In Lost Highway, Fred Madison, the guilt ridden and disassociated main character, recounts the past through discovered videotapes of him and his wife, which are not just tapes but intrusive memories as he is trying to escape himself, from which the Mystery Man serves to bring him back to feel his fears. Both him and Matty in The Blackout are personifying the horror and paranoia in this clear shift in mediated life which has occurred, and therefore contain hostile and strange atmospheres where no characters seem like they’re really alive.

Stills from Lost Highway (1997)

This deep rooted paranoia, disrupted internal logic and blurring between fiction and reality which both main characters in the films experience, whether because of alcohol or guilt and grief, can be explained by what Shane Denson describes as discorrelated images, digitisation and post-cinema and its irrational cameras which are “neither objective or subjective but radically ambiguous and volatile”. This reflects their disrupted stability, the unsettling choices they make throughout and the externalization of their anxiety which are catalyzed by an image, of their own lives or maybe not, on a digital screen. The screen’s presence is highly significant as it is not just apparatus but “diffusely atmospheric”. The fascination with screens is not new, but the idea of a digital screen within a digital screen becomes significant to the distance which we no longer feel with films, where it is no longer an object to be perceived but involved in perception itself immaterially. 

As filmmakers, Lynch and Ferrara probably felt this new kind of perception of themselves and images they see and feel which are subjectively incorporated in unfamiliar ways. Whether they could’ve predicted and supposed this specific condition of digital disruptions from the material and processual novelties that came for them in 1997 is debatable, though the deconstruction of digital video as self-displacing in both films explicitly indicated that their experience of memory within it becomes not about an actual experience but a virtual realm. 

Watching these two films provided a new perspective on my own technological life, thinking about how I was born already living digitally, though still being able to on some level feel a kind of internal disruption and anxiety with the new technologies in negotiation today. 

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