LOST HIGHWAY
A film review by James Pyke
Copyright 1997 James Pyke
i have little interest in writing a review as such of this film. i firmly believe that this film defies traditional "this is what happens and this is why i liked it"-style film reviewing.
i'm not even going to mention any character names or plot events.
instead i would like to suggest that people who have not yet seen LOST HIGHWAY go see it with the following in mind (and those who have seen it and disliked or felt baffled by it may want to give it another shot):
-you will have to stay very focused on the image and sound for the entire running time. (and don't even think about getting to the theater late).
-on first viewing (you will need to watch it more than once), just try to relax and let the images flow into your mind without trying to force them to be "logical" or "linear". as you have no doubt heard, the story is not straightforward nor is it easily grasped. LOST HIGHWAY is unlike any film you will have ever seen (except for the few out there who have seen films by alain robbe-grillet) in terms of its narrative structure (yes, it DOES have one of these, and a very precise one at that).
(an analytical/theoretical digression follows, and may be a bit hard to follow, but i guarantee that i worked it out carefully and tried to word it all as concisely as possible).
in my opinion, this is lynch's best film ever, period. it is also one of the best films of at least the past decade. i put it in a class of what i consider to be "perfect" films which i define as films which have every cinematic element (from photography to acting to editing to sound to etc.) in the exact form necessary to convey the sense or meaning of the film. some have accused LOST HIGHWAY of being plotless or indecipherable when, in fact, it has an extremely complex plot which grows from what is, on its surface, a very simple "kernel" of story.
what makes LOST HIGHWAY so great (i mean "great" in the sense of a monumental cinematic achievement), in the main, is that the method and structure with which it creates itself is ENTIRELY cinematic. that is to say that there is no possible way that any other artform (for example a novel or a play) could convey this story - these ideas - in this way, with this impact. to provide a counterexample: i think that LONE STAR is indeed a wonderfully written, directed, and acted film, but it does not require the medium of film to convey its particular meaning and impact. it could be done with equal quality as a stage play. in fact many of its visual storytelling techniques are extremely "stagelike".
LOST HIGHWAY is wholly filmic. it approaches the medium as a pure means of externalizing human sensory perception in a more nearly complete manner than any other art form could. and this is what film is best at doing among all art forms. music stimulates the hearing, painting stimulates vision (and at times touch), sculpture stimulates vision and touch (if they let you touch it, like they ought to), fiction stimulates the imagination/mind, etc, etc. the unique complexity of film, however, is that it can fuse nearly every other medium to stimulate every human sense (okay, only vision and hearing directly, but these are considered by perceptual scientists to be the "primary" senses and the others can be stimulated in film by implication or indirect means). LOST HIGHWAY stimulates the senses in the extreme.
this is why some have compared watching LOST HIGHWAY to a drug trip: it acts directly on one's perceptions as do hallucinogenic drugs. it forces the viewer to observe reality from an altered perspective. under the influence of drugs, however, one's altered perspective is at least one's own, and so it typically makes some sort of strange sense (even if that sense may not be wholly apparent to the hallucinator). viewing lost highway is like experiencing the world not merely through an altered perspective, but further removes the viewer from his/her own perspective entirely and places her/him into the perspective of a completely foreign mind. add to this the fact that this mind belongs to a deeply distressed individual and the fact that one's own innate perceptions must perforce effect one's grasp of this foreign perspective and it's little wonder that the film is a bit difficult to approach.
to attempt such a high degree of play with human perception (all films - by the nature of their medium - play with perception, but few go to such an extreme as LOST HIGHWAY) is an absolutely brilliant cinematic project which can be an equally brilliant success, but only if the viewer is up to the task of accepting the film on its own terms.
even nick roeg, the last popular master of such experimentation, never took it this far, nor did it with such precision.
LOST HIGHWAY is a truly awesome film.
thanks for reading my words,
jim
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