Dick Laurent is dead.
Spirals upon spirals. Both an extremely nonliteral film and one which imparts the feeling of peeking into something intimately private. The highway is the hallway is the mind. Suffocated in imperceptible darkness, stretching through a vast expanse that is limited by the expanses of one's own perception. There is nothing but what exists in the moment. Two paths lay parallel; one coming, one going, inextricably linked by the rush of the dividing lines. One a frenzied paranoid flight of middle-aged inadequacy, one an unsure outcry of youthful thrillseeking, mirrors of the same form. Two sides of a coin, if that coin were plummeting directly into a chasm.
"I like to remember things my own way. How I remembered them. Not necessarily the way they happened."
Doors along the hallway, as exits along the highway, remembered snapshots of nonliteral occurences. Abject reality has no meaning in a world defined by light and shadow. Branches along a track as you hurtle into absolution. Identity is a dreamed fascimile set to violently unravel around thousands of independent perceptions. Every frame is an anxious push and pull between the senses. The instant you catch your bearings, stimulus is hurtled your direction. The instant you are overwhelmed, anxious tension sets in. Action to reaction. Shot reverse-shot. Push and pull. The cycle begins again.
Dick Laurent is dead.
There's a lot to be said for this being Lynch's most contemporary film, with its plodding pop-industrial score and anachronistic cameos. Still, so many artifacts function as a pastiche of his usual obsession with Americana. Slick cars, slick hair, leather jackets, roadside motels, midcentury modernism in its most suffocating form. In a way this contrast feels like a converging coda for the imagery and dark romanticism of the 20th century. Sex, violence, romantic doom, the dreamy dissolution brought about by the era's ultimate voyeur: the videocamera. You are the watched and the watcher.