Figure 10: Lost Highway (1997).
Cars and movies grew in tandem. Like most machines of the nineteenth century, they apply the technology of intermittent motion, as did the sewing machine, the steam train and the machine gun. (Rees 2002: 83)
Ultimately, though, it fell to cinema – the exact contemporary – to explore the cultural potential of the motor vehicle. It is no coincidence that the nostalgic evocation of a golden age for both motoring and movie-going covers the same period: mid-century. (Kerr 2002: 23)
nostalgia nos-tal’ji-a, n homesickness; the desire to return to some earlier time in one’s life, or a fond remembrance of that time, usu tinged with sadness at its having passed. – adj nostal’gic. – adv nostal’gically. [Gr nostos a return, and algos pain].
travel sickness nausea experienced, as a result of motion, by a passenger in a car, ship, aircraft, etc. (Chambers Dictionary 1998: 1106 and 1767)
The relationship between cars and cinema is closely intertwined as the first two epigraphs above point out. Vehicles and the road also feature heavily in Lynch’s films, such as the crash that projects ‘the dark-haired women’ into Betty/Rita’s fantasy/nightmare in Mulholland Drive, Frank Booth’s vicious joyriding in Blue Velvet, Agent Cooper’s journey to Twin Peaks and Deer Meadow, Sailor’s and Lula’s attempts to evade capture by Mariella in Wild at Heart, Fred Madison’s frantic attempts to evade capture in Lost Highway and even Alvin Straight’s alternative motorized form of transport in The Straight Story. This chapter is an exploration of the ways in which vehicles and the road in Lynch’s films function in relationship to cinema history. In particular, there are a number of ideas or notions that I want to look at – the relationship between screens, mirrors and lenses to sprockets, pixels and spark plugs. The overdetermined, non-literal interrelationship between technological relations of transport and film is the point from which I wish to consider Lynch’s films and their connection to other road movies over the second half of the twentieth century. In so doing I will investigate, via a brief chronological selection of relevant films from this period – Detour (Edgar G. Ulmer, 1945), Easy Rider (Dennis Hopper, 1969) and Vanishing Point (Richard C. Sarafian, 1970) – the trajectory of the road movie genre and the changing nature of its central concerns and preoccupations, so as to ascertain Lynch’s position within that history.
In the early stages of Mulholland Drive (2001), immediately after the jitterbug contest and the spectator’s entry into the dream/fantasy of the film, the camera follows, from above, an elegant black Cadillac as it glides, slowly and effortlessly, in the dark along the eponymous road of the film’s title. The soft white glare of the front headlights, coupled with the warm glow of the red rear lights and the illuminated number plate, give the impression that the car is floating along in an unhurried, meandering, dream-like fashion. Interspersed with these shots of the car are those showing the city of dreams, Los Angeles, below to the left, which looks like a myriad constellation of fairy lights down in the valley. As a treatise on the subject of film as being akin to dream, and Hollywood as the home of both cinematic dreams and nightmares, this vantage point seems a most appropriate place to begin to consider the relationship between cars and films.
Jean Baudrillard (1988: 51–52) writes of flying over Los Angeles and remarks that ‘Mulholland Drive by night is an extraterrestrial’s vantage-point on earth, or conversely, an earth-dweller’s vantage-point on the Galactic metropolis’. In a comparable fashion, the Cadillac appears to glide over the road’s surface, neither fully connected to it nor quite rising above it, but in an elevated location above the city of angels below, thereby offering a distinctive vantage-point on Los Angeles. The seeming dissociation of the car from the ground, and the high angle shots onto the vehicle from above, lends this scene a dream-like, angelic quality in keeping with, but different from, the opening, dizzying montage shots depicting a bleached out image of Diane, accompanied by her ‘parents’, winning a jitterbug contest. These opening images are then followed by what we may later come to realize are point-of-view shots of her slowly lowering her head, accompanied by the sounds of her laboured breathing, onto a burgundy-coloured pillow as her dream/fantasy of herself as Betty begins and the spectator is taken into this complex, interwoven narrative.
Returning to the Cadillac’s journey, the spectator is then presented with an abrupt shift from the languorous pace of the earlier shots. The car comes to a halt and the man in the front driver’s seat turns to the ‘dark-haired woman’ (for, as yet, she has not yet taken the name of ‘Rita’ in Diane’s dream fantasy) and, pointing a gun at her, tells her to get out of the car. The man in the passenger seat of the vehicle meanwhile gets out and opens the rear door for her and then puts his hand on her arm to forcibly remove her from the vehicle. At this moment the spectator is given privileged information by the use of omniscient narration and parallel editing, as two cars are shown careering at high speeds towards the stationary Cadillac. Bright lights from these cars’ headlights are shown shining through the Cadillac’s windscreen, lighting up the frightened face of the dark-haired woman, as one of the joyriding cars crashes into the car. The spectator watches these shots looking out through the windscreen onto the oncoming vehicle, and, at the same time is shown shots of her face as if close to the windscreen, but, seemingly, on the interior side of the car. Paul Virilio (1988: 188) suggests that ‘What goes on in the windshield is cinema in the strictest sense’, and if so, at this point the spectator is presented with cinematic shock shot through two cinematic apparatuses – the camera and the windshield – both of which are projected on to the cinema screen (or the TV screen, or, indeed the computer screen, depending upon the film’s point of exhibition). When the event is staged on the mythologically important cinematic signifier of Mulholland Drive, in the ‘postmodern’ city of Los Angeles, where the car is ‘king’, the impact is significant in a number of ways. The spectator fully enters into Diane’s dream/fantasy at the moment of impact. The previous shots act as a sort of a lull into her dream and link into the spectator’s cinematic daydream in an analogous fashion. The shock of the impact, and the subsequent shots of the crumpled, burning car with smoke coming from it as the dark-haired woman crawls from the vehicle and stumbles, in a concussed amnesiac state, down into the city below drags the spectator along, in a comparable manner, for a similarly dislocated and disassociated experience. These fragmentary shots give the spectator a partial feeling of the trauma experienced by the dark-haired woman, but which we later come to realize is actually an aspect of Diane Selwyn’s trauma and subsequent fantasmatic projection into this dream state.
As A.L. Rees notes in the quotation used at the start of this chapter, cars and movies have a lot in common, and like many nineteenth-century inventions incorporate discontinuous motion. Indeed, as I watched this clip on my previous computer, now updated, I was most aware of the intermittent nature of these images. While they appeared fluid and balanced on the television set, on the computer screen these same images appeared to break down into stilted, staggering attempts at continual movement. And watching the dark-haired woman on the computer screen, I felt a little like I imagine she must feel – slightly dizzy, disorientated and suffering from a form of travel sickness, although in my case this was a form of stationary travel sickness. Rather like watching a live video-cam broadcast over the internet, these computer-screened images made me aware of the origins and development of the technology – new indeed! (See Chapter 6 for an extended discussion about new technology and film.)
At the same time, the development of digital technology, as many commentators remark,1 permits the reinvestigation, from another vantage point, of earlier forms of cinematic technology and production as a means of understanding, in light of changes in technology, what earlier forms of cinematic cultures were doing. And the computer screen permits, or rather potentially provides for, a third space of representation in the way, for instance, that Jean-Luc Godard uses it in Eloge de l’amour (2001); as neither camera nor screen, but as both at the same time.2 In particular, this is apparent during the second section of the film, shot in saturated colour, where Godard uses the screen to ‘hold’ several types of image together. So, for example, the screen presents a seemingly still, painterly image of a boat on the sea, only for it to then transform into the moving image. Later still several images coalesce at once together on the virtual plane of representation, which problematizes notions of surface and depth and the spectator’s relationship to the image. ‘It is just an image’ Godard once said, but now the ‘just’ appears more complicated and intriguing than ever, and the ‘just’ of past images may reveal more in the passing of time from a new vantage point: the future anterior of art.3
Godard’s vehemently anti-American film brings me back, after this brief detour (but the issues it raises will return, this is not to be a cul-de-sac, rather more of a u-turn), to Mulholland Drive. At specific points during this initial scene, interspersed with shots of the car and those of Los Angeles, are ones of the eponymous road sign, which is highlighted and overexposed seemingly in accordance with the motivation of the car’s headlights. After the crash when the dark-haired woman stumbles into LA the spectator is presented with other highlighted street signs: first, Franklin Avenue and then Sunset Boulevard. The latter, along with Mulholland Drive, are important intertextual references within cinematic history, and specific tropes of noir as well as markers of liminal spaces within this and other Lynch films. For example, similar shots of Lincoln Avenue in Blue Velvet are used to specify this dangerous location which marks Jeffrey’s passage from conventional family life towards his primal scene with his fantasy parents, Frank and Dorothy. (And in INLAND EMPIRE after being stabbed Susan Blue stumbles across the traffic lights at Hollywood and Vine, where the road signs are picked out for the audience to take note of.)
Later on in Mulholland Drive, in the shorter second section of Lynch’s film, which depicts Diane’s true existence in Hollywood, one of failure rather than success in which she decides to kill her ex-lover; a similar journey takes place. However, this time Diane is driven to a dinner party where Camilla and her new lover, the film director Adam Kesher, are celebrating their engagement. Diane’s car comes to a halt at exactly the same point on Mulholland Drive, and the man in the driver’s seat turns to Diane, but on this version of the journey it is to tell her that there is a surprise for her as Camilla arrives to walk her up the hill to the party, during which, due to her jealousy, Diane decides that she has to kill Camilla. The shorter second part of the narrative structure of the film thereby sets out Diane’s decision and actions, while the first is her dream fantasy which seeks to alter the course of events that have already been put in place. The use of repetition links the two parts together in an uncanny fashion, as each time the same words or phrases appear to take on other, different meanings in light of their changed circumstances.
I’ve never been to Los Angeles, not in a literal sense anyway. My ‘visits’ and ‘knowledge’ of the city derive entirely from its cinematic representations, stories from news reports and literary sources. While the road and street names conjure up a range of exciting connotations I have a need to get a sense of geography to provide some assistance in my exploration of the city and its environs. From looking at a map of the city (Banham 1971: 102–103) I can see that the dark-haired woman had some way to stumble to make it to Sunset Boulevard (it’s a good job Norma Desmond no longer resides there – although changing her name to Norma may have put a completely different spin on things – no wonder Diane didn’t allow ‘Rita’ to adopt that name in her dream fantasy!4). The chosen locations from the city reverberate with intertextual connotations in Lynch’s relationship with Los Angeles, or more particularly, Hollywood. But this ambivalence to the city and its film history runs through the history of noir, in both its literary and cinematic forms. As Sheen and Davison rightly point out:
one of the most important features of Lynch’s work is his continuing engagement with the noir aesthetic. Arguably the strand of film-making that has maintained the disruptive potential of European traditions within mainstream production, noir has emerged in post-classical Hollywood as the narrative and stylistic template for an independent aesthetic. (Sheen and Davison 2004: 3)
It is this connection between noir, LA, Lynch, vehicles and the road that particularly interests me, for here, I would argue, is a crucial quilting-point in the interconnection between the creative endeavours of the filmmakers with capitalist technologies and the profit system. As Mike Davis (1990: 18) writes, ‘Los Angeles…is, of course, a stand-in for capitalism in general…that it has come to play the double role of utopia and dystopia for advanced capitalism. The same place as Brecht noted, symbolized both heaven and hell’. Hollywood, as Davis goes on to say, was metaphorically remodelled during the period of the depression by both American novelists and the influx of anti-fascist European exiles, particularly those émigré directors like Billy Wilder (director of, among others, Sunset Boulevard, 1950), Fritz Lang and Edward Dmytryk, and writers and intellectuals such as Theodor Adorno and Bertold Brecht. And through its renewals or reawakening ‘noir has nonetheless remained the popular and, despite its intended elitism, “populist” anti-myth of Los Angeles’ (Davis 1990: 21). It is in this context that Mulholland Drive and Lost Highway (1997) can be sited as the continuation and development of the themes and styles that have run through noir since its inception and the genre’s complex relationship to the city and cinema.
Noir has always contained the core of its author’s seething frustration yet fascination with the industry: ‘the noir of the 1930s and 1940s (and again in the 1960s) became a conduit for the resentments of writers in the velvet trap of the studio system’ (Davis 1990: 38). We can certainly bring this up to date with reference to Lynch’s films which continue to explore this relationship between filmmakers and the industry. What Lynch does in Mulholland Drive is to explore poetically this relationship through the complexities of the film’s structure and style which is analogous to the relationship between creativity and profit in the filmmaking industry. The whole of this film reverberates with the tension between the two. It is no longer only situated metaphorically, it now occupies the surface of the screen at the level of the diegesis and the uncanny counterpart of the sounds and images emanating at different levels or registers within. Think only of the meeting between Adam Kesher and the film’s backers which encapsulates all of these issues in its strangely realized mood with Mr Roque listening in as the overall controller. Think also of Kesher’s drive to meet the strange figure of the Cowboy at the ranch at the end of Mulholland Drive. The fantasies and tensions of noir are, in these films, writ large; they no longer occupy the shadowy hinterlands of the film’s frame. Openly staged, but elliptically presented, they offer up images and stories of beautiful and strange connections between art and commerce, intertwining but never quite separating, offering the spectator a ride on a Möbius strip. Or else, like one of Cathy de Monchaux’s sculptures, they present the alluring but simultaneously frightening but also strangely attractive spectacle of the vice-like grip of the vice-ridden velvet light trap of Hollywood.
Here, it may also be useful to consider Fredric Jameson’s (1993) work on that great noir author of Los Angeles, Raymond Chandler. For Jameson, spaces in Chandler become ‘characters’ or actants in the ensuing dramas. And, in a Heideggerian sense of the division between World and Earth, albeit in the aesthetically compromised city of Los Angeles, Chandler’s representations ‘consists in holding the two incommensurable dimensions apart and in allowing us thereby to glimpse them simultaneously in all their scandalous irreconcilability’ (Jameson 1993: 49). In Lynch’s work, I would argue, the holding apart of the ‘two incommensurable dimensions’ becomes even more pronounced. Similarly the aesthetic and formal characteristics of Lynch’s films have a socio-historical significance all of their own. Jameson (1993: 34) also remarks that the episodic limits of Chandler’s novels are themselves of social and historical significance in ‘that it was his society that lacked imagination and that such undoubted limits are those of the narrativity of Chandler’s socio-historical raw material’. In much the same way, the elliptical and poetical nature of Lynch’s films about the film industry also contain the gaps in the socio-historical raw material of postmodern capitalism where the economic base is hidden behind the fantasy of cinematic production and commodity fetishism.
Davis (1990: 44) argues that ‘A major revival of noir occurred in the 1960s and 1970s as a new generation of émigré writers and directors revitalized the anti-myth and elaborated it fictionally into a comprehensive counter-history’. The films he refers to here include Chinatown and Blade Runner. He suggests that
the postmodern role of L.A. noir may be precisely to endorse the emergence of ‘homo reaganus’…[where] The result feels very much like the actual moral texture of the Reagan-Bush era: a supersaturation of corruption that fails any longer to outrage or even interest (Davis 1990: 45).
He is, of course, referring to the first Bush administration, not the frightening (re)appearance of the avenging son. But his comments are, perhaps, even more apposite when one takes into account events from the recent past where terrorist acts mirror back to North America (Hollywood) its own fantasy visions of disasters, in which these acts of spectacular violence bring back home as a nightmare what it only dreamt about in the safety of its own cinemas, but propagated on the rest of the world as its hegemonic vision of escapism, only for it to reappear as the Others’ letter home. But, here the Other is perhaps rather a mirror of the Same.
Davis specifically refers to writers in his analysis of postmodern noir, and he singles out James Ellroy as a prime case, together with Bret Easton Ellis’s yuppie noir, as a means of encapsulating what Thomas Pynchon refers to, in Vineland (1990) as ‘the restoration of fascism in America’ via the Disneyfication of noir (quoted in Davis 1990: 46. And I’ll come back to Disney when we discuss The Straight Story). What I want to argue is that Lynch’s films involving Los Angeles maintain and develop the original complexities and mood of the original noirs and their symbolically staged, ambivalent relationship between the filmmaker and the industry. And I will now look in more detail at the ways in which these films provide that noir – ish mood via the role played by the mobile symbol of LA – the car – in these cinematic visions.
As Los Angeles is the home of the North American film industry, its appearance in film noir as both a starting point for journeys and as a point of return is therefore not surprising. The city becomes the desired destination in Edgar G. Ulmer’s road B-movie, Detour, of 1945. Here, Al Roberts hitch-hikes from New York to Los Angeles to try and meet up again with his girlfriend, Sue, to make a new, better life for themselves in the west. Los Angeles offers a utopian hope for the two of them where Sue might make it in the movies and Al’s musical talents will be more properly rewarded rather than eking out a living playing the piano in a night club (but somehow, mixed up in Al’s ennui, the viewers know that he will never make it, that events will get in the way). However, they are never to meet up again as Al gets caught up in an ever-increasing vortex of fate-inflicted crime. This B-movie, which was made in only six days, incorporates all of the strangeness of the cheap image, which acts as an index of the economic conditions of production, while at the same time uncovering and defamiliarizing the cinematic signifier in unexpected ways.
David Laderman (2002: 23) suggests that the road movie needs to be understood in relation to classical film genres so that ‘The Western, for example, is a classical genre of substantial formative significance for the road movie…both genres explore wandering and/or migration in narrative and aesthetic terms’. In Detour this wandering is a form of nihilistic horror from which Al Roberts cannot escape. Rather than the road and the trip west offering a means of salvation and redemption as in some Westerns, Roberts is stuck on the road and unable to get off it. The driver, Charles Haskill Jr, who offers him a lift and who subsequently falls from the car and dies by hitting his head on a rock, leads Roberts into a descending spiral from which he has no way out. (Similarly, the Western may have, initially, offered hope for the new settlers, but their near extermination of the indigenous population meant that the seeds of destruction were already sown. As such, the new Eden was already contaminated, so that when we change from the horse to the car, even that utopia was damaged and any journey was likely to lead into danger.) This is followed by his offer of a lift to Vera, who realizes that Roberts has taken over Haskell’s identity, because she was the one who fought off Haskell’s rape attempt on her when she took a lift from him earlier on, which provides a form of repetition compulsion that the spectator must know can only end in tragedy, with Robert’s failure to metaphorically get off the road. Vera has got ahead of Al, due to the time he spent disposing of the body of Haskell, and she repeats the journey she had with the first ‘Haskell’, only this time, the shrill, monstrously depicted femme fatale is, metaphorically, in the driving seat all the time.
At the end of the film, which takes us back to its starting point, when Roberts leaves the diner and walks dejectedly up the road, he knows that he cannot escape his fate, that the road has closed in on him and so he wearily accepts his lot and climbs into the police car. The narrative framework of the film is set out in a cyclical structure which emphasizes the relationship and links between earlier road noirs and their contemporary counterparts. Geraint Bryan (1999: 49, emphasis in the original) argues that ‘Detour is the ultimate road noir, with the kind of fatalistic belief in destiny usually encountered in Greek Tragedy’. Lynch’s films continue to develop, in other ways, the psychical and geographical complexities implicit in the original noir cycle where the car and the road are really lures and traps and not symbols of freedom.
In relation to Lynch’s films, Stuart Mitchell suggests that although Wild at Heart is his only ‘real’ road movie, that Blue Velvet and Lost Highway also explore the genre’s concepts and preoccupations. Indeed he goes on to suggest that ‘These three Lynch films occupy consecutive life-stage journeys: through adolescence [Blue Velvet], to the early 20’s [Wild at Heart] and into mid-life crises [Lost Highway]; revealing the sexually troubled, the parentally liberated and the anxiously paranoid’ (Mitchell 1999: 242). We can now add to this list The Straight Story (1999) which moves on into old age, thereby providing a quartet of films with the road as one of their central organizing principles which offer a linear progression along life’s highway in terms of the temporality of the film’s production and the age of the film’s main characters.
Regarding The Straight Story, Devin Orgeron (2002: 44) writes that:
Where his previous films critiqued the postmodern condition by participating in its chaos, The Straight Story achieves its criticism by denial. Lynch, then, finds the elusive – as opposed to the lost – highway. The film’s success, however, seems to hinge upon a troglodytic fear of technology and an almost neo-Victorian notion of family that Lynch’s films have always upheld, and that Disney has historically sought to disseminate.
In contrast to this approach Slavoj 
i
ek (2001b: 144) argues that Alvin Straight represents the ethical subject in Lynch’s films:
What, then, if this is the ultimate message of Lynch’s film – that ethics is ‘the most dark and daring of all conspiracies’, that the ethical subject is the one who in fact threatens the existing order, in contrast to a long series of weird Lynchean perverts (Baron Harkonnen in Dune (1984), Frank in Blue Velvet, Bobby Peru in Wild at Heart) who ultimately sustain it.
What we have, in the first of these quotations, is the often-repeated contention of conservatism in relation to Lynch’s films, against which iek offers a very different reading. Without wishing to reiterate the views put forward by the various critics, I will continue to use Lynch’s road movies to explore what they tell us about the tropes of the genres from which they derive. This, I hope, will help to circumnavigate any impasse between the critical reactions to the films so far discussed.
In Lost Highway Fred Madison’s journey starts in Los Angeles, the home of noir, to where he has to return, before seeking to avoid the police chase by driving into the desert. Yet Madison’s road journey is really an interior one within his mind (as it and all films are truly psychic journeys/explorations), and like Al Roberts’ it is one from which there is no escape. At the start of the film Fred hears a voice from his intercom saying ‘Dick Laurent is dead’, and at the end of the film he repeats these same words into the intercom before he jumps back into his car in an attempt to flee from the police. Yet again the car as the mythological symbol of freedom is really a trap, and as Bryan (1999: 49) points out, ‘the road in the noir movie offers not hope but negation. The fugitives move because they’ve got no choice and so in a dark twist the road represents not freedom but imprisonment’. Bryan is talking about the original noirs, but surely the same can be said of Lynch’s ‘21st century noir horror film’ (Lynch and Gifford 1997: 3)? In the latter case there does not appear to be freedom anywhere: even fantasy offers no escape from the horrors of the Real. In Detour Roberts wearily accepts his fate, which must come as a form of release; whereas, in Lost Highway Fred’s head once again ‘Baconizes’5 as he is repeatedly driven to madness.
Earlier in the film, when Fred transmogrifies into Pete in the prison cell, his fantasy projection sends him off onto the highway to meet his fantasy alter ego who becomes his psychic hitch-hiker. Yet this fantasy projection ultimately breaks down and he eventually has to return to himself as Fred. But during the fantasy life Pete can appear to enjoy, briefly, the illusion/delusion of a successful sexual relationship with his fantasmatic alter egoic female partner Alice. Pete first meets Alice when Mr Eddy/Dick Laurent brings his Cadillac into the garage for Pete, ‘his’ mechanic, to work on. Immediately before this Pete is shown lying under a vehicle as the freeform bebop jazz, played by Fred Madison earlier on in the film, comes on to the radio. The sound affects Pete’s ears and he retunes the radio to something more soothing, much to the chagrin of Phil, another mechanic. Ears are an important organ of meaning in this film. (An ear is similarly the central metaphor used to depict Jeffrey Beaumont’s descent into, and out of, the netherworld in Blue Velvet.) Previously, when Pete had de-tuned Mr Eddy’s Mercedes, prior to the latter’s violent attack on the tailgater, Mr Eddy had told his henchmen that Pete has the ‘best god-damn ears in town’. And it is through his ears that Fred Madison’s fantasy as Pete starts to pain him at this point in the film. However, by altering the music and taking away the psychic pain the fantasy can continue, and he sees Alice Wakefield in the passenger seat of Mr Eddy’s car (Figure 11).
Figure 11: The arrival of Alice Wakefield, Lost Highway (1997).
The spectator also sees the Cadillac and Alice from Pete’s point of view, from a low angle, as if working under a car where the viewing position is affected by a car’s tyre in the line of sight. The use of slow motion at this point also highlights the importance of this scene in this section of the film and later in the eventual disintegration of Pete’s fantasy when ‘she’ disappears from her photograph at Andy’s house as the police close in on him. The flow of the narrative is slowed down and thereby heightened by the change of speed as it presents the spectator with the affect that Alice/Renee has in Pete’s/Fred’s psyche. The accompanying music, Lou Reed’s ‘Magic Moment’, anchors the meaning of this ‘initial’ meeting, based purely on vision with no words said between the two characters, as the non-diegetic music acts as an imaginary dialogue between them. But, of course, this dream of popular culture cannot last until the end of time; it is contingent not transcendent. Yet at this moment the depicted present tense, in its slow motion revelation, suspends fantasy while partaking of the Real. And the car, the sexually charged Cadillac, fuses together sexuality and women in a way which is used, perhaps, as an allegorized cliché of American car fetishism. Karal Ann Marling (2002: 357) points out that:
By 1959, the Cadillac tail fin had acquired a life of its own: it towered three and one-half feet above the pavement. And as the back end rose, the front end strained forward: in 1953, Cadillac bumpers were finished off with new, factory-fresh ‘gorp’ in the form of ‘bombs’ or ‘Dagmars’ (named for the late-night bombshell of the moment) – protruding breasts that were utterly devoid of utility and impossible to repair after the most minor of collisions.
In the first shot below (Figure 12), Alice is framed by the camera and the car’s window frame, highlighting the different technologies of fantasy and desire, while in the second shot (Figure 13) she comes into full view and looks back at Pete. But it is a strange look; one of blankness that is echoed by the whiteness of the background and which does not appear to suggest a reciprocal attraction but one that can come to act as a cipher for Pete’s (or should I say Fred’s) sexual desires. And it is the blankness that Fred projected onto Renee, the outcome of which he, ultimately, cannot escape from. Here the film seems acutely aware of the tropes and conventions depicting desire in noir, in which the woman and the car are conjoined in fantasies of male desire.
In Lost Highway Fred’s fantasy finally comes apart in the desert where, initially in the guise of Pete, he goes with Alice. They make love on the ground, brightly lit up by the car’s headlights, in slow motion to the non-diegetic sounds of This Mortal Coil’s ‘Song to the Siren’. This scene acts as a reiteration of the sex scene in the film prior to Renee’s murder which acts as a form of prefigurement of the murder yet to occur (see Chapter 4). In the desert the two characters initially appear to be in a mutually enjoyable sexual encounter until Pete says ‘I want you’, to which Alice retorts ‘You’ll never have me’, as she once again becomes Renee and Pete returns to himself as Fred, and the impossibility of the sexual relation comes again to the fore. He then follows Renee up the stairs into the wooden hut, but he does not encounter her. Instead he meets again the superegoic Mystery Man who chases him from the building with his hand-held camera.
Figures 12 and 13: Alice steps out of the Cadillac and into Pete’s world, Lost Highway (1997).
Fred manages to drive away to the Lost Highway motel where Renee is being fucked by Mr Eddy. Only this time, after Renee has left, Fred forcibly takes Mr Eddy back to the desert and with the Mystery Man kills him. From here Fred can only seek to escape once again by driving away, and on his way has to return to his home in Los Angeles to repeat into the intercom the words he first heard at the beginning of the film, only this time he is aware that it is he who is/was speaking all along.6 Then, followed by a succession of police cars he can find no way to escape. At the end of the film we return to its beginning; the audience has been taken on a circular journey from which there is no escape, no resolution to the dilemmas posed by the narrative. And yet these shots of the road in front of the car offer a different form of meaning to the narrative of the film. They appear to be abstracted from the diegetic world, but, at the same time, they do not entirely tally with the preceding shots. It is as if the spectator has been deposited on his/her own lost highway without the support of narrative closure to sustain any overall semblance of unity. As in earlier noirs the road does not offer escape but, rather, imprisonment or entrapment from which, it appears, none of us can escape. But Al Roberts could at least slump wearily into the rear of the police car, and we can quietly leave the cinema or put the kettle on knowing that he has to suffer his fate. Fred, however, has no escape in sight and he must keep driving while the spectator, similarly, has no sense of narrative closure or overall coherence.
Moving on now to consider other road movies, we can see that the 1960s presented different versions of the road and its problems from those offered in the original noir cycle. For instance, Easy Rider (1960) seemingly presents a different trajectory in its counter-cultural search for America to that depicting the psychosis of Fred Madison. Here the journey, similarly, ventures from the west to the (south) east; from the city to the country, via the Mardi Gras in New Orleans immediately prior to the violent ending (a location which plays a prominent role in Wild at Heart, and, in particular, in the violent voodoo death of Johnnie Farragut). On a surface level Wyatt and Billy appear to be very different figures to Fred who is trapped within his own mental turmoil. But the road similarly offers no solutions or freedom for them either. From drug deal to death the two characters never quite fit into the various communities they come across on their journey.
At the beginning of their trip the two riders are shown on their motorbikes immediately before setting off. They enter from the right of the frame and then stop before the highway. Within the shot they are themselves framed by the remnants of an older structure which may be the walls of a Native American building, which, we assume, may have been demolished in the genocide that created the ‘New Country’. There follows a series of shots showing Wyatt looking at his watch and subsequently throwing it on to the ground. In the first shot he raises his left hand and looks intently at the watch face. Following this we are given a close-up of his face and then a cut to him pulling the watch off and casting it to his left. The camera pulls back to reveal his face, and then cuts to a shot of the watch as it lies on the ground. These shots appear striking in the way in which they do not offer the continuity flow of classical Hollywood films, but whose non-sequential editing provides an alternative to the mainstream conventions more in keeping with the Nouvelle Vague. These early indications of a different form of road journey provide a means through which to read this film against its predecessors and indeed subsequent road movies. These images are followed by a cut to a shot of the two bikers together and then they set off on the road. At this point Wyatt has seemingly cast time aside; he no longer has to be shackled by the constraints of mainstream culture. Instead he is apparently free to ride down life’s highway at his own pace to wherever he wishes. However at various points in the film he comes back to the question of time and its hold over him. As Alistair Daniel (1999: 75) points out, ‘At the very beginning he throws his watch away in the desert, and at the commune claims to be “hip about time”, yet he refers repeatedly to their distance from New Orleans in terms of days rather than miles’.
Figure 14: Alvin Straight crossing the Mississippi river, The Straight Story (1999).
In a very real sense Wyatt, Billy and indeed George, the lawyer they meet on the way, are framed by the culture to which they run counter. The predominant culture and its economic base provide the framework from within which they challenge its codes and conventions; and ultimately, just for being there they are eventually all killed. This can be seen when Billy and Wyatt cross over a railway bridge, shots of which are used at the start of the journey and which, alongside the perspective views of the highway, provide the framework for their trip. The steel and iron girders put in place by earlier settlers in their struggle to tame the land and open it up to capitalist enterprises thereby gives the travellers the road structures upon which they can travel, but, at the same time it provides a certain means of travel – their route is not entirely free and open. Off the road is the desert, the waste land, which is itself ‘Other’ in that it has failed to be successfully absorbed into the rules of the capitalist symbolic.
Billy and Wyatt are able to cross borders, whereas George seems shackled. At one point he mentions that he has tried, on several occasions, to cross the border without success. This time, with his new buddies he is successful in this endeavour, although it will lead to his death as the bigoted southerners who ‘patrol’ these areas do not accept the different life styles these three travellers offer. Again, while potentially offering choice, the road is again not free of the ideology of the wayside inhabitants.
I cannot know how Alvin Straight (The Straight Story, 1999) would have responded in the 1960s to such travellers of the counter-culture, but he does say to the young cyclists he comes across on his journey that the worst thing about being old is remembering being young. But he seems such a kind old man, haunted by his Second World War-time traumas, that perhaps he understood all that anti-Vietnam stuff. For Alvin, crossing the Mississippi River (Figure 14) is also a significant milestone in his epic journey, again made possible by the engineering feats of earlier pioneers.
All of these films are dependent upon the road surface as a means of travelling. The travel trajectories are framed by the existing road structures, however much the travellers think that they are in control of the routes. But, what happens off the road?
In Vanishing Point (1970), coming at the end of the 1960s, Kowalski’s attempts to escape capture by the police aided by ‘Super Soul’, the blind, black DJ who acts as his ‘eyes and ears’ leads him off the road and into the desert. Kowalski heads deep into the wilderness when two police cars, which take over the entire road, drive towards him in an attempt to make him stop. The police decide to leave him and not to give chase. One of the officers speaks into his walkie-talkie saying ‘I’ll let him cook out there for a while. He ain’t going nowhere.’ Kowalski, who is nicknamed by Super Soul as ‘The Last American Hero’, drives around creating his own lattice work of tyre marks in an attempt to define a route for himself within the vast expanse of the desert; or, rather, to try and map out a form of meaning for himself in this barren land. Eventually, however, as he double-crosses his own tyre marks he comes to his own crossroads, both literally and metaphorically. There does not appear to be anywhere left to go. However, he soon comes across an old man who lives in the desert and hunts for rattlesnakes. He provides Kowalski with a means of escape, and shows him that even within the desert there are people living a life outside mainstream conventions, albeit a rather alienated, subsistence life.
We also find out that Kowalski is a Vietnam vet who was honourably discharged from the army and who received a Medal of Honour. Later he joined the police force from where he was dishonourably discharged and his life has been on a downward spiral ever since. The information about Kowalski’s life is given to the audience in various ways as the film progresses. However, the opening shots of the road blockade being set up, which links into a title message that takes us back to two days before, forewarns us that this journey, again, can only end in tragedy. We find out that Kowalski’s lover died while surfing, which provides some causal indication for his attitude. But, this seems insufficient as the ultimate cause, and through the bits of information that become available as the film progresses, it is a realization that it is the culmination of many events which have led to this situation some of which will never be fully disclosed.
Coming just two years after Easy Rider which offered an insight into the dissolution of the counter-cultural dream, Vanishing Point presents the aftermath where as Jack Sargeant points out:
The remnants of the hippies in Vanishing Point are presented as grubby and dirty, as borderline street-people in Denver – they are no longer the ‘beautiful’ people they once were…The belief in any mystical/religious interpretation of the world has also disintegrated, the sixties search for spiritual enlightenment has ended in the desert. (Sargeant 1999: 94)
The dream of the sixties has come to an end. The preacher and his flock live in the desert and do not seem interested in preaching to anyone else, rather they have withdrawn from such activities into their own private spectacle (if that is not an oxymoron).
Leaving the desert Kowalski comes across two gay men in a broken down car with a sign saying ‘Just Married’ on it. These two characters are stereotypically represented and, at this point, the film seems to have come to its own dead end in its bigoted depiction of Others. Perhaps the appearance of 70s radicalism via the gay and lesbian movement and feminism are negatively prefigured here, but the film’s inability to adequately represent these characters takes us to the end of the road and this film’s limits in representation.
At the denouement we see Kowalski driving towards the road block, and a close-up of his smiling face indicates his willingness to go out in a blaze of glory rather than submit to the authorities. The road has literally come to an end, but it is a false end, in that the police create the block to stop him, who otherwise would keep driving on to San Francisco (and probably back again). The interruption of cause and effect, or more accurately, the spectator’s prior knowledge of the ending, provides a form of cinematic logic in the structure which indicates that although the road in road movies may seem straight, it is seldom straightforwardly linear.
The contrast between the depiction of speed in road movies such as Vanishing Point and Lynch’s use of slow motion at specific points in his films also highlights the technological interconnection between film and cars. The joyriding scene in Blue Velvet and the tailgating scene in Lost Highway are both examples where the manic psychic derangement of the drivers, Frank Booth and Dick Laurent respectively, is shown by the connection between speed and aggression. In Blue Velvet Frank drives Jeffrey out of town to the netherworld of Deer Meadow where he is immolated and violently attacked. In Lost Highway it is significant that it is on Mulholland Drive that Dick Laurent loses control and attacks the tailgating driver in his super charged Mercedes. The potential danger of the car is thereby conjoined with machismo insecurity and violence in the way these characters respond to threats against their identity.
The predetermined crash in Vanishing Point ends Kowalski’s run from authority. In Mulholland Drive the initial crash allows Betty’s dream fantasy to continue until it finally derails. In Wild at Heart as they drive towards Texas, Sailor and Lula also come upon a crash site, which begins with shots of white clothing strewn across the road, highlighted by the car’s headlights. Chris Isaak’s soundtrack music plays gently to accompany the scene. They stop to investigate and find, as Sailor puts it, ‘one bad car crash’. They see the driver dead in front of the car and then a badly injured young woman (Sherilyn Fenn as Julie Day) stumbling around in shock, mumbling incessantly about losing her wallet. Initially they try to help her and plan to take her to a hospital but she dies in front of them. It is an unsettling scene, one of tragic pathos and appears as a strange diversion to the narrative trajectory. Lynch calls this one of his ‘eye-of-the-duck’ scenes, which are not directly central to the story but which come at a specific, crucial point in the narrative and help propel it forward towards the denouement.7 Indeed, this scene leads them on into Big Tuna where Lula discovers she is pregnant, Bobby Peru abuses her and forces her to say ‘fuck me’ before walking out of the room, and then leads Sailor into a trap during a bank robbery in which Sailor is contracted to die but Peru ends up blowing his own head off. From here the end of their road journey is in sight as Sailor is captured and re-imprisoned.
Figure 15: Here we are again, stranded on a Lost Highway (1997).
Upon release, when he is met by Lula with their now four-year-old son, Sailor decides it would be better for them to split up. After walking off down the middle of a seemingly deserted road he is accosted by a gang of Spanish-Americans who he calls ‘faggots’ and who, in response, beat him up. Lying prostrate on the floor, he has a vision of the good angel from The Wizard of Oz who tells him not to turn away from love. Realizing his error, he runs over the top of a traffic jam to find Lula and Sailor Pace. He then lifts Lula onto the bonnet and sings ‘Love me Tender’, the song he had promised only to sing to his wife. As the credits roll he continues his singing, looking particularly ridiculous in his exaggeratedly artificial prosthetic nose. Here it is the traffic jam which provides for the film’s denouement. Gridlocked and stuck, Sailor can be reunited with Lula in a ridiculously kitsch ending.
The highway in Lynch’s films provides a framework for investigating the complexities of life’s journey metaphorically as well as providing a conceptual framework to connect vehicles and the movie business. The interrelationship between filmmaking, vehicles and the road provides for an aesthetic in which the ‘two incommensurable dimensions’ Jameson (1993) discusses in respect of Chandler have a socio-historical importance of their own. In the cinema we are perhaps destined to be stuck on a lost highway, but is there the potential for a reinvigoration of form and spectatorship along another highway: the virtual superhighway? Perhaps, only time will tell, but it must be remembered that this technology is as inculcated in nineteenth-century predecessors and warfare expertise as the celluloid predecessor, so in a sense we are, perhaps, all stuck on an elusive highway looking for a way out. For Lynch himself, it is revealing to consider how he is seeking to establish a greater degree of autonomy via his own website where the film business has less control and where he can experiment and make films in a much freer, more creative manner using digital technology, which will be discussed further in Chapter 6.
1. Here I am thinking of the work of Sean Cubitt (2004), Lev Manovich (2001), Laura Mulvey (2004) and Slavoj iek (2000), among others.
2. I am grateful to Adrian Rifkin for bringing Eloge de l’amour to my attention, and for the discussions about the way in which the screen is mobilized by Godard.
3. See iek (2000: 39–41) for his discussion of the futur antérieur in the history of art and Lynch’s place within it.
4. Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard of 1950 has been an important reference point for David Lynch, as well as being a crucial noir reference generally. Lynch gave a screening of the film prior to starting shooting on Eraserhead as a way of explaining the mood he wanted for his film. See Chapter 6 for the way in which the film crops up again in a more direct fashion in INLAND EMPIRE.
5. Fred Madison’s anamorphically distorted head as his ‘reality’ becomes so unbearable that he fantasizes himself into Peter Drayton, is another example, like the Red Room in Twin Peaks, of the way in which Francis Bacon’s paintings find their way into Lynch’s films.
6. iek (2000: 17) argues that ‘the very circular form of narrative in Lost Highway directly renders the circularity of the psychoanalytic process’.
7. Lynch describes these ‘eye-of-the-duck’ scenes as important, although not strictly necessary, in moving the narrative on towards its conclusion. These scenes include Ben’s mimed rendition of ‘In Dreams’ in Blue Velvet and John Merrick’s visit to the theatre in The Elephant Man.
