Lost Highway (1997)
Lost Highway is living concept art. Its characters and its cars are stylish sketches surrounded by the blank paper of California’s endless desert. This film was David Lynch’s escape from the legacy of Twin Peaks and Blue Velvet, his break from coherent stories, quirky diner patrons and the evil lurking within the nuclear family. A noir horror piece, Lost Highway sees Lynch operate purely in terms of style and atmosphere. The tropes of an ice-cool, seedy retro Americana are picked apart and re-fashioned into an art installation. There’s no resolution and very little in the way of politics, just a Möbius strip of greasers, gangsters, jazzmen and gorgeous dames. Every space is bare and every face is drained of feeling.
Handsome, withdrawn saxophonist Fred Madison (Bill Pullman) has a stable life. He plays furious gigs to appreciative audiences, attends classy parties in the Hollywood Hills and returns home to his beautiful wife, Renee (Patricia Arquette). Their marriage has cooled, but it’s still close and intimate. This icy peace is shattered by the appearance of a mysterious videotape on the doorstep of the couple’s shared home. With a jolt of terror, Fred and Renee discover that the tape contains footage filmed inside their house. Chillingly, it ends with a shot of the couple sleeping. Within days, Renee is found dead and Fred is imprisoned for her murder. In jail, he inexplicably transforms into someone else. Fred is gone, replaced by a handsome young mechanic with a shifty past and a wide open future. Pete Dayton (Balthazar Getty) is freed from prison and quickly meets a striking young woman named Alice. She’s Renee’s double.
Lost Highway was released when the neo-noir genre was booming. Director John Dahl created a string of edgy contemporary noirs (Kill Me Again, The Last Seduction, Red Rock West) and Jim Thompson adaptations suddenly became fashionable (The Grifters, After Dark My Sweet). As the 90s rolled along, the noir-influenced movies Bound, LA Confidential and Devil in a Blue Dress were all released to appreciative audiences. Lost Highway plays against the grain. It’s a 90s neo-noir released from a parallel universe that doesn’t understand the rules of the game. Instead of detailing a coherent story, Lynch provides incredible episodes of fear, violence and seduction before cutting away from the action to focus on rushing road markings, burning shacks and bolts of lightning. Lynch ruthlessly strips the noir genre back to its essentials (the femme fatale, the rich crook, the dumb mark, the innocent man wrongly accused) and removes them from human society. There is no world beyond the space occupied by the characters, each of whom lives in clinical breezeblock slabs decorated with pristine glass. Lost Highway presents a series of pretty pods connected by a road that leads to nowhere.
Lynch wrote the film’s screenplay with Barry Gifford, the crime fiction author who penned the Sailor and Lula series of novels. Lynch and Gifford had previously worked together on a movie adaptation of the first of these novels: Wild at Heart. While this earlier film is supremely florid, trashy and camp, Lost Highway is a different beast. Gifford and Lynch knuckled down to craft something colder, sharper and far more eerie. The equal interplay between the two creatives is apparent in the film’s melding of Gifford’s classic noir set-ups with Lynch’s typically abstract twists. The film separates into two stories, both of which follow the standard beats of noir writing. In the film’s first half, protagonist Fred is an apparently innocent man sucked into a world of violent crime and intimidation. In the second, Alice is an archetypal femme fatale who seduces and manipulates Pete: the young, dumb mark. These feel like Gifford stories, but they’re joined together, remixed and looped by Lynch’s desire to bend reality to his will.
The director adds the mystery, the physical transformations, the shifting identities, the purposeful lack of resolution and the doppelgänger angle. In short, Gifford provides the meat before Lynch adds the sauce. The director’s best touch is the addition of the Mystery Man, a pale-faced ghoulish figure played with a light touch and a haunting emptiness by Robert Blake. This unnamed, seemingly omnipotent character materialises from thin air at a Hollywood Hills party and menaces Fred. The mystery man occupies multiple spaces at once, appears in dreams and seems to hold the key to the supernatural shifts in identity, Fred’s home invasion and the looping of time. Is he a demon? Is he a god? Is he a time traveller? To Lynch, he’s just a cool idea. The mystery man doesn’t need an explanation; he’s a kabuki figure plucked straight from a nightmare and put on the screen. His presence in the film speaks to Lynch’s open-ended intentions. The fact that Blake was later charged and tried for the murder of his wife just adds to the creepiness.
Lynch’s use of licensed music tended to skew towards the 1950s and 60s. Bobby Vinton, Little Eva, Roy Orbison and Elvis Presley provide the tunes for memorable musical moments in his filmography. This changes with Lost Highway, a film that has the glorious musical taste of an edgy suburban goth circa 1997. Working with Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor, Lynch compiled a soundtrack that includes The Smashing Pumpkins, Rammstein, an excellent track from David Bowie’s drum and bass years and (unfortunately) contributions from Marilyn Manson. The music suits the film’s fixation with chrome and darkness, its edgy comic book sexuality and its beautiful young cast. When the pulsing electronic beats of a Smashing Pumpkins track play over images of a leather-clad Balthazar Getty slow-dancing at a nightclub, Lost Highway could easily be mistaken for a Wachowski Sisters film. I don’t think this could be said for any other David Lynch work. There could be a faddish quality to the jet-black imagery and alternative rock music, but I think it’s genuine. Lynch liked this stuff and he was happy to be in tune with the zeitgeist.
The cast do a tough job well. As archetypes, they aren’t acting as much as generating screen presence and power. Arquette is as sexy in this film as any other actress in any other film that you may care to mention. I was particularly impressed with Pullman, so often the paternal authority figure, who I found absolutely magnetic as a laconic, controlled paranoiac. Observing Pullman and Getty, it became clearer than ever that Lynch had a male type. He was enamoured with slim, wiry men with jet-black shiny hair. Lynch collaborators Kyle MacLachlan, Bill Pullman, Chris Isaak, Balthazar Getty and Justin Theroux all fit this basic description. The erotic qualities of Lynch’s films are often underemphasised, but their homoerotic qualities are typically ignored altogether. The director focuses far more on the female form than the male equivalent, but the moody, brooding shots of Pullman and Getty staring into the middle distance are genuinely loving. These two actors are incredibly pretty men and Lynch is always keen to highlight their looks in pillowy close-ups and medium-wides.
It’s taken me several years to warm to Lost Highway. I was initially put off by its superficiality, its lack of emotion and its refusal to provide any form of resolution or explanation for its mysteries. Today I’m swept away by its sheer style and tone. The film is as thin as a razor but it cuts just as sharp. Minute by minute, moment by moment, Lynch’s horror-tinged noir is electrifying cinema. It carries a surfeit of small pleasures (the Richard Pryor cameo, Bill Pullman’s strobe-light jazz gig, the crushing needledrop of Rammstein’s Heirate Mich) inside an ice-cold shell of clinically perfect dimensions. From the maze-like design of Fred’s modernist Hollywood home to the length of Pete’s leather jacket and the stark Fritz Lang style of death row, every straight line adds to the film’s hypnotic quality. In a negative review, Roger Ebert argued that Lost Highway ‘is about design, not cinema’. Why make the distinction? I think it’s about both.