LOST HIGHWAY: Lynch’s Masterpiece Explained Step By Step

It cannot be watched just once from start to finish, and fully grasp all the intricacies and surprises prepared by the director. The chronology of events is far more disrupted than in Pulp Fiction; there, the sequence of chapters can be pieced together, but with David Lynch, this is impossible. But does the viewer stand powerless against the director’s wild visions? Is there really no way to find a solution? I think the best approach is to watch Lost Highway several times, preferably back-to-back. Then, things become noticeable that we previously had no idea existed. The plot, which until then seemed like a scattered puzzle, begins to form at least partially logical sequences of events. The plural is entirely appropriate here since there is no way to grasp everything in a coherent and linear way as we know from 99% of films. At least, I haven’t discovered such a way yet. Maybe one of you will succeed.

As I mentioned before, this film should be treated as a circle (although a mathematician would probably specify it as a loop) rather than a line with a clear beginning and end. Here, the future is simultaneously the past. This becomes most evident when you watch Lost Highway twice in a row. The final scenes serve as a prelude to what we saw two hours earlier. To prove that these are not drug-induced hallucinations (some people don’t watch Lost Highway without at least a slight puff), I took detailed notes on the film, broke it down into points, and it’s easy to notice the mutual connections between future and past. Of course, there are places that cannot be logically explained or connected, leaving Lynch’s work as a collection of large puzzle pieces where a few elements are missing. Or maybe I just haven’t noticed them yet.

Alright, time to get to the meat of it

1. Fred Madison hears a male voice over the intercom saying, Dick Laurent is dead. When he goes to the window to check who spoke, we hear a car driving away and a police siren wail. Want to know who the mysterious speaker was? Go to point 29.

2. Fred’s wife, Renee Madison, says she won’t come to his performance and will stay home to read. When Fred calls from the club, no one answers. However, when he returns, he finds his wife deeply asleep in bed. Want to know why she didn’t answer the phone? Go to point 27.

3. Renee finds an envelope on the stairs. When she discovers a videotape inside, Fred arrives. Renee seems frightened, as if she wants to hide the tape from him. She looks worried, even scared, as Fred inserts the tape into the player. With visible relief, she sees that the video only shows a few seconds of the front of their house. She suggests it was probably sent by a real estate agent. Fred says, “Maybe,” but you can hear doubt in his voice. He definitely noticed his wife’s behavior. Want to know what Renee was afraid of? Patience.

4. In bed, Fred recalls seeing his wife leaving with Andy during one of his concerts. When Renee lies down beside him, Fred tries to make love to her but fails. When Renee places her hand on his back and whispers, “That’s OK,” it’s clear Fred is furious—his eyes narrow in a disturbing way. He pulls away from her.

5. He starts recounting a dream he had the previous night. He was looking for her in the house but couldn’t find her. He heard her calling him, but she was nowhere to be found. Then, he found her in the bedroom, but it wasn’t her. She looked similar, but it wasn’t her. We see the camera (Fred’s point of view) rush to the bed as Renee screams in terror and covers herself as if defending against an attack. Fred wakes up, and the woman lying next to him lifts her head to look at him. Upon closer inspection, it’s not Renee but the Mystery Man (MM). However, when Fred turns on the light, it’s Renee’s face again. Want to know how MM got there? Go to point 7.

6. Another tape appears, but this time, Renee doesn’t try to hide it, leaving it on the table with the lamp, where Fred easily finds it. This time, the intruder entered the house and filmed Fred and Renee while they slept. Renee is frightened and calls the police. Two detectives arrive, check the windows and doors, and suggest turning on the alarm. During the conversation, Fred explains why he dislikes video cameras: I like to remember things my own way, not necessarily the way they happened. The detectives promise to keep an eye on the house.

7. At a party at Andy’s, a friend of Renee (the one she once left the club with—point 4), Fred meets MM, who says they’ve already met at Fred’s house and that he’s there right now. Fred doesn’t believe him, but MM hands him a phone and tells him to call and check. After two rings (point 8), MM indeed answers. When Fred asks how he got into the house, MM replies that he was invited and never comes without an invitation. Shortly after, MM answers his cell phone and walks away. Fred asks Andy if he knows who MM is, but Andy doesn’t know his name, only that he’s a friend of Dick Laurent. When Fred says Laurent is dead, Andy gets really nervous and wants to know who told Fred. Fred and his wife leave the party.

8. Fred asks Renee how she knows Andy, and she says she met him at a club called “Malkey’s” and that he told her about a job. She claims she can’t remember what the job was anymore. As they approach their house, a light can be seen in the upstairs windows, with a shadow moving on the ceiling as if someone is waving a hand over a lamp aimed upward. After a second, the light goes out. Fred doesn’t notice this but suspects MM is in the house and tells Renee to wait in the car. He checks the house but finds no one. The phone rings twice, but Fred doesn’t answer. When he returns outside, he finds Renee standing on the stairs by the door, wearing a shiny gold dress and a matching shawl. Want to know who called? Want to know why Renee’s dress is important?

9. Renee is in the bathroom, removing her makeup. Fred walks around the bedroom, takes off his jacket, then stares into the darkness filling the hallway. Slowly, he ventures into this darkness and disappears. In the dark corridor, we see Fred looking at his reflection in the mirror while Renee is still in the bathroom. When she comes out and doesn’t find him in the bedroom, she calls for him, using the exact words from Fred’s dream (point 5). Finally, Fred emerges from the darkness. Renee is probably already in bed, just like in the dream.

NOTE: In the series Twin Peaks, the killer Bob would appear when his “host” looked into a mirror. Perhaps Lynch is using the mirror metaphor here too, with “bad” Fred emerging from the shadows, a complete mirror opposite of “normal” Fred. This would explain the following events. Though a more likely cause could be frustration from impotence (point 4) and jealousy over Dick Laurent (point 27).

10. Fred holds the third envelope with a tape. It’s unclear where he got it from, as it was always Renee who picked up the newspaper and the previous two envelopes from the doorstep. It’s also dark, as if it were still night rather than morning. When the tape is played, it shows him naked, covered in the guts and blood of his wife, whose torn-apart body lies next to the bed. Besides the grainy footage, there are also flashes of Fred’s visions, full of crimson red and graphic details. Fred is horrified and yells something that sounds like “Vic.” But what does it mean? I haven’t found an explanation. Why did Fred kill his wife? Go to point 28.

11. The court sentences Fred to the electric chair. He is placed in death row. He begins to suffer from severe headaches, during which he has more flashes of the bloody bedroom scene. He also has a vision of a burning wooden cabin on stilts, but the fire is seen in reverse, as if a film were playing backward. When the flames disappear—meaning they haven’t ignited yet—he sees the MM (Mysterious Man) standing at the door, then entering inside. Suddenly, Fred is bathed in a strong blue light, and the lightbulb overhead dims, as though something requiring a massive amount of electricity has just been turned on—perhaps the electric chair.

12. A shot from a camera speeding along the highway, stopping in front of Pete Dayton standing by the roadside. Behind him, we see a glimpse of his home, his girlfriend Sheila, and his parents standing in the doorway. As Pete’s face fades, we see them running toward him, calling, “Stay!”

13. The cell fills with smoke, and as it clears slightly, Fred is seen clutching his aching head, violently shaking it back and forth. He does this so rapidly that his face blurs into an indistinct smear, but for split seconds, you can see his skin blistering as if burned, with blood.

14. A very blurry shape is seen moving slowly up and down. You can just make out the outline of a face and a halo of light hair. Want to know whose face it could be? Go to point 27.

15. In the morning, the guard finds Pete Dayton in the cell instead of Fred. They allow Pete’s parents to take him home but send two detectives to follow him.

16. At a nightclub, Sheila says that Pete is acting strangely, just like “that night.” Pete remembers nothing.

17. When Pete returns to work at the auto repair shop, his boss Arnie tells him that Mr. Eddy has asked about him. Shortly after, Eddy arrives and takes Pete for a drive, during which Pete adjusts the engine of his Mercedes, and we witness the famous lesson in road rules. When Eddy drops him back off at the garage, the detectives recognize Eddy as Dick Laurent.

18. While working on a car, Pete has a headache and is irritated by the shrill music playing on the radio. It’s the same song Fred was playing when Renee excused herself from going to the club (point 2).

19. Laurent brings in a Cadillac for repairs. With him is a woman who looks exactly like Renee but with blonde hair. She is Laurent’s lover, and when she comes to the garage alone that evening, she introduces herself as Alice Wakefield. She takes Pete to a hotel. During a love scene, we see that her nails are painted white. Renee used to paint hers black. Is the contrast in colors symbolic of the contrasting personalities of these two identical women?

20. Alice calls Pete and says she can’t meet him because she’s going somewhere with Mr. Eddy. She’s also worried that Eddy suspects something. After the call, Pete has another headache attack, and his senses sharpen; even the scratching of a spider’s legs on the wall irritates him. He leaves home, takes Sheila to a motel, and they have a very aggressive sexual encounter. When he returns home, his parents tell him that someone from the police called, asking if they had figured out what happened to Pete “that night.” When Pete says he remembers nothing, they tell him that he came home with Sheila and a strange man. They cry when he presses them to say what happened next. He has a flash and, just like Fred, sees Renee’s gutted body.

21. Eddy arrives at the garage and tells Pete that he loves Alice and that if he finds out someone’s “messing with her,” he’ll shove a gun so far up his ass that the barrel will come out of his mouth, and then blow his brains out. That evening, Alice calls Pete and arranges to meet him at the “Golden Hotel.” She says Mr. Eddy almost certainly knows about their affair and will kill them if they don’t escape. She mentions knowing a guy they could rob to get money to flee. This guy rents out girls for money. Pete asks if he rented her too and if she liked it. She says no, but that was the deal. The guy works for Mr. Eddy and makes porn films. When Pete asks how she got involved with such a man, she replies in the same way Renee answered Fred about Andy (point 8). However, she tells how she went to a scheduled meeting for this job, where she met Mr. Eddy, who watched her undress with a revolver pointed at her temple. She then explains the plan to rob this guy, speaking confidently as if she has it all thoroughly planned out.

22. Sheila makes a scene outside the Dayton house, accusing Pete of cheating on her and shouting at his father to tell him what happened “that night.” As she leaves, Pete’s mother calls him to the phone. A man calls—again, for the umpteenth time that evening. It turns out to be Mr. Eddy. With strange interest, he asks if Pete is doing well and how he feels. He then hands the phone to the MM, who says they’ve already met, that they met at his house. He says the exact same thing he told Fred at Andy’s party (point 6). He mentions how, in the Far East, a condemned man is locked in a place with no escape, never knowing when the executioner will come and shoot him. Is this an allusion to Fred’s situation and his mysterious disappearance from death row?

23. Pete goes to the guy’s house to rob him. In the living room, a porn film is playing on a projector, with a close-up of Alice’s face as some man takes her from behind. Pete hides behind the bar and waits for the house owner to come downstairs, just as Alice planned. When it happens, the man turns out to be Andy. Pete knocks him out and, in the ensuing struggle, accidentally kills him (poor Andy ends up with his head impaled on the corner of the table).

24. Pete notices a photo showing Eddy and Andy, with Renee and Alice standing between them. He asks Alice if that’s her in two forms, but she only points to herself, not explaining who the brunette beside her is. Pete has another headache attack, so strong that his nose bleeds. He goes to the upstairs bathroom, as indicated by Alice. There’s a storm, with lightning and thunder as he walks down the hall. He sees room numbers on the doors, passing room 25 and opening the door to 26. Inside, he sees a woman rocking as if having sex. She taunts him, saying he probably now wants to ask her “why?” Pete flees downstairs, where Alice gives him Andy’s gun and tells him to drive a red car. She says they need to go to the desert, where a fence friend has a cabin.

25. The scene with the exploding cabin is played backward, just as Fred saw it (point 11).

26. Pete and Alice arrive at the cabin, but no one is there; they must wait. They have sex in the light of the car’s headlights. Alice moves similarly to the blurry silhouette I mentioned in point 14. Pete says he desires her, and when they’re finished, she whispers that he’ll never have her. She stands up and walks toward the cabin. He also stands, and it’s revealed that he’s Fred again. Fred sees MM in the backseat of the car, then watches as he enters the cabin from the porch. Fred gets dressed and follows him inside. The only one there is MM—Alice has vanished. He asks where she is, and MM says that her name is Renee and that if she told him her name was Alice, she lied. He then asks, And you, who the fuck are you? and starts filming Fred. The image on the camera looks exactly as grainy as the footage on the tapes left for the Madisons. Fred runs away, constantly being filmed, and drives off quickly.

NOTE: This is why Renee was afraid of what was on the first tape. She thought it might be something compromising, like a porn film involving her (as Alice) or some love scenes between her and Dick Laurent. Since Renee and Alice are the same person, as MM implies, she was involved in the porn films made by Andy.

27. Hotel Lost Highway. There’s a storm, lightning flashes, and thunder rumbles as Fred walks down the corridor, just like when Pete was on the upper floor of Andy’s house (see point 24). In room 26, Mr. Eddy and Renee are making love. Renee moves in the same way as the woman Pete saw in room 26 at Andy’s house. Fred waits in room 25 until they finish. When Renee comes out, she’s wearing the same dress she wore at Andy’s party. Fred rushes into room 26 and kidnaps Eddy. As he loads him into Mr. Eddy’s Mercedes trunk, MM watches from behind the hotel curtain. Fred drives Eddy to the desert, where they start fighting. MM places a knife in Fred’s hand, and Fred slits Laurent’s throat with it. MM gives Dick a small television, which shows clips from a porn film, including Laurent groping Renee. Then, MM kills Eddy with the gun Alice gave to Pete after Andy’s murder (point 24). He whispers something in Fred’s ear and vanishes.

28. At Andy’s house, police officers examine the crime scene. The two detectives from the Madisons’ (see point 6) are there, along with the ones who were following Pete (point 15). They notice the picture Pete was interested in (point 24), but now Alice is missing from it. The detectives recognize Renee, meaning this scene takes place after the visit to the Madisons. One of them remarks that Pete Dayton’s fingerprints are all over the place, and another says, There’s no such thing as a fatal coincidence.

29. Fred pulls up to his house and says into the intercom, “Dick Laurent is dead.” When he spots the detectives, who had promised to watch the house (point 6), he gets back into his car and speeds away. The police give chase with their sirens blaring. This explains the sounds Fred heard when he walked to the window (point 1).

30. During the chase, it’s clear that Fred is having another attack, violently shaking his head from side to side, just as he did in the final scenes in the death row cell (point 13). You can also notice his skin bulging, as if something is trying to push its way out from inside. Is this the next transformation?…

And so, we reach the end of the film. But is it really the end? The connections between different events are now quite easy to trace, but a few pieces are still missing to form a complete picture. Maybe it’s better that there’s no final answer. Lynch admitted that this film was created as a flow of thoughts and imagery he didn’t try to control. If that’s the case, the entire story follows the logic of a dream, where anything is possible. This is why Lost Highway is so fascinating. It leads us into the depths of our fears and dark obsessions without offering any clues on how to get out. Everyone must find their own way—or stay forever in this world of nightmarish phantoms. Or, you can simply turn off the TV.

Written by Marek Grabka