10 Most Unreliable Movie Narrators Of All Time
5. Fred Madison And Pete Dayton - Lost Highway
In David Lynch’s trippy 1997 thriller, we’re introduced to Los Angeles-based saxophonist Fred Madison, whose peaceful life with beautiful wife Renee is being disrupted by somebody sending videotapes of the couple to their door. Fred eventually receives a videotape that depicts him standing over his wife’s dead body, and is ultimately sent to jail.
Normally, that would be the end of the story, or at least the lead-in to a new story about Fred attempting to prove his innocence. In Lost Highway, however, Fred momentarily ceases to exist, and is replaced by a man called Pete Dayton. With no reason to keep Pete incarcerated, the cops let him go, whereupon he returns to his life as a mechanic. There, he encounters a woman called Alice, who is the spitting image of Fred’s wife Renee.
Is Pete unreliable? Is Fred unreliable? Are both sequences of events impossible to believe?
Everything about Lost Highway is unreliable. We’re never sure who is who, whether the events in question are taking place, how they might be taking place, and indeed how two men can be completely different and yet the same, at two distinct moments in time.