Lost Highway (1997)

QFS No. 163 - The invitation for January 22, 2025
David Lynch, one of singular, most unique directors in American movie history sadly passed away this past week – a lifetime of cigarette smoking finally catching up to him. Graduate of the American Film Institute’s first-ever class, he was, of course, America’s only even slightly known surrealist or avant-garde filmmaker. Even then, Lynch could never be put into a single category. The Straight Story (1999) is literally a Disney movie and earned him and the film several Academy Award nominations. He was seriously considered by George Lucas to direct Return of the Jedi (1983)! This is the same man who made what is one of the most bafflingly unique fantastic insane film ever made, Eraserhead (1977, QFS No. 22), a film we gleefully watched and discussed back in 2020 when we first started this group.

Lynch pulled off the incredible in his career, perhaps never to be matched - to create his own movies on largely his own terms. What an amazing feat, to be able to tell his completely off-beat and non-traditional films and often got studios to pay him to do so. He came up at a time when unique filmmakers were all the rage and there was a willingness to see what they could do. And he rode that wave the rest of his career – I mean, he made a surrealist television show … on ABC … in the ’90s! That’s truly incredible.

Though he was from Montana, Lynch was able to capture some kind of strange essence of Los Angeles in several of his films, notably Mulholland Drive (literally named after a notable LA street). So perhaps it’s appropriate, as LA undergoes a cataclysmic firestorm event, we turn to the city’s great surrealist. I haven’t yet seen Lost Highway which I’m ashamed to admit, but in Lynch’s honor we’ll remedy that and discuss.

Lost Highway (1997) Directed by David Lynch

Reactions and Analyses:
David Lynch’s enduring gift to me is surrender. I know this is a somewhat strange thing to be grateful for, but I am. Watching a Lynch film requires surrender. His films take on a bizarre meditation if you let them in, which makes sense when you discover that the filmmaker followed and practiced transcendental meditation. Lynch’s gift to many of us is this practice of surrendering the active part of your mind trying to make meaning all the time.

Early on in our nascent Quarantine Film Society group, we selected Eraserhead (1977, QFS No. 22). Many of us in the QFS group were once classmates at the American Film Institute, a place where Lynch had an outsized mythic presence as its more celebrated alum from AFI’s first graduating class. And Eraserhead is a direct product of his time at AFI, having started it while he was a graduate student (“Fellow” is what we’re called). Sheepishly, I had still not seen Lynch’s landmark work even though I had been out of AFI for a couple of decades.

Eraserhead (1977, QFS No. 22), began while David Lynch was still a graduate fellow at the American Film Institute, a member of its first graduating class.

So in 2020, we selected Eraserhead for QFS. And while watching for maybe the first half hour, I found myself attempting to figure out what is going on. It was uncontrollable, the urge to piece together narrative and meaning. I was flustered and perhaps upset at myself – why wasn’t I enjoying this seminal work? And then I made the decision to let go. Release myself from understanding. I let the imagery wash over me, allowing my brain to quiet and just observe. It was a remarkable viewing experience for me – and after that, I was able to see something in the story, in the film, make connections that came to me without even trying. It was, oddly, bizarrely, Lynchianly transcendent.

Renee Madison (Patricia Arquette) has black hair in the first half of Lost Highway (1997) - that much is clear. The rest? A little less so.

I was reminded of this practice with our current selection, Lost Highway (1997). Without even trying, as the movie began I attempted to make meaning of the story in the first portion of the film - knowing full well this is a film directed by David Lynch. But then, five years removed from finally seeing Eraserhead, I relented and just observed. Lost Highway is a different viewing experience and a different narrative structure of course than Eraserhead, a film Lynch cobbled together with scraps of money, sleeping in a barn near AFI, just making what can be called an elevated student film through his imagination.

The partially visible highway motif Lynch returns to throughout Lost Highway.

After more a quarter century later and Lynch’s ascension to becoming the only known American mainstream surrealist, Lost Highway exhibits the sheen of a Hollywood film instead of the scrappy grad student AFI cycle project. Movie stars, evocative cinematography, period vehicles and car stunts. But it retains the flavor of an elevated student film – and I mean this as praise, a testament to Lynch’s integrity as an artist. Lost Highway possesses the familiar devil-may-care, this-is-my-vision-deal-with-it feeling of a story that doesn’t have to explain itself or justify its worth or try to be hip and stylish. A confident film student, unshackled by the need to turn a profit on a film. And the actors perform in the way you find in so much of Lynch’s work – they’re not quite behaving as normal humans behave. Long pauses between very simple reactions. The performances feel very film-school like (speaking from experience).

Performances are often a little off kilter in a David Lynch film.

Mystery Man (Robert Blake) - deranged vidoegrapher? Angel of death? Unsettling at the very least.

But then again, nothing is “normal” in a Lynch film, which is entirely the point. The first half of the film I found to be a terrifying nightmare. Just about one of the most unnerving movies I remember seeing, especially when the Mystery Man in black (Robert Blake) shows up, pale faced and wide-eyed, maybe the angle of death. Many in the QFS group brought up that the movie doesn’t exist in traditional logic, but in fact dream logic – so the “nightmare” comparison is perhaps apt.

And suddenly, this is Pete Dayton (Balthazar Getty) and Mr. Eddy’s (Robert Loggia) story, a young hoodlum and his gangster friend, who really really doesn’t like tailgaters.

For example, halfway through the film, Fred Madison (Bill Pullman), convicted of murdering his wife, is in prison. But then, the prison guards look in and they find a completely different man inside the same prison cell (Pete Dayton, played by Balthazar Getty). The perspective change is striking – everything up to this point is being told through Fred’s point of view. But now we’re outside of his body and even his cell, so is this actually happening? It’s such a shift, but if you think of this as dream logic, that perspective changes and people transpose from one person to the next, then you can accept that these prison guards and officials are now dealing with a fantastical phenomenon without missing a beat. It only causes a minor stir – Pete Dayton, a low-level young criminal, is set free and sets off the second half of the movie that seems like a completely different storyline. But… is it? Alice Wakefield (Patricia Arquette), looking very much like a blonde twin of Fred’s murdered wife Renee Madison (also Patricia Arquette) shows up at Pete’s garage as Mr. Eddy’s (Robert Loggia) girlfriend – the two halves of the film relink.

Alice Wakefield (Patricia Arquette) looking very much like Renee Madison but with blonde hair shows up in Pete’s story, linking the two halves of the film and giving us a window in a connection. Or teasing us with one at least.

Delving further into this plotline goes against what was written before about surrendering and resisting attempt to make narrative meaning, but for a moment, let’s speculate that Fred did indeed kill his wife Renee – haunting, but murky. Then perhaps, perhaps, this second half of the film is a dream-life, Fred’s alter ego of some kind while he’s in prison awaiting execution. A projection of his youth. There are unexplained mysteries throughout, but the stories begin to overlap as if the dream is ending or merging.

Stepping back outside from the attempt to make narrative meaning, one member of group suggested that perhaps Lynch is telling a story about what happens when you repress your shadow. The deep, dark, evil that lurks in all of us, something that would drive us to kill our spouse and behave as if we haven’t. A thing we can repress, in the way that say a murderer can kill his wife and the next day be golfing as if nothing happened. Is Robert Blake’s Mystery Man then the imp that brings out the darkness? (Let’s leave aside the real story of Robert Blake and it’s grisly connection here.)

Mystery Man, playful imp who brings darkness with him.

This idea, that it’s a story about the evil inside and the ability to live on as if it didn’t happen, and if you follow that logic and believe that Fred is also Pete and in the Pete story all of the characters are part of Fred’s inner dream life, then you can squint and see logic forming. Which is not exactly what Lynch wants, but it’s the tantalizing thing, the question of what is it all about that surfaces until we push it back down and quiet it.

Sergei Parajanov (The Color of Pomegranates, QFS No. 130) forces you to let go from gleaning meaning directly, just as David Lynch does a decade later in the West.

Which is why it’s important to inject an analysis of movie viewing when talking about Lynch and what we can learn from that in watching movies made by other filmmakers. Some filmmakers lead you straight to the meaning, as clear as a shopping list. And others force you to let go, as Sergei Parajanov does in The Color of Pomegranates (1969, QFS No. 130) and as Lynch had done throughout his life as a filmmaker. Letting go is probably useful in watching any movie, but particularly essentially for Lynch and others including Parajanov.

And yet, Lynch does this all without coming across as condescending in a way many artistic filmmakers tend to. This notion that you’re too obtuse if you don’t get it like the smart ones among us. Lynch doesn’t come across that way in his work. The haunting imagery, the unclear connections, the inky darkness of night, the playful naivete of many characters - crucially the playfulness, which takes the edge off of any feeling of snobbery, is perhaps the director’s masterstroke in these complex dreamscapes he creates.

Lost Highway contains it all, as do Eraserhead and Blue Velvet (1986) and Mulholland Drive (2000). Lynch’s work just stands as it is, forcing you to observe and take away from it what you will. To surrender.