" Lost Highway " was filmed in 1997. It is not a work with a huge audience base in the David Lynch film sequence, but it is a subjective expression of structure, blackness, dreams, and images. The aspect continues Lynch’s style and forms a powerful presentation of authorship.
1. Structure
From a structural point of view, "Monster Night Panic" does not follow the traditional causal linear model. For example, the development of Renee's previous sex work is divided into two parts. One is in the real world, Renee mentioned A place called "Moker", but we don't know anything other than that, and we can't predict the emotional performance of the male protagonists Fred and Renee. The second is presented in a later dream, directly mentioning Renee's filming of pornographic videos. Only at this time can the audience go back and connect Renee's experience with the relevance of the video at the door of the house.
"Monster Night Panic" adopts a dream polyphonic narrative mode. From the form of dream expression, it should be an indirect introduction with explanation. First, before the night when Fred became Pete, he seemed to have a splitting headache and experienced a violent shaking. But the next shot is the patrol of the jailer the next morning. At this time, the dream has been entered, but due to the linear relationship between the two images in time, the audience can not directly know the time when the dream started.
In the timeline of the movie, there is a point in time that implies a loop. At the beginning, the male protagonist heard a voice from the doorbell in front of the door: "Dick Laurent is dead." This sentence appeared twice in the film later, the more obvious one was in the film. At the end, Fred parked at the door of his house and said "Dickrow is dead" to the doorbell. This end echoed the beginning. This grafting was completed with two different positions and even different perspectives, similar to The arrangement of couple robbers robbing the restaurant in the beginning and end of "Pulp Fiction". There was also a more secret presentation: In a conversation with Andy at a party, Fred said: "Dickrow is dead, isn't it?" After the message was thrown out, Andy expressed confusion. In Andy's perspective, Dicroft's death is after the dialogue, while in Fred's perspective, Dicroo's death is before the dialogue. This paradox in time may represent Lynch’s two claims. One is the externalization of the subjective psychological world, the logic of the plot gives way to emotional expression, and the chaotic world is the source of Fred’s life; the other is outside the doorbell. As the sound data and the video data represented by the video tapes, the sound of the film forms a class of things-as an extension of people, the authenticity is always trusted, but in the eyes of Director Lynch, it is suspicious. Here we will expand the explanation in the fourth part.
2. Dreamland
This article believes that there are two ways to suggest dreams in the film. One is to rely on the specialization of the form of presentation, such as the virtual focus of photography, psychedelic music, and the shaking of the lens; the other is the content of the suggestion. , Such as the intervention of specific elements in the reality where Fred is located. In particular, the suggestion to the dream seems to be realized by the impending breakage of the dream. There are two more obvious examples.
First, when Eddy threatened Pete for the first time, Pete's facial close-up gradually defocused and sounded harsh accompaniment, suggesting that the dream was weakening and Fred was about to wake up. Second, when Eddie called Fred, he said, "Someone wants to see you", and then passed the call to the mysterious man on the side, where Fred's dark side of spirit is solidified.
This article believes that the mysterious man Fred met at the party is another personality of him. Compared with a perverted voyeuristic other, the mysterious man is a nightmare from himself. The basis I found in the film is that when the husband and wife were in bed at night, Renee’s face suddenly changed to that of a mysterious man. At that time, the video tape had not aroused Fred’s suspicion, and the mysterious man was not at the party. Shang meets him for the first time, so what the audience sees is not a direct narrative of the event, but a visual presentation of an emotional process.
Trying to interpret Freud's trauma theory, in a dream, the power of repressive instinct and desire is reduced, and unconscious content will be embedded in the realm of consciousness and be perceived. And here the fortress of dreams has been invaded by reality. The mysterious man said that people who committed crimes in the East would be shot in the back of the head secretly by the executioner, unaware that his death was approaching. This unknown fear has deeply affected Pete's psychology. It not only represents that Eddie may find his adultery with Alice at any time, but also symbolizes that he is about to face the electric chair death penalty in reality.
In addition to this, there is also a manifestation of dreams. When Alice and Fred conspired to elope, she gave a long instruction to teach him how to make peace. The form of expression is very similar to that in "Spirited Away", in which Bailong gave instructions to Qianxun on how to mix into the world of gods and monsters. Bai Long put her finger on Qianxun's forehead, and every step she should take was printed in her mind. In "Monster Night Panic", this kind of dialogue is not like real, but more like random thoughts formed in the brain. It is more common in dreams than in reality.
3. Blackness
"Monster Night Panic" has a strong black appearance. At the beginning of the movie, the fast-moving highway was from the perspective of driving. Later, it appeared repeatedly in the movie. There is nothing but the dazzling marking line on the high-speed. There is no object. It can provide a fulcrum of sight, but the instability of the sense of speed intensifies the narrative fulcrum of the film's violence, sexiness, and hatred.
Fred's sexual anxiety runs through almost the entire movie. In the dream paragraph, after killing Andy, Pete repeatedly asked Alice "What should we do" with a confused look, which reflects Pete's passive state. This state is substituted into the relationship between Fred and Renee, and it becomes a long-term relationship model. Renee's beauty and romance, her ambiguous relationship with her former employer, and her former work as a pornographic actress all exacerbated Fred's insecurities of sexual performance and his distrust of his wife.
At the same time, Renee's career and personality also reflect the misogyny complex often seen in film noir. This complex emerged with Fred's subconscious sexual anxiety. In many places in the film, he can see his desire for an active position in marriage. First of all, in the strip scenes when Alice first entered the porn industry, the oppression of male taste and the imbalance of gender ratio in the field both reflect a kind of patriarchal worship. Fred's replacement, Pete, and Alice reconciled, which is basically the subconscious ideal self's self-confidence in sexual ability externalized into a superior position relative to women.
The blackness is also presented through the environment in the movie. For example, when Fred’s workplace first appeared, Fred played the harsh saxophone with an extremely self-conscious attitude, and the bright light on his face kept flickering. Bright light symbolizes a sense of insecurity in some contexts, and here also indirectly implies Fred's plight in social and family relations.
From the perspective of film language, "Monster Night Panic" uses a larger angle of elevation and depression. First, when the two police officers left the home of Fred and Renee, the four people on the curved open staircase formed a very powerful overhead shot (Figure 1). This kind of visual experience similar to God’s perspective has a strong visual experience. Domination, it seems that the instigator of the video tape has long known the presence of the police and spied on them somewhere, creating a new dimension of horror. Secondly, after Fred was imprisoned, he used a huge looking up lens when he went to the infirmary of the prison due to a headache. Weakness and passivity have been strengthened again.
4. Image
David Lynch said in an interview: "To some extent, memory is even more real than reality." In fact, Lynch showed us his own views on the concept of images through this film, which embodies a strong Authorship.
Lynch’s understanding of the concept of images has a title in the movie, and it may also be one of the few lines in the movie that directly shows the value orientation. When referring to his aversion to video, Fred said, "The way I recall things is not necessarily the way they actually happened." (How I remembered them, not necessarily the way they happened.)
We are accustomed to believing in the truth of what the camera shoots, and David Lynch seems to have put forward a philosophical proposition: questioning the long-term status of the camera in the film that is the product of the camera. As Susan Sontag expressed in the article "Image World": "The new era of faithlessness has strengthened allegiance to images. I no longer believed in understanding reality in the form of images, but now I believe in understanding reality. For is the image. [1]” Just like Rene Magritte's "This Is Not a Pipe", it explores the dilemma that people tend to accept images as reality in advance. The image has actually changed our understanding of reality.
An obvious feature in the film is that the perspective of the mysterious man overlaps with the photographic form. Most of the scenes seen by the so-called mysterious man rely on black and white pixels. This is also the medium feature of the video tape. Although we are familiar with Jean-Luc Godard’s famous saying: Movies are the truth of 24 frames per second, but the movie itself is built on deception as a medium. It is always an illusion.
From this, we can find that "Monster Night Panic" uses discontinuous time and space order, curious visual communication, and chaotic element arrangement to form doubts and rebellion against the image's "loyalty to reality" role, in the form of meta-movie. It conveys the absurdity of the dream and the author's view.
[1] [America] Susan Sontag. On Photography[M]. Shanghai. Shanghai Translation Publishing House. 2019. Page 237.
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