David Lynch's Lost Highway (featuring director Mark Jenkin)

As always on The Cinematologists podcast, we like to address topics of salience, but in our own way and in our own time. The death of David Lynch left an irreplaceable hole in the fabric of cinema and, rightly, prompted immediate tributes from collaborators, as well as countless reflections on his status as an artist and filmmaker.

The spectre of his influence has found its way into many episodes over the years: Scott Tanner Jones discussing Lynch’s impact in this episode on Physical Media, also in Neil’s conversation with Bertrand Bonello on The Beast, and in my conversation with Michel Chion, and has been referenced in numerous others. This was the third screening in Mark’s unofficial L.A. trilogy with us, following Big Wednesday and The Doors.

Lost Highway has always existed at the edge of even Lynch’s already strange filmography. Critically dismissed at the time and commercially ignored (like most of Lynch’s work), it is now seen by many as the beginning of his late “L.A. Trilogy,” preceding Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire. For both Neil and Mark, this film is personal, formative, and endlessly rewatchable—precisely because it resists resolution.

Set in a murky Los Angeles that exists halfway between industrial hellscape and erotic fever dream, Lost Highway is a Möbius strip of a movie, beginning where it ends, and unravelling its characters and its viewers alike. It conjures its mood not just through narrative but through textures: light, shadow, analogue tape, blown-out industrial soundscapes, and those unnameable feelings that reverberate long after the final frame.

The conversation is as engaging and in-depth as you’d expect, with Mark, Neil and the audience at Newlyn in top form. Key themes discussed include:

* Lynch and memory’s strange register:Mark reflects on how Lynch’s films live in a different kind of memory register than most; more a series of fleeting snapshots than the coherence of active recall. Because of that, every viewing reveals new aspects; haunting fragments displace and rearrange entire subplots that had taken hold in the subconscious. In that sense, we consider Lynch’s cinema as a form of recursive hauntology.

* The loop as trap (road to road):From the very first shot of that endless road to the repetition of sounds and visuals at the film’s end, Mark explores Lost Highway as a recursive loop that traps its characters in a fugue state of guilt, desire, and dissociation.

* Structural ouroboros and influence:This structural ou