Our friends at The Projection Booth watch David Lynch’s Lost Highway (1997). “We conclude #Noirvember 2021 with a special episode about David Lynch’s Lost Highway (1997). Written by Lynch and Barry Gifford, it’s the story of Fred Madison (Bill Pullman), a musician who has trouble trusting his wife, Renee (Patricia Arquette). When they begin to get anonymous deliveries of VHS tapes, the pair are plunged into an underworld of mystery…
Jedidiah Ayres and Bill Ackerman join Mike to discuss the film and this phase of David Lynch’s career.”
Categories: Notes
The Cultural Gutter 
Because everything connects, this is how I open the Preface to my Interrogating Memory book:
**Early in David Lynch’s neo-noir film Lost Highway, Fred Madison (Bill Pullman) talks to two police detectives about mysterious videotapes he and his wife Renee (Patricia Arquette) have received in the mail. One detective asks if they own a video camera.
“No. Fred hates them,” replies Renee, to which Fred adds, “I like to remember things my own way.”
When pressed, Fred elaborates: “How I remembered them. Not necessarily the way they happened.”
The remainder of the film reveals the surreal lengths Fred will go to remember things his own way, a theme Lynch later explored even more brilliantly in Mulholland Drive.
By contrast, I strive in this book to be the video camera Fred desperately wants to avoid. Spurred initially by the deceptively-simple question, “Why do you love film noir?” I set out to write a straightforward account of the roots of my fandom. As I began to write, though, I realized I needed to contextualize those facets through my suburban Philadelphia Jewish upbringing, the lives of my parents, and the lives of their parents, two of whom had left what was then called the Pale of Settlement as young boys to live in Philadelphia.
And that is just my legal family.**
Needless to say, I love LOST HIGHWAY and I I love David Lynch; I actually just started reading Lynch on Lynch. So, the timing of this discussion is perfect. 🙂
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