David Lynch’s 1997 film Lost Highway is haunted by the specter of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), itself a ghost story on many levels. 2 In Lost Highway , the spectralizing effects of recording and communication devices are rendered in graphic form; characters get “lost in the medium,” in the delay of the lost time. No longer simply the art of the index, Lost Highway puts the virtual observer into the scene, and characters are caught in the movement of affect, a vertigo of suspense that is not simply epistemological in nature. Inspired by the spiral form that dominates Hitchcock’s masterpiece, Lost Highway explores the effects of living in a world characterized by paramnesia. A form of déjà vu , paramnesia is a disjunction of sensation and perception, in which one has the inescapable sense of having already lived a moment in time, of being a witness to one’s life. Consider Gilles Deleuze’s description of the crystal image, a key element of the time-image in Deleuze’s analysis of cinema. The crystal image is an indivisible unity of an actual image and its virtual image: