David Lynch’s Lost Highway is one of the most intriguing cinematic illustrations of the dialectic of ressentiment, utopian dreaming, and class struggle. The film’s looping dreamwork narrative structure demonstrates the complex intertwined nature of these three concepts and highlights the mechanism of bourgeois ideological containment of proletarian utopian dreaming.
In the contemporary anti-totalitarian cultural climate, ressentiment is the central concept deployed against communism, labelling all demands for equality and emancipation as a form of envy. Ressentiment is an efficacious way of containing class struggle. Therefore, every time I encounter suggestions of ressentiment, my critical reason antennas prick up as I sense the return of the repressed in the air. Ressentiment is the fear of the other’s enjoyment.
Fredric Jameson defined utopian dreaming as the basic social desire for an unalienated social life. This desire, engendered by alienation itself, is the prime object of politics, the class struggle over how to articulate it. This struggle takes place in culture. I will argue that after the defeat of the labour movement, ressentiment is the return of the repressed class struggle and utopian dreaming.
Is there a way of breaking out of the bourgeois containment of class struggle in the form of ressentiment? I would argue that in Lost Highway, David Lynch unpacks the process of ideological containment of class struggle. He does not propose an alternative narrative but rather makes obvious how the containment works by going through its ideological mechanisms. It forces the audience to witness by revealing the ideological construction of their transparent reality. This strategy makes it difficult for audiences to engage with this film, and judging from the common interpretation of the film as a psychological drama, it triggers the reflex of re-enclosure of its meaning through its reading.
First, we need to explore the meaning of ressentiment.
The best way to understand ressentiment is via Nietzsche.
Nietzsche presented ressentiment as a slave mentality that can't present itself in its true form, the will to power, because of its weakness. The repressed will to power turns into envy.
In a recent adaptation of The Little Match Girl (Sadler’s Wells, Ballo Arthur Pita), the representation of the bourgeois family is the perfect illustration of ressentiment. Confronted with the annoyance of the little match girl, the bourgeois family is caught between its fragile desire to preserve the appearance of the good-natured joviality of bourgeois life and the anger and disgust that the presence of the little match girl triggers in them. As such, they are two-faced. When they face the audience, they smile, playing innocent, soliciting sympathy for the suffering they endure. When they face the girl, they display fear, disgust, or deep, vengeful anger. This is a display of weakness: they can't be true to their feelings. They are not masters. For Nietzsche, a master would preserve their composure and relate to the audience and the little match girl with detached indifference. Moreover, the master would not be disturbed by the little match girl and would treat her with the real charity of the true master, thus not causing suffering. However, for Nietzsche, the niceness of the liberal bourgeoisie is fake. They hate the poor because their existence reminds them of their own helpless condition, but because they are not courageous enough to display their true feelings, they treat them with false reverence. Moreover, they are the actual cause of the suffering of the poor and their own. For Nietzsche, this is not because the hierarchies of power are preserved in bourgeois society, but because the liberal bourgeois wants to abolish those hierarchies but can't. For Nietzsche, hierarchies of power are natural, and we can only hide them, not dissolve them. Hiding them causes weakness, moral degradation, and ressentiment. For Nietzsche, the liberal bourgeois is a socialist, a weak and poor person who, after a good meal, thinks of themself as a master.
This theatre production was aimed at the middle classes. Why does the bourgeoisie enjoy being mocked?
In many ways, Nietzsche’s narrative is a devastating critique of liberalism/socialism, of the current historical moment.
However, it is also a deeply reactionary and resentful position. It is the dream of a return to a slave society, where everyone is kept in their place, and where the powerful are masters of their destiny through their domination of the masses. Nietzsche resents liberalism not because it is two-faced but because it undermines the naturalness of power hierarchies. He resents socialism even more because it makes social equality possible. Nietzsche is probably the thinker most affected by ressentiment.
Nevertheless, the concept of ressentiment helps us understand the representation of class struggle in today's liberal cultural products.
Liberalism has co-opted ressentiment in its struggle against communism. In contrast to Nietzsche, liberalism sees class struggle as a resentful plot of power-thirsty individuals, be they rich or poor, against the professional petit bourgeoisie. Often, the poor and the rich work in a sinister coalition to subvert the tolerant liberal society and bring totalitarianism.
As such, anything that challenges the contradictions of the liberal order is deemed as ressentiment.
David Lynch's Lost Highway has instigated many interpretations, from being declared incomprehensible nonsense to various attempts to interpret its meaning. However, the most common feature of these interpretations is to turn it into a psychological story and the effort to distinguish between reality and fantasy in the film.
Its dream-like circular plot has been compared to a Möbius band, which unites the two sides of a band into a continuous surface through a twist. The first side tells the story of Fred, and the other side tells the story of Pete. The two stories/sides are united by Fred turning into Pete. One of the strange things about the various interpretations of Lost Highway is that while all commentators acknowledge the dream-like construction of the film, they tend to consider Fred’s story to be real and Pete’s story to be a fantasy. This strategy reduces the story to psychological drama. Fred’s ressentiment and murder of his wife are real, while Pete's struggle for love and freedom is a kind of fantasy justification for the murder. This tells us much about today's political framework and the horizon of meaning in which people live their lives.
I will argue that Lost Highway is a political film about social revolution, and how to contain it. This interpretation is possible only if we see the story and its characters as allegorical, as dream-work.
Are Pete and Fred really the same person? Are the petit bourgeois individual and the proletariat the same subject?
And let's not forget about the Mystery Man, the worker’s alienated consciousness confronting them as an external force!
I suggest that both Fred and Pete must be treated as figures of political allegory: Fred the petit bourgeois and Pete the proletariat. Similarly, the double character of Renée / Alice changes her ideological valence: as Fred's wife, Renée is the embodiment of the proletariat, and as Pete’s girlfriend, Alice becomes a femme fatale, the embodiment of both utopian dreaming and its ideological trap. Mr Eddy/Dick Laurent is the embodiment of capital.
Such a reading appears unrealistic. However, class structure and class struggle appear to be impossible categories in a liberal, atomised society. Yet, the characters in the film seem to occupy clearly defined social positions, with various degrees of stability and precarity. The most precarious condition is that of Renée/Alice.
For the bourgeois ideology, any social revolution that tries to overthrow capitalism and build socialism appears as a monstrosity, an act of unpardonable terrorism. The theory of totalitarianism is the academic articulation of this view.
It was built on Nietzsche's foundational concepts of "slave morality" and ressentiment. Slave morality is an inverted form of morality in which the weak/slaves are valued over the strong/masters. This reversal is based on ressentiment, the feeling of envy that the weak "naturally feel" towards the strong. Communism, the demand for equality and democracy, is fuelled by ressentiment. Totalitarianism, the violence of revolution and the state of terror installed by the weak over the strong, is the outcome of this twisted feeling. In such a theory, there is no room for class struggle, democracy, equality, and ultimately communism.
Lost Highway's plot twist unfolds the bourgeois effort to contain the class struggle within the cycle of ressentiment. The film remains ambiguous in its meaning; therefore, the job of ideological containment of class struggle is closed through specific readings. To enforce this closure, most interpretations reduce the film to a psychological story of jealousy and murder, the staple of film noir. They posit Fred as the symbol of reality, while Pete is his imaginary self, made up to justify the murder of his wife.
Instead, we need to turn around the story. Fred is the imaginary subject, a petit bourgeois whose life is literally impotent self-denial, destruction, and oppression. The suburban setting’s cold and paranoid atmosphere of isolation in the Fred segment perfectly captures this. Pete is the real character, the proletariat, who tries to break out of the chains of inequality, exploitation, and alienation. The typical American working-class setting of Pete’s segment, divided between day and night, illustrates a different form of dreaming. The daytime is a good-natured community, both at home and at work. Yet, into this idyllic setting, which proves shallow, Pete’s parents are cardboard characters as are his girlfriend and work colleagues, the real force of capital intrudes in the form of Dick Laurent. At the same time, the utopian dreaming embodied by Alice comes in, too. This intrusion is presented as an offer Pete can't refuse. Pete decides to steal Alice from Dick Laurent, to steal enjoyment back from its appropriation by capital. The nighttime scenes deploy the film noir atmosphere of suspicion, paranoia, and containment through betrayal. Pete’s head injury is usually interpreted as a connection to Fred, but I suggest that it is, in fact, the symbolic wound of the proletariat’s alienation.
Fred's life breaks apart when he hears the call for revolution in the magic words “Dick Laurent is dead!” However, these words, rather than setting him free, send Fred into a downward spiral of jealousy and ressentiment towards his wife, Renée, whom he suspects of having secret access to enjoyment via Mr Eddy. He ends up killing both his wife and Mr Eddy. Fred’s ressentiment and the murder of his wife are a symbol of the fascist turn against the proletariat. We must remember that each side of the story performs a transvaluation of characters and their role.
Renée is the proletariat. Mr Eddy is capital. In the petit-bourgeois imagination, a fear is constructed that a conspiracy between the elites and the destitute steals their enjoyment.
Pete's girlfriend is a synthetic figure, both utopia (breaking out of Mr Eddy's enslavement) and seduction. The hypersexualised image of the wife/girlfriend is a complex construct that shows the dangers of patriarchal imagination for women and men alike. Is Pete a victim/perpetrator of these patriarchal visions? Perhaps this is why David Lynch chose female lead characters for his follow-up feature film, Mulholland Drive. Apart from the wife/girlfriend figures, this is a film about men and masculinity. Perhaps the film’s female figures function not so much as representations of women, but as the social product produced by labour and enjoyed by capital. Alice is thus both the utopian dreaming of emancipation from alienation and its containment by the seductive power of commodities. Are Renée and Alice the same person? Are the proletariat and the petit bourgeois the same subject?
As such, Lost Highway's dreamwork narrative enacts a complex and twisted dialectic of class struggle. It critiques the fascist turn with all its paranoid and violent forms of enjoyment. It stages proletarian utopian dreaming and its containment as ressentiment.