As always on The Cinematologists podcast, we like to address topics of salience, but in our own way and in our own time. The death of David Lynch left an irreplaceable hole in the fabric of cinema and, rightly, prompted immediate tributes from collaborators, as well as countless reflections on his status as an artist and filmmaker.
The spectre of his influence has found its way into many episodes over the years: Scott Tanner Jones discussing Lynch’s impact in this episode on Physical Media, also in Neil’s conversation with Bertrand Bonello on The Beast, and in my conversation with Michel Chion, and has been referenced in numerous others. This was the third screening in Mark’s unofficial L.A. trilogy with us, following Big Wednesday and The Doors.
Lost Highway has always existed at the edge of even Lynch’s already strange filmography. Critically dismissed at the time and commercially ignored (like most of Lynch’s work), it is now seen by many as the beginning of his late “L.A. Trilogy,” preceding Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire. For both Neil and Mark, this film is personal, formative, and endlessly rewatchable—precisely because it resists resolution.
Set in a murky Los Angeles that exists halfway between industrial hellscape and erotic fever dream, Lost Highway is a Möbius strip of a movie, beginning where it ends, and unravelling its characters and its viewers alike. It conjures its mood not just through narrative but through textures: light, shadow, analogue tape, blown-out industrial soundscapes, and those unnameable feelings that reverberate long after the final frame.
The conversation is as engaging and in-depth as you’d expect, with Mark, Neil and the audience at Newlyn in top form. Key themes discussed include:
* Lynch and memory’s strange register:Mark reflects on how Lynch’s films live in a different kind of memory register than most; more a series of fleeting snapshots than the coherence of active recall. Because of that, every viewing reveals new aspects; haunting fragments displace and rearrange entire subplots that had taken hold in the subconscious. In that sense, we consider Lynch’s cinema as a form of recursive hauntology.
* The loop as trap (road to road):From the very first shot of that endless road to the repetition of sounds and visuals at the film’s end, Mark explores Lost Highway as a recursive loop that traps its characters in a fugue state of guilt, desire, and dissociation.
* Structural ouroboros and influence:This structural ouroboros recalls the severed ear in Blue Velvet, or the rabbit-hole narrative of Mulholland Drive. For Mark, as a filmmaker, this formal approach is profoundly influential to his own sense of cinematic composition, time and narrative fracture.
* Sexual jealousy and the violence of looking:The film’s narrative is anchored in the protagonist’s feelings of inadequacy, paranoia, and desire. The Mystery Man, played with uncanny chill by Robert Blake, becomes a vessel for projecting disowned guilt and dissociation.
* Hollywood as a transformation machine:Patricia Arquette’s double role, and the thematic through-line of transformation (from Fred to Pete; from brunette to blonde), prompt a reading of the film as a noir dream of Hollywood, where people are consumed, remade, and destroyed by the gaze.
* Sound as cinema:A recurring motif across the discussion is Lynch’s sonic world-building. Angelo Badalamenti’s score, Barry Adamson’s textures, and contributions from Nine Inch Nails, Rammstein, David Bowie, and Marilyn Manson shape the film’s contours. It’s a work felt not just through images but through air movement and industrial pressure waves.
* A sense of closure:Neil and Mark discuss the finality of Lynch’s oeuvre. “Everything is set now,” Mark says of the filmography. “There will be no more work from him. You watch it now in the context of a finished body of work, rather than imagining what he might do next.” Neil ends the episode quoting from Pier Paolo Pasolini’s reflections on the Long Take in Cinema and Life, which felt apt.
Neil and I continue the conversation around the central tension of the episode: how—or even whether—we’re supposed to “understand” Lost Highway. I reference Warren Buckland’s analysis of the film as a “puzzle film”: one whose clues scramble narrative logic and deny classical causality. Viewers are caught between “flaunted gaps” (overt mysteries like the videotapes) and “suppressed gaps” (dream sequences that promise meaning but deliver obfuscation).
Lost Highway confronts you with the truth that “nothing makes sense.” Its refusal to resolve mirrors a deeper psychological or existential unease—a thematic throughline that aligns with other so-called “vibes films” we mention, such as Inherent Vice, Under the Silver Lake, and even Cronenberg’s recent The Shrouds—an interesting counterpoint in grief, surveillance, and ambience. A good engagement with this idea and Lynch’s career can be found in Ruby’s Hamilton’s recent piece for the London Review of Books.
We talk about the character-swap device as Lynch tapping into a pathology of being unable to reconcile the self and the other. Lynch doesn’t just show identity breakdown; he renders it as form. The Fred–Pete body swap isn’t a mere plot twist—it’s an allegory of dissociation, repression, and the unassimilated parts of the psyche. A psychoanalytic reading points to how Lynch dramatises the internal exile of our “dark sides,” now returned as spectres, doubles, and avatars.
Another key point of discussion is the brilliance of Patricia Arquette—mesmerising in a mode that adopts and then reverses the power dynamics of the gaze. Rather than being simply the object of the male gaze, Arquette’s character weaponises it—using sexuality and performative presence to manipulate, dominate, and escape. It’s arguably an apposite post-feminist staging of power inside patriarchal mechanics. As Neil reflects, Lynch’s women are never merely passive; they are agents, even in systems built to consume them.
These are just some of the strands of discussion, but there’s much more to get your cinematic teeth into—including an ongoing bit about the appearance of ’Allo ’Allo! actor Guy Siner. (American listeners, you may need to google that one.)
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