"What do you mean? You're where right now?"A voice tells Bill Pullman, a middling saxophonist named Fred Madison, over his home's intercom system that "Dick Laurent is dead." Pullman thinks his wife Renee, played by Patricia Arquette, is fucking around on him; they receive a package with a videotape of the exterior of their house, then another, this time with footage of them in their bed, sleeping; they go to a party, hosted by some sleazeball named Andy, where Pullman meets a bizarro Robert Blake (billed in the script only as "The Mystery Man"), who is simultaneously at the party and in Pullman's house; Pullman hallucinates; Arquette is murdered, and Pullman is convicted of the crime, sentenced to die in the electric chair.
Then Lost Highway gets crazy.
While on death row, Bill Pullman somehow becomes Balthazar Getty, playing an 18 year-old kid named Pete Dayton. Since Dayton isn't guilty of anything, the cops let him go, and he returns to his job at garage run by Richard Pryor. His best customer is a Mercedes-driving sociopath named Mr. Eddy (rendered with phlegmy panache by Robert Loggia), who, as we learn following an impromptu lesson in driving etiquette, is definitely a bad motherfucker. Of course, Mr. Eddy has a girl, Alice, who looks suspiciously like a blonde Patricia Arquette (Pullman's Arquette was a brunette); she promptly sets about seducing Balthazar. Balthazar gives in, and (correctly) fearing Mr. Eddy's wrath, they hatch a plan that involves robbing Andy (the sleazeball from earlier in the film, who turns out to be some kind of porn kingpin) and going on the lam. They fuck on the road, illuminated by car headlights.
Then Bill Pullman/Fred Madison reappears. And it turns out that there weren't two Patricia Arquettes after all. And Mr. Eddy turns out to be Dick Laurent, and he's involved with Arquette somehow. Pullman and Creepy Blake kill him; Pullman says "Dick Laurent is dead" into his house's intercom and then takes off, chased across the nighttime desert by the police. Fin.
It is impossible to spoil a David Lynch film, so don't worry that I've given the game away: I still hardly understand what the hell happened myself. Greil Marcus has theorized that, unlike 2001's famously cryptic Mulholland Dr., Lost Highway actually becomes less comprehensible each time you see it. Which would be quite a feat, as Lost Highway is pretty incomprehensible the first time you see it. People become other people for no apparent reason; there's a snuff film with Marilyn Manson and Twiggy Ramirez; a man is memorably killed by a glass coffee table; Gary Busey turns in a fairly restrained performance. As David Foster Wallace put it in a contemporaneous account from the film's set, "The one thing I feel I can say with total confidence is that the movie will be...Lynchian." It is.
David Lynch has professed that he isn't certain what he wants to say to his audience: "I get ideas and I want to put them on film because they thrill me." In this sense, his movies have more in common with theme park amusements than any summer blockbuster; after all, no one rides a roller coaster in order to get somewhere. Obviously this approach limits the appeal of his work: most people go to the movies expecting to see a narrative, to be told a story, and while there are characters, events, thing happening in Lynch's films, they don't really ever add up in way that pleases the human mind's inherent need to impose order on everything it encounters. Lost Highway looks like a puzzle to us, littered with the simulacra of clues: a picture that pointedly changes from one scene to the next, an image of cabin burning that we see repeated, the appearance and reappearance of Robert Blake's Mystery Man. We try to solve the puzzle, but regardless of whatever explanations we come up with, whatever theories we develop, the pieces don't ever seem to fit conclusively; probably because they're not meant to.
The in-vogue approach is to say that the movie is then like a Rorschach inkblot - you are free to supply your own meaning. Yet, I don't think this is the case. Lost Highway represents a very definite set of events and ideas. There are concrete themes of suspicion, jealously, and betrayal; the Pullman/Getty transformation suggests the fragile and fragmentary nature of the human psyche. Bill Pullman's blank-faced Fred MacMurray stand-in, Arquette's twin femme fatales, and Getty's good kid from the wrong side of the tracks are all noir archetypes; the plot to rob Andy, which predictably goes awry, is practically lifted from Double Indemnity. All of this may not say a whole lot, but any semiotician could tell you that it means something.
Lynch himself explained it best in a 1997 interview about the film with Rolling Stone: "You can say that a lot of Lost Highway is internal.
Then Lost Highway gets crazy.
While on death row, Bill Pullman somehow becomes Balthazar Getty, playing an 18 year-old kid named Pete Dayton. Since Dayton isn't guilty of anything, the cops let him go, and he returns to his job at garage run by Richard Pryor. His best customer is a Mercedes-driving sociopath named Mr. Eddy (rendered with phlegmy panache by Robert Loggia), who, as we learn following an impromptu lesson in driving etiquette, is definitely a bad motherfucker. Of course, Mr. Eddy has a girl, Alice, who looks suspiciously like a blonde Patricia Arquette (Pullman's Arquette was a brunette); she promptly sets about seducing Balthazar. Balthazar gives in, and (correctly) fearing Mr. Eddy's wrath, they hatch a plan that involves robbing Andy (the sleazeball from earlier in the film, who turns out to be some kind of porn kingpin) and going on the lam. They fuck on the road, illuminated by car headlights.
Then Bill Pullman/Fred Madison reappears. And it turns out that there weren't two Patricia Arquettes after all. And Mr. Eddy turns out to be Dick Laurent, and he's involved with Arquette somehow. Pullman and Creepy Blake kill him; Pullman says "Dick Laurent is dead" into his house's intercom and then takes off, chased across the nighttime desert by the police. Fin.
It is impossible to spoil a David Lynch film, so don't worry that I've given the game away: I still hardly understand what the hell happened myself. Greil Marcus has theorized that, unlike 2001's famously cryptic Mulholland Dr., Lost Highway actually becomes less comprehensible each time you see it. Which would be quite a feat, as Lost Highway is pretty incomprehensible the first time you see it. People become other people for no apparent reason; there's a snuff film with Marilyn Manson and Twiggy Ramirez; a man is memorably killed by a glass coffee table; Gary Busey turns in a fairly restrained performance. As David Foster Wallace put it in a contemporaneous account from the film's set, "The one thing I feel I can say with total confidence is that the movie will be...Lynchian." It is.
David Lynch has professed that he isn't certain what he wants to say to his audience: "I get ideas and I want to put them on film because they thrill me." In this sense, his movies have more in common with theme park amusements than any summer blockbuster; after all, no one rides a roller coaster in order to get somewhere. Obviously this approach limits the appeal of his work: most people go to the movies expecting to see a narrative, to be told a story, and while there are characters, events, thing happening in Lynch's films, they don't really ever add up in way that pleases the human mind's inherent need to impose order on everything it encounters. Lost Highway looks like a puzzle to us, littered with the simulacra of clues: a picture that pointedly changes from one scene to the next, an image of cabin burning that we see repeated, the appearance and reappearance of Robert Blake's Mystery Man. We try to solve the puzzle, but regardless of whatever explanations we come up with, whatever theories we develop, the pieces don't ever seem to fit conclusively; probably because they're not meant to.
The in-vogue approach is to say that the movie is then like a Rorschach inkblot - you are free to supply your own meaning. Yet, I don't think this is the case. Lost Highway represents a very definite set of events and ideas. There are concrete themes of suspicion, jealously, and betrayal; the Pullman/Getty transformation suggests the fragile and fragmentary nature of the human psyche. Bill Pullman's blank-faced Fred MacMurray stand-in, Arquette's twin femme fatales, and Getty's good kid from the wrong side of the tracks are all noir archetypes; the plot to rob Andy, which predictably goes awry, is practically lifted from Double Indemnity. All of this may not say a whole lot, but any semiotician could tell you that it means something.
Lynch himself explained it best in a 1997 interview about the film with Rolling Stone: "You can say that a lot of Lost Highway is internal.
It's Fred's story. It's not a dream: It's realistic, though according to Fred's logic. But I don't want to say too much. The reason is: I love mysteries. To fall into a mystery and its danger ... everything becomes so intense in those moments. When most mysteries are solved, I feel tremendously let down. So I want things to feel solved up to a point, but there's got to be a certain percentage left over to keep the dream going. It's like at the end of Chinatown: The guy says, 'Forget it, Jake, it's Chinatown.' You understand it, but you don't understand it, and it keeps that mystery alive. That's the most beautiful thing.
