The French filmmaker Jacques Rivette once said that for all storytellers, “Scheherazade is our patron saint.” When Lynch says, “Endings are terrible things,” he also — perhaps unwittingly — invokes the mythic queen of One Thousand and One Nights, who perfected the art of the cliffhanger as a hedge against death. In its way, the circular Lost Highway was an attempt to make a film without a conclusion, and serial television, regardless of its risks and constraints, allowed him to defer, at least for a time, those terrible endings.
