(#WhatThomWatched number nine, number nine....)
Lost Highway
(David Lynch, 1997; Universal Studios disc)
A David Lynch movie is immune to spoilers, because anything anyone can say about it can’t really spoil the experience of watching it, preferably in the dark, alone with one’s own self-doubt. A viewer’s mind naturally organizes the images and events in a movie in an effort to understand “what really happened”; fascinatingly, in Lost Highway “what really happened” doesn’t really work out any differently even when choosing between two wildly different takes: Perhaps the movie’s events are supernatural, and a character (Bill Pullman as Fred Madison) physically morphs into a second human being (Balthazar Getty as Pete Dayton) — or, at the other extreme, Pullman is the only actual protagonist, and the second act is entirely within his own mind as he refuses to face the reality of what he’s done . . . . In either case, part of the genius of Lynch’s construction is that either interpretation fully works, not to mention interim interpretations, and there’s satisfaction to be derived from any of them. The eerie touches and the surrealist imagery (cabins that explode backwards, a demonic character that can be in many places at once), if taken literally, create a grim and evocative horror piece; but if those bits are put aside as merely internal window-dressing, and the various clues are seen as fractured memories and versions of events in Pullman’s life, a puzzle version of the same raw material emerges. And Lynch choosing to credit that demon as ”Mystery Man” seems to make the idea that he is presenting a mystery to be solved (or at least to hypothesize over) explicit.
So, Lynch uses Pullman and Getty to show us two versions of a man — Fred/Pete — matched to two wildly divergent interpretations of a woman, both played by Patricia Arquette: Fred’s wife Renee, and Pete’s lover Alice. If we treat Arquette’s extremes as representational of Fred/Pete’s uncomprehending view of her, we can imagine a real Renee/Alice who is actually in the middle — a person with a bit of a sordid past which Fred/Pete has blown so out of proportion in his mind that he becomes unhinged. Or perhaps Renee/Alice is simply the mild-mannered Renee version, and a psychotic Fred has invented the Alice version out of whole cloth in his mind (along with a matching Pete version of himself) in order to justify a horrific murder. Also doubled, and somehow connected to Renee/Alice’s past (which is either Renee’s one-time mistake or Alice’s pervasive and hidden evil side), is the brutal character played by Robert Loggia and called Dick Laurent in Fred’s world and Mr. Eddy in Pete’s; he is a bad man in either of Fred’s interpretations of Renee/Alice (either victimizing her or in cahoots with her). If Renee is an innocent, then nothing that happens in the Alice (second) story is necessarily real; Fred has invented Pete to reinvent himself as the victim: younger, weaker (though perversely more sexually potent), a naïf who is goggle-eyed by the violence of Mr. Eddy and his goons. (Does the “lost highway” represent a road, however twisted, which connects these events into a logical narrative, or would do so if it could be followed?)
Reminds me of:
Given that this is the first film in a loose, thematically connected work that Lynch calls his Hollywood Trilogy, it’s worth asking if this entry says anything in particular about the Valley (or the film business) other than just using it as a setting. There’s no question that Lynch and production designer Patricia Norris capture the dry, washed-out feel of Southern California, and a car chase in the hills that ends in violence shows off the terrain, the Angelenos’ second skin (their automobiles), and the Hollywood sign to boot. Characters and events cover some typical terrain as well: slick parties in nouveau riche decor stuffed with beautiful people, or darker meetings in these same rooms with slimy men and desperate, exploitable actresses. But that’s all surface: Lynch’s two main characters and their dual aspects apiece also say something about acting, about people we pretend to be and whether or not we accept others at face value or suspect that they, too, are hiding their true selves. The Fred/Pete “character” had to be played by two actors, somewhat similar visually (enough to be accepted as one person) but distinct in very clear ways as well (age/potency being the most obvious). The Renee/Alice “character,” in contrast, is played by one actress, possibly lending support to the idea above that her two sides really represent two extreme (and external) views of the same actual person, two warring misinterpretations of the same evidence as parsed by an observer. All of this plays to what happens in Hollywood all the time, the business of the movies, and of how we as audience accept (or not) the characters we see, even to the extreme of burying our own shame and revulsion and projecting our worst selves onto pop culture, both movie roles and the actors themselves. I’m not sure I’ve uncovered anything interesting or true in these guesses, but when I get around to (re)-watching Mulholland Drive and (for the first time) watching Inland Empire, I’ll revisit this exercise and see if there aren’t some similar themes.
Whole transitions between scenes read exactly like snippets of of early avant-garde film experiments, like something from Rien Que Les Heures by Cavalcanti, or Le Retour á la Raison by Man Ray. The enigmatic final few seconds (of Fred driving on the “lost highway”) inspired me to walk through them frame-by-frame, just to see how Lynch had constructed it to invoke maximum unease. Each frame has clearly been carefully composed and selected, and watching it this way only deepened the final mystery for me — it opened up even more questions. This scene and others (such as the torn-away, impressionist frames of the bloody bedroom) are masterpieces of implication, microseconds-long works of art.
It was also hard not to compare the inciting incident of this film — mysterious videotapes, arriving anonymously in the mail, that appear to show surveillance of the characters’ home — with Michael Haneke’s devastating Caché, which begins the same way.
But then — the guilt!
This is a strong role for Arquette, up for awards this season with her decade-spanning role in Richard Linklater’s Boyhood. Lynch creates a rich and complex dual-extremes-of-Woman character, but of course it’s difficult to watch her be so passively submissive and sexualized as Renee, and then so evilly duplicitous and sexualized as Alice — two pernicious clichés of a male’s sexist view, which of course is exactly the point. Arquette does a phenomenal job but that doesn’t make it any less uncomfortable.
The opening credits — rolling against a rushing highway — are clearly connected to the openings of Ulmer’s Detour and of Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly, both dark and perverse films noir that Lynch must be evoking. (This winds up in the BTTG section because, I’m ashamed to admit, I’ve never seen Detour. Kiss Me Deadly, yeah, several times, and I’ll gladly watch it again for a #WTW one of these days, but that doesn’t excuse the other.)
Pitch:
There’s so much more here than I can possibly work with in a blog post, not to mention so much that I’m not smart enough to understand. Lynch really isn’t for everyone and this movie is particularly prickly and unpleasant. But his ability to create something that invites interpretation and rewards close viewing makes me grateful for the experience, and kept me mulling over it all for weeks. If you’re similarly inclined, you won’t need a pitch.
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