Abstract

David Lynch’s Lost Highway (1997) and Raymond Chandler’s The High Window (1942) each contain scenes in which ambiguous distances and fluid identities disorientate the protagonists. The principle of incrimination that underpins modern criminal investigation demands a rationalisation of time, space and identity. But these three categories can be undermined, intentionally by individual action, or inherently by the technologies and systems of modernity itself. In both Chandler and Lynch, audio-visual media, particularly the telephone, demonstrate the fragility of any rigid, rationalised conception of distance and proximity, undermining the possibility of the stable knowledge by which the detective might solve the case, and the accused might defend himself against incrimination. The particularly disorientating dynamics of relation experienced by Lynch’s protagonists are also analogous to his subversion of cinematic narrative structure – in which the possibility of narrative closure constantly seems to both approach and recede.

Highlights

  • David Lynch’s Lost Highway (1997) and Raymond Chandler’s The High Window (1942) each contain scenes in which ambiguous distances and fluid identities disorientate the protagonists

  • David Lynch’s films Lost Highway (1997), Mulholland Drive (2001) and Inland Empire (2007) constitute an informal trilogy linked by a common setting – Los Angeles at the turn of the twentieth century– and by certain common tropes

  • This essay will not attempt to provide a comprehensive reading of any one of these films; it will primarily focus on a single scene from Lost Highway. Placing this particular scene in the context of Los Angeles narratives of detection, and relating it to criminological theory, a necessarily tentative and provisional attempt will be made to bring out something of the film’s underlying logic – to propose a starting point from which to explicate the ambiguous distances and fluid identities that are so prevalent in all three films, and so threatening to Lynch’s protagonists

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Summary

Introduction

David Lynch’s Lost Highway (1997) and Raymond Chandler’s The High Window (1942) each contain scenes in which ambiguous distances and fluid identities disorientate the protagonists.

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