Balthazar Getty wears a Timex

I keep coming back to the cut. David Lynch's Lost Highway, from 1997, spends its first act on Fred Madison, a jazz saxophonist played by Bill Pullman, who is convicted of murdering his wife and sent to death row - and then, one morning, the guards open his cell and a different man is sitting inside it. His name is Pete Dayton, a young auto mechanic from Van Nuys, played by Balthazar Getty, and he gets released, bewildered, to his equally bewildered parents. Lynch never explains how one man became the other. The movie just keeps driving.

Somewhere in Pete's half of the film, the camera pushes all the way in on his wrist until the dial swallows the frame. What's on it? Not some statement piece you'd expect a director to plant in a macro shot. It's a Timex. A champagne sunburst dial with full Arabic numerals you can read at a glance, thin baton hands and a central seconds hand, a date window at three, and the TIMEX wordmark sitting plain under twelve. No model line anywhere on the dial, so the brand is as far as the watch will tell you.

And that's the joke, or the point, or both. Pete is the ordinary half of a split identity - a guy who fixes Cadillacs where Fred brooded over a saxophone - and Lynch hands him the most legible object in a film built to be illegible. A cheap, working-class Timex you can actually read, strapped to the one character who has no idea who he is.