LOST HIGHWAY
A film review by Dave Cowen
Copyright 1997 Dave Cowen
This review contains what might be considered spoilers, but I honestly don't think that it would spoil the film for anyone. There's two sides to every story.
Like a jazz artist, Lynch takes his head and adds new riffs, playing his pet themes with a different tone, or improvising with new ideas. While with certain filmmakers this would indicate a lack of inspiration, with Lynch it indicates a desire to explore deeper with certain themes which resonate throughout his work. In order to understand those themes, and the resonance that they provide in the context of these films, it's necessary to look back at his prior works to shape the meaning of the seemingly inexplicable plots Lynch weaves together. Unfortunately, this hardly means that LOST HIGHWAY is Lynch's best or more successful film. While there are distinct moments of brilliance in LOST HIGHWAY, and the very structure of the film allows Lynch to explore his primary themes in new ways, there are flaws which make LOST HIGHWAY seem mediocre when compared with other films in Lynch's stable.
In TWIN PEAKS, the Little Man From Another Place (Michael Anderson) shouts out the word "Doppelganger!" played forward on tape after it had been recorded from the actor reciting the word backwards. The idea of a doppelganger, a ghostly double of a living person, is a theme explored in the prematurely aborted TWIN PEAKS that has carried over into LOST HIGHWAY's universe -- and is an idea essential to the understanding of the film. Lynch himself, it would appear, would seem to have a doppelganger: the genuinely nightmarish imagery of his films don't seem to have any link with Lynch's own innocent, genial Eagle-scout republican image. This separation of the nightmarish and the innocent in Lynch's films have led critics to berate these films for having a poor sense of morality, or portraying good and evil in a literal and simplistic sense. But that doesn't seem to be the case: most of Lynch's characters seem to exhibit both sides of this moral structure, having both innocent ideals yet being intimately familiar (or curious) about the darker sides of human life -- something that one rarely sees in the standard good guy / bad guy structure of the average Hollywood film. It is natural, not just natural but common, in life for a person to be at once repulsed by and drawn in by something, or for a person to have a side that they consider light, or moral and right, and dark, a more primal, amoral side. Lynch takes this element of human life, often hidden or simplified in both life and in art, and makes them accessible through his surreal visions. On the most simple level the doppelganger, in a Lynch film, is a literal separation of a character's "light" and "dark" sides.
Nearly everyone in LOST HIGHWAY has a doppelganger. Fred Madison, played by a brooding Bill Pullman, is a tenor, a saxophonist who plays free jazz at local nightclubs and on the local radio. His doppelganger is Pete Dayton (Balthazar Getty, doing his best Luke Perry), a talented young mechanic who seems to spend more time having sex than fixing cars. Fred lives with Renee (Patricia Arquette), a brunette who seems to be straight out of THE BETTY PAGES. Pete meets who appears to be Renee's doppelganger Alice (also Arquette), who is a blond sexpot in the same vein. Both Renee and Alice know Andy (Michael Massee) and Mr. Eddy, who is also known as Dick Laurent (Robert Loggia), all of whom are involved in the pornography industry.
"Her name is Renee! If she told you her name was Alice, she's lying," says the Mystery Man, played by Robert Blake. With white facepaint and no eyebrows, the Mystery Man appears to be no less than Mephistopheles himself (or Bono's Macphisto, perhaps?). Fred dreams of the Mystery Man's face on Renee's body one night... and Renee/Alice and the Mystery Man are often seen at the same place, but never in the same shot. It would seem that Renee's doppelganger isn't her blond self, Alice -- when Pete sees a picture of Laurent, Renee, Alice and Andy, he asks her which one she is. "I'm this one," she says, scratching her finger over Alice's blond body. When the police come to the scene of a crime later, they look at the picture. Alice's image isn't part of it.
A true dread creeps through the opening scenes. Dialogue that is alternately cliched and filled with meaning between the lines flows when Fred and Renee speak with each other, always in a slow, stunted manner throughout the first 30 minutes of the film. Renee says that she's not going to watch Fred at the club tonight because she's "going to read". "Read?" Fred says incredulously. He continues until she smirks and lets out an uncomfortable laugh. "I'm glad to see I can still make you laugh," says Bill in a deadpan tone, "that's why I married you." Bill's face seems to appear and disappear into darkness of his apartment through this portion of the film, offering some of the most impressive visual compositions seen in film for a very long time. These shots are as low-contrast as one could possibly push the film stock, making images sink in and out of darkness, forcing the viewer to search the film's widescreen image in fear that there's something lurking just out of sight. These are by far the best scenes of the movie, ones that hearken back to Lynch's ERASERHEAD in style, and ones that truly unnerve. It seems incredible that Peter Deming, cinematographer of such straightforward, undemanding work as SON IN LAW or COSMIC SLOP, would be able to create such outstanding images, and leaves the filmgoer to wonder if Lynch didn't do most of the work on this portion of the film on his own.
One of the quintessential Lynch images is that of an electric light which, when it finds itself suddenly glowing too bright, burns out with a violent crack. Similarly, Lynch will occasionally bathe his human or supernatural characters in a bright, almost blue light, to underline moments of the feeling of love, or warmth, or the desire thereof. Henry Spencer, the main character of ERASERHEAD, finds himself fascinated by a "lady in the radiator", who seems to irradiate warmth and promise him that, in heaven, everything is fine -- and when at the end of the ERASERHEAD, he chastely embraces her, the screen is filled in that similarly white light. However, when earlier in the film Henry makes love to a woman, he draws her into a pool illuminated similarly in white -- the glow disappears soon after which she realizes and is horrified with the situation Henry is in. In LOST HIGHWAY's pivotal scene, Fred's doppelganger Pete is making love with Alice, bathed in the white light of the headlights of their car. "I want you," says Pete. "You'll never have me," says Alice, and walks off, nude, into a shack. The light from the headlights fade, and we see Fred get up, walk into the shack, only to find the Mystery Man.
Many have accused Lynch's view of sex as being adolescent. In Lynch's films, however, when the characters crave love they turn to sex believing it to provide one in the same, and are disappointed and embittered when that is not the case. In the story of LOST HIGHWAY, we see the young and virile Pete transform into Fred, the bitter and haunted artist, after having failed to find true love. Is it too much to have Renee, a woman who draws them in with promises of what they desire and then leaves them empty and cold, to seem to have the devil as her doppelganger? Maybe. Maybe not.
What Lynch is doing, and what he has done in all of his best works, is to take a look at the dark side of life. ERASERHEAD, exploring childbirth as a biological nightmare, took the most familiar event known to man and showed the dark side of it so completely and surrealistically, that most viewers were either confused or repulsed (or both) by a relatively simple and universal story of a young father. In BLUE VELVET, Lynch examined the dark side that could exist in any community. TWIN PEAKS literalized the concept of the doppelganger, as in the last episode, when the main character's soul is taken, literally splitting the character into good and evil apparitions. Does this draw an easy line between good and evil? Not so -- characters who appear evil, such as TWIN PEAK's Windom Earle or LOST HIGHWAY's Dick Laurent are destroyed by Lynch's apparitions of the real forces of darkness ("Bob" in TWIN PEAKS, or LOST HIGHWAY's Mystery Man) as if to show that individuals who try to emulate evil in the real world are nothing more than dangerous poseurs. In Lynch's films, the real evil stems from natural emotional and biological processes, so separated from the happy-faced whitewash that we as a society tend to put on these events or feelings, that they are exaggerated to a surreal degree when discovered -- and that is precisely what makes Lynch's best moments genuinely frightening.
In fashioning a story that relies on showing two sides of every character, Lynch and Gifford have plotted the film so that no character appears on screen with their doppelganger counterpart. The story instead takes place as a cycle, where every action has a reaction in the film, but not necessarily after the event occurs in a linear fashion: an action can take place in the latter half of the film whose reaction appears in the first half. Things that seem needlessly surreal may in fact be a harbinger of developments to come -- in a movie like LOST HIGHWAY, where literal events go hand in hand with surrealistic representations, it's easy to confuse the two. When the Mystery Man appears at the party and plays a trick with Fred's cell phone, is it really that the Mystery Man is both at the party and at Fred's house at the same time, or is the Mystery Man revealing that he is the doppelganger of Renee, who has been invited both to the party (by Andy, or Dick Laurent) but also to Fred's house? When Fred goes back to his house, after the party, he leaves Renee outside, checking to see if there's a Mystery Man inside... "Of course there isn't," he ends up muttering. He's right.
The acting in Lost Highway is what ultimately spoils the fun. None of the actors show much range, with Loggia's half-baked Frank Booth impression to Getty's and Pullman's brooding -- and all of the minor players give ridiculously artificial and deadpan performances. Only Robert Blake as the Mystery Man strikes the perfect tone, and one wonders what this film would have been like had Lynch used actors of the caliber of his other work.
Also problematic is the soundtrack. Fluctuating between Lynch's grand 'sound design', where background noises add depth to the film along with overtones from the talented Angelo Badalamenti and the appropriate and energetic work of Barry Adamson (whose faux-soundtrack albums have in the past shown his ability to create filmic moods through music alone) are mixed in with inappropriate songs from NIN and a ridiculously distracting cover of "This Magic Moment" by Lou Reed.
LOST HIGHWAY is worth seeing for any of Lynch's fans, but will seem obtuse and overwrought to anyone not familiar with Lynch's work. The film lags in its second half, and has its share of flaws from the standpoint of editing, music and acting. What isn't problematic, however, is Lynch's vision, which is more clear and daring than it had been with his last feature films, WILD AT HEART and FIRE WALK WITH ME, films where Lynch's world view took a back seat to cheap thrills. There's cheap thrills here, but there's a lot more for the adventuresome filmgoer to discover, too.
Signed: ESCHATFISCHE, david (esch@fische.com) ----------------------------------------------------------
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