Žižek, Slavoj. The Art of the Ridiculous Sublime: On David Lynch’s Lost Highway.
Seattle: Walter Chapin Simpson Center for the Humanities, 2000.

…it nonetheless scores a point against the notion of Lynch as the ultimate deconstructionist ironist in that it correctly insists that there is a level at which Lynch’s universe is to be taken thoroughly seriously. 3

Recall the final ecstatic rapture, after her brutal rape and murder, of Laura Palmer in Fire Walk With Me; or Eddy’s outburst of rage against the driver on behalf of the need to follow the “fucking rules” in Lost Highway; or the often-quoted conversation in Blue Velvet between Jeffrey and Sandy, after Jeffrey returns from Dorothy’s apartment, in the course of which Jeffrey, shattered and deeply disturbed, complains, “Why are there people like Frank? Why is there so much trouble in this world?” and Sandy responds by telling him of a good omen in her dream about robins who bring light and love to a dark world—in a paradigmatically postmodern way, these scenes are simultaneously comical, provoking laughter; unbearable naïve; and yet to be taken thoroughly “seriously.” Their “seriousness” does not signal a deeper spiritual level underlying superficial clichés, but rather a crazy assertion of the redemptive value of naïve clichés as such. This essay is an attempt to unravel the enigma of this coincidence of opposites, which is, in a way, the enigma of “postmodernity” itself. 3

It is as if the unity of our experience of reality sustained by fantasy disintegrates and decomposes into its two components: on the one side, the “desublimated” aseptic drabness of daily reality; on the other side, its fantasmatic support, not in its sublime version, but staged directly and brutally, in all its obscene cruelty. It is as if Lynch is telling us this is what your life is effectively about; if you traverse the fantasmatic screen that convers a fake aura on it, the choice is between bad and worse, between the aseptic impotent drabness of social reality and the fantsamatic Real of self-destructive violence. 13

Perhaps it is precisely this senseless complexity, this impression that we are drawn into a schizophrenic nightmarish delirium with no logic or rules (and that, consequently, we should abandon any attempt at a consistent interpretation and just let ourselves go to the inconsistent multitude of shocking scenes we are bombarded with), that is the film’s ultimate lure to be resisted. 15

Patricia Arquette was therefore right when, in an effort to clarify the logic of the two roles she was playing, she produced the following frame of what goes on in the film: a man murders his wife because he thinks she’s being unfaithful. he can’t deal with the consequences of his actions and has a kind of breakdown in which he tries to imagine an alternative, better life for himself, i.e., he imagines himself as a younger virile guy, meeting a woman who wants him all the time instead of shutting him out, but even this imaginary life goes wrong—the mistrust and madness in him are so deep that even his fantasy falls apart and ends in a nightmare. The logic here is precisely that of Lacan’s reading of Freud’s dream, “Father, can’t you see I’m burning?” in which the dreamer is awakened when the Real of the horror encountered in the dream (the dead son’s reproach) is more horrible than the awakened reality itself, so that the dreamer escapes into reality in order to escape the Real encountered in the dream. 17

However, such a direct psychoanalytic reading also has its limits. To put it in somewhat Stalinist terms, we should oppose both deviations, the rightist psycho-reductionist one (what occurs to Pete is just Fred’s hallucination, in the same way the two corrupted elder servants are just the narrator’s hallucination in Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw), as well as the leftist, anarchic-obscurantist, anti-theoretical insistence that one should renounce all interpretive effort and let ourselves go to the full ambiguity and richness of the film’s audio and visual texture—they are both worse, as Stalin would have put it. The naïve Freudian reading is also in danger of slipping into obscurantist Jungian waters, conceiving all persons as mere projections/materializations of the different disavowed aspects of Fred’s persona (Mystery Man is his destructive evil Will, etc.). Much more productive is to insist how the very circular form of narrative in Lost Highway directly renders the circularity of the psychoanalytic process. 17

The temporal loop that structures Lost Highway s thus the very loop of the psychoanalytic treatment in which, after a long detour, we return to our starting point from another perspective. 18

By this direct confrontation of the reality of desire with fantasy, Lynch DECOMPOSES the ordinary “sense of reality” sustained by fantasy into, on the one side, pure, aseptic reality and, on the other side, fantasy: reality and fantasy no longer relate vertically (fantasy beneath reality, sustaining it), but horizontally (side by side). 21

The Nazi executioner acting as a cold bureaucrat, indifferent to the plight of his victims, was not unlike the subject who can maintain a tired indifference towards the comedy he is watching, while the TV set, through its soundtrack, performs the laughter for him, on his behalf (or, in a Marxist reading of commodity fetishism, the bourgeois individual who can afford to be, in his subjective self-experience, a rationalist utilitarian—the fetishism is displaced onto the commodities themselves. 27

This figure of the obscene rapist father, far from being the Real beneath the respectful appearance, is rather itself a fantasy formation, a protective shield—against what? Is the rapist father from the False memory Syndrome not, in spite of his horrifying features, the ultimate guarantee that there is somewhere full, unconstrained enjoyment? And, consequently, what if the true horror is the lack of enjoyment itself? 31

It is as if, in Lynch’s universe, the psychological unity of a person disintegrates into, on the one hand, a series of clichés, of uncannily ritualized behavior, and, on the other hand, outbursts of the “raw,” brutal, desublimated Real of an unbearably intensive, (self)destructive, psychic energy. 35

He transposes the vertical into the horizontal and puts the two dimensions—reality and its fantasmatic supplement, surface and its “repressed”—on the same surface. 35

The two main alternative readings of Lost Highway can thus be interpreted as akin to the dream-logic in which you can “have your cake and eat it too,” like in the “Tea or coffee? Yes, please!” joke: you first dream about eating it, then about having/possessing it, since dreams do not know contradiction. The dreamer resolves a contradiction by staging two exclusive situations one after the other; in the same way, in Lost Highway, the woman (the brunette Arquette) is destroyed/killed/punished, and the same woman (the blond Arquette) eludes the male grasp and triumphantly disappears. 36

There are two standard uses of cyberspace narrative: the linear, single-path maze adventure, and the undetermined, “postmodern” hypertext form of rhizome fiction. The single-path maze adventure moves the interactor towards a single solution within the structure of a win-lose contest (overcoming the enemy, finding the way out, etc.). With all possible complications and detours, the overall path is clearly predetermined; all roads lead to one final Goal. In contrast, the hypertext rhizome does not privilege any order of reading or interpretation; there is no ultimate overview of “cognitive mapping,” no possibility to unify the dispersed fragments in a coherent encompassing narrative framework. One is ineluctably enticed in confliction directions; we, the interactors, just have to accept that we are lost in the inconsistent complexity of multiple referrals and connections. The paradox is that this ultimately helpless confusion, this lack of final orientation, far from causing an unbearable anxiety, is oddly reassuring: the very lack of a final point of closure serves as a kind of denial which protects us from confronting the trauma of our finitude, of the fact that our story has to end at some point. 37

A whole series of narrative procedures in nineteenth-century novels announce not only the standard narrative cinema (the intricate use of “flashback” in Emily Bronte or of “cross-cutting” and “close-ups” in Dickens), but sometimes even the modernist cinema (the use of “off-space” in Madame Bovary)—as if a new perception of life were already hear, but was still struggling to find its proper means of articulation until it finally found it in cinema. What we have here is thus the historicity of a kind of future anterieur (future perfect): it is only when cinema arrived and developed its standard procedures that we could really grasp the narrative logic of Dickens’s great novel or of Madame Bovary. 39

This perception of our reality as one of the possible—often not even the most probable—outcomes of an “open” situation, this notion that other possible outcomes are not simply cancelled out but continue to haunt our “true” reality as a specter of what might have happened, conferring on our reality the status of extreme fragility and contingency, implicitly clashes with the predominant “linear” narrative forms of our literature and cinema—it seems to call for a new artistic medium in which it would not be an eccentric excess, but its “proper” mode of functioning. One can argue that the cyberspace hypertext is this new medium in which this life experience will finds its “natural,” more appropriate objective correlative, so that, again, it is only with the advent of cyberspace hypertext that we can grasp what Altman and Kieslowski were aiming at. 40

This is what Lynch does in Lost Highway: he “traverses” the fantasmatic universe of noir, not by way of direct social criticism (depicting a grim social reality behind it), but by staging its fantasies openly, more directly, i.e., without the “secondary perlaboration” which masks their inconsistencies. The final conclusion to be drawn is that “reality,” and the experience of its density, is sustained not simply by A/ONE fantasy, but an INCONSISTENT MULTITUDE of fantasies; this multitude generates the effect of the impenetrable density that we experience as “reality.” This, then, is the ultimate answer to those New Age-inclined reviewers who insisted that Lost Highway moves at a more fundamental psychic level (at the level closer to the universe of “primitive” civilizations, of reincarnation, of double identities, of being reborn as a different person, etc.) than that of the unconscious fantasizing of a single subject. Against this “multiple reality” talk, one should thus insist on a different aspect, on the fact that the fantasmatic support of reality is in itself necessarily multiple and inconsistent. 41

…the unbearable scene of the “ideal couple” (a male ape copulating with a female cyborg). By displaying the two fantasies side by side in hypertext, the space is thus open for the third, underlying fundamental fantasy to emerge. Lynch does something of the same order when throws us into the universe in which different, mutually exclusive fantasies co-exist. He thereby also encircles the contours of the space that the spectator has to fill in with the excluded fundamental fantasy. Does he not, then, in a way compel us to imagine a male ape copulating with a female cyborg—in the most efficient way to undermine the hold this fantasy exerts over us? 44

…and is not Lynch’s entire work an endeavor to bring the spectator “to the point of hearing inaudible noises” and thus to confront the comic horror of the fundamental fantasy? 44