53 pages • 1 hour read
David Foster WallaceA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
On assignment for Premiere magazine, Wallace is invited to the set of Lost Highway, a 1996 film by American director David Lynch, presumably to interview Lynch. However, from the essay’s outset, he confesses to gaining no knowledge about Lynch as a person. They remain distant throughout Wallace’s visits to the set, and Wallace’s essay expresses little interest in Lynch as a person. Wallace, an avowed fan of Lynch’s work, instead used the visit to explore his relationship with it. After a brief overview of Lynch’s filmography, Wallace posits that Lost Highway may be the film that rehabilitates Lynch’s reputation after a series of commercial failures in recent years. Lost Highway is about shifting identities. Throughout the essay, he repeats this motif (interchangeable identities) as actors pose next to their stunt doubles or stand next to their lookalikes.
Wallace wryly suggests that one could interpret Lost Highway in “roughly 37” ways. Although he cannot predict its success, he asserts that it will be at least “Lynchian,” referring to “a particular kind of irony where the very macabre and the very mundane combine in such a way as to reveal the former’s perpetual containment within the latter” (161).
By David Foster Wallace
American Literature
View Collection
Art
View Collection
Books & Literature
View Collection
Challenging Authority
View Collection
Community
View Collection
Education
View Collection
Fate
View Collection
Laugh-out-Loud Books
View Collection
Nation & Nationalism
View Collection
Philosophy, Logic, & Ethics
View Collection
Popular Study Guides
View Collection
Power
View Collection
Truth & Lies
View Collection