Taking a long, strange trip down 'Lost Highway'

I should preface this post by making it clear that I am an enormous David Lynch fan. I've liked or loved nearly every film he's made (except for the abominable Dune). I even staged an albeit ill-fated improv comedy show centered around his work.

Sadly, he doesn't make movies enough. It's been eight years since his last feature (Inland Empire) and lately he's been more preoccupied with making music and promoting his beloved transcendental meditation.

But the few films he has made really stick with you. Blue Velvet is one of my all-time favorites, but I also really enjoy 1997's Lost Highway, which I re-watched last night.

It's one of his creepiest, sexiest and most challenging films and I spent much of its running time marveling that it was even made let alone comprehending what I was watching.

Lynch has literally never had a hit film and to say that his films are often inaccessible is major understatement. And yet, somehow, he has survived in an industry where true creativity and artistry is so often discouraged -- but I digress.

As far as Lost Highway is concerned, it was largely dismissed by critics. The late Roger Ebert, who I usually admire, wrote: "It's a shaggy ghost story, an exercise in style, a film made with a certain breezy contempt for audiences. I've seen it twice, hoping to make sense of it. There is no sense to be made of it. To try to miss the point. What you see is all you get."

Robert Blake in Lost Highway

I couldn't disagree more. Curiously, Lynch himself says the film was inspired in part by his preoccupation with the O.J. Simpson trial.

"What struck me about O.J. Simpson was that he was able to smile and laugh. He was able to go golfing with seemingly very few problems about the whole thing. I wondered how, if a person did these deeds, he could go on living. And we found this great psychology term—'psychogenic fugue'—describing an event where the mind tricks itself to escape some horror. So, in a way, Lost Highway is about that. And the fact that nothing can stay hidden forever," Lynch once said.

The plot starts off pretty normally at first. Bill Pullman plays a musician who suspects his smoking hot wife Patricia Arquette is being unfaithful to him. 

Then they start getting packages at their apartment with videotapes showing the exterior (and then later the interior) of their home. These sequences are infused with a foreboding sense of dread and this is before anything all that disturbing really happens.

Pullman's character eventually is confronted by one of the creepiest little demon characters I've ever seen (played by real-life convicted murderer Robert Blake) who I think is a manifestation of his subconscious. At a party, Blake's mystery man tells Pullman he's been in his house and says he's actually there right now.
In one of most memorable, surreal moments in the movie he demands that Pullman's character "call him" to prove it.

This all leads to Pullman's character being found guilty for the Arquette character's grisly murder and we see him anguished as he sits on death row awaiting execution for his crimes. If things weren't weird enough already -- they get even more complicated.

Essentially our hero (the Pullman character) loses his mind and his identity and the movie abruptly takes a turn where Pullman's character appears to have been reincarnated in the body of a younger, James Dean-type mechanic. 

This character (played by Balthazar Getty) gets involved with a blonde femme fatale (also played by Arquette) who is involved with a terrifying mobster called Mr. Eddy (played by the great Robert Loggia).

Some scenes, particularly in the second half, feel like vignettes, like Mr. Eddy's brutal beatdown of a tailgater or some very frank yet erotic sex scenes featuring Arquette. By now I presume only the most hardcore Lynch loyalists would be poised to stick with the movie because it stretches the boundaries of narrative cohesion to really risky lengths.

Still, if viewed in a manner similar to Lynch's more popular Mulholland Drive, you can come to understand that second half as being more a manifestation of the Pullman's character's paranoid delusions about his wife. The films conclusion is purposely opaque as Lynch as been very vocal about preferring mysteries that continue after the movie has ended.

My interest in this man's work will likely also go on endlessly as I am always finding new and intriguing threads in his movies ever time I see them. So, take a trip down Lost Highway, it's not for the faint of heart or for people who like their narratives linear but it is definitely a film that gives you a lot to chew on.