Lost Highway (1997)

Duistere David Lynch-film over saxofonist Fred Madison die onder mysterieuze omstandigheden wordt veroordeeld voor de moord op zijn vrouw Renée.

De centrale figuur in deze hallucinante film is Fred Madison (Bill Pullman), een saxofonist wiens huwelijk met Renee Madison (Patricia Arquette) bol staat van onuitgesproken spanningen. Die lopen nog hoger op wanneer ze anonieme videocassettes op hun stoep vinden, iets of iemand begluurt het huis en de bewoners. Op een van die cassettes zien we hoe Fred zijn vrouw vermoordt, ter dood wordt veroordeeld en in de dodencel terechtkomt.

Multiple Reviews: David Lynch’s “Lost Highway” is like kissing a mirror: You like what you see, but it’s not much fun, and kind of cold. 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 is to miss the point. What you see is all you get.

That’s not to say it’s without interest. Some of the images are effective, the soundtrack is strong and disturbing, and there is a moment that Alfred Hitchcock would have been proud of (although Hitchcock would not have preceded or followed it with this film). Hope is constantly fanned back to life throughout the story; we keep thinking maybe Lynch will somehow pull it off, until the shapeless final scenes, when we realize it really is all an empty stylistic facade. This movie is about design, not cinema.

It opens with two nervous people living in a cold, threatening house. They hate or fear each other, we sense. “You don’t mind if I don’t go to the club tonight?” says the wife (Patricia Arquette). She wants to stay home and read. “Read? Read?” he chuckles bitterly. We cut to a scene that feels inspired by a 1940s ‘noir’ (“Detour” maybe), showing the husband (Bill Pullman) as a crazy hep-cat sax player. Cut back home. Next morning. An envelope is found on their steps. Inside, a videotape of their house (which, architecturally, resembles an old IBM punch card).

More tapes arrive, including one showing the wife’s murdered body in bed. They go to a party and meet a disturbing little man with a white clown face (Robert Blake), who ingratiatingly tells Pullman, “We met at your house. As a matter of fact, I’m there right now. Call me.” He does seem to be at both ends of the line. That mirrors another nice touch in the film, which is that Pullman seems able to talk to himself over a doorbell speaker phone.

Can people be in two places at once? Why not? (Warning: plot point coming up.) Halfway through the film, Pullman is arrested for the murder of his wife and locked in solitary confinement. One morning his guard looks in the cell door, and–good God! It’s not the same man inside! Now it’s a teenager (Balthazar Getty). The prison officials can’t explain how bodies could be switched in a locked cell, but have no reason to hold the kid. He’s released, and gets his old job at the garage.

A gangster (Robert Loggia) comes in with his mistress, who is played by Patricia Arquette. Is this the same person as the murdered wife? Was the wife really murdered? Hello? The story now focuses on the relationship between Getty and Loggia, a ruthless but ingratiating man who, in a scene of chilling comic violence, pursues a tailgater and beats him senseless (“Tailgating is one thing I can’t tolerate”). Arquette comes to the garage to pick up the kid (“Why don’t you take me to dinner?”) and tells him a story of sexual brutality involving Loggia, who is connected to a man who makes porno films. 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“.

Does this scene have a point? Does any scene in the movie have a point? “Lost Highway” plays like a director’s idea book, in which isolated scenes and notions are jotted down for possible future use. Instead of massaging them into a finished screenplay, Lynch and collaborator Barry Gifford seem to have filmed the notes.

Is the joke on us? Is it our error to try to make sense of the film, to try to figure out why protagonists change in midstream? Let’s say it is. Let’s say the movie should be taken exactly as is, with no questions asked. Then what do we have? We still have just the notes for isolated scenes. There’s no emotional or artistic thread running through the material to make it seem necessary that it’s all in the same film together. The giveaway is that the characters have no interest apart from their situation; they exist entirely as creatures of the movie’s design and conceits (except for Loggia’s gangster, who has a reality, however fragmentary).

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). He made absolutely no attempt to explain this oddity. One woman would leave a room and the other would re-enter. And so on.

But when Lynch has Patricia Arquette apparently playing two women (and Bill Pullman and Balthazar Getty perhaps playing the same man), we don’t feel it’s a surrealistic joke. We feel–I dunno, I guess I felt jerked around. Lynch is such a talented director. Why does he pull the rug out from under his own films? I have nothing against movies of mystery, deception and puzzlement. It’s just that I’d like to think the director has an idea, a purpose, an overview, beyond the arbitrary manipulation of plot elements. He knows how to put effective images on the screen, and how to use a soundtrack to create mood, but at the end of the film, our hand closes on empty air.

For David Lynch, Lost Highway is a transitional film, of sorts, a limbo-like zone between the innocence redeemed in Blue Velvet and the innocence corrupted in Mulholland Drive.

An introduction to the Independent Film Festival of Boston screening of Lost Highway, which will take place on August 28 at 7 p.m. at the Somerville Theatre as part of the Hot Summer Nights series.

Patricia Arquette and Balthazar Getty in scene from Lost Highway.

Somewhere between Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive, perhaps by way of Twin Peaks, you might come across David Lynch’s Lost Highway. Some find it a bit of a detour in Lynch’s 10-feature career. Not many warmed to it when it came out in 1997 and it has a 53 on Metacritic. Some comments include “a virtuoso symphony of bad vibes,” from David Edelstein. “Soulless and dull,” says Manohla Dargis. Ebert and Siskel gave it two thumbs down. Lynch blurbed the downturned digits on the movie poster saying that it was “two more great reasons to see Lost Highway.”

But Michael Sragow in the New Yorker kind of liked it, calling it “a compelling erotic nightmare.” In my review in the Boston Phoenix I wrote “an exuberant tour of the dark side where the fact that things don’t make sense is exactly the point.” I must confess that I’ve used the word exuberant at least a hundred times since then but still have trouble spelling it.

Perhaps Jonathan Rosenbaum summed it up best, saying that “The enigmatic plot” is “shaped like a Möbius strip.” “Despite the shopworn noir imagery and teenage notions of sex this beautifully structured (if rigorously nonhumanist) explosion of expressionist effects has a psychological coherence that goes well beyond logical story lines, and Lynch turns it into an exhilarating roller-coaster ride.”

I like a critic who can include “rigorously nonhumanist” and “roller-coaster ride” in the same sentence.

Some reviewers decried the film’s depiction of women, and I can see why. There’s a crime scene that slips by in an eyeblink and is shot in a strobe-like style but if you look closely and are familiar with the case you can see it mimics the notorious Black Dahlia murder.

But the men don’t get off easy either, and it becomes clear, or at least it does to me, that Lynch is exploring the demonic depths of patriarchal power. He doubles down on the dynamics, themes, and structure of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, in which that toxic influence is analyzed and condemned. Maybe that’s why Lynch’s next features (The Straight Story excepted) would focus on women as protagonists who insist on their own identity in a world structured by misogynistic stereotypes.

So Lost Highway is a transitional film of sorts, a limbo-like zone between the innocence redeemed in Blue Velvet and the innocence corrupted in Mulholland Drive. Unlike the uninitiated protagonists in the other two films, Fred, a jazz musician played by Bill Pullman, starts out already pretty compromised and with a lot more challenges ahead, not least being a mind-blowing identity switch. But then again, none of the characters in the film have a fixed identity. And adding to this disorienting effect are some startling casting choices. These bizarrely familiar, out of context faces add a special diabolical resonance to lines like “We’ve met before, haven’t we.”

It is kind of like when Dennis Hopper makes his entrance in Blue Velvet. I saw that film in a Chicago screening room and I still remember the Chicago Tribune’s Dave Kehr cackling at the scene and saying, of course. There are at least three such epiphanies in Lost Highway, which I won’t spoil by identifying them, but I will say one is the most horrifying and hilarious example of the-call-is coming-from-inside-the-house horror movie trope. I should also note that for some of those performers this would be their last film, so perhaps Lost Highway is kind of a film maudit, cursed like Poltergeist or The Exorcist, and bringing ill fortune to some who participated in it.

Robert Blake in a scene from Lost Highway.

Take for example Louis Eppolito, who plays the policeman, Ed. He’s the one who asks Fred if he owns a video camera and Fred says no I like to remember things my own way. Eppolito might be familiar to you from playing heavies in films like Goodfellas (1990) and Bullets over Broadway (1994). In real life he was a cop with the NYPD and a few years after Lost Highway he and his partner were convicted of arranging and carrying out murders for the Lucchese crime family. He was sentenced to life plus 100 years in prison, where he died in 2019.

Be that as it may, what does it all mean? Usually very reticent about explaining such things, Lynch has offered a clue to interpreting this, perhaps his most cryptic film, in an interview in Filmmaker magazine. He says, “Sometime during the shooting, the unit publicist was reading up on different types of mental illness, and she hit upon this thing called ‘psychogenic fugue.’ The person suffering from it creates in their mind a completely new identity, new friends, new home, new everything — they forget their past identity. This has reverberations with Lost Highway, and it’s also a music term. A fugue starts off one way, takes up on another direction, and then comes back to the original, so it [relates] to the form of the film.”

Makes sense to me, kind of. It’s as helpful perhaps as Charlie Kaufman referring to maladies like the Capgras and Fregoli Syndromes in explaining his maddening cinematic provocations. So I agree with Rosenbaum, who advised people to see Lost Highway more than once before drawing any conclusions. To those seeing it for the first time, all I can say is, good luck.