Who is the Mystery Man in Lost Highway? Start with the party scene where he's also at the other end of the phone
He turns up at a party, tells you he is already inside your house, and then hands you a phone to prove it. Here's how the Mystery Man functions in Lost Highway and what the film actually gives you to identify him with.
David Lynch's 1997 film contains roughly ninety seconds that most viewers can still describe years later. Everything the Mystery Man is can be worked out from them.
Robert Blake plays him, in white kabuki-style make-up with his eyebrows shaved off, and it was the last film role of his career. He has no name, no arrival and no exit. He is simply at Andy's party, in a room full of people, looking at Fred Madison (Bill Pullman) and waiting to be noticed.
The party
He opens with a question that is already an accusation: "We've met before, haven't we?" Fred says he doesn't think so. The Mystery Man says it was at Fred's house.
"As a matter of fact, I'm there right now."
He offers Fred a mobile phone and tells him to ring his own number. Fred does. The Mystery Man answers — from inside the house, while standing in front of Fred, in the same voice, at the same time. When Fred asks how he got in, the answer is the line the whole film turns on.
"You invited me. It is not my custom to go where I am not wanted."
Blake reportedly holds Fred's gaze without blinking for the length of the exchange. The scene is staged flatly, at a party, with the music still audible, and it does not ask for a single horror-film device.
Where else he turns up
He is not a one-scene curiosity. He recurs, and each appearance narrows what he can be:
- The videotapes — the recordings that arrive on Fred's doorstep, filmed from inside the house. He is later seen holding the camcorder.
- The phone call to Pete — routed through the gangster Mr Eddy, with a monologue about how criminals are dealt with in the East.
- The cabin in the desert — where he films Pete and Alice, and where the question "is it possible that she is a liar?" is put to Fred about Renee.
- The gun — he hands Fred the weapon used on Mr Eddy, then goes.
- The Lost Highway Hotel — the corridor where Fred is made to look at what he already knows.
What he is
Lynch never explained him, and Barry Gifford, who co-wrote the script, borrowed the psychiatric term "psychogenic fugue" to describe the film's structure — a state in which a person loses their identity and constructs a new one, travels, and remembers none of it. Read that way, Fred is not being visited. He is being accompanied.
The Mystery Man is the only figure in the film who knows that Fred Madison and Pete Dayton are the same man. He is present for every act Fred cannot admit to, he holds the camera for them, and he supplies the gun when it is time. He is not the devil, exactly, and he is not a hallucination, exactly. He is the part of Fred that keeps the receipts.
Which is why the phone call works as a thesis rather than a trick. He is at the party and inside the house simultaneously, because he is inside the man at the party.
For the record: the film opens with Fred hearing "Dick Laurent is dead" through his own intercom, and ends with him saying it into it. The Mystery Man is the only character who could have told him either way round.
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