Review: Lost Highway (1997)

I have no damn clue at all what the hell I just watched, but it was something really incredibly, wonderfully, disturbingly bizarre.

It's probably apparent by now that I am a fan of that most singular of American filmmakers, David Lynch. For some reason, the sheer disturbing, neo-noir/horror world that his films inhabit is a place I love to continually visit. What that says about me I don't exactly know, but what I do know is that 1997's Lost Highway, Lynch's seventh feature, is possibly the film that, more than any of the other film's of his I've seen so far, sums up his creative ethos.

Trying to describe the 'plot' of a David Lynch film is more or less an exercise in futility. And no more does this apply than to Lost Highway. In a way, it's appropriate that one of the main characters is a jazz saxophonist, since I'm of the opinion that Lynch's films are like jazz music: They take a melody that is easily recognizable on the surface (man suspects wife of cheating, kills her, goes to jail for it), and then transforms it into something entirely and completely foreign from the original melody. And here, Lynch does exactly that.

Here, Lynch spools forth a strange, otherworldly tale of Bill Pullman's jazz saxophonist named Fred Madison, who has begun to have the sneaking suspicion that his wife, Renée Madison (Patricia Arquette), is having an affair. After being told via his house intercom that "Dick Laurent is dead", and finding several increasingly invasive video tapes of his home (including footage of he and his wife in bed together), plus a strange encounter with a Mystery Man (Robert Blake) at a party. The next day, Fred wakes up alone, only to be greeted with another tape...showing him feasting on his wife's dismembered corpse. He is swiftly arrested and sentences to death, and while on death row, is tormented by headaches and visions of the Mystery Man and a burning cabin in the desert.

The first portion of the film is a slow, burning rope of tension and unease, with every moment carrying with an unnatural aura of wrongness, from Fred's downright violent saxophone playing in a nightclub (shot entirely by seizure inducing strobe light), to an unsettlingly explicit sex scene between Arquette and Pullman, to the Mystery Man's appearance at the party and Fred's visions, it feels like a distorted horror movie, steadily building until the abrupt cut off.

Which leads us to the next portion of the film, where, the police go to check in on Pullman's cell, and find that Pullman has vanished, and instead a young 20-something named Pete Dayton (Balthazar Getty) in his place. Upon returning home to his parents, he goes back to work, and the film shifts tone again, becoming a somewhat more relaxed film. Here, it almost feels like Lynch is revisiting the overly pedestrian and Americana world of Blue Velvet, but through a grungy, oversaturated LA lens. Here, Pete works at a local mechanics shop (run by Richard Pryor, in his last film role), and fixes the car of local mobster Mr. Eddy (Robert Loggia, in a role that very much recalls Dennis Hopper's Frank Booth from Blue Velvet), a man who seems amiable enough, but will beat people to a pulp for tailgating him. After a typical day, Pete runs into Mr. Eddy's girlfriend, the oversexed Alice (Patricia Arquette...again). He quickly enters into an immensely sexual affair with her, and then the film once more begins to darken. As Pete is seduced by Alice's raw sexuality, she eventually confesses that she desires to run away with him, and escape her life as porn actress/mistress to Mr. Eddy, who is subtly revealed to be porn producer Dick Laurent. The film truly begins to unravel, as Pete's world begins to become more and more nightmarish, culminating in him assaulted with headaches, and accidentally splitting a man's head open on a coffee table, while Alice looks on. They drive to the desert, where they find a cabin (that Alice insists belongs to a friend). After having sex in front of the car's headlights, Pete expresses his desire to stay with Alice's, repeating "I want you", over and over. Alice merely scoffs, coldly telling him "You'll never have me", before walking into the cabin. Pete gets up to follow in shock, only to be revealed to have transformed back into Fred. Fred stumbles into the cabin, only to be greeted by the Mystery Man again, video camera in hand, who proclaims that Alice's real name is Renée, and demanding that Fred tell him his name. Fred escapes, stalking out at the Lost Highway hotel, where he sees Renée and Mr. Eddy having sex. He hunts Mr. Eddy down, and, with the help of the Mystery Man, slits Eddy's throat, and shoots him in the head, leaving him in the desert. Fred races to his home, pressing the intercom and saying "Dick Laurent is dead", before being chased by the police. As the footage of Fred in the car begins to flicker wildly between increasingly disturbing images of Fred's distorted and burned face, the film cuts to the same racing shot of the highway at night that opened the film, over which the credits role.

Now, since I've basically divulged the entire movie to you, I feel appropriate that I should at least propose a theory (and one that seems to be the closest to Lynch's own). It feels as if this film is showing two sides of the same event, a fact hinted by Fred's line that he wishes to remember things "The way I remember them, not necessarily how they actually happened". It seems to me that Renée was indeed having an affair, with one Dick Laurent. Fred, enraged, brutally murdered the two of them, and, while in prison, attempts to reimagine the scenario as he would have preferred it. He is no longer Fred, but now the more innocent and gullible Pete. Renée is now the deceitful and sexual Alice, who conned an unwitting Pete into helping her commit murder. Of course, the universe is about to let Fred get away with that, and traps him in a horrific loop, where he's forced to eternally live these events (both the real and the fictional), in a loop. Whenever he tries to pretend he's innocent Pete, the Mystery Man will appear, forcing him to commit acts of brutality as Fred again, and so on and so forth for all of eternity.

At least, that's how I see it.

As always, Lynch's use of cinematography, sound design, music and editing is top notch. Peter Deming, who would later collaborate with Lynch on Mulholland Drive, gives the film a muted, morose quality. Almost all color is dark and dreary, giving it the feeling of a strange, oppressive darkness. Lynch's sound design is as demented and innovative as always, and coupled with longtime collaborator Angelo Badalamenti's original score, and a disturbing swirl of Marilyn Manson, Nine Inch Nails, Rammstein and others, it helps further the constant aura of disturbing otherworldly darkness and perversity that lurks throughout the film.

The acting is solid, albeit a tad stiff on Arquette's part (although that plays to her favor in the second half), and everybody is giving good performances, as is typical for Lynch. Nobody's quite "real" in that sense. In many ways, Lynch encourages making the characters feel like strange, disjointed fragments of real people, which helps further contribute to the disjointed, fragmented narrative of the film.

Of course, being a Lynch film, the content can be quite assaultive at times, particularly the sexual content, which is shot with the now-trademark unnerving mix of eroticism and horror that pretty much every Lynch-directed sex scene has ever had, except now turned up to an eleven. And what little violence is here is astonishingly brutal (a man gets his head cleaved open by a coffee table, a woman gets chopped up and eaten), which makes the film feel even more unsettling. It's an ugly, brutal film, which has no qualms with showing this kind of stuff, yet, also making it the absolutely least gratifying and appealing stuff in the universe.

So, I think it's safe to say that Lost Highway is one of Lynch's most uncompromising and obtuse films, and yet, that's why I liked it. It might not be the Lynch film I go to as my default, but it's a ride I'm willing to take again, and submerge myself into it's dark world. Of course, it's up to you to decide if you yourself can take it on it's own terms.

5 out of 5 stars, but most certainly not for everyone.

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[nightcrawlerfan]

...to quote Daffy Duck, "Well, this is surreal."