Revisiting David Lynch: Lost Highway (1997)
Lost Highway is an important bridge in David Lynch's career, ushering him out of the world of Twin Peaks (1992’s Fire Walk with Me was the previous feature he directed) and into the Los Angeles trilogy that would later include Mulholland Dr. (2001) and Inland Empire (2006).1 In the middle of this trilogy, Lynch also directed The Straight Story (1999), which is something of an outlier in the director’s career—after all, nothing overtly surreal happens—though it also perfectly represents his “life is strange” worldview. While The Straight Story is one of my favorite Lynch films, the director would arguably go on to make his most complex, sensitive, and groundbreaking films in the early 2000s (though his feature debut Eraserhead [1977] remains my favorite).
Lost Highway paves the way2 for the development in theme and richness that Lynch would express in Mulholland Dr. and Inland Empire, but it's a bumpy road.3 When I first saw the film at about 14 years old (!), I was mostly baffled and didn't know how to feel about the abundant sex and nudity. This time around, it seems less baffling, and I have a more critical, less hormonally driven view of the film's focus on lust, jealousy, and sexuality.
The movie's split into two halves. In the first, we witness the slow-burn tension of a married couple, Fred (Bill Pullman) and Renee (Patricia Arquette), who start receiving mysterious videotapes of their own home on their front steps. (The videotapes become increasingly frightening, including footage of them sleeping in their bed at night.) Fred also encounters a "Mystery Man" (Robert Blake) who provokes Fred’s darkest, most rageful tendencies. Fred seems obsessed with the possibility that his wife is cheating on him with a sleazy playboy, Andy (Michael Massee), and this all-consuming fear culminates in a violent act that explosively leads to the second half of the movie.
In part two, Fred somehow transforms into a teenage mechanic named Pete (Balthazar Getty), who often does work for a violent gangster named Mr. Eddy (Robert Loggia). Mr. Eddy has a young mistress named Alice who looks almost exactly like Renee (and is also played by Arquette), though this time she has platinum blond hair. Pete enters into a torrid affair with her, even though he knows Mr. Eddy will kill them both if he finds out. Pete's lustful madness is exacerbated when he learns that Alice has acted in numerous pornographic films at the command of Mr. Eddy, echoing the jealous derangement of the first half of the film.
It seems pretty clear to me that Lost Highway is about jealousy: Fred/Pete wants to fully possess Renee/Alice sexually, but the fear that he's unable to do so (as Alice taunts him at one point) drives him mad. (There's a parallel here to Buñuel's That Obscure Object of Desire [1977].) The male character in Lost Highway seems predestined to repeat this doomed fate over and over: he's never able to escape his jealousy and simply be with the woman he loves (or at least lusts after). I would buy that Fred's horrific act at the end of part one sends him into a "psychogenic fugue" (as Lynch called it) where he imagines himself as Pete in an over-the-top fantasy of sex and violence.
But I like Patricia Arquette's reading even more: "To me," she said, "it's sort of a movie about looking at women through the eyes of a misogynist... [Fred/Pete]'s totally obsessed with her, can't love her enough, can't have her to himself enough, can't kill her enough times... In this man's mind, a woman is always the monster. No matter what."4
I admire that interpretation, and I think it holds up if you give Lost Highway all the benefit of the doubt in the world. But Arquette the actress (who performs some extremely difficult scenarios, including lots of nudity and sex and some scenes involving rape and pornography) obviously has more agency and depth than either Renee or Alice. Even if the movie is intentionally about misogyny and filtered through the warped mind of a man-child who's driven by lust and possession, that doesn't mitigate the film's prevalent depictions of women as sex objects or treacherous femme fatales. This is a common problem in movies that exist almost entirely in the headspace of a warped man: even if they ostensibly try to dissect misogyny, toxic masculinity, etc., we're trapped in their brains for so long that everything is skewed by their brutality. In other words, any attempts to criticize misogyny are negated by the harmful representations on display, which can’t help being misogynistic in and of themselves.
That can be an issue in some of Lynch's filmography specifically. I hate to speak ill of the dead (especially since I do mostly love Lynch and few can compare to his formal mastery), but his themes often simplistically revolve around a duality between surface normalcy and pervasive rottenness. In Blue Velvet, Wild at Heart, and Twin Peaks (all three seasons of the TV show and Fire Walk with Me), there's a contrast between earnest young love and the horror that defines the world at large. You never know exactly how sincere or ironic Lynch is with these contrasts, which I don't mean as a compliment. So, in Lost Highway, we have the filthy male world of Fred/Pete, Mr. Eddy, Andy, and the Mystery Man, in sharp contrast to the beauty and victimization of Renee and Alice (not to mention Pete's girlfriend, Sheila, whom he treats extremely callously). Even if there's thematic material here, it feels overloaded and simplistic at the same time.
I don't want to overlook the obvious, though, which is that Lost Highway casts a captivating spell from its first images to last. The opening credits, set to David Bowie's "I'm Deranged" as a car speeds down a (lost) highway at night, slap you awake from the start and force you to take notice. I love the sense of dread and inevitability in the first hour of the movie, and the Mystery Man is an effectively chilling character, even if he feels like a repeat of Bob from Twin Peaks. There are haunting, poetic images throughout, especially a stunning shot of a cabin in a desert exploding in reverse-motion. Even if the subtexts around it are frustrating and questionable, Lost Highway's plot is absolutely spellbinding. I like it infinitely more than Lynch’s previous Barry Gifford collaboration, Wild at Heart (which was based on Gifford's novel); I consider that to be Lynch's worst movie, stuffed to the brim with petulant shock value. Lost Highway (which was co-written by Lynch and Gifford) might still be about 50% petulant shock value, but the bleakly gorgeous aesthetic and glimmers of thematic substance partly make up for that.
Some movies, including Lost Highway, are love-'em-or-hate-'em: I can understand either a scathing pan (like the ones Siskel and Ebert gave in 1997) or retrospective analysis that considers Lost Highway one of Lynch's masterpieces. I think it's more accurate, though, to call the film love-it-AND-hate-it: I can't dismiss the film's dreamlike majesty or its overabundant sleaze (especially by the time Marilyn Manson shows up in a pornographic 8mm film being projected on the wall of a mansion). In the end, there's less to Lost Highway than meets the eye, but that's in part because there's so much for the eye to take in: there's no way the ideas at the film’s core and its fringes can match Lynch's unshakeable nightmare visions.
In the mid-1990s, Lynch also directed several short films (including Premonition Following an Evil Deed, his contribution to the anthology film Lumière and Company), a few TV episodes (for the series On the Air and Hotel Room), and a music video for the band X Japan.
Pun intended.
Pun intended #2.
Lost Highway's cryptic story about a man who kills his wife (seemingly as a product of his lust and jealousy) is mirrored by several real-world incidents, in ways both intentional and gruesomely coincidental. Lynch has admitted that the O.J. Simpson trial influenced his co-writing of the screenplay, as Lynch was shocked by the apparent ease with which Simpson escaped culpability. Robert Blake, who plays the Mystery Man, was arrested in 2002 for the murder of his second wife, but was later (controversially) acquitted. Natasha Gregson Wagner, who plays Pete’s girlfriend, Sheila, is the daughter of Richard Gregson and Natalie Wood, who was killed in a boating accident under mysterious circumstances, possibly murdered by her husband, Robert Wagner. That’s not to mention sexual assault allegations against Marilyn Manson, who appears in a cameo. If the film is concerned with the sexual violence and delusions of control that some misogynistic men are capable of, that theme is queasily reflected by the real-life circumstances surrounding it.