Lost Highway

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🎙️ EPISODE 159: 02.15.19 *Review starts @ ~ 12:53 No film surprised me more during my recent rewatch binge then 1997’s Lost Highway. David Lynch’s seventh film might be his most divisive, in so much as it failed to ignite the critical response that really any of his other films did upon their release. While it’s industrial rock heavy soundtrack perhaps dates the film to its actual era of production more than any other Lynch picture, it also works as an anchor. Outside of Inland Empire, this is easily his most abstract and seemingly rambling work. It is grounded through style and feel. And it might just be his best singular statement.

Bull Pullman is a revelation as the jazz saxophonist Fred Madison. His chaotic emoting on the stage through his blaring instrument is but another counterpoint, this time to his subdued, confused off-stage demeanor. Who knew the goofy President from Independence Day could pull this off?

My critique of Patricia Arquette in many of her other roles is that she comes across as lifeless. Well, with her performance here as a dead-on-the-inside beauty, that mode has never played better. She’s tremendous, acting the conduit in this strange play, this circuitous journey that is often described as a theatrical möbius strip, where our leading man has quite literally been replaced.

And that brings up another interesting point: There doesn’t seem to be a traditional main character in this film. Arquette in her dual role as Renee and Alice is functionally it, but she gives way to Pullman and Balthazar Getty’s Pullman––a car mechanic named Pete––for long stretches, and its Lynch’s most diplomatic film in terms of dolling out the heavy lifting in this regard. Don't forget about Robert Loggia's legendary scene either.

And last but not least we have to talk about… Robert Blake.

In a sea of outstanding, intensely weird and occasionally unforgettable supporting characters throughout the Lynch filmography, Blake’s Mystery Man might just take the cake. That Robert Blake, more than likely an actual sociopath, instructed Lynch on his character’s look––which, let me remind you was such: Blake decided to cut his hair cut extremely short, parted in the middle, white Kabuki make-up on his face, and an all black outfit––might be the best example of the auteur trusting his instincts, and having it pay off completely. Only on screen for a handful of scenes, Blake, who would be arrested and acquitted for the murder of his wife just a couple years later, delivers a truly unsettling performance. In his final film role ever, he encompasses true evil more than Twin Peaks’ BOB or Frank Booth in Blue Velvet. The Mystery Man is the lurking, vile corruption of what’s good that Lynch has always been looking for.

But Lost Highway is not a “what’s beneath the surface” film like Blue Velvet or Twin Peaks or even Mulholland Drive are. The “point” of Lost Highway might just be that evil exists in plain view… and there’s nothing we can do about it. Gary Busey sometimes has to watch his only child disappear in a lightning bolt of spoiled meat and that’s that. When they reappear, broken and struggling, and falling down the same path until it happens again, well… that’s just life.

One of my favorite parts of the entire movie is a scene early on when a detective asks Fred Madison if he owns a videocamera. His wife, Renee Madison, portrayed by Patricia Arquette, responds, “no, Fred hates them.” Fred responds, “I like to remember things my own way.” The detective asks, “what do you mean by that?” Bill Pullman, as Fred Madison, replies, “how I remember them. Not exactly the way that they happened.”

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CHRONOLOGICALLY
⫷ EPISODE 159A - (YOU ARE HERE) - EPISODE 160A ⫸

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