fred and rises to follow Alice to the house, but she has been displaced by the Nameless Man. Fred is chased to his car by the Nameless Man who films his flight with a video camera. Fred stops eventually at a dusty motel named the Lost Highway. In the adjoining room his wife Renee is fucking Mr. Eddy. She leaves and he enters and bludgeons Mr. Eddy and stuffs him in his trunk. Somewhere on the road he stops and with the aid of the Nameless man, now configured as ally and double, he kills the man he now realizes to be the enigmatic Dick Laurent. He then rushes home to deliver into his intercom the original phantom message to himself that "Dick Laurent is Dead." The police are now waiting outside and a car chase commences. We leave Fred hurtling down the lost highway toward yet another point of exchange.
Three primary fissures are foregrounded in this film: that which exists between between one discrete individual and another; that which exists between the individual and itself; and that which exists between the thing and its representation. Complicating these distinctions will be the work of the film. But this work can only be done by approaching the abyss that lies between them, and finding with horror the one behind the face of the other. When Fred has a nightmare on the first night and Renee reaches over to comfort him, he awakens and, for a moment sees her face in the darkness displaced by the face of the Nameless Man he will only later meet at the party. This Nameless Man will play a leading role in the film as that which stands between doubles, between passages from one realm to the next, and between each individual and itself. He exceeds the contraints of temporality and spatiality, moving from past to present, from subject to subject, and occupying two spaces simultaneously. While everyone in this film is trapped, everyone also partakes of this blackness that exceeds limit and border.
It is perhaps tempting to interpret him as the unconscious, especially in the light of Fred's apparent forgetfulness of his wife's murder.5 One might also be inclined to understand him as the figure of death as symbol, like the ghoul who comes to call in Bergman's Seventh Seal. But I will do neither. I also want to insist that I am not understanding this figure in terms of a Hegelian negativity that serves as a resource in the dialectical process. Rather, I want to understand him in the Bataillian sense as that excess which undoes and exceeds any system of signification-a dark tear that is revealed through heterogenous matter, excess, obscenity, sacrifice, and eroticism.6 This is also close to Derrida's concept of Otherness, which he insists is not a lack or void but a "negativity without negativity."7 This is not the reverse side of positivity, but rather something that transgresses signification. To even name this figure is problematic because he is precisely what is nameless. He both is and is not. He is the downfall of Aristotelian logic and Hegelian dialectics. He is what breaks apart all construction and yet serves as its groundless ground. He is beautiful and terrifying. He is in everything and yet he is nowhere and nothing. He is glimpsed at the threshold of the paradox, the aporia. And he is everyone's double. I will call him the Nameless for the sake of legibility, keeping in mind that to say him is to unsay him.
The first thing the Nameless Man will complicate is the notion of home. Home is the structure, the center, the vessel of identity, it is both the point of origin and the destination of the road, and as such, most traditional narratives involve flight and return, fragmentation and reconciliation. But I would like to hold firm to the dual meaning invested in the complicated incantation uttered by Dorothy, rather than to simply posit a vulgar postmodernism that declares the absence of center, embracing its "opposite." The phrase "there's no place like home" means both that home is Not and that home is primary. The "there is" followed by the "no" under the shadow of the metaphoric "like" demarcates the labyrinth we are entering in language. To de-center is always to declare and function within a notion of centrality.
Fred and Renee, for example, occupy their interior like patients in a waiting room. There is no connection between their bodies and their sterile abode. They are not safe in their dwelling, there is an unnameable presence, the walls have eyes, and they walk about as if their every gesture and word were being recorded. Likewise, as the narrative develops, characters transform into other characters, neither one able to proclaim original authenticity, neither one every fully at home. At the crossroads between these transformations is the recurring image of the road and the windowless house in the desert that perpetually explodes, undoes and reconstructs itself. As such, this image mimics flight and return, only home in Lynch time is not closure but recurrence, the precise moment of reconstitution, a place heavy with the anticipation of the coming explosion. The explosion is a dominant theme throughout the works of Lynch. It has erupted in fire, fighting, music, dance and sex. There is in every Lynch film a moment of unbridled, excessive anger and destruction that ruptures any sense of reason and context and leaves everyone uneasy, from the audience to the critics to the witnesses within the frame. In Lost Highway one such moment occurs when Mr. Eddy drives a tailgater off the road, threatens to blow his brains out, and beats him into a delerium. This exceeding of bounds duplicates both the bed and the breakdown of meaning, or better yet, meaning as breakdown. It is what makes narrative as poetics impossible. It is what inspires Nietzsche to shout in Ecce Homo, "I am no man. I am dynamite."8 Interpretation wields the blow. The house is on fire. The ideal space for these homeless characters will be the roadside motel.
It is interesting from this perspective to look at a classic American road film such as The Wizard of Oz, which while not being linear, is circular rather than cyclical. It transpires in an America centered in its heartland, an America where one goes out into the void of dreams only to return to the center. While this circle suffers duality and is fraught with doubles, it resists repetition. Home is not displaced but rather doubly confirmed as both origin and telos. Home is understood as a place outside myth, a "real" place. In 1939 this "reality" was signified by the familiarity of the black-and-white image, and the land of fantasy was signified by the seemingly unnatural spectacle of the new Technicolor. From a different technological vantage point, Lynch will use black-and-white in his early films to create an unreal atmosphere in order to expose the mythos of "reality" but, beginning with Blue Velvet, a new use of color emerges, similar to The Wizard of Oz in that it also serves to complicate our sense of the real. Lynch will use color to paint an America that is as surreal as the Emerald City itself, but without the return to the reassuring black-and-white softness of Auntie Em. Black-and-white now appears in the video footage which implicates Fred in the murder of his wife. The documentary "real" is now shrouded in doubt, uncertainty, and even impossibility.
In The Wizard of Oz the gendered limitations that mark the nice Midwestern girl who forfeits the mystical ruby slippers when she realizes her place really is in the home, mimic the limits of the Western metaphysical narrative ruled under the sign of logos, reason, and a Judeo-Christian God. While on one level The Wizard of Oz critiques this metaphysics by allowing its protagonist to arrive at the coveted end point, here known as "over the rainbow," only to discover its mythos and to work her way back to earth, on the other hand it simply displaces the sacred transcendent with the secular metaphysics of home and heartland.9 Oddly enough, this journey to secular America can only be traveled with the aid of witches, magic wands, and mystical ruby shoes. Lynch will also make use of these mythological forms to conclude Wild at Heart. The good witch points the way to closure, and the mythic Elvis serenade signals that it's time for the heart frame to fade to black, extinguishing all memory of the hell of narrative. But an element of irony has entered the image. We begin to get the feeling we are being mocked, just as we did in the "closure" of Blue Velvet, when we traveled out the ear and awakened back into the waxlike diorama of the suburban home.
The traditional road film that The Wizard of Oz can be understood to critique is the one invented in the gesture of escape, the flight from home, the striving toward a better place which appears as a linear trajectory usually westward toward California as mythos. These narratives are so plentiful in American cinema as to constitute a genre in themselves. Though American road films seem invested in a linear metaphysics of progress and telos, they are actually less dedicated to these notions than The Wizard of Oz. They are rather the foreshadow of the turn taken onto the Lost Highway. The classic American road narrative actually leads not to California but to a shattering moment of consciousness somewhere across the barren desert of adversity and solitude where a terrible truth emerges: that this is the road to nowhere. What lies ahead is only more of the same, what lies behind is a receding history that cannot be regained, and destination is impossible. This double bind leaves only one exit to glory: temporal death, whereby one enters the American metaphysical kingdom like James Dean, by dying and becoming an absence that is present as an afterimage in the dreams of the surviving: to be an American myth. To pass this exit is to meet either failure or farce.
In the lonely bedroom of Lost Highway, the mirror has teeth, and whoever stands too close will be devoured... their hell will not be death, but yet another life, a parallel life, on the other side of the looking glass. The mirror has been a source of mystical transversion and a point of passage in narratives for so long as to have become cliche. It has signaled the divided self, the marker between dream and waking, fantasy and reality. In the mirror we are inaugurated into a labyrinth of terror and infinite ontological reflexivity we can scarcely fathom, and as such the notion of the reflected image and the double has played a dominant role in the genres of horror and fantasy in both literary and film narrative. While terror, which has always spoken of the borders of reason, has had a very low profile in the philosophy canon, and reflexivity and duality have for the most part been theorized in absence from visceral experience, the threat invoked by the reflexive act is explicit in the determination of Western philosophy to suture the abyss of the mirror.
The notion of reflection, a founding principle of philosophy, becomes a central, systematic notion in modern philosophy with the writings of Descartes. Rodolphe Gasche defines this philosophical conception of reflection as the moment of separation where the mind turns itself outward toward an object, but also more explicitly as the moment where this activity itself becomes the object of reflection. This brings the subject into the foreground in modern philosophy as a center and origin of meaning. As Gasche writes,
With such a bending back upon the modalities of object perception, reflection shows itself to mean primarily self-reflection, self-relation, self-mirroring... self-reflection marks the human being's rise to the rank of a subject. It makes the human being a subjectivity that has a center in itself, a self-consciousness certain of itself.10
Gasche also points out that the term reflection of reflectere means literally "to bend" or "to turn back or backward," as well as "to bring back", and that the many conceptions of reflection share the optic metaphor of throwing back light in the form of images. So the mind's grasp of itself grasping itself "becomes analogous to the process whereby physical light is thrown back on a reflecting surface."11
Lost Highway enacts the fissure between knowledge and reflexivity. This fissure is in the doubles and parallel worlds, as well as in cinema and spectatorship itself. It is in the Nameless who wields a camcorder, making autonomous images that perpetually separate and suspend in doubt. But the image of reflexivity and doubling that emerges in this film departs significantly from the classic double of modern literature and the Descartian subjectivity of modern philosophy. Lynch's doubles are neither discrete nor antagonistic warring forces of contradiction. The treatment in Lynch's film of the American binaries pushes the limits between brunette and blond, innocence and criminality, blue and red, sex and death, surface and subterranean, to the point where they implicate one another. They are not unified, sunthesized, neutralized nor overcome in this commingling. Rather they illustrate the perpetually divided "origin" of reflexivity. Derrida describes the problem well in On Grammatology,
There are things like reflecting pools, and images, an infinite reference from one to the other, but no longer a source, a spring. There is no longer a simple origin. For what is reflected is split in itself and not only as an addition to itself of its image. The reflection, the image, the double, splits what it doubles. The origin of the speculation becomes a difference. What can look at itself is not one; and the law of the addition of the origin to its representation, of the thing to its image, is that one plus one makes at least three.12
Similarly Nietzsche in Ecce Homo will joyously declare himself a doppelganger: "I have a second face in addition to the first. And perhaps also a third."13 In this depiciton of meaning the very act of reflection creates not simply a double, but doubles back, splitting the "source." The third face is just the beginning.
Implicit in the notion of reflexivity, doubles, and representation is the notion of passage and link. The double is that which is both divided and joined. The link, the passageway, becomes the place where one is both and neither. The road is such a link, functioning as both ground and link. The image of the severed link reoccurs throughout the films of Lynch; it is in the log carried by the Log Lady in Twin Peaks (1989), the umbilical cords which surround the dancing feet of the Radiator Lady in Eraserhead (1976), and in Lost Highway it is in the broken, dotted line that makes up that larger link between two points, which is the road.14
It is perhaps fitting that postmodern epistemologies that adopt cyclical versus linear notions of time can also be seen as part of a critique which in itself follows a cyclical course. The writings of Nietzsche and Heidegger15 both pose a challenge to the grand linear narrative of Western culture and do so by turning back (reflectere) to the presocratic Greek thinkers to uncover a conception of being and time prior to the emergence of Platonic and Aristotelian metaphysics. Heidegger questions a subject-centered tradition that has forgotten Being by replacing it with the beings of being. He strives to reassert Being as Time, rather than as subject or thing that merely moves through time. Nietzsche, on the other hand, critiques those reactive forces which work to deny and steady the flowing Dionysian world of Becoming.16 Broadly speaking, the critique of metaphysics understood within the context of narrative takes place within a Western culture constituted as the entwined parallel journey of two dominant linear narratives - the biblical text and metaphysics. On one hand, the Judeo-Christian biblical narrative precedes and writes history as the Word of God. It is a linear narrative beginning with Genesis and culminating in the Last Judgement. As such, the temporal world is a broken world, condemned to sin and desire, finding redemption only in a turn away from flesh to the spirit. This visual narrative dominates the history of painting and images up to modernity. Philosophy as metaphysics breaks from the Greek pre-archaic sense of cyclical time and enacts a secular version of he same impulse to work within a linear path moving from origin to telos, where the transcendent unified principle serves as cause, origin and foundation of the world of multiplicity.17 Heidegger calls this metaphysics an onto-theology. What begins in the writings of Plato and Aristotle reaches its climax in the dialectical journey of the Hegelian Absolute Spirit which, though circular, culminates in a closed system. And yet the return to presocratic conceptions of being and time can never be a return to origin; it is a new place one arrives at, one in which words like "Socrates" and "metaphysics" bear a meaning that they didn't have on the last turn. Similarly, at the conclusion of Lost Highway, when Fred returns to his home, to deliver the messagethat will set the whole narrative in motion again, a new element has entered the script that was not there the first time around in the form of the cop cars waiting outside the home. This illustrates well that repetition is never identical, and that at the core of sameness is difference.
While Nietzsche and Heidegger did not use the term "narrative," their emphasis on reestablishing temporality into ontology and epistemology also entails certain upsets to the traditional notion of narrative as a stable structure, as a vessel which contains time. Despite the emergence in this century of several critiques of metaphysics, two major modern, formalist notions of narrative became dominant in the study of the creative text: one, the creative text emergence of narrative as a central category in structuralist poetics as narratology, and two, the anti-narrative political discourse that emerged in film studies in the 1970s around the critique of classic Hollywood narrative cinema. While this paradigm has not gone without challenge in film theory,18 it still remains dominant. It will be useful here to consider it briefly.
While several divergent positions on narrative emerge in the 1970s concerning film, including important contributions from Laura Mulvey, Colin MacCabe, Peter Wollen and Peter Gidal, they share a common political and formalist Althusserian telos and an attempt to situate alternative cinemas within the avant-garde. Stephen Heath's essay "Narrative Space"19 was representative of the Screen position and is interesting for the manner in which it calls into question not only narrative but the development of codes of vision and figuration inherited from Quattrocento perspective, the visual techniques developed in the fifteenth century Italian painting for creating the illusion of three-dimensional reality. Heath argues that the camera has followed this tradition in positing a view from a central perspective and that spectatorship has been trained to understand representation in these terms. Film narrative in this scenario, he argues, developed as a response to the constant threat introduced within the frame by movement. Whereas in classical painting the composition is organized along dominant lines of force, in cinemas this centering must be achieved by the action within the frame; that is, by the logic of the narrative. Heath argues that the movement of classical cinema is always made in the interest of forming coherence in the face of disruption, in order to center a subject under siege. For instance he uses the psychoanalytic concept of "suture" to describe the ongoing dialogue between lack and fulfillment that transpires both within shots and from shot to shot. This dialogue is foremost for Heath an ideological one, constituting a subject in the form of dominant ideologies.
While these critiques mirror the larger critique of metaphysics in their emphasis on disrupting a movement toward stability and wholeness and closure, they differ in an important respect. By working within the framework of ideology, these theories place an impossible burden on alternative cinema as form. The avant-garde film is given the task of speaking for truth, while classic narrative is delegated to myth, ideology, and abuse. As such, these theories simply take a longer and seemingly more critical road back to the same metaphysics of identity based on a conception of truth as correctness or correspondence. Rather I am understanding narrative not simply as structural form or story or ideology, but as an unfolding, an unconcealing, in the Heideggerean sense of truth as unconcealment,
...this is never a merely existent state, but a happening. Unconcealedness (truth) is neither an attribute of factual things...nor one of its propositions... That which is, is familiar, reliable, ordinary. Nevertheless, the clearing is pervaded by a constant concealment in the double form of refusal and dissembling. At bottom the ordinary is not ordinary; it is extra-ordinary, uncanny. The nature of truth, that is, of Unconcealedness, is dominated throughout by a denial. This denial, in the form of a double concealment, belongs to the nature of truth as unconcealedness. Truth in its nature is untruth... [this] is not, however, intended to state that truth is at bottom falsehood. Nor does it mean that truth is never itself but, viewed dialectically, is always also its opposite... What is truth, that it can happen as, or even must happen as, art?20
This epistemology, developed in hermeneutics and Deconstruction, foregrounds interpretation and turns narrative into a process of disclosure. As such is it neither good nor evil, but both. This epistemology also significantly upsets the solidified base from which political and ideological positions have traditionally been voiced. To involve the presence of time in the epistemological and the ontological necessarily destabilizes the fixed ground of the ethical as well. The real challenge of contemporary political and moral thought is to theorize on post-metaphysical ethics, a non-static conception of justice. Critiques which read texts in order to delineate the politically "progressive" from the "regressive" remain ensconced in the stability of metaphysics, fixed in a modern conception of justice.21 Lynch's cinema has never fallen under the good graces of such readings. His vision of America has been neither condemning or embracing, and his pastiche never simply playful nor nihilistic. Ultimately, Lynch's primary interest has been in dissecting the cat, following along its strange corridors, peering into its pink folds and red tunnels.22 If we come closer, the inner organs begin to emerge. Lynch is interested in coming closer. Exaggeration, the seeing "too much" of obscenity, has always been an important part of Lynch's language. Even a fluorescent diner sign can be obscene if we look at it long enough, and especially if we listen to it. Such visions unconceal something beneath form, something naked in its neutrality, the horrible thing that Emmanuel Levinas called the "there is" and described as
"...something resembling what one hears when one puts an empty shell close to the ear, as if the emptiness were full, as if the silence were a noise. It is something one can also feel when one thinks that even if there were nothing, the fact that "there is" is undeniable. Not that there is this or that; but the very scene of being is open: there is."23
The pilot for Twin Peaks ends with a terrifying image of a hand, a part of some unknown whole, reaching toward the dark soil and turning over a rock beneath which a precious clue lies hidden. We never see the broken gold heart that waits there in the dark, just the sudden gesture of the hand turning the stone followed by an image of the terror-ridden mother of the late Laura Palmer waking with a jolt from her disturbing vision. It is this shock of waking, placed at the very end of the pilot, that signals the beginning of a 29 episode dream of American life. The unwinding of narrative, becoming, and interpretation are given appearance here. They are a reaching hand, a rock being overturned, a scream in the night bed. Paradoxically, word, image, and sound unite in cinema in order to reveal the fragmentation of meaning, and more precisely the point where meaning explodes and implodes in upon itself perpetually.
In its cyclical portrayal of meaning, Lost Highway's narrative "unconceals" what narrative strives to conceal about itself. The cycle is not simply a set track, on which a determined course of events will forever circle like a broken record. This is apparent in the film's conclusion when new elements emerge, such as developing police knowledge, that were not in the cycle's past, now configured as its future. Similarly, certain nagging and unresolvable problems emerge within the narrative, strains that cannot be bound and that escape interpretation. For instance, the spatiality of the temporality is unresolvable, as is the question of continuity of consciousness in peripheral characters. It is not clear whether these parallel realities are happening simultaneously or what space the receding double occupies. Lost Highway is a film that resists closure hermeneutically as well as structurally because, like organic forms, it forever defies the laws of a logic that could stabilize it, and yet must appear in form, as a structure. Likewise narrative circulates simultaneously as limit or law and as its undoing. I am not arguing that Lost Highway, by virtue of its untraditional form, breaks free from dominant ideology... rather I am arguing that Lost Highway is a work that discloses the radical alterity and apoetic complexity of narrative and meaning. Cinema is being described here not only as somthing moving, but as something alive. Spectatorship and interpretation are the link, a collision on the intersection of two lost highways.