David Lynch's take on multiple-personality disorder in Lost Highway is decidedly nonhumanistic and relatively pessimistic--especially in relation to character development, this being a movie fatalistically constructed like a Mobius strip. Properly speaking, this isn't a movie with characters but with figures, each of them as overblown as a plastic inner tube. (The huge close-ups of eyes and lips that periodically blip through the narrative only add to the overall sense of abstraction.)

According to the logistics here, certain kinds of people are interchangeable, hence dispensable and maybe even disposable. This is true of both heroes, middle-aged and middle-class jazz musician Fred Madison (Bill Pullman) and punk garage mechanic Pete Dayton (Bal-thazar Getty)--the second of whom replaces the first, without explanation, in a prison cell. It's also true of Fred's brunette wife Renee (Patricia Arquette), whom Fred may or may not be guilty of murdering, and of a hot blond named Alice Wakefield (also Arquette), who betrays her gangster boyfriend (Robert Loggia) to have regular sex with Pete. There's an androgynous weirdo identified in the credits as the Mystery Man, played by Robert Blake, who gives several indications that he's Renee and Alice in another form, and even the gangster boyfriend has two identities and names, Mr. Eddy and Dick Laurent.

Similarly, a stucco Los Angeles house that figures climactically in the plot does double duty as the Lost Highway Hotel as soon as one climbs the stairs to the second floor. And cars are commonly filmed frontally, from the front or the rear, exactly as Arquette is filmed when she takes off her clothes. At one point, Pete (or is it Fred?) pistol-whips Mr. Eddy (or is it Dick Laurent?) and then stuffs him into the trunk of one of these cars, only to find him leaping out later in a fighting mood. One might wonder, under the circumstances, if the gangster is emerging from Renee/Alice's womb--or maybe even the Mystery Man's--in some kind of cataclysmic birth trauma.

The thrill of this kind of enigmatic rhyming structure, combined with Lynch's masterful and often powerful fusions of sound and image, is that it makes all sorts of splashy expressionistic effects possible--moments of "pure" filmmaking in which the ideological trappings of noir become subverted by the heady mixtures (such as the literal and figurative grafting of the Mystery Man onto the body of Arquette). The limitation is that, even if the thematic preoccupations at times appear to float and circulate independent of the inner tubes, their assumptions remain mired in the adolescent mind-set ("dirty" sex and corrupted male innocence) that informs virtually all of Lynch's features. (I'm less certain that this applies to Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, which I'll have to see again, but it clearly forms the affective core of Eraserhead, The Elephant Man, Dune, Blue Velvet, and Wild at Heart.)

It can be argued--and will be in a book about Lynch by Martha Nochimson that will be published next fall--that the projection of male feelings of guilt, fear, disgust, and shame about sex onto female figures in Lynch's films is always defined as a traumatized-male construction, and that Lost Highway doesn't have any real women. This is a plausible hypothesis, but how consistently one can read the movie in this light depends on how well one can plow through the proliferating iconography of puritanical noir cliches, which invade so much of the available space they leave little room for decoding. (Are there any real men in this movie either?).