On Lost Highway and David Lynch An essay by Serdar Yegulalp Copyright 1998 by Serdar Yegulalp
Less than a full day after posting my review of David Lynch's LOST HIGHWAY, I got a flood of mail from people who insisted I was deluded, mistaken, a snob, or some combination of those three. Since I've never gotten such a violent reaction from any other review I posted, I decided I owed a more detailed and public explanation of my stance.
I've grown to dislike David Lynch's movies. I didn't initially; I found ERASERHEAD, THE ELEPHANT MAN and even BLUE VELVET interesting and unique. After that he's grown hopelessly self-conscious and self-important, but those are not the worst of his problems as a director. Because my primary reaction to his movies is emotional, I need to sit down and take apart the reasons *why* I think he provokes these reactions in me.
First, I have grown tired of the way he takes potentially interesting material and then smothers it with his "style" -- really just a strategy, a way of taking the edge off ugly material by calling it all a big pop-culture joke. This is not the same as satire of the DR. STRANGELOVE variety. There, we have at least a sense of WHY we should feel contempt for a given figure. Lynch's approach is like pointing and laughing, and inviting for us to do so when we really don't want to. The noxious opening scene in WILD AT HEART is a good example of this. Lynch gives us Nicholas Cage beating a black man to death, but instead of trying to deal with the consequences of including such a stomach-turning scene of violence in his movie, he laughs it off. Roger Ebert felt the same way about BLUE VELVET, and while I disagree with his take on that particular movie, I agree with his comment at large: "I didn't need the director prancing on every ten minutes in top hat and tails, whispering that it was all in fun."
I'm also tired of being told that the symbolism in Lynch's movies are the key to understanding them. Symbolism is private. Your interpretation of the name "Henry Long" might differ totally from mine. Because of that, it's no accident that the movies which have their symbolism debated the most fiercely are the ones which already tell an engaging and absorbing story: because we've already had our interested enlisted on one level, we can then move to dissect what the director really "meant" by this line of dialogue or that image.
A movie that isn't interesting from the beginning, that has "symbolism" forcibly injected into it -- in the same way that many dull Hollywood comedies are pepped up by the gratuitous inclusion of a car crash or a man getting kicked in the groin -- is hardly worth taking apart. It's like the boy who cut his drum open to see what made it go bang. If Lynch sits there with long lists of carefully-mapped symbolisms to write into his movies, he's kind of missing the point.
As far as non-linear technique, or just technique in general, I keep thinking of CITIZEN KANE. That movie was non-linear and experimental, but told a strong and absorbing story BECAUSE of those things instead of IN SPITE of them. The technique served the story. In LOST HIGHWAY, the technique doesn't evolve out of the material, but is slapped on top of it as a way of jazzing it up.
There's one line which was pointed out to me as being a "key" to the movie: Fred Madison's statement, "I like to remember things my own way." This is presumably supposed to be a sign that the whole movie's disjointedness is because it is the rememberances of a dissasociative mind. Fine, but if they'd actually written a movie ABOUT that, instead of just CONTAINING it, it would probably have been watchable. As it stands, it just uses that as a showcase for Lynch's various obsessions, which aren't interesting because they aren't hooked into anything.
Other people have argued that Lynch's movies are not really about plot, but emotions. Fine. Scott Renshaw, another rec.arts.movies.reviews regular whose writings I respect, had this to say in his review: "A linear narrative is not a pre-requisite for the evocation of an emotional response." Maybe not, but it's a good way to insure that the odds of *spurious* emotional responses are cut down. If *all* Lynch wanted out of me was an emotional response, that's fine, because I had one: Boredom. It's not that his movies don't make any sense or are "weird", it's that I can see all too clearly why they're like that. They're part of a strategy to help him deflect criticism of a story which at its core has not been given any real thought.
I am not a person who demands that every movie follow the mapped-out genre-dictated requirements of every movie before it. I do not walk into a theater expecting to have my hand held and my ego stroked. I admire experimentation in the movies. I *liked* ERASERHEAD and BLUE VELVET, but those seemed to have been made before Lynch became hyper-conscious of what he was doing and started to one-up his audience.
Art critic and historian Jacques Barzun once said that one of the prerequisites of labeling anything an experiment is the willingness to concede that the experiment may be a failure. I like the fact that Lynch is trying to do something different, but I can't pretend to enjoy the results.
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