The purpose of this essay is to explain the psychoanalytic and postmodern ideals portrayed in the David Lynch film "Lost Highway." His works are, for the most part, non-linear, absurd, chaotic and emotional. Lynch takes the rawness of human schizophrenia and attempts to create a world where everything happens at once. His visuals are a subconscious storm that evoke rather than render a concrete story.

With this destruction of story there is also the destruction of the meta-narrative. Lynch creates an object of a story rather than the story itself. The creation of this destruction requires there to be a mental narrative, and like most stories in literature or cinema they are interpreted rather than told. The story is individual, and decoded by the individual. It is not whole, and the sense of completeness is lost on paper and screen; only to be recovered by the audience. To destroy the meta-narrative a meta-narrative has to be created. When the meta-narrative that destroys is created it is used as an object rather than a meta-narrative. Lynch creates this obscureness through portraying visions as a sub-conscious flow, and having almost all of the dialogue delivered in his

The metaphor being used here refers to the consciousness acknowledging itself through reflection. Madison's denial of that mirror (in this case a camera) is a denial of consciousness. This enables him to retreat into the imaginary and lose the symbolic self, allowing him to morph into everything that he is not, Pete Dayton. Dayton is young, good-looking, macho, and has a great sex life. The real and symbolic aspects of Madison eventually catch-up to Dayton through the imaginary acknowledging itself. This point begins to surface when his parents and girlfriend start referring to a "terrible thing" that happened the night Dayton disappeared. That "terrible thing" is the murder of his wife. Dayton has not realized that he has murdered his wife, signifying the schizophrenic snap between the symbolic and the imaginary.

I once read a sentence in a children's book that said, "Run, Spot run." I don't remember where I read it, but the simplicity of the sentence gives us an actor, and an action. The actor is a dog, so we can assume he is running in a yard somewhere. Now, the reader has a place for the actor to go. The actor is doing something-running. The reader has a person (dog), place (in a yard), doing something (running). The yard is evoked from our subconscious, and not entirely defined, but a place for him to run is there nonetheless. To take this simple scene and subconsciously evoke it without using a yard, dog, or running is in my opinion the Lynchian style.

The movie is an embodiment of this thought, where the audience is looking into the movie screen as a jumbled self reflection and is trying to figure out what is really going on, what is reality, what is imagined, and what is the timeline that brings everything in order. According to Lacan's psychoanalytic theory, a person's imaginary division of personality is suppose to try to "heal" the real division of the personality. Based on this idea Fred Madison's imaginary cannot "heal" his real. So the imaginary begins to creep up into the real and cause schizophrenic division. The division is doubly (but probably more) represented by Madison's perception of altered reality and the attempt to seek out and change his reality. This struggle to retain an accurate and discernable reality is centered on paranoia- specifically the paranoia of his marriage to an oddly striking wife (Patricia Arquette).

Madison doesn't like to see things as they really happened, he likes to create his own reality and reform his own memories. Not wanting an accurate representation of time through the eye of a camera symbolizes the internal conflict of Madison's real and imaginary self.

Madison is the symbolic, the aspect that governs the translation of language to a convoluted mental picture. If the language the symbolic uses is flat and ambiguous, there is little possible way that the imaginary and the real aspects of the personality can travel through their communicative highways. When these highways are broken, Lacan's psychosis is defined (Lacan). The short innocuous phrases that Madison uses throughout the film supports this, and the ability of the imaginary self (Dayton) to speak freely and clearly helps to define him as the imaginary, free from symbolic translation.

Much of Lynch's work could be argued as very modernistic, because it seems auteur and incredibly original. My purpose here is not to explain his particular techniques in filmmaking, but his style in portraying the subconscious and subject alienation from a postmodernistic standpoint. Much of Lynch's work reaches so far into the subconscious that it is hard to reconstruct with language in a chronological framework. Everything is happening at once in a self-reflecting Moebius strip; it is multi-layered yet one sided. The complexity portrayed in "Lost Highway" through the eyes of Madison is incredibly hard to grasp. In an interv

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