LOST HIGHWAY
Director ~ David Lynch
Writers ~ David Lynch, Barry Gifford
1997, France-USA
Cast ~ Bill Pullman, Patricia Arquette, John Roselius
After the
negative reception to ‘Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me’, it took four
years for ‘Lost Highway’ to be made. Anyone who came to ‘Fire’ on
the back of the ‘Twin Peaks’ series might have been baffled, but anyone
familiar with his earlier work, circa ‘Eraserhead’, would not have been.
‘Fire Walk with Me!’ and ‘Lost Highway’ returned to Lynch’s
string of putting nightmares on screen, where a perpetual feeling of something
not right, occasionally darkly funny, often terrifying and unknowable was
predominant.
And Barry
Gifford: author of hip, oddball crime stories, the types that ended up in ‘Wild
at Heart’. Lynch came across the phrase “Lost Highway” in a Gifford novel
and the term inspired them to throw ideas back-and-forth until they came up
with the film story. Gifford felt ‘Lost Highway’ was more akin to ‘Eraserhead’.
Rober Ebert concluded of ‘Lost Highway’: “This movie is about design,
not cinema.” But
Lynch’s doctrine was cinema is and as a feeling and
vice versa: he insisted on it. ‘Lost Highway’s use of space, light,
genre tropes and music strike me a wholly cinematic. Lynch quote: “Some things
in life are not understandable, but when things in films are that way, people
become worried.”* In interviews and in his in his idiosyncratic interviews and monologues, it
is easy to see that to Lynch, the mystery was all.
Lynch has
spoken of his inspiration for ‘Lost Highway’ as also being the OJ
Simpson case and wondering how a murderer can go on after committing homicide.
The answer here is very much a typical Lynchian Rorschach test, but an answer
can be gleamed from three angles: reportedly, Gifford’s interpretation settled
on the psychotic break; Patricia Arquette read it as the delirium of a man who
hates women so much that he always ends up killing her in his fantasies; Lynch
said it is only a part that we see, which certainly aligns into the reading of
a reoccurring doomed romance Möbius strip narrative. There’s certainly a
reality break.
Scenes
set in Fred and Renee's mansion were filmed at Lynch's own home in the
Hollywood Hills but amended for the feeling that a home is a labyrinthian maze
of emotional detours and missteps. Certainly, its geography is hard to pin
down. For me? We meet them at the end of untroubled lust, she seems to be going
through the motions and he’s seething at the idea that she’s unfaithful:
there’s paranoia and caution on both sides, it would seem. The mystery man
signals not just Death, but homicide. Even at the gangster’s party, where they
meet, he roams freely chatting to people (a good gag), his essence is back home
and just waiting for Fred. Fred can’t handle that he’s murdered Renee – there’s
all these ellipses (the fade-to-blacks being synonymous with black-outs) – even
to the point where he can only see it on security camera footage. So he denies
reality and turns himself into a younger, hipper guy, a vision taken from earlier
Biker Youth Cool. But even then, the fabric of reality/film/genre keeps trying
to shake the frame and turn him into someone else when the truth almost becomes
too much even for his incarnation, Pete Dayton (Balthazar Getty). The truth
can’t be denied. And that’s where we leave Fred: with nowhere to escape to, he
tries to deny and morph again.
Lynch’s
ability to be retro-hip takes on a new level here, having made the underside of
picket-fence rock-n-roll Americana his own, with the shock of heavy metal
introduced in ‘Wild at Heart’ alongside Elvis. Here, Bowie, Smashing
Pumpkins, Trent Reznor, Lou Reed and Rammstein sit alongside a Lynch favourite,
This Mortal Coil’s ‘Song to the Siren’** and the Angelo Badalamenti and
Barry Adamson score. And there’s also Henry Rollins and Marilyn Manson in the
cast, all of which adds Nineties street cred, alternative artist validation to
Lynch’s visions. And then there was a ‘Lost Highway’ opera. Just the
scope of this musical interest and his being so embraced by such influential cult figures shows how remarkable Lynch’s appeal to
mystery was and still is for someone so unconventional.
There’s a
plague of toxic masculinity throughout Lynch’s work and ‘Lost Highway’ offers
a more claustrophobic exploration of this topic than the cartoonish but scary
malevolence of, say, Frank Booth or Bobby Peru. ‘Lost Highway’ is a
prime example of Lynch’s forte with the symbolic and opaque nightmare
narratives that rely upon their own internal logic and for the audience to negotiate
by intuition rather than coherence. Its studied, almost somnambulistic pace
quickly becomes fascinating and as immersive as it is baffling. As a
psychological and cinematic puzzle, not necessarily meant to be solved, always
surprising in its song choices and resistance to easy interpretation, ‘Lost
Highway’ pointed to Lynch gleefully going down the rabbit hole as far he
ever had and rewards multiple viewings
as a “psychogenic fugue”.
~
· * ‘Lost Highway’, Criterion booklet, excerpts from ‘Lynch
on Lynch’ 2005, Chris Rodley.
·
** We can be eternally grateful that Lynch did not
have the budget to buy ‘Song to the Siren’ as it gave us his work with
Julee Cruise and Badalamenti.
