On assignment for Premiere magazine, Wallace is invited to the set of Lost Highway, a 1996 film by American director David Lynch, presumably to interview Lynch. However, from the essay’s outset, he confesses to gaining no knowledge about Lynch as a person. They remain distant throughout Wallace’s visits to the set, and Wallace’s essay expresses little interest in Lynch as a person. Wallace, an avowed fan of Lynch’s work, instead used the visit to explore his relationship with it. After a brief overview of Lynch’s filmography, Wallace posits that Lost Highway may be the film that rehabilitates Lynch’s reputation after a series of commercial failures in recent years. Lost Highway is about shifting identities. Throughout the essay, he repeats this motif (interchangeable identities) as actors pose next to their stunt doubles or stand next to their lookalikes.

Wallace wryly suggests that one could interpret Lost Highway in “roughly 37” ways. Although he cannot predict its success, he asserts that it will be at least “Lynchian,” referring to “a particular kind of irony where the very macabre and the very mundane combine in such a way as to reveal the former’s perpetual containment within the latter” (161).