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KMID : 0385320000110010082
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Journal of Korean Psychoanalytic Society
2000 Volume.11 No. 1 p.82 ~ p.93
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Psychoanalytic approach on the movis, ’Lost Highway’
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Choi Seung-Mi
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Abstract
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This article is to introduce the several psychoanalytic approaches on the David Lynch’s movie, ’Lost Highway(96)’. It is consists of two parts, one is the group discussion about the movie, which was held in the seminar of Prof. Cho., in the Department of Psychiatry, Seoul National University Hospital in 1999. The other is the psychoanalytic criticism about the movie based on Lacan’s theory. The movie and characters are analyzed by using Lacan’s concepts of the ’mirror-stage’, the ’tripartite scheme’ - the "Symbolic’, the ’Imagary’, and the ’Real’ and Oedipus complex theory. 1st part: Residents and psychologists in the Department of Psychiatry, Seoul National University Hospital participated in the group discussion, focusing on the group’s impression and psychoanalytic criticisms to the movie. The impressions of the movie were generally negative, which might have been caused by unpleasant feeling from its abstrusity and complexity. Especially, it was pointed out that the non-linear narrative of ’Lost Highway’, of which this story developed out of sequential processing, made it difficult to understand the whole story. In the psychoanalytic criticisms, they thought Fred Madison, the main character, to suffer from psychopathology, possibly schizophrenia, and the movie showed the development of the illness. Eventually the three parts of the movie may symbolize his splitting personality. To understand Fred’s condition, the Oedipal theme was also used. The characters of the movie were understood to represent infant, father, and mother on the Oedipal stage of psychosexual development. 2nd part: This part presents psychoanalytic criticism of Lost highway, especially using the Mirror Stage theory developed by Jacques Lacan. Lacan’s Mirror Stage theory suggested the idea of three distinct but overlapping orders of human identity, the imaginary, the symbolic, and the real. These stages influence one another and work together simultaneously to give most individuals a stable relationship with reality. In the case of Fred, the three orders have become separating quite distinctly and the different three versions of the same story were originated from his different three personae. The start of the film features Fred in the symbolic order, the middle part of the film has transformed Fred into Pete Dayton in the imaginary order, and the final part of the film has re-transformed Pete Dayton into Fred, representing the real order. Finally, to understand the non-linear narrative, I used the Moebius Strip, which is one of the topological figures studied and put to use by Lacan. It is the mysterious figure of which the two sides can be clearly distinguished at one point, but when you track on the strip as a whole, the two sides are experienced as being continuous. In other words, the inside and outside of the figure are merging at one point. In ’Lost Highway’, the merging of the opposites is very critical, and the problematization of the opposition between the inside and the outside is the most important issue.
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KEYWORD
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Oedipus complex , Lacan, Moebius strip
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