David Lynch’s near-impenetrable 1997 masterpiece Lost Highway is a temporal mobius strip, constantly twisting and looping structure built around the mind of a monster and transplanted onto 35mm film – and as such, it is a perfect example, perhaps more so than any other film of the past thirty years, of purposeful manipulation of the cinematic time-images Giles Deleuze describes in great detail in Cinema II: The Time-Image, both through narrative and editing structure as well as the physical temporalities and characteristics of the contrasting forms of video used throughout the film. Within Cinema II, Deleuze defines and describes various forms of the time-image, the spatialization of time and the embodiment of it within film – but perhaps most relevant to Lost Highway, and to the work of Lynch, is the dream-image – a form which, one could argue, Lost Highway remains within for essentially the entirety of its runtime, with the film’s central conflict forming when this dream-image is interrupted, forced to contort and reconstruct itself. As Deleuze defines it, the dream-image exists in contrast to the time-image, which while imbued with a sense of temporality outside of movement, still exists to link one shot and one direct temporal idea to the next – while dream-images “rather affect the whole: they project the sensory-motor situation to infinity, sometimes by ensuring the constant metamorphosis of the situation, sometimes by replacing the action of characters with a movement of world.” (p. 273). 

In almost all traditional narrative films, the dream-image acts as a break or contrast from the reality of the rest of the film, informing the remainder through the psychological flourishes it shows of the dream’s point-of-view character. As Deleuze describes the purpose of dream-images: “It is clear that [the traditional cinematic] system includes the unreal, the recollection, the dream and the imaginary but as contrast. Thus the imaginary will appear in the  forms of caprice and discontinuity, each image being in a state of disconnection with another  into which it is transformed.” (p. 127). However, in contrast to almost all narrative cinema, Lost Highway functions in the exact opposite way – it is almost entirely a dream-image, a subjective, shifting world bent to its protagonists whims, a visual and narrative landscape of bold, outward “caprice and discontinuity,” occasionally and violently broken through by a sense of objective reality.

Lost Highway functions as a cinematic interpretation of a man’s delusional phantasy rather than a traditional narrative, crafting a world which circles around the events the protagonist desperately wishes not to deal with or take responsibility for – one mediated and interrupted directly by video itself, challenging the subjective reality the protagonist crafts, until it forces the phantasy to break down and reform anew. This cycle can be reconstructed continually yet never truly changed, for fear of confronting that which the dream was created to obfuscate – and in the process, the film embodies a form of Deleuze’s cinematic dream-image state which distorts and stretches cinematic time around the desires and psychological cowardice of its central character, Fred Madison. 

The central method in which Lost Highway creates its dream-image while intentionally and jarringly breaking it through the menacing idea of “objectivity” is by the material contrast between of the video mediums used within it – analog film and VHS, and how their own inherent temporalities compliment and feed into their competing roles within the film’s narrative structure. Analog film, the traditional material medium for fictional cinema, and specifically the capitalist fantasy-producing machine of Hollywood, represents the vivid internal dream-life we all create for ourselves, smoothing over the aspects of our lives we wish not to dwell on – while VHS, the medium of amateur home recording and the first mass-adoption of video for diffuse and uncertain purposes – most sensationally, of the dreaded snuff film, represents the far hazier, less comfortable reality we wish to suppress and avoid. 

Early on in the film, this contrast is made explicit when Fred is questioned by police about the strange, voyeuristic video tapes of his and his wife Renee’s home which have begun appearing on his doorstep, the officers asking if he owns a video camera – which Renee denies, stating Fred hates them, to which Fred elaborates: “I like to remember things my own way… how I remembered them, not necessarily the way they happened.” Fred’s mind exists in a constant battle between the dream-image and the recollection-image, which Deleuze describes somewhat similarly (though far less concise) to Fred’s outwardly stated mode of being – recollection-images exist “within the framework of the sensory-motor situation, whose interval they are content to fill, even though lengthening and distending it; they seize a former present in the past and thus respect the empirical progression of time, even though they introduce local regressions into it (the flashback as psychological memory).” (p. 273). 

While Fred’s world is one of recollection, it becomes quite apparent just how distorted his view of reality is, the events depicted in Lost Highway quickly becoming far too absurd to be anything close to an “objective” memory, the film sinking further and further into the pure realm of the dream-image as it continues. As such, VHS and its fluid temporality, contrasting with the easily curated and manipulated regimentation of analog film, represents a direct threat and contradiction to Fred’s carefully constructed dream life regardless of the content of the videos themselves – which just so happen to ultimately be the very thing Fred has fractured his own psyche to avoid, his brutal murder of his own wife. It is interesting in itself to consider how VHS, the far hazier form of video featured within the film, represents the closest thing Lost Highway has to a “true” reality, in contrast to the more visually lifelike nature of analog film. This serves to reinforce these mediums as not representative of an external reality at all, but of how we internally perceive it in retrospect – the memories which remain vivid in our minds often bare little resemblance to how they truly occurred, but instead exist as composite of fantasies which both distort and enhance those invents, while the actual reality exists only as a hazy afterimage.

It is quite telling that the VHS recordings within the film are directly personified by their creator – the “mystery man,” an unblinking, deathly-pale voyeur who is the closest thing Lost Highway has to an antagonist. His only motivation seems to be tearing down the fantasy Fred has built around himself, and the holes he rips in Fred’s carefully constructed fantasy force the protagonist to create a new self and reality entirely once he has finally been broken from that fantasy. The mystery man shares the role of the recordings themselves, confronting Fred directly with the falsehood of his dream-image while at the same time seeming far more unreal than any other aspect of Fred’s reality. The mystery man willfully breaks the spatial and temporal laws which govern our own existence, forcing Fred to recognize the unreality of the fantasy world he has built for himself in the same way the VHS recordings themselves do. Lost Highway is an internal war of contradicting time-images, one embodied both by its jarring breaks from traditional methods of relating cinematic time and filmic reality, and by its purposeful use and manipulation of the inherent physical temporalities of the video mediums it employs. 

Lost Highway winds through the timeline of its literal events in an outward rejection of traditional cinematic structure, its editing often a purposefully jumbled, nigh-incomprehensible, and perhaps even impressionistic interpretation of the content of the film’s narrative – and one which reinforces its use of analog film as a medium of dream-images and internal delusion, only broken through with the far more direct, temporally untampered VHS recordings. This is perhaps most directly illustrated by the way the film reaches what is arguably the single point of “reality” within its runtime: the revelation of Fred’s monstrous secret and his subsequent incarceration, with Fred’s cramped cell perhaps acting as the stage for the entirety of the film’s mental tapestry. Instead of a gradual reveal of these events, or even any continuity between one shot and the next – as soon as Fred sits down to watch the final video tape sent to his house, the camera zooming in on the fuzzy CRT television as it displays the gruesome sight of Fred seemingly bathing in the viscera of his own wife’s mutilated body, contradicted directly by the appearance of his wife grabbing said video in the first place just a few moments prior.

Then, the film cuts immediately to Fred in an interrogation room, with an officer trying to beat a confession out of Fred before he is immediately thrown into a cell. All of this occurs in the space of a few seconds, violently disrupting the dream-image and transitioning the film into its second half, with Fred imagining himself as an entirely different person – auto mechanic Pete Dayton, the persona we follow for almost the entirety of Lost Highway’s remainder. Pete is a manifestation of everything Fred wishes to be, free from the impotence and festering resentment which manifested in his act of murder – and from this point, with Fred (or Pete) now given over completely to this fantasy entirely detached from his real world (or at least, it seems to be) – a final victory of the dream-image over the recollection. As Deleuze lays out: “What, more precisely, is the difference between a recollection- image and a dream-image? We start from a perception-image, the nature of which is to be actual. The recollection, in contrast [ – ] is necessarily a virtual image. But, in the first case, it becomes actual in so far as it is summoned by the perception-image. It is actualized in a recollection-image which corresponds to the perception-image. The case of dream brings two important differences to light. On the one hand, the sleeper’s perceptions exist, but in the diffuse condition of a dust of actual sensations – external and internal – which are not grasped in themselves, escaping consciousness. On the other hand, the virtual image which becomes actual does not do so directly, but becomes actual in a different image, which itself plays the role of virtual image being actualized in a third, and so on to infinity: the dream is not a metaphor but a series of anamorphosis which sketch out a very large circuit.” (p. 56). Fred Madison exists in the gap between recollection and dream-image, creating a world “summoned by the perception-image” of his external life yet clearly distinct from it – while Pete’s existence is the personification of fully giving over to the dream-image, of that circuit of fantasies taking complete hold – visualized by our first look at Pete, standing at the side of the titular lost highway, a place seemingly outside of any temporality whatsoever.

The VHS recordings and the presence of the mystery man fade until the film’s conclusion, where Fred’s crippling inferiority complex and sexual resentment manifest themselves in his new reality, transforming back to his original persona and body as we see the mystery man directly recording Fred for the first time on his video camera, finally integrating the worlds of analog film and VHS together as the man interrogates Fred, asking: “And your name, what the fuck is your name?” At this point, the fantasy finally fully unravels as Fred descends down the film’s titular dark, endless highway which had previously only been seen in flashes, as the transition point between Fred and Pete. The lost highway is a place seemingly outside of time and space itself; it is the final intersection between the vivid dream-image and the hazy reality, the point of merging between subjectivity of analog film and the cold objectivity of the VHS camera. Judging by the painful and brutal contortions and deformation of Fred’s face as he is seemingly fried with electricity behind the wheel of his car, this intersection can perhaps only be reached in the form of death. Whether it be death of the body, death of the ego, or even death of the film – it is the only way to possibly conclude the infinite metamorphosis of the dream-image.