© 2010 by James Clark
In the course of the bewildering machinations propelling David Lynch’s Lost Highway (1997), two detectives have under surveillance a young man enjoying a full calendar of trysts. One says, “Fucker gets more pussy than a toilet seat.” What we have to keep in mind with this is that toilet seats are unisex. And what the film demands we notice is that the two most conspicuous male protagonists (one of whom under surveillance) are pussies, hardly worth a shit to the (same) woman in their life.
Patricia Arquette, the actress inhabiting the sensibility of the leading lady, is a natural for a femme fatale hearkening to the noirs of yesteryear. She is so natural that, with hair styling and color, eye makeup and high beams from a stolen car (whose owner’s murder she has presided over) lighting up some lovemaking in the desert night, she fires out at us Jeanne Moreau’s “Jackie,” doyenne of the roulette tables in Jacques Demy’s noir, Baie des Anges (Bay of Angels) (1963). She is a gambler, for sure; but, confining yourself to classical noir history, you’d never guess what kind of gambler she is.
At the outset she is “Renée,” slinky, well-groomed, with dark cascades in tune with a black silk dressing gown with 1940s shoulders and kabuki-inspired high-heeled slippers. Her voice is barely audible, seemingly in the throes of some oxygen inversion. She is quietly, very quietly, at a partial ease as she tries a meeting of minds with her partner, an avant-garde jazz sax player. “You don’t mind that I’m not going to the Club tonight?” The latter, whom we saw in an opening shot looking very anxious, tries to match her dreamy tone, but still seems a bit at a loss in inquiring, “What are you gonna do?” “Stay home. Read,” is her hollow reply. In a setting of cool moderne furnishings and impressive interior dimensions, she has about her the aura of Mike Hammer’s Velda, in the noir, Kiss Me Deadly (1955). But her partner, that shaky guy? One thing though, he does share Mike’s position on reading. “Read? Read what?” She laughs. He overhastily follows up with, “I can still make you laugh.” “I like to laugh, Fred.” “That’s why I married you.” Then he’s at the Club, doing a John Coltrane “Love Supreme”-like outcry (accompanied by a light show [feebly] attempting to simulate a nuclear explosion) that has us wondering where the money came from to buy those digs.
A few nights pass, comprising a whole era for both of them. The first, still at the Club (“Luna Lounge”) has him trying to reach her on the phone, unsuccessfully, and doing some Soccer-Mom emoting. On arriving home, he’s nonplussed to find her asleep on the bed. (One other thing, in moving about the cavernous, unlit property, he passes—several times, in this fateful forty-eight hours, a red curtain that reminds us of the intro-format getting a workout four years hence in Mulholland Drive, and five years hence, in Rabbits.) She had said, in the awkward estrangement apropos of “reading,” “You can wake me up when you get home.” On getting her cue, the next day, she takes off her covering and hits a profile right out of one of the tonier skin mags. That cue comes after her having picked up, at the sun-drenched doorstep, not only the morning paper (her subscription) but a big Manila envelope containing a videotape that they find to consist of only a pan shot of their Bauhaus-inspired extensive frontage. She supposes it’s a realtor’s come-on; he, as always, looks worried. Then they have their conjugal moment, notable for some fine burnished skin tones, her carriage-trade charms, and her tapping a well-manicured, black-nailed set of fingers on his back, as he nearly faints imagining she’s sharing an orgasm. (She had first positioned herself by him as if she were going to have a pap smear.) Early next morning, she’s picking up the paper again, and another big envelope, having been wakened by “some dog barking.” (Being troubled by a dog would resurface in Rabbits, in light of the prissy horrors deposited by Henry the Eraserhead.) Apropos of the current dog, “Fred Madison,” the husband and suburbanite careerist in need of PR amplification, frets, “Who the hell owns that dog?” a question his prototype would never have asked, and in a Neighborhood Watch timbre he’d never have produced. This time the video gets inside and shows them asleep in bed. Something’s getting into their face here; and it is Renée who comes up with that tributary of common sense that Velda was far from immune to: “We have to call the police.” Two of LAPD’s finest—obese and dyspeptic—assure them of their support, and the man of the house gives them a sendoff with, “Thanks, guys.”(Renée’s bored but cogent gambit has been spooked from the range of vision. She has heard herself peep, “Someone broke in and filmed us!” Looking at her shamefaced diminishment, you know she’s asking herself, “Did I just do this?”) There is a sudden cut to a pool party that night, where two indicators are served up to us. She’s a bit tipsy, and has latched on to an “Andy,” a smoothie with a pencil moustache who had arranged a job for her some time ago. “What kind of job?” Fred asks, his not excellent day having popped his blood pressure. “I can’t remember,” she tells him, so quietly you know she doesn’t care if he hears it or not. He has no trouble hearing a little guy with beady eyes and Kabuki makeup declaring, “We’ve met before, haven’t we?” “I don’t think so.” “At your house… I’m there right now.” (There is some business where he calls home and the same unpleasant sprite is on his phone. Before losing our temper or studying up on parapsychology or quantum singularities, let’s hold fast to the real-time drama of being consumed with self-contempt by reason of caving into fear. “How did you do that?” Fred’s easily mystified conscience demands. “Ask me,” demands the last thing Fred wants to confront. [He had mentioned to the cops, “I like to remember things my own way. Not necessarily the way they happen.”] This little device of personification spins into play from out of the shadowy anathemas of noir disappointment. Its emergence at this point prepares us for bigger circumspective trauma hurtling into view very soon.) “You invited me. It is not my custom to go where I’m not invited.” Then he’s dragging her away (“We never should have come here in the first place”), and snapping at her, “How’d you meet that asshole Andy, anyhow?” “We met at a place called “Monks,” is her deliberately unhelpful reply. They reach their pad, where something disturbs the electricity for a second or two. He shouts out the horror cliché, “Stay in the car!” finds nothing but darkness and that red curtain in the house, runs out, finds her by the front stairs, laughing at his fearful histrionics, they enter, lose touch altogether in that murky place of outrage, he comes into view with another Manila envelope, puts in the tape and sees himself by her on the bathroom floor, her blood everywhere, especially over his face and hands.
Was it plausible that he killed her? A humiliated coward might boil over in that way. Lynch presents, in countless filmic churnings, a critical mass of refusal to meet the rigors of personal and public history. There certainly might be a precedent for such a couple coming apart like that. But you have to trust where the carnal punch resides in this specific action, and it points to a far better put-together Velda bidding Hasta la vista to a Mike who should have been a one-night stand.
Be that as it may, his pals on the force as seen the day before are into beating a confession from him, he’s found guilty and spends some uncomfortable days on death row. That would be the probability twist of Fred-the-Mike’s homicidal disarray rolling into a policing farce, constant from ages past. That would not be an episode leading anywhere. But in the interests of establishing a monumental torrent of weakness in face of which Velda, a free agent and working girl once more, must tread, the routine of the jailhouse requires jolting. Replacing Mike in his cell comes “Pete” (perhaps prematurely housed with murderers). (Crying for an aspirin, Mike is referred to by one of the prison staff as “That’s one fucked-up wife killer.” His partner quips, “Which one?”and they laugh, mirthlessly.)
Pete is soon released to his parents, who could be likened to Ozzie and Harriett on Quaaludes. They all live in a sitcom bungalow on a sitcom street, the upshot of which is to heavily reinforce that American thrust of the proceedings given a first injection by the tribulations of Renée and Fred. Pete leaves for an evening of recreation with some hormonally overt friends—highly recommended by Mom and Dad, who are watching a black and white documentary on strawberry cultivation—which culminates in a bowling alley the staidness of the patrons prompting the clique to flourish their outlaw propensities, and Pete reconnects with the girl in his life who is very concerned about the nasty bump he is sporting on his forehead. “What happened to your face?” “I don’t know.” The next cut provides us with a pretty good guess about the disfigurement. We’re at a garage, Pete walks in and is greeted in the same way his garage mechanic pal, Nick, greeted Mike on being released from the hospital. (“Mikey! Mikey Boy! You’re back! How you doin’, Mikeeey?”) “Pete! Where you been? It’s good you’re back! Pete’s back!” (Nick, as you’ll recall, received a very nasty bump on the head when Soberin loosened the jack holding up a chassis he was working under.) And who should turn up, in a black limo, not unlike Soberin’s, but “Mr. Eddy” (and a couple of his hit men) who wants his main (garage) guy, Pete, to go for a spin to put the big hearse back in sync. (Pete soon goes under the hood and puts things right, just as Mike had defused two accelerator bombs—the second by way of Nick’s equipment.) Like Soberin, Eddy (or “Dick Laurent”) is an ethical rhapsodist. On this occasion, he and his men beat some hapless tailgater within an inch of his life, destroy his car and leave the writhing, crying mess with an injunction to restudy the driver’s manual. “Tailgating is one thing I cannot tolerate.” Before pulling away from the garage, he offers Pete a porn video (“Give you a boner”). Pete says, “No, thanks.”
Although we’re in Mike Hammer’s hometown, the nitty gritty of this scenario wants to show something beyond Angelinos copping out. Tailgating the quirky scene described above is one of Lynch’s patent epiphanies, bringing into force a new regime and endowing Lost Highway, surely the director’s most maligned work, with a claim to be one of his best. Eddy had mentioned to Pete he was bringing in his Caddy for some special care, and we see the latter, being approached by the former, under a chassis in a classic set-up for disaster. Only, this is a delayed disaster; and before it strikes we’re in for some real excitement. One of the hurdles to overcome in this movie (as was the case in Inland Empire) is its smattering of pop music cladding, arranged to make us slightly sick. The opening conduit for the credits includes evocation of expansive, wide-open highway adventure by Lynch’s longstanding musical assistant, Angelo Badalamenti; but it is an offering interrupted by David Bowie’s “I’m Deranged,” which leans on us—like a badly trained dentist—by way of a tremulous vocal line, putting us in mind of a choir boy’s mid-week or an NGO spokesperson. There are several other moments, by the likes of Nine Inch Nails and Rammstein, that seemingly take as their pretext a challenge to keep a straight face while mimicking at length the voice of Bella Lugosi. The aural design here would be negation of a rootedness of American sensibility. In welcome contrast to such puerile misjudgment, the scene coming up involves Mr. Eddy and his big black Cadillac convertible, a passenger, and Lou Reed’s rendering of “This Magic Moment.” The passenger is Renée, now a platinum blonde and doing business under the name of “Alice Wakefield.” (That Velda’s last name was “Wakeman,” is only the beginning here.) Pete has rolled out from under his job and, as a Fender base growls and the lead guitar covers not only its last frontier in California, but the whole skein of American desire for well-being, Alice, in torrid slow-motion, locks into Pete’s eyes, while Reid sings, “This magic moment, so different and so new/Was like any other, until I met you./And then it happened/It took me by surprise/I knew that you felt it too/I could see it by the look in your eyes./Sweeter than wine/Softer than a summer’s night/Everything I want, I have/Whenever I hold you tight./This magic moment,/While your lips are close to mine,/Will last forever/ ’til the end of time,” and we understand, beyond any doubt, but prior to any articulation, what Renée is about. The shoreline of Balboa Beach at sunset, with Santa Carolina off in the haze, takes over, as does a brief and dark impromptu by Badalamenti. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJuya9mJcDA&feature=related Then she’s arriving, alone, back at the garage, at quitting time. She steps out of a cab, made for her, not only in its big “V” on the door, but its full name, “Vanguard.” She walks up to Pete and asks (very quietly, but with more oxygen than she ever generated with Fred), “How’d you like to take me to dinner?” The Valley boy—he had convalesced by way of Bossa Nova—replies, with the same fear in his eyes we’d seen in Fred’s, “I don’t know…” (Uneven-tempered Mr. Eddy had anointed him, “You’re my man, Pete.”) Alice smiles and counters with, “Why don’t I take you to dinner?” He stands pat with, “Look, I don’t think this is a very good idea.” But his eyes belie all this. She graciously defers, goes to the phone to get back on the Vanguard, and Pete changes his mind. She smiles at him with laughing eyes and says, “Maybe we should just forget about dinner.” Their love-making includes eye contact and they breathe freely. Her nails are hot white, and she does not tap on his back. A quick cut forward shows her on the top level walkway of a motel, calling to him, “Hey! Up here! C’mon up, Baby! I already got the room!”
This latter register of the bleachers does not reach us by happenstance. It coheres perfectly with the unspoken motives of the song, “This Magic Moment.” Blonde or brunette, this Velda is an aristocrat in spades. And precisely for that reason she exudes a carnality closely meshed to the comings and goings of workaday life, especially the wheeling, dealing life of democratic America. Early in the nineteenth century, a French visitor to America swallowed hard in face of the rowdy rage for material well-being evinced by a population whose near-ancestors could never have dreamed of aspiring in that way. His aristocratic distaste for the “smallness” of that socioeconomic invention did not prevent him well recognizing the consequentiality of a topspin of sensual intensity sporadically trailing above the “miserable” specifics threatening an end to what he called “greatness.” The writer’s name was Alexis de Tocqueville, and, sad to relate, he lacked the balls to provide serious coherence to his sense of the drama of democracy in America. There was nothing trivial about having Renée opt for reading; nor was it meaningless chat having her and her overmatched husband being close to “the Observatory.” Departing that insolvency (Tocqueville marvelled at Americans’ tolerance for bankruptcy) whose fiscal vectors would make a shell game seem transparent, she resurfaces with a long-standing business associate (the strong points each bringing to their axis not hard to fathom) under the name of not only recent icon Velda, but distant inspiration, Alex (Alice). Alex lacked the sensual finish to be more than a catchy, classical rational academic. Alice is another matter, apropos of drawing a bead upon the desert overriding “greatness,” here referred to by Lynch as a “lost highway.”
Mr. Eddy (a competitive Beast with [very] unsteady purchase upon sufficient rightness) would have had to absorb many losses (not all of them monetary) in the course of tolerating the reckless overtures of his invaluable (and not indifferent) partner (her account to Pete of coming into his lair and his orbit—a harsh initiation, to be sure—does not lack eerie appreciation, though she denies it when reproved by him) and far from constant lover. Alice knew that, events having spun as they did, little Pete could not be accommodated within the creative accounting systems she had pressed upon Eddie. On recognizing her consort’s being well aware of the boy’s tailgating his procession, she brings to “Baby’s” attention their being confronted with some messy conflict, profit-taking and intercontinental travel (a new frontier). The boy is soon reduced to tears, but she plays him along, for the sake of her next stand, to the point of his murdering Andy and chauffeuring her to a fence she knows at a desert cabin. During the early stages of this wonderfully nuanced positing of the cost of working into an intractable market, she with difficulty quells her own fear (blue nail polish becoming compelling); then, sucking it up, rattles off details of a clinically conceived assault and heist, and, with Andy’s head geometrically sliced by an unforgiving countertop and large screens showing one of Andy’s oeuvres wherein she is depicted being screwed from behind (her eyes looking only at the camera) saunters down, in déshabillé, from his bedroom, says (as if watching a nice double play) “Wow,” and, looking squarely at Pete, capsulizes things as they stand, with, “You killed him.” He becomes ill on noticing a photo showing her twice, as Renée (the touchstone for his trauma of replacing Fred) and Alice, with Eddy and Andy (the most eerie paste-up on record, of the longing of Demy’s young girls of Rochefort. She levels a gun at his head, then lowers it, gives him a sunny smile, hands it to him and says, as if sending a toddler off to school, “Stick it in your pants.”(On going upstairs to find a bathroom, the disintegrating recruit comes to a room numbered 26 [like Henry’s room in Eraserhead] and glimpses Alice mounted from behind, thus constituting an almost unrecognizable version of Balthazar. The actor playing Pete has somehow come up with the name, “Balthazar Getty,” leading us, particularly as to Jean Paul Getty, one of the foxiest exponents of American capitalism, with a sort of microchip of Tocqueville’s unfinished task in synthesis.
She says, “C’mon, Baby,” leading him to Andy’s car. Then, later in the drive, Peter fuming, “Where the fuck are we goin’?” she explains, “We have to go to the desert, Baby.” As they race toward their destination (“He’ll give us money and passports for all this shit”) it rips apart in a fireball in slow-mo like Soberin’s beach house, then recombines to stand as a cabin in the desert, the fence not in. By this time, Pete straggles behind her, like a child wishing he’d had a mother who’d warned him about talking to strangers. All the affinities, from his point of view anyway, have vanished forever. She gives him a knowing smile—like the ones Jean Moreau, as “Jackie” the gambler, in Demy’s Bay of Angels, gives her young “lucky charm” and disenchanted paramour—and says, “We’ll have to wait.” She sets up the high beams, turns up the radio, and, with a night wind blowing, they love one more time. (This has been preceded by a grim and fearful Pete’s trembling, “Why me, Alice? Why choose me?”) She is on top, and as she savors the night and what there is to gain from such a prop-heavy, ritualized action—something she knows a lot about—her platinum mane twisting wildly, her eyes lower toward his and the comedy strikes them and her mouth, and at that moment she astonishingly comes to a visual unity with the “Jackie” of thirty-four years before. Swept up in all this as far as his courage allowed, her lover repeats, “I want you.” She whispers into his ear, as he lies exhausted in the sand, “You’ll never have me.” She strides away to the cabin, and that is the last we see of her.
A postscript ensues, Fred having replaced Pete. He’s almost literally trampled by the not easily pleased harbinger of the lost highway (especially incensed that Fred can’t see Renée as the one; Alice—from his [questionable] discernment having pushed the envelope to tatters), races off in Andy’s car (it was almost a write-off, anyway) and comes to something called The Lost Highway Hotel. (If only writing it down could really make it happen!) In Room 26, Renée is servicing Eddy (somewhat like the girl with Henry in Eraserhead). At about this point we realize, the master having made her final exit, a bit of unsellable but still edifying fireworks remains to be burned as a last lugubrious and laughter-accessible note. Fred, the jettisoned artiste, has been brought to bear (his righting instincts being what they are) upon the unrespectable source of his former wife’s line of credit. After she tucks him in and kisses his forehead, Renée drives off in Andy’s car, and Fred goes on to smash Mr. Eddy in the head with a gun and load him into the trunk of his own limo. Then he drives off to a remote part of the desert, opens the trunk, is attacked by a revived Dick Laurent, slashes Dick’s throat, and with blood coursing from various sources, the latter checks out on a Blackberry-like device proffered by the short Conscience (before shooting him) a sort of highlight reel of his swinger’s haven (“Monks”), including Renée in various manoeuvres, one, with him, laughing off a snuff-movie scene). He nails his resentful, bathetic adversary with faint praise, in terms of, “You and me, Mister. We can really out-ugly those sons of bitches.” (Though it hits our eyes for only a microsecond, and in very low light, Fred’s murder scene entails the kind of mutilation [of Renée] that the 1946 Beast would apply to that deer he just had to chase down. Some years later, Eddy would do it again, applying his Mercedes’ 1400 horsepower engine to chase down that tailgater.) On delivering the news of Eddy’s death to his own intercom (to iterate how recurrent such entities as Fred and Dick are), he is pursued by several police cars and runs into a roadblock to fatal effect (screaming like a baby), one last reason, if you needed it, distinguishing him from Mike.
That wrap-up would be all well and good, were it not for lumping Dick Laurent (Le Roi, King) with slaves like Fred (Mad. Ave. Madison) and Pete (Dayton, only for datin’). The presence of someone so old, so crude and so ridiculous would seem to preclude involvement in a love story with a breathtakingly beautiful and seriously innovative young woman. But the powers of the Beauty and the Beast adventure only come into their own where you find yourself thinking, “Impossible!” Mr. Eddy’s loopy and embarrassing eccentricities, as portrayed in our first meeting him apropos of the deadly Californian sin of tailgating, immediately put him out of the running as a romantic lead. But let’s look closely at another first, at Alice’s first day on that job she is so cavalier and evasive about. Pressed by a now directly targeted and terrified prudish (ascetic) Pete to explain the hold her improbable consort exerts upon her (“How did you get in with these fuckin’ people?”), she takes him (and us) back to her initial interview. Dressed in a tightly fitting black skirt and suit top, her hair pinned short, she is made to wait in a cavernous foyer, sternly overseen by a well-tailored and no-nonsense front office foot soldier, and also in the incongruous presence of a shirtless, big black guy lying on his back pressing Olympics-level weights. She is finally shown in, and, with Marilyn Manson (judging from the name, an offspring of Cocteau) delivering a cataclysmic version of “I Put a Spell on You” to fill out the den, she has a big revolver put to her head by a living prop reminiscent of the light-standard holders in Belle et Bête. Mr. Eddy, seated, and intent upon her, makes a slight hand sign for her to get started; she slowly peels herself out of that tight covering and, following the slightest of eye signs downward, walks up to him with a mixture of fear and thrilling and kneels to show what she can do.
“I put a spell on you
Because you’re mine.
I can’t stand the things that you do
No, no, no. I ain’t lyin’.
No.
I don’t care if you don’t want me
’Cause I’m yours, yours, yours anyhow.
Yeah, I’m yours, yours, yours.
I love you. I love you.
I love you. I love you.
I love you. I love you.
Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!
Yeah…
I put a spell on you.
Lord! Lord! Lord!
’Cause you’re mine…
I can’t stand the things that you do
When you’re foolin’ around.
I don’t care if you don’t want me.
’Cause I’m yours, yours, yours anyhow…”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XFEWO2CEIdQ
Despite the lack of full explicitness, Pete gets the jist (“You liked it, huh?”[Alice had used the gambit, “Meow, meow” in informing him by phone one night that she couldn’t show because she had to “go somewhere” with Mr. Eddy]) even as he swears to her his love, from which—in a flash—she comes back with, “Should I call Andy?”(to put the new business plan in motion).
At the Lost Highway Hotel, in Room 26, Renée gently makes love to Eddy, straddling him, tucks the sleeping lion in with a simple kiss, and departs. Fred and his importuning shadow of ascetic rectitude put an end to the aged lover’s errant venture, and in this they resemble the spouse jealous of a talking horse in the 1961 comedy, Mr. Ed. Not only Balthazar (the “Mathematical Donkey” of Bresson’s film) but the butchered baby in Room 26 in Eraserhead thereby flit across their vigilantism. From out of this surreal overdrive, Renée’s/Alice’s/Belle’s bidding adieu to an unviable royalty finds itself capitalized over and above Andy’s reluctant contribution.
Robert Blake (the mystery man) is truly the most fascinating aspect of this movie. In my opinion, he is Fred’s idea of the devil. He has supernatural powers and he feeds off the sins of mortals. The scene at the party is one of the creepiest movie scenes I’ve seen, yet at the same time it is hilarious. The way the music and party noise fade when the mystery man and Fred walk up to each other created a bizarre and surreal exchange. Another great scene of the movie is when Mr. Eddy and the mystery man call Pete together. “Yeah Pete, I just wanted to jump back on and let you know I’m glad your ok!” Click. That was great. And of course, I can’t talk about the great scenes in the movie without mentioning the “tailgating” scene. Robert Loggia (Mr. Eddy) is a master. So much is said in this amazing thesis that has expanded the boundaries for this great film, one of the master’s finest.
David:
I’m usually fairly loathe to wander outside the text and talk about real-world correspondences, but given Blake’s subsequent murder trial and civil suit, it’s undeniably striking to witness the similarities between Bonnie Lee Bakley and Renee / Alice (and Laura Palmer for that matter!) . Bakley’s murder certainly lends an added creepiness to Blake’s presence in this film, which was a damn sight creepy enough in 1997.
David,
Thanks for the comment.
Robert Blake is perfect for portrayal of the generally sensed to be worst thing in your face— beside which the blues would be fun. What I particularly like about that presence of his is its proneness to go out of whack, turning Fred, for instance, into a murderous prude whose “ugliness” Eddy recognizes in the shambles of his own bestiality.
Best,
Jim
Enjoyed the you tube clips! The party scene was the most memorable part of the film, with that brief phone exchange a hoot. This is an amazing piece of writing.
Joe, the phone scene is rightly the most famous in the film, but again we are faced here with the overlap of what is real and what isn’t. But I understand you didn’t make any clarification anyway.
Joe,
I’m glad you agree some real footage contributes to understanding here. It allows us to appreciate how Alice quels her fear and proceeds toward more than a job.
Thanks for the complimentary remark.
Best,
Jim
James:
You seem to be positing that Renee / Alice is the “real” protagonist, or at least the fulcrum around which the film rotates. With the caveat that Lynch’s works offer seemingly endless avenues of interpretation, I have to gently disagree. To me, it seems readily apparent that the film is an exploration of Fred’s / Peter’s psyche, and how the former is drowning in a raging denial about a heinous crime he has committed.
If Lynch has a favored “setting,” it’s surely the headspace of a character wracked by guilt and denial. The narrative and thematic patterns that surface in “Lost Highway” are all over “Mulholland Drive” and “INLAND EMPIRE,” but also “Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me” and his short telefilm, “Tricks” for the “Hotel Room” anthology. For all the film’s surrealism, the noir elements are used in a fairly standard manner here. The male is the Detective, the woman is the Femme Fatale. There’s not much mucking around in the gender aspects of the genre, as in “Mulholland” or “EMPIRE”. I don’t think one can describe “Lost Highway” as Renee / Alice’s story anymore than “Mulholland Drive” is Rita / Camilla’s story. The film might spend time with her, even diverge briefly to follow her viewpoint (as in te conspicuous “audition” scene), but the narrative (such as it is) follows Fred / Pete. It’s about his confusion, his fear, his revelations.
I’ve heard (apocryphally, perhaps) that Lynch described “Lost Highway” partly as a response to the O.J. Simpson trial. As I recall it, the director was sort of astonished that the former football star (who, in Lynch’s view, was clearly guilty) didn’t *act* like a guilty man, with his talk of finding the “real killer”. The notion that someone could so compartmentalize their mind and construct an elaborate fantasy to explain a horrible crime, well… you can see the outlines of that in “Highway” fairly clearly.
I agree that this harrowing film is an under-rated work in the director’s oeuvre. With “Mulholland,” which I regard as a masterpiece, it took me several viewings to truly absorb what Lynch was doing. With “Lost Highway,” I felt like I understood it immediately. Not that additional layers haven’t revealed themselves to me on later viewings, but for a film that is so unconventional, narratively speaking, I find it astonishing that I connected with it right away. At bottom, it’s about a man who has not accepted that he let evil into his house (head) and then acted on it, taking the life of someone he used to love. It certainly has the darkest ending in Lynch’s filmography, offering not the happy-yet-uneasy ending of “Wild at Heart” or “Blue Velvet,” the transcendent release of “Eraserhead” or “INLAND EMPIRE”, or even the peace-in-death of “The Elepant Man,” “TP:FWWM,” or “Mulholland Drive”. By the end, Fred / Peter is still trapped on that highway, his head is still bursting with repressed horrors. He’s going to repeat it–starting the cycle again by telling himself, “Dick Laurant is dead”–until he internalize what he done.
Andrew,
Thanks very much for your “gentle disagreement,” which is, in fact, a stimulating challenge.
You remark with surprise that it was not hard to “connect” with “a film that is so unconventional, narratively speaking.” I must gently disagree with your notion that Lynch is an artist only formally unconventional. He is, I think, and his recourse to surrealism telegraphs this, a major artist, which is to say, a remarkably unconventional thinker as well as stylist. Were he primarily intent upon the likes of Fred and Peter, he would be an also-ran rather than, with Alice, in “the Vanguard.”
Best,
Jim
Jim:
True enough re: Lynch’s “unconventional thinking”. For me, the narrative unconventionality of Lynch’s films (especially “Eraserhead” and the “Highway / Drive / Empire” cycle) isn’t a barrier precisely because Lynch’s psychological intuition is so keen. What we know about his creative process reveals an artist who works by the seat of his pants and is constantly open to the unexpected ideas and moments and images and sounds and inspirations. And, somehow, it *works*, at least for me. I often don’t understand what precisely is going on in his films, but it always feels “right” (or horribly “wrong” in all the right ways.) For all his notorious oddball personal traits, I think Lynch understands the human condition as few living film-makers do, and I wouldn’t hesitate to call him one of the world’s most empathetic directors, in the sense that he is fascinated with what goes on inside the human mind, and, just as importantly, he is highly skilled at creating potent, evocative light and sound representation of such mental landscapes. If any other director attempted the sort of formally fractured works that Lynch turns out, they would land with a thud. His films soar, and the formal fracturing *doesn’t even matter.* (Or, often, they only enhance the dream/nightmare atmospherics.)
“For all his notorious oddball personal traits, I think Lynch understands the human condition as few living film-makers do, and I wouldn’t hesitate to call him one of the world’s most empathetic directors, in the sense that he is fascinated with what goes on inside the human mind, and, just as importantly, he is highly skilled at creating potent, evocative light and sound representation of such mental landscapes.”
Brilliant, brilliant stuff here Andrew!!!!
“You seem to be positing that Renee / Alice is the “real” protagonist, or at least the fulcrum around which the film rotates. With the caveat that Lynch’s works offer seemingly endless avenues of interpretation, I have to gently disagree. To me, it seems readily apparent that the film is an exploration of Fred’s / Peter’s psyche, and how the former is drowning in a raging denial about a heinous crime he has committed.”
Andrew I am inclined myself to support your interpretation here, and must tip my cap to you for what is surely one of the most remarkable comments I’ve ever read in the blogosphere in over two years of involvement. Of course it comes as a follow-up to one of the most probing essays ever posted at this site. James Clark, in this nearly 5,000 word “thesis” (yes David, that is the correct word here) has dared his readers to look at this film in a new light. And with his tellingly persistent correlation with the cinema of Jean Cocteau – I like this one here particularly:
“Dressed in a tightly fitting black skirt and suit top, her hair pinned short, she is made to wait in a cavernous foyer, sternly overseen by a well-tailored and no-nonsense front office foot soldier, and also in the incongruous presence of a shirtless, big black guy lying on his back pressing Olympics-level weights. She is finally shown in, and, with Marilyn Manson (judging from the name, an offspring of Cocteau) delivering a cataclysmic version of “I Put a Spell on You” to fill out the den, she has a big revolver put to her head by a living prop reminiscent of the light-standard holders in Belle et Bête.”
–he again makes a stellar case for Lynch’s conscious or unconcious homages.
Of course, it has never ceased to astonish me that Robert Blake’s murder trial put a real life bizarre underpinning on this work, as Lynch couldn’t even have planned it this way. And I like the broaching of O.J. Simpson too here in this discussion, and Lynch’s unknown-till-now position on it. But, as alluded to here the essence of LOST HIGHWAY is basically to allow us to enter the mind of a man who killed his wife, so the connection is a more than a persuasive one. But, the issue here is far more complicated. As we would expect from Lynch, the movie does not attempt to peer into the mind of an every day, ordinary person. Instead, we are invited to experience reality through the eyes of a formidable and grisly murderer. Hence, the people we see may not be real, but symbols, a position I myself support.
Sam,
Sorry to be so slow answering, but it’s been a hectic day with the other biz.
Of course Lynch is very focused upon human consciousness. But I think his findings are about massively redefining “empathy.” Whatever the case, and this is what is so exciting about your and Andrew’s reasoning, this is a forum able to come upon perhaps irreconcilable differences and count that impasse as grounds for further reflection. There are myriad moments in Lynch’s films when a state of parallel lives and their respective priorities is salient. It provides the works with not only an ominous keynote, but marvelous wit. There is a moment in Wild at Heart, which (along with Blue Velvet) I’m getting ready to present, when Sailor, doing some self-effacing, says to Lula, “Here you are, with a parole-breaking murderer,” and she ripostes, “Don’t exaggerate. You’re only a man-slaughterer.”
Best regards,
Jim
There’s really so much more in this deliciously marathon missive that I loved too. This sentence here for example:
“Pete is soon released to his parents, who could be likened to Ozzie and Harriett on Quaaludes. They all live in a sitcom bungalow on a sitcom street, the upshot of which is to heavily reinforce that American thrust of the proceedings given a first injection by the tribulations of Renée and Fred.”
And the posting of the lyrics to “This Magic Moment” (Jay and the Americans” would take notive here too!) and the followup analysis.
Yeah, Jim you are right to pose that this film was critically-maligned upon release, but unlike WILD AT HEART, which seems to have gone in the opposite direction, this one has steadily gained in stature.
Here is a lengthy excerpt from Brad Stevens’s fascinating “Discovering David Lynch’s LOST HIGHWAY” which brings quite a bit to the table:
Lost Highway is obsessed with the idea of the double. Besides the more obvious doublings of characters and events (as well as the extensive use of mirrors), there are two detectives, two prison guards, two bodyguards, two bedrooms, two dogs (one of them is barking so insistently that it must be the star of Lynch`s cartoon strip The Angriest Dog In The World), two saxophones, two Fords and two Room 26s, as well as Robert Blake`s ‘Mystery Man’, who has the ability to be in two places at the same time. But the doppelganger motif here actually stems from a single character. Fred, rather than being paralleled with some kind of secret sharer, actually murders his wife, presumably because he suspects her of infidelity. Unable to live with what he has done, he escapes into another identity and makes an attempt, completely incoherent on the ‘plot’ level, to justify (while denying) his actions by revealing that his interpretation of the evidence of his wife`s infidelity was actually correct. Tellingly, when one of the detectives asks why he hates video cameras, Fred replies “I like to remember things my own way…not necessarily the way they happened”.
This fantasy involves a traditionally Lynchian structure, for Fred not only imagines his transformation into Pete Dayton (Balthazar Getty), but also provides Pete with a mirror image, Mr Eddy (Robert Loggia), who recalls Frank Booth, Pete`s function as Fred`s ideal younger version of himself, however, leads to some striking differences. For one thing, Pete is lacking in the explicity virginal quality of the young men (usually played by Kyle MacLachlan) in Lynch`s previous films; indeed, while Jeffrey Beaumont admits that he “hasn`t been in pussy heaven”, Pete is described as getting “more pussy than a toilet seat”. In escaping from an intolerable reality, Fred creates an alter-ego possessed of the virility which he feels he has lost (and of which the obsession with his wife`s supposed infidelities is a sure indicator). Yet Fred is transformed not only into Pete, but into Mr Eddy as well – it is, after all, Mr Eddy who is cuckolded by Patricia Arquette`s character, and the connection is made explicit at the climax of the flashback to Alice (Arquette)`s first meeting with Mr Eddy, which ends with Alice reaching out to touch Mr Eddy`s face, followed by a shot of her touching Pete`s face in the present. Lynch even return his fantasy to its source, for Mr Eddy, like Frank Booth (“It`s Daddy”), is also a father figure, and Pete eventually kills him in order to possess The Mother (who, like all good mothers, is obliged to tell her son “you`ll never have me”).
What is particularly fascinating is that this structure is explicitly defined as a neurotic fantasy belonging to a character witin the fiction, rather than simply a product of the artist`s unconsciuos, thus allowing a radical critique of both the construction of masculinity within our culture, and the narratives which reinforce it. This gradual clarification of the structure`s meaning in Lynch`s oeuvre is accompanied, interestingly enough, by the disappearance of humor, used in much of the middle-period work – running from Blue Velvet to the final episode of Twin Peaks – as a way of softening the darker elements (look, for example, at the way we are asked to laugh at Laura Dern`s ‘robins’ speech in Blue Velvet, or Nicolas Cage`s songs in Wild at Heart). This tendency to sweeten the pill undoubtedly contributed to the director`s brief popularity with audiences and critics. However, humor in Fire Walk With Me is confined solely to opening section, the entire Laura Palmer story being represented without a rupture of the gruelling tone (though a description of various scenes left on the cutting-room floor published in Video Watchdog 16 suggests that this decision was made late in the editing). And Lost Highway is almost completely humourless (with the exception of the ‘tailgating’ scene).
So Lynch doesn`t make us laugh anymore. On the other hand (as Francois Truffaut once remarked on the reception of Chaplin`s later films), his critics make me laugh. The stupidity of the American reviewers` reaction to Fire Walk With Me can only be explained by their being mentally retarded. Do they really know any better? As I write, Lost Highway has not yet opened in the U.S. (I saw it in Paris), but its chances of escaping a similar (anti) critical drubbing seem virtually non-existent. Basically, reviewers resent being made to work.
To a slightly lesser extent, this is also true of general audiences, and Lost Highway appears to have deliberately positioned itself as a ‘problematic’ work. The casting of Bill Pullman, fresh from the success of Independence Day, seems to convey the message “This film is unreadable in terms of your expectations”. It belongs to a maverick tradition which, in America, is best represented by such figures as Orson Welles, Sam Peckinpah, Albert Lewin, Michael Cimino, John Cassavetes, Elaine May, William Richert, Monte Hellman, S. Lee Pogostin, Charles Eastman, Dennis Hopper and James William Guercio (some of whom have made only a single film). It can, perhaps, be seen as the final part of a trilogy with Jess Franco`s Venus In Furs (1968) and James B. Harris` Some Call It Loving (1973), films centering on jazz musicians who withdraw into isolated world of neurotic sexual fantasy. But ours is not a cine-literate culture. How many people will understand that Richard Pryor has been cast in Lost Highway as a tribute to his role in Some Call It Loving? And am I just imagining that the shots of Renee Madison`s dismembered body refer back to the shots of the dismembered mannequin in Fernand Leger`s The Girl With The Prefabricated Heart – segment of Dreams That Money Can Buy (1946), an excerpt from which was presented by Lynch in a 1987 Area documentary on The Surrealists?
So Lost Highway`s prospects seem hopeless. It may find an appreciative audience on video, though any attempt to pan and scan Lynch`s widescreen compositions, which use the empty spaces of Panavision to convey a palpable sense of unease, will be ruinous. Perhaps this should be the last ‘lost’ film, best seen via a mysterious TV station which one has unexpectedly tuned into, or a videocassette discovered in a yellow envelope with no return address on the stairs leading up to your front door.
(Brad Stevens)
NOTE. All David Lynch quotations are taken from an interview conducted by Chris Rodley, published in Sight and Sound July 1996, and Rodley`s on-set report in BBC2
That’s a great essay.
Looking at the early conversation between the Stranger and Nikki / Susan in “INLAND EMPIRE,” it strikes me that it could almost be a dialogue between “aware” Fred (who knows what he did) and “unaware” Fred (who is denying what he did) in “Lost Highway”:
Neighbor: So, you have a new role to play, I hear?
Nikki: Up for a role, but I’m afraid far from getting it.
Neighbor: No, no. I definitely heard that you have it.
Nikki: Oh?
Neighbor: Yes. It is an… It is an interesting role?
Nikki: Oh yes, very!
Neighbor: Is it about marriage?
Nikki: Um, perhaps in some ways, but…
Neighbor: Your husband is involved?
Nikki: No.
and:
Stranger: Is there a murder in your film?
Nikki: Uh, no. It’s not part of the story.
Stranger: No, I think you are wrong about that.
Nikki: No.
Neighbor: Brutal fucking murder!
Nikki: I don’t like this kind of talk; the things you’ve been saying.
Great dialogue here Andrew!!!!
I’ll come back with more thoughts after I’ve had a chance to go back through this lengthy post, but my reading of the film mirrors these thoughts that Andrew Wyatt posted (and Sam also quoted): “To me, it seems readily apparent that the film is an exploration of Fred’s / Peter’s psyche, and how the former is drowning in a raging denial about a heinous crime he has committed.”
My opinion of Lost Highway is about as high as it gets, and think that calling it underrated in Lynch’s overall body of work is probably even an understatement. I LOVE this movie and rank it only behind Mulholland Dr. in terms of my favorites from Lynch.
Andrew – I too heard the story about OJ Simpson and his actions following the murder/trial to be one of the sparks in writing this script. It makes sense as far as interpreting the film, but how true the tale is I don’t really know.
Dave:
Biographer Greg Olson talks about two points of genesis for Gifford and Lynch’s script: A) Lynch’s interest, springing from Kafka’s “Metamorphosis” and probably Bergman’s “Persona” (which “Mulholland Drive” also touches upon), in the idea of someone waking up and discovering that they are someone completely different; and B) Lynch and then-girlfriend Mary Sweeney’s discussion (during a late-night drive through the desert, no less) of the frightening prospect of someone sending you a film of yourself asleep in your bed.
The somewhat irrational fear of being watched, and, more forcefully, the ability of moving images to crack open stubborn psychological bulwarks, was also explored in Haneke’s equally masterful “Cache”. I’ve thought for some time that film and “Lost Highway” would make for a great double-bill.
I always thought this had one of Lynch’s best soundtracks. I vaguely recall it being a huge hit while the film was not widely seen. There is something so late ’90’s about this film — it’s like a time capsule of pre-Millennial/pre-9/11 anxieties. The OJ Case surely influenced, and the use of Blake was eerily prescient.
I always thought Lynch somewhat overplayed his hand here — this was too “of the moment” and not as stream-of-universal-conscious and nostalgia-saturated as his other more celebrated works (Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks, Mulholland Drive). But, man, what a trip! I remember showing this to a bunch of dorm buddies my freshman year of college as an intro to Lynch. This was maybe a year or two after it came out. It blew everyone’s mind.
There was something about Patricia Arquette in this, too…man oh man…she never looked better. And I loved the detectives’ little quips while on stake-out. Great stuff.
There’s also a great line from the prison guard when he finds Pullman has morphed into Getty…I can’t quite remember the exact words…but the delivery was hilarious.
David,
Your reminiscences are very relevant here, because they present a situation of revisiting an experience from the past and being confronted with how things have changed, perhaps allowing of a closer understanding of that flashpoint. I’ve had a turnaround like that in seeing, after quite a long hiatus, Antonioni’s L’Avventura.
Best,
Jim
David, great, I was just about to slap everyone’s wrists with a big ruler for letting the soundtrack go unmentioned for 20 posts. the soundtrack was produced by none other then the great Trent Reznor.
Shame on you others for not mentioning NIN when a NIN mention is warranted!
Well Jamie, I will live up to my guilt here, as I also loved that soundtrack/score, and music in general, but failed to mention it. My bad.
well Sam you get a pass, because I believe he’s uncredited. I only know he did it because I know just about everything Trent Reznor has done, as he’s one of my absolute favorites. (In Sam speak he’s top 5 singular musicians to me)
Fantastic write up here Mr. Clark. I’ve said elsewhere so I’ll say it again, I am a big Lynch fan and this is my favorite film of his. I cannot drive (in the rare instance that I do) at night, or sit in the passenger seat and look out into where the headlights end and blackness begins on the road and not think of this film. It contains everything Lynch does well (intentional camp dialogue about love, nonsensical plot lines, noirish environments, surrealism, fantastic female leads, and fantastic visuals), and just has something else that I can’t quite put my finger on… maybe the Reznor connection (lol)?
On the fantastic visuals, how about that cabin on the beach burning, then burning in reverse? pretty fantastic. I wanted this on dvd so bad (remember it was strangely delayed till about 3 years ago) that when it arrived I bought it over lunch the day it came out, and watched it that night. I haven’t watched it since, now I will this weekend. That I suppose is a mark of a great review!
Jamie,
I know what you mean about this picture’s special ability to haunt an audience. That was a main reason for providing the two clips. It does have “something else” very hard to articulate. Your enthusiasm is a treat for me. Thanks for showing it, and for the kind words.
Best,
Jim
I’m amazed, I have to admit. Rarely do I encounter a blog that’s both educative
and amusing, and let me tell you, you have hit the nail on
the head. The issue is an issue that too few folks are speaking
intelligently about. I am very happy I found this in my search for something relating
to this.