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Lost Highway
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A Bigger Thing
And then I remember a much bolder example in a more daring little
genre film – a horror-thriller, starring the great James Spader and directed by
the ever-intriguing Rowdy Herrington, called Jack’s Back (1988). This one starts with handsome James being
brutally murdered in the street at night. And then it cuts to that most
over-used of modern clichés – the shot of the hero sitting in bed in a cold
sweat … yes, it was all just a dream!
But, but, but: James hears a noise. He goes to his window. There’s a commotion
out in the street: ambulances, police sirens. He whacks on a coat, goes down to
investigate, breaks through a cordon, lifts the sheet off the body of a fresh
corpse and sees – himself! It’s a freak-out of monumental proportions.
I take an avant-garde relish in this type of occurrence in popular
cinema. The idea that a character in an otherwise normal, rational movie can
suddenly be doubled or multiplied – that there can be these kinds of intensely
irrational, magical appearances and disappearances happening – is an idea which
excites me no end. I call it an avant-garde idea perhaps because I see it
largely in avant-garde films: experimental fiction films like those of Raúl Ruiz, where anything up to eight different actors are used to play a single
character, without any explanation for the havoc this causes us as viewers. Or
remember Luis Buñuel’s classic That
Obscure Object of Desire (1978), which keeps cutting between two different
actresses playing the lead role – with no one inside the story ever commenting
on this disconcerting fact.
Some people may assume that it is only in such avant-garde or
surrealist/oddball movies that you find this kind of up-front play with
shifting around, or pulling apart characters and actors, as well as the
makeshift fictional identities they form with their bodies and voices.
But my love for this kind of playing around comes just as much
from a certain strain in popular culture. Cartoons, for instance: like the Tex
Avery masterpiece in which you see a character miraculously pop up throughout
the story in the most unlikely times and places and, when at the end somebody
else asks, ‘How did you do that?’, suddenly the screen is filled with multiple
clones of the hero, and they all chant in mass unison: ‘There was twenty of us!’.
And then you’ve got the bolder, popular horror-thriller films, forerunners to Jack’s Back like Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) or certain Brian De Palma films, where you follow one character and their story for a little while until
– whammo! – that character is suddenly killed off and we are away on another
narrative tangent, with a completely different character. The trick happens
again in Wes Craven’s horror film Scream (1996): a very avant-garde title, that.
What I really love in movies that play these kinds of games is the
sweet, delirious feelings of transformation,
of perpetual loss and rebirth, that they stir within me. It’s as if what is
normally so weighty, so rigid, so fixed in movies and in life – namely, our
personal identities, our selves, our egos – in these crazy films, suddenly all
that solidity is dissolved, tossed in the air. It is a liberating feeling. And
the feeling reminds me of the words of that fine, liberationist philosopher
Norman O. Brown, who said succinctly in the 1960s: ‘The solution to the problem
of identity is – get lost!’
Well, you and whatever blessed identity you entertain can
certainly get lost on
There are two starkly opposed ways of describing what happens in
this movie, in its plot, and I believe that many of the reviews of Lost Highway are pretty much going to
disqualify themselves, from the word go, depending on which route they take. On
the one hand, you could just describe what there is to be seen on, and heard
from, the screen – describing these things neutrally, which is how the film
itself presents them, in a quiet, eerie, uncanny tone. Lost Highway starts out as the story of Fred (Bill Pullman), a
haunted character, married to the blank and enigmatic Renee (Patricia
Arquette). Their sparse apartment has the strangest, shiftiest spatial layout
since the Star Ship Enterprise hit a time-warp continuum. At any rate, Fred is
haunted by videotapes anonymously deposited at his door that show the inside of
this flat, then he and his wife in bed and, finally, evidence of a horrifying
murder committed by Fred himself. So Fred goes to jail, and waits to be
executed. One morning in his cell, a cop looks in and finds that Fred is not
there – in his place is a much younger man, Pete (Balthazar Getty). There is
some shock and surprise registered at this strange fact, but no solid
explanation will ever be forthcoming.
The substitution of Pete for Fred is only the start of an
incredible series of narrative games in
There’s much more to the plot and the world of
This may all seem rather ridiculous as a fix on the film – it seemed
pretty ridiculous to me, at first – but I would not want to completely discount
or discard such notions, either. Lynch himself, in a marvellous interview
published with the script of the film (Lost
Highway, Faber and Faber, 1997), never endorses this literal
interpretation. But it is at least clear that, for him, the film is about some
kind of process of mental disturbance and crack-up, an imaginary escape from
some unbearable reality. For him, quite simply, it is about ‘unfortunate things
that happen to people’ – that’s putting it mildly – and especially ‘a thinking
man in trouble’.
In Michel Chion’s excellent David
Lynch (BFI, 1995), emphasis is placed on Lynch’s very particular artistic
process, how he dreams up his scripts, images and sounds. He quite literally
dreams, or at least daydreams, them
through a process of meditation, letting things swim up from his unconscious to
his conscious mind. Then he starts to work with his material, at every level,
until everything feels right, fits right. Lynch may be the most intuitive and
least intellectual of filmmakers – which is important to remember, since he is
so often derided as a postmodern intellectual trickster, taunting us with
enigmas and unreadable symbols. In the interview already mentioned, Lynch says
that with his co-writer, novelist Barry Gifford, ‘we never talked about meaning
or anything. We seemed to be in sync on where we were going, so a lot was left
unsaid. We talked, but that can be dangerous. If things get too specific, the
dream stops’.
The dream stops: what a
telling, suggestive, resonant phrase! Lost
Highway is much more than a film about dreams. apparitions or hallucinations; rather, it is a dream-like film, or more
strongly, a dream-film. Saying this, I
am aware that many of my favourite movies – from Jean Vigo’s L'Atalante (1934) and Buñuel’s classics
to Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man (1995) – can
fit this bill of the dream-film. Sometimes, it can be a lazy description, a
meaningless tag like Surrealist or Magic Realist that really doesn’t tell us
very much, other than that there are weird, crazy, illogical things going on in
the movie. But Lynch’s films are authentically and deeply dream-like.
Maybe this doesn’t have so much to do with the surface content of
his films. Much of the content in Lost
Highway wades around, as a friend of mine put it, in Lynch’s familiar,
shallow pool. There’s the spooky femme fatale, the hip-swinging teenagers in
leather, the bumbling cops, the probably gay villain, and the noir-prototype
hero stumbling through the mists of his own semi-consciousness. And there are
the usual low jokes from Lynch the irrepressible showman: scenes of jokey
violence meted out by Robert Loggia as ‘Mr Eddy’, prurient and silly gags about
promiscuous sex.
There are the slightly corny, cliché, B movie signs of things mad
and supernatural going on: subjective shots shifting in and out of focus,
special transformation effects possibly derived from that fascinating little
pre-X Files, philosophical
mystery-thriller, Jacob’s Ladder (1990).
But these familiar, more or less entertaining elements, are not the heart of
the film. It was the British critic Raymond Durgnat who once suggested (in an
essay on Blue Velvet in the 1988 Film Yearbook, edited by James
Parks) that Lynch ‘dreams his films first, and plots them after ... The plot is
just a pretext for a dream’. And he added: ‘Lynch knows the secrets of poetic
alchemy’. Lynch himself repeatedly refers to Lost Highway as an abstract film, and he stresses that what matters to him is not the characters and their
identities, but the exact properties of specific movements, gestures and
sounds. And there is no Lynch film more finely controlled and tuned than Lost Highway. From the first, empty
apartment shots with their low soundtrack hum, the film is a quite dark and
unnerving audio-visual event for the viewer. And, like in Twin Peaks, Lynch’s
poetic alchemy comes together from a weave of odd, uncanny motifs – little
incidents and phenomena that are never strictly meaningful or symbolic.
In Twin Peaks, there
were the flickering fluoro lights everywhere, and the strange, endless rondo of
telephonic and radiophonic occurrences – phones ringing, calls re-routed, voices
issuing from tinny speakers. It is not fanciful to suggest that a goodly number
of the motifs in Lost Highway may
have arisen from Lynch’s conscious or unconscious meditation on the O.J.
Simpson case – murder of a spouse, frenzied road pursuit, and so on. (1)
But once you pass down through the thick undergrowth of these
poetic motifs – if you can stay open and alive to their sensual, disturbing
magic – there is something going on underneath the surfaces of Lynch’s best
films. Like Twin Peaks once again, Lost Highway is a film that seems
founded on some unspoken secret, some trembling topic at its hidden centre, some phantasm. To spell this phantasm out
is, in a sense, impossible … and it might spoil the fun, or stop the dream. But
you can circle the secret, in the way
that the film circles it. In the case of Lost
Highway, I’m not sure I have an intimate feeling yet of just what that
deep, dark secret is – although I strongly sense that it is there. Chion
suggests (for example) that the psychoanalytic key of Lynch’s work revolves
around the presence in the maker’s life or psyche of a depressive mother.
Others speculate (not always kindly) that Lynch’s cinema rests
upon a particularly vicious and violent misogynist fantasy – always with the
violation, extreme injury or murder of a woman at its centre. In a brilliant
article titled “Incomparable Bodies”, Nicole Brenez reads Lost Highway as a febrile phantasm whose primal, inaugural image –
a man being executed in an electric chair for the murder of his wife – is
presented to us only in its ‘catastrophic versions’, its displacement into three
distinct registers: a story of the mundane life of a couple that leads to death
(the first section of the film), then the fantasticated version of that same
story decked out with every movie cliché of glamour and violence (Getty
section), and finally, threaded throughout, a system of ‘electric sensations’
that translate the death experience: images and sounds that conjure heightened,
stroboscopic or ecstatically musical states.
All the terror about identity in Lost Highway definitely has something to do, in my mind, with an
obscure, wretched anxiety attached to masculine sexuality – and all the crazed
projections, paranoias and masochistic, apocalyptic visions that flow on from
that anxiety. After all, the spookiest scene in the whole film is the initial,
slow-motion sex scene between Fred/Pullman and Renee where, after he comes too
soon, unable to control himself, she pats him coolly on the shoulder like a
mother, whispering ‘That’s okay, that’s okay’. But we know what that means for
this guy: nothing will ever again be okay. And the extremely disquieting
pay-off from that moment comes for Fred/Getty much later, when he whispers into
Renee’s ear as they make love in the desert ‘I want you’, and she replies as
she dismounts him and strides off naked into the dark desert: ‘You’ll never
have me.’
This, too, attracts the label of misogyny to Lynch and his work:
the somewhat adolescent, essentially freaked-out apprehension of women’s sexual
Otherness, never graspable, and always rather petrifying – but, as a (guy) viewer,
I find Lynch’s cinematic embodiment of such primal, masculine, heterosexual
terror compelling, haunting … even, in a weird way, touching.
Lynch does not like giving his films genre labels, and even the
one he himself coined for Lost Highway – a ‘21st century noir horror film’, which has become its essential ad-line –
he hastens to describe as a load of baloney. According to him, the one label
that he can stand is mystery. He does not mean mystery in the
banal sense of a detective story or whodunit – although he does sometimes
launch off from these basic templates of mystery fiction, as in Twin Peaks. No, Lynch means mystery in a
high-flown sense: the mystery of things, of appearances, of beings – the
mystery of existence and of the phenomenal world. And, unlike a strictly
generic mystery, Lynch’s aim is not to assuage mystery, to resolve all doubt,
but rather to prolong a thick aura of
mystery as far and as long as possible.
This brings us back, finally, to plot interpretation. It is easy, with Lost Highway, to fall into what I
regard as the most boring, least fruitful question in the annals of film
criticism and filmgoing. In a nutshell, this is the question – asked of just
about any movie that has high poetic levels of mystery – ‘Is what we are seeing
reality or fantasy?’ Variations on this hoary old question include: ‘Is what we
see real or a dream?’ and ‘Is what we see reality or a character’s subjective
hallucination?’ The problem here is the implication that such old, stickler
questions can and should actually be answered in a quantifiable, rational way;
the implication that it is just a matter of sorting out the constituent parts
of a film, working out the logic that governs them, and then assigning the
labels of fantasy or reality to each bit. Maybe it has something to do with our
crummy education system, but it seems to me people are trained to ask such
dumb-ass questions of mysterious films from Fellini’s Otto e mezzo and Buñuel’s Belle de jour (1967) to David Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch (1991). And the questions function as deadly ways of taming or
breaking the mystery of these films.
I don’t think it is a matter of simply declaring that all these
movies of poetic mystery are dream-like, dream-films, and leaving it at that. Lost Highway certainly slides, in an
indeterminate way, between many zones of fantasy and reality; and it plays in a
spooky, excruciating way on the tension, the agony we feel being caught in the
middle of this indeterminacy as viewers. We try to make sense of the things
Lynch shows us – it is in our human nature to do this, after all – but then we
find that the path back to rational, coherent narrative is indeed a lost
highway. Too much of the road has dissolved or been broken up, forked off into
multiple paths, just behind our backs, as we plunged forward with this most
driven and compelling of films. And, hurtling forward in some strange mutating,
indefinite state, like Fred/Pullman in the last shots of the movie, we have no
choice but to follow Lynch when he says: ‘There are things that happen
sometimes that open up a door and let you soar out and feel a bigger thing’.
© Adrian Martin March 1997 MORE Lynch: Mulholland Drive, Lumière and Company, The Straight Story, Inland Empire, Twin Peaks: The Return See also: Outside / Twin Peaks (2015) MORE memory complexes: The Blackout, Memento
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