Analysing Lost Highway as a Non-deterministic Narrative Structure: Initiating Déjà Vu-like Recognition to Establish Non-causal Linkage

Abstract

This article examines how repetition produces déjà vu-like recognition in non-deterministic narrative cinema. Focusing on David Lynch’s Lost Highway (1997), it argues that the film’s repetitions do not lead to conventional repetition–resolution, but instead organise an entangled binary narrative structure: two discontinuous diegetic modules remain distinct while becoming mutually implicated through recurring elements. Drawing on theories of repetition, modular narrative, impossible puzzle films, Nochimson’s account of entanglement, and psychological models of implicit memory, the article develops déjà vu-like recognition as a formal and phenomenological mechanism rather than as a literal empirical claim about spectators’ cognitive experience. Through episodic experience, single-element familiarity, and Gestalt familiarity, recurring phrases, figures, objects, spaces, and situations encourage viewers to perceive non-causal linkages between narrative fragments that resist stable resolution. The article’s contribution lies in reconceptualizing repetition, doubling, and ambiguity in Lost Highway not merely as textual motifs, but as mechanisms that sustain interpretive oscillation between recognition and uncertainty. A brief discussion of Bi Gan’s Kaili Blues (2015) serves as a limited comparative case, suggesting that this framework may also clarify other non-deterministic narrative structures in which repetition connects narrative modules without producing causal closure.