Episode 125: Lost Highway & What Really Happens in Hollywood...

There are plenty of interpretations of Lost Highway, as with any David Lynch film. IMO, one component is: "Here's how Hollywood really is. You cannot go there and have a 'normal' life in the industry."

⚠️ Spoilers ahead.

➡️ Is Fred in a Möbius strip? Is it Purgatory?

➡️ Who was the Mystery Man?

➡️ Who was Pete Dayton? How did he get there?

Links:

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0116922/

https://www.buzzsprout.com/2289560/episodes/18127645

https://www.buzzsprout.com/2289560/episodes/15257465

https://www.buzzsprout.com/2289560/episodes/15170983

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bayo4TZzjYA

https://abc7.com/live-updates/diddy-trial-live-updates-sean-combs-sex-trafficking-case-nyc-court/16368610/entry/16414409/

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/30/business/david-boies-pottinger-jeffrey-epstein-videos.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDwpmnmpbFc

****

My award-winning biography of Dag is available on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Decoding-Unicorn-New-Look-Hammarskj%C3%B6ld-ebook/dp/B0DSCS5PZT

My forthcoming project, Simply Dag, will be available in hardback, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats on July 29th! 

Transcript

Transcription by Otter.ai.  Please forgive any typos!

Sara Causey discusses David Lynch's 1997 film Lost Highway, interpreting it as a critique of Hollywood's dark underbelly. The film follows Fred Madison, a saxophonist, who is stalked by a mysterious man shortly before and after his wife Renee is murdered. The narrative shifts to Pete Dayton, an auto mechanic, who replaces Fred. The film's non-linear storytelling and surreal elements are highlighted, with Sara comparing it to a Mobius strip. She also draws parallels to real-life Hollywood scandals, suggesting that the film reflects the industry's exploitative nature and the impact of blackmail and pornography on aspiring actors.

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

Lost Highway, David Lynch, Hollywood, surrealist film, psychogenic fugue, Mobius strip, VHS tapes, mystery man, Patricia Arquette, pornography, blackmail, Mephistopheles, purgatory, nonlinear storytelling.

Welcome to con-sara-cy theories. Are you ready to ask questions you shouldn't, and find information you're not supposed to know? Well, you're in the right place. Here is your host, Sara Causey.

Hello, hello. Thanks for tuning in. In tonight's episode, I will be talking about David Lynch's 1997 film Lost Highway, and how I believe it gives us a peek behind the curtain into what actually goes on in Hollywood, the surface level is glitz and glamor. It's Tinseltown, it's the place where dreams come true. The celebrities always look so good, they're trendsetters, they walk the red carpet, and if you come out here and you make it big, then you can finally live the life of your dreams, but then in reality, as soon as you even minorly scratch beneath that surface, you find a lot of festering poison. It's like a superficial veneer over the top of a cesspool. Spoilers will be present. There's no way for me to review the film and to talk about what I think David Lynch was telling us, without spoiling the film. I normally say, watch this, check it out for yourself, come to your own conclusion first, download this episode or bookmark it and come back to it later if you haven't seen the film, and I would still recommend that you do that, but I might make an exception in this case, only because the film is just so weird, it's very odd. Lynch himself has described it in the past as being like a quote psychogenic fugue. Other critics have said it's like a Mobius strip, where you can't really tell chronologically what's happening. So I will make an exception here, and say even if you haven't seen this film from start to finish, you might still get something beneficial out of this episode, because it is - it's just a different kind of film, unlike Bob Roberts, which I had no memory of, never heard about it back in the 90s, never saw it. I actually went to see Lost Highway in 97 mostly for the soundtrack, because he had gotten people like Trent Reznor from Nine Inch Nails, David Bowie, I think Marilyn Manson, and The Smashing Pumpkins, you know, like all the guys that we were listening to back in the 90s, like Tate totally takes me back to high school and college, and I was like, what the hell was this, it's definitely the kind of film where I sat there, and I was like, what the hell did I just watch? What even was that? I had a similar reaction to Eyes Wide Shut in 99 I went to see that at the theater with a guy I was dating at the time, and we both walked out. We went to a very late showing back when they still did midnight movies. We went to a very late showing, and so we walk out, and it's like two or 3o'clock in the morning, and we're like, what the hell was that? Neither one of us really got it. And I think part of the problem is because Eyes Wide Shut was marketed to the public as being an erotic thriller. Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman are really married in real life, and you're going to get to see them in these hot, steamy sex scenes, and there's going to be a mystery, and it's like, oh, well, all right. Then, then you get in there, and it's like, well, this is something different from that. Years later, when I was in my 30s, and I watched Eyes Wide Shut again, I was like, holy shit, it scared the crap out of me. And one of the early episodes that I did for this podcast was reviewing Eyes Wide Shut, so somebody on social media had been posting Robert Blake as the mystery man, and I was like, "Oh my god, I had forgotten all these years - it's been like almost 30 years ago that Lost Highway came out, and I thought I had totally forgotten how creepy he was as the mystery man. I should rent this movie and watch it again, and I did. I didn't find it anywhere on streaming for free, obviously. That's always subject to change. Things come and go off of those outlets like Pluto and Tubi, so always check. But even if you have to spend three or $4 to rent this on streaming, it's worth it in my opinion. If you like this kind of surrealist film, if you want hyper linear linear, hyper literal storytelling, beginning, middle, end, plot exposition, conflict resolution, denouement. If you, if you want everything very ABCD in the storytelling, you're probably going to hate this film, but if you are open to David Lynch's style, if you're open to something that's more surrealist in nature, then you might really enjoy it. I'd like to do an episode sometime soon about my theories vis-a-vis hyper literal storytelling and what it says about. The current state of the human brain, because genres that require the audience to meet the filmmaker or the author halfway seem to be disappearing. I had this experience recently because I was looking for a copy editor for a dark comedy, like a black comedy, dark political satire that I've written, and I wanted a copy editor to take a look at it, and I, I really wanted to hire somebody who got the genre of satire, who understood it and loved it, and it was exceedingly difficult, because so much of what you find out there are editors who are like well I mostly proofread the trendy genres because that's what people want, that's where the money is, and it's like okay, well, even if you're mostly proofreading stuff like romance, Amish romance, romantic, see weird erotica and fetish books, etc. Because that's what's popular. Like, what are you reading in your downtime? Like, do you engage with satire when you're not reading as part of the job? Or, like, what? What are you doing? I feel like side build. Who are they people? Like, what? What are you doing? I had a lot of applicants who would say I read George Orwell's Animal Farm back in high school, and I really liked it, so I think I could probably handle a dark comedy political satire, and I'm sitting here like, right, that's kind of like saying I read Romeo and Juliet in high school, or I watched the movie with Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes, so I'm a Shakespearean scholar. Like everybody had to read Romeo and Juliet in high school, everybody had to read Animal Farm in high school. That's not quite right. If at least one applicant had said, hey, I read Primary Colors by Joe Klein, or I read American Hero, which later became Wag the Dog by Larry Beinhart, and I really liked it. That would be great. I would have been thrilled to see some references like that, but it was literally like, well, a red animal farm back in high school, so I think I could probably do this, and me sitting back going no, no, just no, and I think that these lowest common denominator genres have.. I'm trying to think of exactly how I want to say this, because my goal is not to sound like a snob, my goal is to just sort of wave a flag and say I think we have a problem here, and I'm not sure which came first, the chicken or the egg. Are we guilty of hyper literal storytelling because social media and TikTok and instant gratification have ruined the human brain and the human attention span, people are lazy, and they don't want to meet an author or a filmmaker halfway anymore. Or is it the opposite? Hyper-literal storytelling has not caused it, it's just a reflection of it. Or hyper-literal storytelling has caused it, and the other things are in effect. I don't know, is it the chicken or is it the egg, but in my opinion, it's certainly part of the problem, because people, by and large, don't seem to want to be intellectually stimulated. It's like everybody wants to be entertained, as opposed to intellectually stimulated, as opposed to somebody saying, "Wow, that podcast episode, or that movie, or that book gave me some shit to think about, like that was heavy, and I want to go chew it, chew on it for a while.

I want to go do some further research about it, because it's really sticking with me now. I'm not saying that literally everybody in the world is that way. I'm I'm painting in broad strokes, because it seems like a lot of people have more or less been lobotomized, and I find that really sad for me, unless I am writing very specifically for children, and I mean, like little children. I have a series of books called Learning with Dag, where they're bilingual books, and they're meant to be extremely simple on purpose, because they're for little itty bitty children, as well as a zero or a one language learners, but basically like the old school C spot run, see Jane play, like very simplistic language for people who are just starting out. Aside from those that are meant to be hyper simplistic, it's just not the kind of creation that I enjoy. I want somebody to like walk on the road with me, take this journey with me, like, think about what I say in this podcast all the time. Let's saddle up and take this ride, because I expect that you're taking the ride with me. It's like we're on the trail and I'm on a horse and you're on a horse and we're riding side by side, but I still expect you to meet me. It's not just I'm out here by myself telling you what to think. I expect that you're saddling up with me, and you're managing your own horse. You're looking at the trail from your own perspective. And I think that for those of you who are loyal tuner inners, and you're here every week, first of all, thank you. I don't take you for granted. Thank you for doing that, and thank you for being you. Thank you for having a brain, and for being willing to say, yeah, sure, I will. I'll take this ride with you, I'll see where it goes, and I'm willing to steer my horse and to make my own decisions about it. So, with all of that being said, had a little tangent there, but it is important. If you are not a big fan of like nonlinear, non-chronological surrealist filmmaking, then this might not be the movie for you, but if you're willing to have an open mind, I think the more you can go into a film like this with zero expectations, the better. For tonight, as we saddle up along the trail, I want to give you my interpretation and why I think David Lynch is telling us here's the way that Hollywood really works. Stay tuned.

Just a reminder, Sara's award-winning biography of Dag Hammarskjold, Decoding the Unicorn, is available on Amazon. Her next nonfiction project, Simply Dag, will release on July 29th. To learn more about her other works, please visit SaraCausey.com. Now back to the show.

The film opens up with Fred Madison, who's played by Bill Pullman, and he's a saxophonist in like a little jazz band, and it's the kind of band that goes around at night from club to club and plays gigs. He lives in Los Angeles, I believe, in the Hollywood Hills, and he gets this weird message on his intercom, where somebody says into the intercom, Dick Laurent is dead, and he's standing there like, Who the hell is this, and who the hell is Dick Laurent? He goes outside to try to figure out who this person is and who they're talking about, because he doesn't know anybody named Dick Laurent, or would care that Dick Laurent was dead, but tires peel like he hears the sound of burning rubber, and then sirens, and he's thinking, okay, so somebody came up to the intercom to tell me about some guy I don't even know, and then they burned rubber, and the cops are after them, that's fucked up and weird. He goes off that night to play a gig at a club, and he calls the house, and it's late, you know, it's after midnight, it's like one or 2o'clock in the morning, and his wife doesn't pick up, his wife is this woman named Renee, who's played by Patricia Arquette in a really weird, obviously cheap, unflattering brunette wig, he calls the house, she doesn't pick up, and he's like, well, where would she be? It's late. She knew that I was going to be calling when I had a set break. Where is she? He gets home, and she's in the bed at their house, naked, and that would make anybody kind of say, "I wonder what happened here while I was gone. The next morning Renee finds a VHS tape, yeah, because back in the day she finds a VHS tape on the porch, and it shows this like weird, creepy video footage of their house. It's like grainy footage that somebody has taken. It's definitely the kind of thing that you would see in a horror movie of somebody sending a message of I'm watching you that night. Fred and Renee are trying to get intimate, but they're not really super successful at it, because he admits that he has had a bad dream that she might be attacked, and then he's looking at her, and he sees this weird kind of creepy face of an old man, so it's almost like having a waking nightmare or an hallucination. So the next day, another VHS tape shows up, and this time somebody has been inside the house and has filmed Fred and Renee sleeping in the bed together. At this point they call LAPD, but the detectives are kind of like, hey, man, you know it's fucking LA, we've got crime a lot worse than this. If somebody's stalking you, if somebody's watching you, yeah, that's bad, but like it's not as bad as the murders and armed robberies and shit like that that we've got to deal with, plus they're not really giving the cops much to go on. It's kind of like, do you know anybody who would want to do this? No. Do you have a video camera? And at that point, Renee makes the comment, like, no, we don't have any kind of cameras or video cameras in the house, because Fred hates them. So they're not giving the detectives much to go on, but it will become interesting and germane to the point that Renee tells the cops that Fred doesn't have any cameras in the house, hates video cameras, can't stand them. Later on, Fred and Renee go to this party who's hosted by her friend Andy. Andy is played by Michael Mass. And he's just this greasy skeevy guy, like you know, the kind of guy that his, he's got like his shirt way unbuttoned and a chain on, and he reminded me of Paul Snyder, the creep who married Dorothy Stratton, and then murdered her back in 1980 He definitely had, he, Andy has big Paul Snyder vibes. He just is like, so Fred gets in this party, and while he's there with people who Renee apparently knows, but Fred really doesn't, and they, and they do seem, frankly, to be skeevy people.

There's this man that comes up, unnamed and played by Robert Blake in white makeup, like he has on white makeup and eyeliner, and he just looks bizarre, and he comes up and starts talking to Fred, and he says that they've met before, and then he also says that he's currently inside Fred's house, and it's like, well, obviously you're not, because you're standing here talking to me, and he's like, no, here, pick up a phone, call your house, so Fred does it almost like, is this a party trick? What the fuck is this? And sure enough, the guy who's standing there in front of him also answers his home phone in real time. Fred is trying to figure out who the hell this man is, why he claims that they know each other, and Andy tells Fred that this mystery man is an acquaintance of Dick Laurent, and he's sort of like, but I heard that Dick Laurent was dead, and Andy's like, well, yeah, I mean, probably, so Fred is severely unnerved by all of this, and gets Renee, and they leave the party as one would if such a thing were to happen in real life. Okay, so the next morning another VHS tape arrives, and it shows Fred standing over Renee's body, which has been dismembered, packed up, dismembered. Fred is arrested and then sentenced to death for her murder. While he's on death row in the jail house, he starts to get severe headaches. He starts to see visions of the mystery man. He sees a cabin that's caught on fire in the desert, and then all of a sudden there's all this bright light, you know, like people die and they go into the light. All of a sudden, there's all of this bright light. One of the prison guards goes to check on him, and they discover that Fred Madison, the saxophonist, is gone, but he has been replaced by a new man named Pete Dayton, who is an auto mechanic from Van Nuys, and this young kid Pete Dayton is played by about the Sarghetti. Pete is like, "What the hell? Where am I? He doesn't know how he ended up there. The cops don't know, and he doesn't know how he somehow teleported into a jail, like, where the hell is Fred? And how did this young boy, who looks nothing like Fred, get in here? Because he's not guilty of Rene's murder, he gets released to his parents, but LAPD decides to keep tabs on him, because this whole thing is super fucked up. Pete goes back to work as an auto mechanic, and he has this gangster client named mr. Eddie, and Eddie likes to bring his cars to Pete, because, like, Pete's the best. And one day, mr. Eddie takes Pete on a drive, and then gets into, like, a road rage incident with a guy who was tailgating, then after that mr. Eddie comes back to the garage with his mistress, who is a woman named Alice Wakefield. Now it's Patricia Arquette again, but this time blonde. Later that night, Alice comes back to the garage and seduces Pete, and the two of them begin having an affair with each other, and even though Pete has a girlfriend and Alice is supposedly the mistress of this gangster, she's now gotten involved with Pete. She starts to get nervous that mr. Eddie suspects that they're messing around, and she concocts a plan that the two of them will will conduct a robbery. She says she knows that Andy has money, and so they can rob him and then leave, just go to his place when he's not home, take his stuff, and then leave. Then we. Be together, we'll be away from everybody, and we can be together without fear. Meanwhile, the girlfriend that Pete has, this lady named Sheila, discovers that he's messing around with Alice, and she leaves him. Pete gets a disturbing phone call from mr. Eddie, as well as the mystery man, and he decides, like, instead of thinking to himself, I better back the hell out of this situation, he agrees to Alice's plan, because he thinks I need to get the hell out of here, instead of I need to get the hell away from these people and be by myself, it's like, well, I guess me and Alice can run off together, Pete confronts Andy at Andy's house, but there's this kind of graphic murder scene where Andy dies because he gets pushed into the corner of a glass table and it goes way into his skull. Pete discovers a photograph of Dick Laurent, and as he's standing there looking at this picture, he realizes that Dick Laurent and mr. Eddie are the same person. He also, in this picture, so he sees Dick Laurent slash mr. Eddie, he sees Andy, and then he also sees Alice and Renee together. Now, keep in mind, Alice and Renee were both portrayed in this film by Patricia Arquette, Renee was the brunette, and then Alice is the blonde. So he sees all four of them together, and then he starts to have a nosebleed. He gets disoriented and woozy headed, so he goes to the bathroom, but instead, when he, like, kind of comes to, he finds that he's wandering the hallways of a hotel instead of being at Andy's house, Pete and Alice arrive together at this weird cabin in the desert, and they're planning to fence the goods that they've stolen from Andy's house. They go outside because they're waiting around for whoever the fence is, and they have sex outside. It's a very weird sex scene outside where Alice starts to taunt Pete, and she's saying things like, "You'll never have me. And then she disappears into the cabin. Then we get another big burst of light, kind of like the one that we saw Fred having in the prison, there's another big burst of light, and then Pete transforms back into Fred. So now Bill Pullman is back in the picture. Fred searches the cabin, and he finds the mystery man, and he tells him that Renee exists, but Alice does not, and the mystery man comes after Fred with a video camera, but Fred escapes, and he tracks down Dick Laurent slash mr. Eddie at the Lost Highway Hotel, where Dick Laurent is having sex with Renee. After Renee leaves. Fred kidnaps Dick Laurent and takes him back into the desert. The mystery man comes back, and he gives a knife to Fred, and then Fred uses the knife to murder Dick Laurent. Dick gets confused in the, in the course of this, you know, stabbing, and it's like, well, ask them what they, what do they want, what are you here for. So the mystery man plays back an X-rated video of Renee, so it's like Dick Laurent has made this pornographic video that features Renee, and so we can see Renee and Dick Laurent watching the video in kind of like a flashback montage. Back in the desert, the mystery man puts Dick Laurent out of his misery by pop popping him, and then whispers something inaudible to Fred before he vanishes, and he just sort of hands the boom stick to Fred, and then walks off. When the police investigate Andy's death, Alice is no longer in the photograph that Pete saw. Fred drives to his house, buzzes the intercom, and says Dick Laurent is dead, and then as the detectives arrive, Fred flees the scene and leads the police on a chase through the desert, and then the end of the movie is him screaming helplessly as there are flashes of light that kind of dissolve into a dark, or I guess we could say lost highway, so I think it's interesting that the beginning of the film and the ending of the film are essentially the same, because it leaves us to wonder if this is like a closed loop or a Mobius strip where the person who comes up to the intercom. At Fred's house, and says Dick Laurent is dead, and speeds off to be involved in a police chase. Is Fred himself, but then, how is Fred in the house listening to future Fred, and is it future Fred, or is it past Fred?

You know that also gets into some questions of things like the multiverse and whether or not time is truly linear, I suspect that time itself is not as linear as we think that it is. There's also a sort of purgatory type vibe to the film, like, is Fred doomed to just keep repeating the circumstances of Rene's murder over and over again, because of his guilt, kind of like how Sartre's No Exit is about internal, eternal, excuse me, eternal entrapment, it's not a repeating cycle per se, like Lost Highway, but there is the idea that once you're in this room you're stuck there. Groundhog Day, in a more comedic way, deals with the idea of lather, rinse, repeat, where Bill Murray wakes up and just keeps experiencing the same day over and over again. I think there's also a little bit of Kafka thrown in too, because there are aspects of it that remind me of the trial, it's not literally circular, but there certainly is this feeling of inescapable doom, like you know that something is going to happen to the protagonist, you know he's in a trap that he's not going to be able to get out of, and I actually might do an episode about the trial at some point, since it involves this protagonist being accused of a crime and not even really understanding what's happening. Before I get into more of the, hey, this is how Hollywood really is. As an interesting bit of trivia, one of the jumping off points for this film was that in real life somebody buzzed the intercom of David Lynch's house, and said Dick Laurent is dead, and by the time he got to the front to figure out who it was and who the hell they were talking about, the person was gone. He didn't know anybody named Dick Laurent, and he didn't know who showed up to tell him that Dick Laurent was dead, or why. And I just think, as a creative myself, it's like that's so much how these things can happen, like something can happen that a normal person might brush off, or they might tell their friends, "Hey, somebody came by and said some guy I didn't even know was dead, isn't that fucked up? They must have had the wrong house. And then everybody laughs, and it's forgotten. But I think, like, the job of the artist is to take something like that and say, "What if I made it into more, because that's really a storyteller's job. What if? What if this? What if that? What if this person knew that they were talking to me? What if there was a connection to Dick Laurent? What if this happened to a character in a film or in a novel? So, I just, as a bit of trivia, I think that's really cool. I mentioned before that whenever Fred and Renee start to get these VHS tapes on their porch, Renee tells the cops Fred hates cameras, he hates video recorders. We don't, we don't have anything like that in the house. Fred makes a comment, it's.. I might not get it perfect, but it's something along the lines of I like to remember things, I like to remember things my own way, how I remembered them, not necessarily the way that they happened, or not necessarily the way that a camera would capture them, and I think that is giving us an important key to what happens in the movie, because Andy is a pornographer, that's made very clear in the film, and that was really where it started to all click in my mind, like this is how it actually works, because there's this veneer of normalcy, like we see this couple, Fred is a saxophonist who plays in a jazz band, and they go around gigging, and they have a nice little house, and she stays home, and everything looks relatively normal.

I'm using air quotes here, relatively normal, but then he calls in the middle of the night, and she's gone, and she has a creepy, gross friend who has Paul Snider vibes and is a pornographer that in and of itself would make somebody outside the Hollywood circuit say why are you hanging out with that guy, but then again we kind of know why, and it becomes clearer as we get farther into the film because Renee slash Alice slash these women played by Patricia Arquette have been involved in these pornography films. They've been involved with people like Andy the pornographer, who looks about like Paul Snyder, and then also involved with a mobster like Dick Laurent. It makes me think back to the episodes that I recorded about the Black Dahlia case. Now we don't actually know if Elizabeth was an aspiring actress, that's been the story that's gone around for years, but I haven't ever seen any substantive proof that she was a struggling actress trying to make it in the business, but that's the stereotype. Woman with stars in her eyes moves out to La La Land with the dream of becoming an actress, and then gets sucked into something that she never would have imagined and would never have done if she had just stayed behind at home about 10 years before Lost Highway was released, Richard Marx had a song called Don't Mean Nothing, and it tells a very clear story, not only in the video, which makes it even more explicit, but even just in the lyrics. It tells the story of, like, if you get out here to Hollywood, here's the expectation: you're going to be expected to take nudie pictures, you're going to be expected to screw a director on the casting couch, and he has the line about the California snow. He's not talking about actual snow people, he's talking about blow. And there's a guy in the comment section who says this video is basically an introduction to Hollywood, also a warning. Yeah, it is. Then there's also the question of what are these guys doing with these videos once they have them. Back in December, I recorded an episode called Gaslighting Inside the Cult-like Mansion, where I took a look at A and E's show Secrets of Playboy, and some of the things that Hefner has been accused of, which included making videos of people who were there in the mansion having sex, and it's not just like, oh, I'm going to watch this later to titillate myself and keep it in my private collection, there's also the element of blackmail. This came up during Puff Daddy's or P. Diddy, whatever, whatever. I remember it was Puff Daddy from back in the day, whatever the hell he's called now. I'll read from an article that was on ABC seven.com Combs turned freak-offs into blackmail. Cassie testifies the article tells us for a second time on the witness stand. Cassie Ventura flipped through a binder containing photographs of escorts that she said were hired for freak-offs. Now I'm going to put a pin in this article for a second, because I also recorded an episode - gosh, I think it was back in 2024 How time flies, that's crazy. It's like almost Halloween of 2024 Bonus episode was hostile based on a true story, and in that episode I told you about my former friend Bob. I to this day I don't know whatever happened to Bob, but he goes out to Hollywood and he gets a job doing catering at an actor's house. I don't know who it was. I didn't know who it was then. I don't know who it was now. And he talked about before the staff had even left, there was a van of sex workers that showed up, and they started doing appalling S and M type things with each other, and it's like the caterers and the waiters hadn't even departed yet, and they were already getting it started. This stuff happens. I understand that we don't want to imagine that it happens, but it does. So, now I'll return to the ABC seven.com article.

In a matter of fact tone, she recalled their names: Ash, Brian, Dave, Greg, and someone she knew as Islander, she had sex with all of them, some in multiple cities, and she told the jury it's possible she and Combs had some of them flown to different places, testimony that federal prosecutors no doubt hope helps prove one of the charges Combs faces, transportation for the purposes of prostitution. Ventura hired them herself. It was expected of me, she said. Ventura also told the jury Combs went turned freak-offs into blackmail, threatening to release video recordings when he was upset about something. She testified that Combs threatened to embarrass me and put my career in jeopardy. She said she absolutely feared he would release the videos. I just feared for my career. I feared for my family. It's just embarrassing and disgusting. Nobody should do that to anyone, Ventura said, quoting Combs as telling her the videos could ruin everything that she worked for and make her look like a slut. End quote. Now, so far, I think the main accusations have been that he did all of this for personal reasons, you know. I think the accusation some of the girls have made against Hef is that Hef was doing this for his own personal blackmail, and now we're hearing the same thing about Diddy. Well, he was doing this for his own personal blackmail. He personally wanted to have leverage against people, is the. Not as far as it goes, I mean, really, let's think about all the things that we've learned from the Teffrey Tepsteen files. It's like with Oswald, you know, people would say this has the fingerprints of intelligence, like it's not like the JFK murder happened in a vacuum, like two or three dudes in a back alley planned it. That's one of the things I find so laughable about the idea that it was just the mob, like all the things that Jim Garrison says, or the character of Jim Garrison says in the JFK movie. Could the mob have done this? Could they have initiated the cover-up? Could they have controlled the autopsy? Could the mob have done all of these things by themselves without some cooperation from the Charlie India Alpha and the government. I mean, really, I don't think the intelligence agencies of the world really like some independent operator horning in on their territory. So one has to wonder, were these people making these blackmail videos, doing it purely for their own amusement, purely for blackmail purposes that only they would use, like maybe at a small level, there are those people in Hollywood, like I'm gonna keep this nasty movie just in case this gal ever becomes big, and then I can blackmail her and get money out of her, and I'm sure that that happens on a smaller level, but once you start talking about these large blackmail operations, you cannot convince me that there aren't the fingerprints of intelligence there. The New York Times ran an article back in November of 2019 titled Jeffrey Epstein: Blackmail and a lucrative hot list, the idea being that he had his own little catalog of videos. I think it was even Jizz Lane who said that he had cameras everywhere, including the bathroom. There was no place that you could go to do anything truly private. He knew everything that was going on. Now, the official narrative wink is that he was just watching videos because he was a dirty pervert, and he wanted to watch them purely for himself. He was there's no evidence that he was accruing these videos to blackmail prominent people, but that's just dumb. That is the stupidest thing I've ever fucking heard. Just here recently, Bill Gates has been testifying. The Today Show ran a story about it a few days ago, and the headline is Bill Gates accuses Jeffrey Epstein of blackmail over his infidelities. So, at this point, Bill Gates is kind of like, hey, look, I was not always faithful to my wife, I was only having sex with consenting adults, but Tefferty Tepsteen knew about it, and he was going to use that information to blackmail me. It's a tale as old as time. Hey buddy, I know you've been screwing ladies that ain't your wife, so I'm going to blackmail you with that information, right? I'm sure that's the extent of it.

I kind of look at Lost Highway as being a situation where this man has gotten together with this woman, and it's like they think they can handle Hollywood, they think that they can have some cute, sweet little existence in the middle of this cesspool, but yet Renee has gone off and had this situation, whether it's an actual relationship with Andy, or whether they were just friends, or if he was some sleaze who convinced her to do it. That part's not clear, but she had some kind of thing with Andy, the pornographer, and she winds up being in pornographic videos, and that's how she has this network of people like the pornographer and Dick Laurent. It makes me think of someone like Elizabeth Short, aka the Black Dahlia, being in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong people, and then paying the ultimate price for it, like it's not only okay, I'm, I'm at this house, and these people turn out to be freaky, deaky perverts. It's this, this guy turns out to be a murderer. This is, this is a torture session. It's not just some risque pushing the envelope S and M sex, it's something much, much worse. I also think the addition of the mystery man, who we're never told by Lynch who this man is supposed to be, is he the devil, a devil? Is he a vampire? Like, what? What exactly is he? As the story goes, Robert Blake was given a copy of the script and didn't really understand what was going on, which is completely understandable and forgivable in this situation, but Lynch had told him you can be responsible, like come. Up with your own ideas for what you think your character should look like, and so that's when Robert Blake cut his hair way short, shaved his eyebrows off, and then put on this white pancake type makeup and a black outfit, and then he shows the idea to David Lynch, and David Lynch is like, "Yes, do this, roll with it, and there have been various interpretations about what exactly is the mystery man, because he appears to have supernatural abilities, for example, standing right in front in front of Fred at the party, but then also being on the telephone at the same time inside of Fred's house, he also has this bit of dialog whenever he is telling Fred that he's inside Fred's house. At that exact moment, he says something like, 'You invited me. It's not my custom to go where I'm not wanted, which we could take that as anything really demonic. We could take it as being the actual Christian devil. We could take it as being a vampire, you know. If I'm thinking about the lore around the true blood vampires, for example, they can't come in the house unless you invite them in. People have said that about demonic activity as well. They have to have a doorway to come inside. They don't just come in at random and start tormenting people. They have to be invited in Robert Blake's own interpretation, you know. Lynch is famous for not really making a blanket statement, which I think is so smart. It keeps the je ne sais quoi, it keeps people guessing, and then it keeps fans coming up with theories endlessly. It's actually a very smart tactic, and I admired the hell out of out of him for doing that, but Blake himself has stated in interviews that he thought he was actually playing the devil, he thought that he was just actually playing Satan in that role. I would probably categorize it as being more Mephistophelian in nature, because I'm thinking in particular of Goethe's Faust, and then also Murnau's film adaptation of the same, the idea that Mephistopheles goads Faust into doing things, he presses and he pokes and he prods and he picks the scab to get Faust to do something, and then after Faust does it and it blows up in his face, then Mephistopheles laughs about it, he's not a character who gives sympathy, he laughs about it and rubs salt in the wound, and then goads Faust into doing other things.

In the film adaptation, for example, after Faust kills Valentine, Gretchen's brother, which Mephistopheles has goaded him into doing, he runs through the street screaming murder, murder, and getting everybody's attention, and making the situation much worse, and he just laughs the way that Emil Yannings plays that role. He just, it's like he just crouches down and laughs maniacally, and it really does look rather satanic, I have to say. And that's my interpretation of the mystery man, it's like Fred and Renee have gone out there, and they think they can have some semblance of a normal life in Hollyweird in the cesspool, but they can't, because Renee gets pulled into pornography, possibly even prostitution, because she's sleeping with Dick Laurent while being married to Fred, and then here's this Mephistophelian satanic character that shows up, like, well, you invited me in, and then the next thing you know, Fred's a murderer. As with any of David Lynch's films, it's certainly open to interpretation, and I would never be hubristic enough to say, like, oh well, my interpretation is the only one that's defensible, it's certainly not in my opinion. He's showing us what really goes on in Hollywood, the way that people get sucked into these things, like this is the only way that you're going to be able to make a living out here. If you want to be famous, if you want to have the right connections, then you have to do this quid pro quo, if you scratch my back and do this, then I'll make good on it. And then, so many of the times, the men don't make good on it. There's a line, in fact, from that Richard Marks song that I mentioned, where he says it's never what, but who it is, you know, and that seems to so often be the case when we start to look at these people who supposedly came from nowhere, and nothing. Whenever some enterprising independent journalist actually does start fact checking the story, you find out that they really didn't come from nowhere, like Daddy was an investment banker, or Mommy was the heir to a fortune, or Granddad was a famous Hollywood actor, and his name still has pull in town. It may seem like they were an overnight success, or it may seem like they were an industry outsider that just flew into the stratosphere from nowhere, but that just seems to never actually be the case. Yes, so if you enjoy surrealist films, if you're able to saddle up and take that ride and understand that there may be times of incoherence, or you may have to watch the film more than once to fully get what's going on, and if you're comfortable with that kind of closed loop unresolved storytelling where Fred is forever in this kind of purgatory state, where he's going to have to relive as his punishment the dissolving of his marriage, Renee getting pulled into a pornographic lifestyle, and his flipping out and murdering her, etc. And this is just going to go on for eternity in a closed loop. This could be a great movie for you, if you're like, you know, what I don't get, David Lynch. I just want somebody to tell me a clear story where I understand what's going on. This is probably not the film for you, but even so, I really do think it shines a light on what actually goes on in Hollyweird, and the types of weird, skeevy characters that are doing it. Stay a little bit crazy, and I will see you in the next episode.

Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe to this podcast and share it with others.