Lost Highway (1997)
Directed by David Lynch
A tormented jazz musician finds himself lost in an enigmatic story involving murder, surveillance, gangsters, doppelgängers, and an impossible transformation inside a prison cell.
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The film has obvious parallels to Maya Deren's work (Meshes of the Afternoon) and to Lynch's later Mulholland Drive (2001), and it's interesting to note that on that subsequent film Lynch was able to smooth out his narrative a bit more.
This is played out in Lost Highway, with Fred suspecting Renee of marital infidelity and Pete encountering Alice's lust in conjunction with Mr. Eddy as a father figure--a transgression that implicitly ushers in guns, violence, and porn movies--but it's also configured exclusively in terms of noir stereotypes, many of them seemingly borrowed from Kiss Me Deadly (the Robert Aldrich movie, not the Mickey Spillane novel) by way of Barry Gifford, a novelist and noir specialist who collaborated with Lynch on the Lost Highway script.
The chief inspiration seems to have been such psychologically based films as Ingmar Bergman's Persona, in which main characters exchange personalities and identities in ways that are difficult to understand.
The narrative, such as it is, is circular -- a construction that was probably used to creepiest effect in the horror anthology film Dead of Night (1945), but which has come back into vogue recently with the success of Pulp Fiction (1994) and Twelve Monkeys.
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And if the entire movie represents some sort of dream state, it becomes impossible to distinguish which events, if any, are "real" and which are projections of the mind -- the obvious forebears of these sorts of narrative games are Akira Kurosawa's splendid Rashomon (1950) and Alain Resnais' lush Last Year at Marienbad (1961).
In my opinion, it's the most powerful evocation on film of the dissolution of sanity and identity since, back in 1969, Nicolas Roeg and Donald Cammel collaborated on the neglected Performance, an exuberant tour of the dark side where the fact that things don't make sense is exactly the point.
Luis Bunuel , the Spanish surrealist, once made a film in which two actresses played the same role interchangeably, in the appropriately titled " That Obscure Object of Desire " (1977).
And if the entire movie represents some sort of dream state, it becomes impossible to distinguish which events, if any, are "real" and which are projections of the mind -- the obvious forebears of these sorts of narrative games are Akira Kurosawa's splendid Rashomon (1950) and Alain Resnais' lush Last Year at Marienbad (1961).
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Without giving it away, let's just say that Lynch, adhering to the basic structure of Vertigo while obscuring it considerably, begins the film's second half by picking up the story of a horny young auto mechanic named Pete Dayton ( Balthazar Getty , perfectly aping Pullman's lethargic mannerisms).
Mostly, it's about the malleability of identity, and, as such, takes a few cues from Hitchcock's Vertigo.
David Lynch teamed up with writer Barry Gifford ( Wild at Heart ) once again for this baffling, yet pulsating thriller.
It turns out that Lynch came across the phrase while reading a noirish novel by Barry Gifford, who wrote the book that became Lynch's Wild at Heart (1990).
And Lynch, who wrote this with Barry Gifford (who wrote the novel "Wild at Heart," which Lynch also adapted), doesn�t seem hard pressed to explain it.
Working with co-screenwriter Barry Gifford (who wrote the novel Lynch's "Wild at Heart" was based on), the director has taken traditional film noir elements--gangsters, youthful hunks, jazz musicians, unattainable women and implacable fate--and tossed them into a conceptual Mixmaster.
Co-written by Lynch and Barry Gifford ("Wild at Heart"), the film is populated with paranoid characters whose lives intersect with weirdos, pornographers and underworld figures, who arrive from another dimension.
Except for the occasional inspired moment in Wild at Heart and Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, his few films since then have been paralyzed by the compulsion to be meaningful.
Blue Velvet's Frank Booth is reincarnated here as Mr. Eddy (Robert Loggia), Alice's violent and jealous boyfriend.
The second part reminded me of "Blue Velvet", David Lynch's other masterpiece.
The maker of such great works as "Blue Velvet" and "Twin Peaks" has finally run out of road.
This requires a scene where Arquette is forced to disrobe at gunpoint and stand naked in a roomful of strange men--an echo of Isabella Rossellini's humiliation in Lynch's " Blue Velvet ".
"Lost Highway," troublesome but also the director's most accomplished work since "Blue Velvet" a decade ago, takes this tendency even further.
"Lost Highway" is easily as good as or better than "Blue Velvet," the director's erotic mystery about the underside of suburbia.
When I heard Lynch's new movie, his first since 1992's Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, was to be titled Lost Highway, I assumed it was a reference to the famous Hank Williams hit of the same name.
From "Eraserhead" through "Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me," his films have focused on the creepy illogic of nightmare, on mocking reason and celebrating the dream state.
Lost Highway is the first feature since Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me from that master of eccentricity, director David Lynch.
Except for the occasional inspired moment in Wild at Heart and Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, his few films since then have been paralyzed by the compulsion to be meaningful.
(I'm less certain that this applies to Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, which I'll have to see again, but it clearly forms the affective core of Eraserhead, The Elephant Man, Dune, Blue Velvet, and Wild at Heart.)
And, while not approaching the brilliant level attained by Blue Velvet, Lost Highway is an improvement over the film maker's most recent two outings, Wild at Heart (based on the novel by Gifford) and Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me.
He’s not as prolific as many great directors — and he has almost as many misfires (“Dune,” “Lost Highway,” “Inland Empire”) as he has classics (“Blue Velvet”).
From "Eraserhead" through "Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me," his films have focused on the creepy illogic of nightmare, on mocking reason and celebrating the dream state.
But it is confusing and weirder but not better than Eraserhead and Blue Velvet.
Less actor-driven than The Elephant Man, Blue Velvet, or Wild at Heart, Lynch's Lost Highway also represents a watershed--not merely a defiant and confident comeback after five years of silence, but an audacious move away from conventional narrative and back toward the formal beauty of Eraserhead, Lynch's first (and best) feature.
The journeys to the seedy underbellies of Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, the play that John Merrick experiences in The Elephant Man revealing to him that he is an equal human being worth living on this earth, the pulpy, sleazy iconography of Wild At Heart exposing the modern romantic American Dream, and the Cold War, post-baby-boomer allusions scattered throughout Eraserhead‘s nightmare world.
Take the cultural cues in his work: the Rockwellian Americana he essays in Blue Velvet ; the Bauhaus by way of Antoni Gaudi of Dune ; or the late-Hitchcock identity puzzles he rejiggers in Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive --both commonly seen as satires of what they represent but more accurately described, perhaps, as simple, uncommented-upon representations of what a lower layer of consciousness might consider to be unadorned gospel.