LOST HIGHWAY
A film review by Zach Ralston
Copyright 1997 Zach Ralston
Directed by David Lynch Starring Bill Pullman, Patricia Arquette, Balthazar Getty, Robert Loggia,
Rating: *** (out of four)
To sleep, perchance to dream. To dream, perchance to kill your wife, rob a porn star, and blow out the brains of a gangster. Welcome to the world of David Lynch, a warped, unpredictable world that has been responsible for as many good dreams (like the darkly comic romance Wild at Heart) as bad ones (such as Dune, and the crass, boorish Blue Velvet,).
Lynch's latest psychic nightmare Lost Highway, is possibly his most schizophrenic and dissociative entry, running all over the place faster than rapid eye movment. The opening credits are immediately grabbing. We are hurled down a dark highway, yellow lines racing by with blurry intensity to the beat of a throbbing David Bowie dance. The names of the cast shoot out at us, and we know that there is something amiss, since these names include Henry Rollins, Gary Busey, and Richard Pryor. Lynch has staked his claim to this film, and however bizarre and incomprehensible it may be, we can't accuse of it of not being engrossing.
But along with the enticing mood comes inherent, deliberate confusion. Describing the plot would be futile, since no audience member will be able to figure it out, and I suspect Lynch himself doesn't know what it's about.
Lost Highway is an exercise in sensual filmmaking, geared for shock and surprise rather than cerebral connections. Characters become other characters, and actors change faces like chameleons change colors. What lingers is not a linear narrative, but singular images, with emotions ranging from fear to sexual desire, and everything in between.
As expected with an experiment like this, not everything is consistently good or bad. Lynch is beyond good and evil, until his films define a context of their own, and all we can do as viewers is respond with base impulses and instinctual reactions. Lost Highway is an antidote to rationality; things can go just as horribly wrong as they can go ecstatically entertaining.
The story that pretends to be a plot, at least for the first hour, revolves around Fred Madison (Bill Pullman, whose tusseled locks and nordic features make him look suspiciously like a watered-down Lynch), a sax player who is married to the sexy Renee (underplayed seductively by Rosanna Arquette). When mysterious videotapes of Fred and Renee's private lives begin appearing on their doorstep, the wealthy Los Angeles couple call the cops, who offer no help. Unfortunately it is this pair of police that arrest Fred a couple days later for slashing Renee to death, a murder he can't remember committing (and we can't remember watching).
On death row, Fred inexplicably changes bodies - his soul is transferred to the youthful car mechanic Pete (Balthazar Getty, unsuccessfully imitating James Dean), who must be subsequently released from jail, since he couldn't possibly have murdered Fred's wife. Pete returns to work for his boss (Pryor, in a thankless and condescending role), and resumes friendship with the evil Mr. Eddy (Robert Loggia). Mr. Eddy's mistress is Alice, a blonde bombshell, played by -- yes, Rosanna Arquette. Is Alice the same person as Renee, or does she just look like her? Is Pete the same person as Fred, even though the two look totally different?
Then the story gets really crazy. Lynch feels content to excuse his narrative unwinding with the fact that dreams are just as perplexing. It is not Lynch's goal to communicate in terms we like to understand; he wants us to catch a glimpse of his subconscious, a mind that doesn't connect from A to B.
Early in the film, Fred states that he hates video cameras because, "I want to remember things the way I remember them. I don't want to reflect the way things really happened." This is the closest Lynch comes to telling us straight out his filmmaking motives. Realism has no part in his world; documentary is fiction and fiction is fantasy.
For much of the movie, especially the first half, Lynch's images are brilliant. He shows a rare talent for personifying the "id," and denying the superego. Filmically, Lynch is a Freudian anarchist, treating sex and violence as sensuous desires rather than moral problems. But when these psychological gimmicks surface as filler, the film grinds to a halt, as confusion becomes a hinderance rather than an asset. It often feels as if Lynch is being sick for the sake of being sick, hoping that abstract gluttony masks his lack of substantial ideas.
Lost Highway is if anything, an interesting film. It doesn't aspire to be conventional, but it also doesn't apsire to be safely entertaining. Lynch admits that his dreams are often scary, funny, twisted, and terrible. And to see into his mind, we have to endure some of the terrible to get at the hidden genius.
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