h4le-bopp:

“The Lost Highway sounds like a movie about me …”
Dylan Klebold

Actually, there are some interesting parallels between Dylan Klebold’s way of feeling and experiencing the world and the movie Lost Highway.
For example there are several parts in his journal, where he mentions a feeling of being cut out from his real self. This goes so far, that Dylan does not identify with his name anymore, contrary to the general idea of a changed personality: “I’m X and although I once was 5 years old and now I changed, I’m still X”.
Dylan, however, wrote: “wonder how/when I got so fucked up w my mind, existence, problem – when Dylan Benet (sic!) Klebold got covered up by this entity containing Dylan’s body …”
A few lines later he wrote: “I lack the true human nature that Dylan owned & they lack the overdeveloped mind/imagination/knowledge too”.
The movie Lost Highway is about the Jazz musician Fred Madison who, after murdering his wife, gets sentenced to death. During one night in prison, he experiences strange headaches and possible hallucinations. When the warders visit his cell the next morning, they find a completely changed person- Pete Dayton, a young man without any ties to Fred Madison. Although this may already seem like a similarity, there are things at odds. In the movie, Fred’s transformation to Pete Dayton is a positive for him. While Fred Madison can’t sexually satisfy his wife and suspects her of having an affair, Pete Dayton is a young, sexually active man who starts an affair with a woman who is married (actually the woman is a transformed version of Fred Madison’s wife, while her husband is a transformed version of the man who is having an affair with Fred Madison’s wife). Yet when Dylan writes about his new personality, it sounds like he judges it in a negative way. So, besides the topic of transformation, is there a similarity?
Maybe it will be helpful, if we add some other ideas, Dylan had about himself to the story. Not only wrote Dylan about being not Dylan anymore, but also about being godlike or a god. So while he complained about lacking the human nature of Dylan, he also raved about his mind making him a god. It also appears interesting, that Dylan notes the “true human nature” of his former self as positive, since in several other entries he mentions his humanity as something that causes him to suffer.
Maybe, there was more than one transformation. Or maybe there was only one transformation, but Dylan had very mixed feelings towards it.
So if Dylan was stopping being Dylan and starting being the god of sadness; how we can put that into a context with what is happening to Fred Madison in Lost Highway?
I think there are two elements in this story: the godliness of the mind and getting dominance & revenge. Fred Madison turns into Pete Dayton, meets his own wife in a transformed form, meets the mystery man and at the end of the movie gives his former self secret messages, he is- summing it up- distorting reality. He changes reality due his needs; even he does not always reach what he is longing for.
Dylan constantly wrote about different realities, other dimensions etc. and apparently believed that he could reach them through his mind. Dylan saw himself as a god, because he had wisdom about these other dimensions, because he was going through a transformation, because he was- summing it up- distorting reality. He did not change the actual reality of his life, but he was able of floating into other realities, where the circumstances were better than in his daily life. Additionally, he met the girl of his dreams in these realities, just as Pete Dayton is able win the love of the same woman, Fred Madison looses in his reality.
Shortly before the attack, Dylan wrote a school essay about a man who commits mass murder. The man in the story is tall, left-handed and wears a black treanchcoat. It is not unrealistic to conclude, that Dylan was writing about himself. Yet, Dylan also appears to write about himself, when he describes the feelings of the observer towards the end: “I was still, as he came my way again. He stopped, and gave me a look I will never forget. If I could face an emotion of god, it would have looked like the man. I not only saw in his face, but also felt emanating from him power, complacence, closure, and godliness. The man smiled, and in that instant, thru no endeavour of my own, I understood his actions.”
Other people already have guessed, that Dylan was both- the shooter AND the observer in this story. What gave Dylan the impression of power, complacence, closure, and godliness was his own ideal self; the godlike being he wanted to transform to. And besides the godliness of the mind, his school essay gives us another idea of what being god meant to him: power, dominance and revenge. And exactly that is, what Fred Madison reaches, when he turns into Pete Dayton. He becomes sexually active (what is a form of power and dominance in itself) and he gets the woman he wants. Also, in the second reality the woman is the girlfriend of the same guy, who has an affair with Fred Madison’s wife in the first reality. So, Pete Dayton’s romance with her is not only a form of winning back the love of his wife, it is also a form of revenge against his rival, just as the man in Dylan’s story is taking revenge against peers who apparently have wronged him in some way.
In the movie, Pete Dayton turns back into Fred Madison, as he realizes that even in his new self, he is not able to really win his love. Before the transformation takes place, Pete and the girl are having sex in the desert. When it’s over, the girl whispers into his ear “You will never get me” (translated from the German dubbing, the original wording may be different). As she walks away, we see that Pete Dayton is turned back into Fred Madison.
Having lost all his hope, Fred Madison resorts to the last opportunity, he thinks he has: violence. He kills the man who is having an affair with his wife.
Dylan also felt, that he was not able to win the love of his girl. And like Fred Madison, he resorted to violence. But there is a small difference: while in the movie Fred Madison is condemned to repeat his unpleasant experience over and over again, Dylan found a way out; a last opportunity to reach love- he choose death.

Interesting read! I’m amazed that you drew literal parallels between Dylan and Lost Highway. Commendable. 🙂 I’ve always sort of failed at doing that simply because the flick is your standard Lynch ‘distorted mirrored room funhouse’ affair – always nebulous, symbolic and leaves you to grope around in the dark and draw from it your own personal interpretations. I tend to think that for Dylan, on a personal level, it figuratively represented a sense of infinite damnation and no matter what skin he reincarnated into – whether it be selecting Door No. 1, 5 or 66 within his self described ‘Hallway of Existences’, it would always be the same brand of fail.

I feel that I am in eternal suffering, in infinite directions in infinite realities

In Lost Highway, the initial impotent has-been character gets caught for his supposed crime, and transforms into a potentially more successful persona. Yet, the end result is always the same: the doom of the reset button of a damnable existence. (Think, the most pessimistic version of the flick “Groundhogs Day”;) ) “The Lost Highway repeats”, and the direction the character finds himself in at the end, is once again, the very beginning of one endless, repeating downward spiral.