Lost Highway. (18.)
Directed by David Lynch. 1997.
Starring Patricia Arquette, Bill Pullman, Balthazar Getty, Robert Loggia, Gary Busey, Natasha Gregson Wagner, Richard Pryor, Jack Nance and Robert Blake. Out on Blu-ray from Criterion Collection on October 31st.
Lost Highway is David Lynch’s lost masterpiece. It’s perhaps not quite on a par with Eraserhead, Blue Velvet or the third season of Twin Peaks but it’s damn close. That it resides in comparative obscurity astounds me more with each viewing. To some degree, I guess this is due to it being made in the nineties when Lynch was suffering a critical backlash after the popular success, initially, of the TV show Twin Peaks and the Cannes triumphs of Wild At Heart. But, the film he made before this, Twin Peaks Fire Walk With Me, has been the subject of a sweeping critical re-evaluation (actually a critical U-turn) after its hostile reception. So why not this? It’d be a much more worthy recipient. How can Mulholland Drive be held up as his best film when it’s, to some degree, just an inferior remake of this? Lost Highway is inscrutable and perplexing, compelling and seductive, crazy sexy and that bit nastier than his usual.
“You and me, mister, we can really out ugly them sumbitches, can’t we?”
This is not standard Lynch. The 50s influence is minimal. Apart from Nance, the old gang is not here. However disturbing, Lynch’s surrealism has always had a cosy side to it. There’s a comforting reassurance even when it was peddling despair. There’s none of that here, no safety net. It’s not without hope, it may even have a happy ending (though it may not) but this is harder, more unrelenting than other Lynch films. Lynch has managed to get through an accumulation of 76 years presenting himself as a wide-eyed schoolboy with a passion for handiwork and craft projects. The projects were always disturbing, but his passion for them was entirely wholesome. Lost Highway though is his awkward adolescent phase, his emo film.
Take the music. As anyone who’s seen the Woodstock 99 documentary Trainwreck knows, the late nineties were a horrible time for American music. The contemporary artists selected to help out here are a class above the nu-metal crybabies at Woodstock, but they are straightforwardly, conventionally Goth: Trent Reznor, Rammstein, The Smashing Pumpkins and Marilyn Manson, who even gets himself on screen as a porn star. (Was never much of an MM fan even before the sexual abuse allegations, but he does contribute a fantastic version of I Put A Spell On You to the soundtrack.) The most effective music choice is David Bowie’s I’m Deranged and This Mortal Coil’s version of Song To The Siren which is the film’s (kind of) love theme. The Bowie track, which opens and closes the film over the shot of the camera whizzing down an empty road at night, is taken from his concept hyper-cycle Outside and fits in with the goth mood. Song To The Siren, though suitably haunting, has always struck me as too well-known and a bit too obvious. There is no subterfuge or subversion to his musical choices here; there's no equivalent of using Roy Orbison's In Dreams in Blue Velvet, no teasing out of a menace that had previously been hidden. All the music is taken at face value.
The major obstacle viewers have with the film is the opaque narrative. Put simply it is structured like an uneven tryptic. In the first third of the film, we are inside the troubled marriage of saxophonist Fred Madison (Pullman) and Renee (Arquette.) This ends with Fred on Death Row and complaining of headaches until one morning the guards arrive to find young car mechanic Pete Dayton (Getty) sitting in his place. The authorities have to let him go and resume his daily life. His part of the story is full of reversals and mirror images of the earlier section. Where Fred is impotent, Pete is priapic; when he hears one of Fred’s sax solos on the radio it turns it off because it hurts his ears; he enters into a relationship with a blonde version of Arquette, the girlfriend of gangster Mr Eddy (Loggia). In the final part of the film, Fred returns to replace Pete and is allowed to find some kind of solace/ vengeance/ retribution.
Lost Highway is so inscrutable because whereas with Mulholland Drive there seems to be a clear divide between the dream sequence and reality, which is not the case here. Though there are theories that Pete is Fred's fantasy or fugue state projection, the film consistently suggests that he is a separate character, living out a life in another part of town. But then why does he have to suffer for Fred's sins? There seem to be various highways of karmic retribution running through the film, but it’s never quite clear who’s being redeemed. And honesty, I’m not much bothered either way. After twenty-five years, I'm no nearer understanding what is going on, but I am sure that that something IS going on, that David Lynch knows what it is and that’s good enough for me.
“Dick Laurent is dead.”
A problem with the film perhaps is that the opening section detailing the horrible claustrophobic tension in the Pullman/Arquette marriage is so strong it overshadows what follows. This has got to be some of Lynch’s very finest work. Michael Haneke pinched one of its most effective ideas – the anonymous videotapes filmed inside their home that appear on their doorstep – for Hidden.
After that, the section with Pete Dayton seems lightweight. Balthasar Getty is almost uniquely charmless but probably few others could fill the role as well. Such innate chumpness is hard to find. (His only other contribution to movie history is getting killed by Juliette Lewis in Natural Born Killers.) As the baddy, Mr Eddy, Robert Loggia starts quite badly. In his first outburst, the scene where he attacks a tailgater, he’s too full on and comes across as trying too hard. I know it’s supposed to be comic but it doesn’t work. After that though he turns it around and by the end, he is very effective.
In the final section, wife killer Fred Madison is given some sort of redemption. Just like Laura’s father in Twin Peaks, Lynch suggests that he wasn’t responsible for his actions, that some malevolent force made him do it. Lynch's desire to absolve perpetrators of domestic violence and murder of their guilt is decidedly sinister.
“Give Me Back My Phone.”
Politeness and manners really can work wonders. Lynch's golly-gosh veneer of innocence allows him to get away with all kinds of things. Arquette is supposedly so shy that she doesn't like being naked even when she's alone. Yet in Lost Highway, she is stripping off throughout and for reasons that are hardly essential to the plot. Lynch has her walking starkers through a desert at night; forced to strip at gunpoint, disrobing before moving off-screen and focusing on the slow-motion oscillation of her boobs during sex. It is entirely gratuitous but, with the arguable exception of Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct, I can't think of an actress who has been so effectively sexually objectified.
“I just want to jump on and let you know I’m glad you’re doing ok.”
Lost Highway was the start of his LA trilogy, which concludes with the grungy indulgence of Inland Empire and peaks, according to the consensus, with Mulholland Drive. Now MD has many fine attributes – Naomi Watts’ finest performance; Angelo Badalamenti’s most alluring theme; the inexplicably entrancing Club Silencio sequence – but it is just a TV pilot with a tacked-on ending. The greatest trick David Lynch ever pulled was persuading people that there was a meaning to Mulholland Drive. Some of its most unsettling moments, when people are together in a room and then one of them moves outside of the frame and disappears, were first employed in Lost Highway. Highway is the better film if for no other reason than it is more cinematic. Take the opening and closing scene, the camera racing down a dark desert road at night as the credit slap into the screen. That’s nothing to it really but it is intoxicating and thrilling – at the beginning, it hypes you up for what is to come and at the end it sends you out feeling fired up.
"There are nine people down here. You can ask seven of them and if you get that price from one of them, I'll let you speak to the other two."
Lost Highway would be the last film of a number of its cast: Blake, Nance and Pryor. Blake’s career was ended by his arrest for killing his wife (he was acquitted but found liable in a civil case) but he went out on perhaps his best role, the Mystery Man. In contrast, neither Nance nor Pryor, both of whom are in the scenes set in the garage Pete works at, are given much to do. But, if for nothing else, you should love this film because it gives Pryor a classic final line on which to bow out of his long and estimable career, "There are nine people down here. You can ask seven of them and if you get that price from one of them, I'll let you speak to the other two."
Supplements
New 4K digital restoration, supervised and approved by director David Lynch, with a new 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack
Directed by David Lynch. 1997.
Starring Patricia Arquette, Bill Pullman, Balthazar Getty, Robert Loggia, Gary Busey, Natasha Gregson Wagner, Richard Pryor, Jack Nance and Robert Blake. Out on Blu-ray from Criterion Collection on October 31st.
Lost Highway is David Lynch’s lost masterpiece. It’s perhaps not quite on a par with Eraserhead, Blue Velvet or the third season of Twin Peaks but it’s damn close. That it resides in comparative obscurity astounds me more with each viewing. To some degree, I guess this is due to it being made in the nineties when Lynch was suffering a critical backlash after the popular success, initially, of the TV show Twin Peaks and the Cannes triumphs of Wild At Heart. But, the film he made before this, Twin Peaks Fire Walk With Me, has been the subject of a sweeping critical re-evaluation (actually a critical U-turn) after its hostile reception. So why not this? It’d be a much more worthy recipient. How can Mulholland Drive be held up as his best film when it’s, to some degree, just an inferior remake of this? Lost Highway is inscrutable and perplexing, compelling and seductive, crazy sexy and that bit nastier than his usual.
“You and me, mister, we can really out ugly them sumbitches, can’t we?”
This is not standard Lynch. The 50s influence is minimal. Apart from Nance, the old gang is not here. However disturbing, Lynch’s surrealism has always had a cosy side to it. There’s a comforting reassurance even when it was peddling despair. There’s none of that here, no safety net. It’s not without hope, it may even have a happy ending (though it may not) but this is harder, more unrelenting than other Lynch films. Lynch has managed to get through an accumulation of 76 years presenting himself as a wide-eyed schoolboy with a passion for handiwork and craft projects. The projects were always disturbing, but his passion for them was entirely wholesome. Lost Highway though is his awkward adolescent phase, his emo film.
Take the music. As anyone who’s seen the Woodstock 99 documentary Trainwreck knows, the late nineties were a horrible time for American music. The contemporary artists selected to help out here are a class above the nu-metal crybabies at Woodstock, but they are straightforwardly, conventionally Goth: Trent Reznor, Rammstein, The Smashing Pumpkins and Marilyn Manson, who even gets himself on screen as a porn star. (Was never much of an MM fan even before the sexual abuse allegations, but he does contribute a fantastic version of I Put A Spell On You to the soundtrack.) The most effective music choice is David Bowie’s I’m Deranged and This Mortal Coil’s version of Song To The Siren which is the film’s (kind of) love theme. The Bowie track, which opens and closes the film over the shot of the camera whizzing down an empty road at night, is taken from his concept hyper-cycle Outside and fits in with the goth mood. Song To The Siren, though suitably haunting, has always struck me as too well-known and a bit too obvious. There is no subterfuge or subversion to his musical choices here; there's no equivalent of using Roy Orbison's In Dreams in Blue Velvet, no teasing out of a menace that had previously been hidden. All the music is taken at face value.
The major obstacle viewers have with the film is the opaque narrative. Put simply it is structured like an uneven tryptic. In the first third of the film, we are inside the troubled marriage of saxophonist Fred Madison (Pullman) and Renee (Arquette.) This ends with Fred on Death Row and complaining of headaches until one morning the guards arrive to find young car mechanic Pete Dayton (Getty) sitting in his place. The authorities have to let him go and resume his daily life. His part of the story is full of reversals and mirror images of the earlier section. Where Fred is impotent, Pete is priapic; when he hears one of Fred’s sax solos on the radio it turns it off because it hurts his ears; he enters into a relationship with a blonde version of Arquette, the girlfriend of gangster Mr Eddy (Loggia). In the final part of the film, Fred returns to replace Pete and is allowed to find some kind of solace/ vengeance/ retribution.
Lost Highway is so inscrutable because whereas with Mulholland Drive there seems to be a clear divide between the dream sequence and reality, which is not the case here. Though there are theories that Pete is Fred's fantasy or fugue state projection, the film consistently suggests that he is a separate character, living out a life in another part of town. But then why does he have to suffer for Fred's sins? There seem to be various highways of karmic retribution running through the film, but it’s never quite clear who’s being redeemed. And honesty, I’m not much bothered either way. After twenty-five years, I'm no nearer understanding what is going on, but I am sure that that something IS going on, that David Lynch knows what it is and that’s good enough for me.
“Dick Laurent is dead.”
A problem with the film perhaps is that the opening section detailing the horrible claustrophobic tension in the Pullman/Arquette marriage is so strong it overshadows what follows. This has got to be some of Lynch’s very finest work. Michael Haneke pinched one of its most effective ideas – the anonymous videotapes filmed inside their home that appear on their doorstep – for Hidden.
After that, the section with Pete Dayton seems lightweight. Balthasar Getty is almost uniquely charmless but probably few others could fill the role as well. Such innate chumpness is hard to find. (His only other contribution to movie history is getting killed by Juliette Lewis in Natural Born Killers.) As the baddy, Mr Eddy, Robert Loggia starts quite badly. In his first outburst, the scene where he attacks a tailgater, he’s too full on and comes across as trying too hard. I know it’s supposed to be comic but it doesn’t work. After that though he turns it around and by the end, he is very effective.
In the final section, wife killer Fred Madison is given some sort of redemption. Just like Laura’s father in Twin Peaks, Lynch suggests that he wasn’t responsible for his actions, that some malevolent force made him do it. Lynch's desire to absolve perpetrators of domestic violence and murder of their guilt is decidedly sinister.
“Give Me Back My Phone.”
Politeness and manners really can work wonders. Lynch's golly-gosh veneer of innocence allows him to get away with all kinds of things. Arquette is supposedly so shy that she doesn't like being naked even when she's alone. Yet in Lost Highway, she is stripping off throughout and for reasons that are hardly essential to the plot. Lynch has her walking starkers through a desert at night; forced to strip at gunpoint, disrobing before moving off-screen and focusing on the slow-motion oscillation of her boobs during sex. It is entirely gratuitous but, with the arguable exception of Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct, I can't think of an actress who has been so effectively sexually objectified.
“I just want to jump on and let you know I’m glad you’re doing ok.”
Lost Highway was the start of his LA trilogy, which concludes with the grungy indulgence of Inland Empire and peaks, according to the consensus, with Mulholland Drive. Now MD has many fine attributes – Naomi Watts’ finest performance; Angelo Badalamenti’s most alluring theme; the inexplicably entrancing Club Silencio sequence – but it is just a TV pilot with a tacked-on ending. The greatest trick David Lynch ever pulled was persuading people that there was a meaning to Mulholland Drive. Some of its most unsettling moments, when people are together in a room and then one of them moves outside of the frame and disappears, were first employed in Lost Highway. Highway is the better film if for no other reason than it is more cinematic. Take the opening and closing scene, the camera racing down a dark desert road at night as the credit slap into the screen. That’s nothing to it really but it is intoxicating and thrilling – at the beginning, it hypes you up for what is to come and at the end it sends you out feeling fired up.
"There are nine people down here. You can ask seven of them and if you get that price from one of them, I'll let you speak to the other two."
Lost Highway would be the last film of a number of its cast: Blake, Nance and Pryor. Blake’s career was ended by his arrest for killing his wife (he was acquitted but found liable in a civil case) but he went out on perhaps his best role, the Mystery Man. In contrast, neither Nance nor Pryor, both of whom are in the scenes set in the garage Pete works at, are given much to do. But, if for nothing else, you should love this film because it gives Pryor a classic final line on which to bow out of his long and estimable career, "There are nine people down here. You can ask seven of them and if you get that price from one of them, I'll let you speak to the other two."
Supplements
New 4K digital restoration, supervised and approved by director David Lynch, with a new 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack
- The alternate uncompressed stereo soundtrack
- Pretty as a Picture: The Art of David Lynch, a feature-length 1997 documentary by Toby Keeler featuring Lynch and his collaborators Angelo Badalamenti, Peter Deming, Barry Gifford, Mary Sweeney, and others, along with on-set footage from Lost Highway
- Reading by Lynch and critic Kristine McKenna of excerpts from their 2018 book, Room to Dream
- Archival interviews with Lynch and actors Patricia Arquette, Bill Pullman, and Robert Loggia
- English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
- PLUS: Excerpts from an interview with Lynch from filmmaker and writer Chris Rodley’s book Lynch on Lynch
- New cover by Fred Davis
