Who is the villain in Lost Highway? Lynch never explained — but he left a camcorder full of clues
Lynch's 1997 film has a gangster, a pornographer and a man in white make-up, and its director declined for nearly thirty years to rank them. Here's what each one actually does on screen, and what the camcorder keeps turning up for.
Lost Highway has a gangster, a pornographer, a jealous husband and a man with no eyebrows. Lynch was asked which of them was the villain for the rest of his life, and never gave the same answer twice.
Take the candidates in the order the film introduces them. Fred Madison (Bill Pullman) is a saxophonist who suspects his wife Renee (Patricia Arquette) of an affair, and who is convicted of butchering her on the evidence of a videotape he has no memory of making. He is the only character in the film who is convicted of anything, and he is also the one the film abandons in his cell when he turns into somebody else.
Mr Eddy (Robert Loggia) is the loud option. A pornographer and gangster who also answers to Dick Laurent, he runs the tailgating scene on Mount Hollywood Drive — pistol-whipping a driver while explaining road safety — and he keeps Alice Wakefield on the understanding that she works in his films. He is unmistakably a bad man and he is not the one the film finds frightening.
The man with the camcorder
The Mystery Man (Robert Blake) has perhaps six minutes of screen time. He appears at Andy's party, informs Fred they have met before, says he is at Fred's house right now, and hands him a mobile telephone so Fred can ring his own hallway and hear him answer. Later, at a burning cabin in the desert, he is holding a camcorder and pointing it. Later still, he hands Fred a knife, holds up a portable television showing Mr Eddy footage of his own operation, and then shoots Fred and whispers something inaudible into his ear.
The camcorder is the thread. Somebody has been filming the Madisons' house from inside it. Somebody delivers the tapes. The one person in the film seen operating a camera is the one person the film never explains.
Lynch described him as "a man who, whether real or not, gave the impression that he was supernatural."
Robert Blake got no more than the audience did. He asked Lynch what the character was and came away empty-handed.
"I don't think he knows! He doesn't come from that place at all," Blake told Cinefantastique in 1997. Lynch's instructions were to work like a child and use his imagination.
Blake designed the white kabuki face and shaved eyebrows himself. Lynch looked at it, said "Wonderful", and walked off — and then told the rest of the cast to react to the man as though he were a butler, which is why nobody in the film ever remarks on his appearance.
What Lynch would actually say
He described the structure as a psychogenic fugue, and meant the musical sense as much as the clinical one: a fugue "starts off one way, takes up on another direction, and then comes back to the original". Asked whether the film is a loop, he preferred "a spiral that comes around, the next loop a little bit higher".
His co-writer Barry Gifford took the flatter reading: Fred has a genuine dissociative episode and invents Pete Dayton to live in. The O. J. Simpson trial, which Lynch cited as an influence, supplies the rest — a man who does something and then carries on as though he has not.
Arquette, looking back on playing both women, put the case for a fifth candidate.
"In this man's mind, a woman is always the monster. No matter what," she said of the film's perspective.
The working answer
Mr Eddy is the criminal. Fred is the murderer. The Mystery Man is the one who films it, hands over the weapon, and keeps the tape — a function rather than a person, and the only figure in the picture with access to every version of Fred at once.
For the record: this was Robert Blake's final film role. In 2002 he was charged with the murder of his wife Bonny Lee Bakley, shot dead outside a Los Angeles restaurant in May 2001; he was acquitted in March 2005, found liable in a civil action later that year, and died in March 2023 aged 89.