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    [1997 - 1977] 

"I belonged to a new underclass, no longer determined by social status or the color of your skin.

We now have discrimination down to a science. "

Lost Highway

The storyline is thought to be based on Ambrose Bierce's famous story An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,

in which a war prisoner is hanged, during which the victim imagines escaping and traveling home .

In his book Catching The Big Fish, Lynch reveals that it was only years later when he realized what inspired the storyline: the O.J. Simpson trial.

The fact that the escape was a dying man's hallucination is however only revealed at the end of the story.

A similar construction is thought to be used in Lost Highway, where the protagonist is arguably electrocuted at the end of the movie.

Other movies based on the same idea are

Jacob's Ladder by Adrian Lyne, an episode of The Twilight Zone based on the aforementioned Bierce story and Terry Gilliam's Brazil.

Philosopher Slavoj Žižek authored a paper on Lost Highway

in which he interprets the film's bipartite structure as exploiting

"the opposition of two horrors:

the fantasmatic horror of the nightmarish noir universe of perverse sex, betrayal, and murder,

and the (perhaps much more unsettling) despair of our drab, alienated daily life of impotence and distrust"