Film Text: Lost Highway

Much of the material for this lecture overlaps with that covered in UWE's C35 programme: Psychoanalytical Approaches.  This lecture re-examines some of the ideas brought up in this course after discussion of "North by North-West".  Here we observe that, in the genre of Film Noir is subsumed the basic components of an Oedipal 'engine' driving motivation, and that Neo-Noir brings this to the surface, consciously toying with the fact that audiences now have (even an unconscious?) knowledge of the rules of the narrative games mobilised by Hollywood texts.  If Hitchcock did something similar to this in the (comic?) undertones of "N by NW", Lynch gives it a macabre twist in "Lost Highway" - which is to be understood in relation to texts such as "L.A. Confidential" and "The Last Seduction" in terms of its representation of women.  Theorists such as Zizek even widen discussion to include representations of the father in "Life is Beautiful."