[3] 
  
   
 Take a strip of paper  
  
 Make sure that it has two sides  
  
 Take one end of the strip, make a 180 degree twist, and  put it to the other end.  
  
 Tape - or, better, with respect to suture, which is  important, as we will see - stitch  the two ends together.   
 As a result, you now have a one-sided figure instead of a  two- sided figure. 
  
   
 Ill 1: The  Moebius Strip 
  
 The  Moebius Strip subverts the normal, i.e. Euclidean way of spatial (and,  ultimately: temporal) representation, seemingly having two sides, but in fact  having only one. At one point the two sides can be clearly distinguished, but  when you traverse the strip as a whole, the two sides are experienced as being  continuous. This figure is one of the topological figures studied and put to use  by Lacan. (19) On the one hand, Lacan employs the Moebius Strip as a model to  conceptualize the "return of the repressed," an issue important in Lost Highway  as well. On the other hand, it can illustrate the way psychoanalysis  conceptualizes certain binary oppositions, such as inside/outside, before/after,  signifier/signified etc. - and can, with respect to Lost Highway,  characterize Fred/Pete. These oppositions are normally seen as completely  distinct; the Moebius Strip, however, enables us to see them as continuous with  each other: the one, as it is, is the "truth" of the other, and vice versa. Reni  Celeste invokes a similar topology, when she comments on Lynch's rewriting of  American metaphysics, a rewriting that emphasizes the position where "violence  meets tenderness, waking meets dream, blond meets brunette, lipstick meets  blood, where something very sweet and innocuous becomes something very sick and  degrading, at the very border where opposites becomes both discrete and  indistinguishable" (Celeste).  
  
  Escher's Moebius Ring -  Ants:        
   
 In  Lost Highway, the merging of opposites is crucial, and the  problematization of the inside/outside opposition is a most important issue. In  fact, it is an important issue in Lynch's oeuvre as such  - it suffices to refer to the scene in Blue Velvet,  when the camera intrudes the severed ear that Jeffrey finds, and at the end of  the movie, the camera virtually seems to come out of Jeffrey's ear again. In  Lost Highway, the question of inside and outside and their conflation  is repeatedly posed. On a general level, the diegetic reality of the movie -  that what we actually see on the screen, as it were, INSIDE the movie - is  composed out of bits and pieces from other movies: Lynch uses the different  genres of Hollywood as a kind of quarry. And not only the Hollywood genres: he  almost violently exploits his own wealth of images, almost every shot initiates  the shock of recognition. One might call this repetitiveness, but, after all,  language in general - and especially a distinct film-language such as Lynch's -  relies on repetition in order to function. 
  
  
  
  
  
 Another  specific example of the merging of inside and outside apart from the  frame-tale (Dick Laurent is dead) already mentioned, is, most  important, the scene in which Fred meets the Mystery Man for the first time. In  fact, the Mystery Man - simultaneously being inside and outside - can be read at  the place where these (and in fact: all) opposites meet, he is - so to speak -  the twist in the Moebius strip. In Lacan's use of the Moebius Strip, the place  denoting the suture of the imaginary and symbolic in a way "hides" the  primordial cut that instigated this topological figure in the first place, the  cut that is the unconscious (or, in Lacanian terminology: the real).  It is by suturing off the real that reality for  the subject remains a coherent  illusion, that prevents the subject from  falling prey to the real, that is, falling into psychosis. It is no wonder,  then, that the Mystery Man always appears when a change in personality is close.   
  
 Reni  Celeste is correct when she observes that in Lost Highway,  there are three important fissures: "that which exists between one discrete  individual and another, that which exists between the individual and itself, and  that which exists between the thing and its representation ... Th[e] Nameless  Man [Celeste's name for the Mystery Man] ... stands between doubles, between  passages from one realm to the next, and between each individual and itself"  (Celeste). However, it is important to note that the structure of the Moebius  Strip re-conceptualizes these fissures, allowing them to be seen not so much as  fissures, or ruptures, but as places of transition. Lost Highway's  moebial structure disallows the suture of the subject into the narrative. In  contrast to the traditional Hollywood diegesis, in which the narrative unfolds  in a straightforwardly telelogical manner - even in spite of displacing  strategies such as flashbacks, or the "film within the film"-motif -  Lost Highway in fact presents a multiple diegesis. The more so, since  both stories - the story of Fred and the story of Pete - are not simply related  to each other as prequel, and/or the solution of the other. Although there are  definite anchoring points that clearly connect the two stories: the one does  not subsume the other without remainder. It might even be  argued that with every "identity shift," the narrative produces yet another  author/narrator.  
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