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”.
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· * ‘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.
