February 27–March 6, 1997

movies

Lost Highway

The unconventional narrative of David Lynch's Lost Highway.

by a.d. amorosi

Patricia Arquette as Renee/Alice in Lost Highway.

David Lynch.

Directed by David Lynch
An October Films Release

recommended

Hassan I Sabbah, the 11th-century Persian religious agitator, said that nothing is true, everything is permitted. While he did not say this directly to me, I'm positive David Lynch picked up the call and made it his mantra. With his newest work (and "work" sounds best for this painter/director/sound designer/furniture maker) Lost Highway, we see that Lynch is still following Sabbah's light.

First things first. Critics have lined up to attack Highway's non-linearity, its nonsensical notions, its derivative pulp fantasies (the "new" genre he was hacking at while Tarantino was still doing bit parts on Golden Girls) and psychological meanderings. Huh? Either I've lost my ear or Lynch, co-screenwriter Barry Gifford (Wild At Heart) and I are psychic brethren, for within the realities of psychology and cinema this movie made sense to me. It is an unconventional narrative to be sure, but movies are supposed to be magic.

And Lynch is a great magician, with a painterly vision, an oddly comic storytelling style and a keen awareness of the absurd, not to mention the downright silly. Some of the laughs come easily — reactions to the stilted, minimal dialogue, the broadly played gangsters (like Robert Loggia's craggy Mr. Eddy), the dopey cops and the gloom-bringing homunculus played by Robert Blake as a menacing combo of Yoda and Dieter. And then there are the less comfortable moments: the morphing headwound victims and bloody deaths by coffeetable don't seem funny at first, butlike a screwball comedy slowed from 78 rpm to 16 rpm, they'll get you laughing — eventually.

The story of this "21st-century noir horror film" (as Lynch calls it) is circular. In rose-is-a-rose fashion, the first words we hear — "Dick Laurent is dead" — are also the last, uttered by Fred, a successful, suspicious sax player (played smirkingly by an elastic Bill Pullman).

Fred lives sparsely and geometrically with a moody brunette wife, Renee (Patricia Arquette), who's never home. Sex is dull. They don't talk. Until unmarked videotapes start arriving at their front door, tapes which show the interior of Fred and Renee's house, ending up in their bedroom as they sleep.

They call the cops. Fred and Renee go to a party. Renee is friendly with Andy (Michael Masse), a guy with a thin mustache who offered her "a job." As Fred gets drinks, he meets a mystery man (Blake). The next morning he arises to another tape. This one is slower, grainier and depicts a bloodstrewn mutilation of Renee by Fred. Fred doesn't remember this, so he goes to jail where he begins to not feel well. Perhaps it's that quickly darkening brown spot on his head.

A fast car pulls alongside a family headed by Gary Busey. His son Pete (Balthazar Getty) is blinded by bright light and smoke. Pete appears the next morning in Fred's cell with a bloody gash on his head. Fred is no longer there. Pete gets out of jail and goes to his garage job, where he takes good care of Dick Laurent/Mr. Eddy (Loggia), a man who's violently particular about driving safety. One day Mr. Eddy brings in his bad car and his bad blonde, Alice (Arquette). . .

And round and round it goes. The story of Fred leads to the story of Pete which leads back to the story of Fred again, with the mysterious Renee/Alice, Andy and his "job," Mr. Eddy, and, of course, the mystery gnome, appearing and reappearing in both, until we hear Fred's voice telling us, once again, "Dick Laurent is dead."

But we knew that.

That Lynch pulls all this off means you've suspended belief; you've accepted the possibility of a psychological condition (a "psychogenic fugue") in which a person faces such great fear or desperation that he lifts, separates and borrows cell structure. But, of course, fear and its distortions are the earmarks of Lynch's work, daring an audience to go further and deeper into his beautifully woven abyss.

With pulsing blackness (off-)balanced by electrifying bursts of daylight, Lynch scores the film with a swirl of claustrophobic industrial noise and the orchestrated electronic lounge Muzak of Angelo Badalamenti and Barry Adamson. Like those musicians, Lynch knows how to use space: the rests, the dark. The familiar images (heavy curtains, mistaken faces, characters moving in/out of complete blackness) have a Rococo edge.The grainy pixels of video seem etched. Renee's murder scene is alive with greyed stains against stark white and Munch-like painted mouths. Characters, as much in silhouette and shadow as not, don't just blur figuratively; Lynch shoots them so intensely it feels as if they're fraying and fuzzing. Pullman's already rubbery sweaty face seems distorted in each frame, while Arquette's naked body is sensually sculptural.

As with any great film noir filled with brazen women, jokey gangsters and frightened men, you always wonder why the lead characters don't know what's comin': Isn't Pete wary of the consequences of an overly made-up blonde who dates a mob guy? Why doesn't Fred steer his wife away from anybody with a wafer-thin mustache? And forget the phone trick, man, the dwarf in black without the eyebrows? Phew?!

But at the end of the Highway, Lynch's elusive cinematic language becomes an unseen character in its own right. Like a shadow with a sense of humor, it shrouds everything in darkness while tickling your head with unbearable shards of light.