Director: David Lynch
Screenplay: David Lynch and Barry Gifford
Starring: Bill Pullman, Patricia Arquette, Robert Loggia
Country: US
Running Time: 134 mins
Year: 1997
BBFC Certificate: 18
The film
It is a cliche to describe films as ‘dream-like’, but in the case of David Lynch it is a difficult comparison to avoid. For his entire career, Lynch has pursued an approach to filmmaking that rejects the limitations of ‘realistic’ cause-and-effect narrative, preferring instead to create characters and settings that feel true or correct, even if they defy any logical explanation. Interviewers often report their frustration at Lynch’s refusal to explain or analyse his own work, as if he is deliberately hiding something from them. Yet the truth may be that Lynch himself does not know why particular details occur in his films, beyond a certainty that they seemed like the right thing to do at the time. Lynch’s apparently fearless willingness to trust his subconscious judgement has led to him to some dark, some corny, and some simply baffling places. Yet in a way captured by few other filmmakers, there is an inevitability about Lynch’s choices that gives his work a genuinely dream-like quality completely different from the over-thought randomness or obvious symbolism of most attempts to represent dreams on film.
If all Lynch’s films evoke dreams to greater or lesser degrees, Lost Highway is the most straightforwardly like a nightmare. The opening credits play over a continuous shot hurtling down a barely visible highway at night, accompanied by David Bowie’s propulsive, haunting I’m Deranged. It’s a perfect primer for the plunge into darkness that follows as we’re introduced to troubled protagonist Fred Madison, played with a near-constant grimace by Bill Pullman. Fred is a successful saxophonist, but every other aspect of his life seems tortured and wrong. His modern, minimalist house has too few windows, its interior all awkward angles and shadowy blank walls. His wife, Renee (Patricia Arquette) shows little emotion beyond fear of her husband. Fred suspects Renee is unfaithful, and his paranoia isn’t helped when anonymous videotapes begin arriving at their door, first with footage of the house, and then of the couple sleeping in bed.
As Fred’s mental state deteriorates, so does any hope of rationally explaining the narrative. He meets a ghoulish, white-faced man (Robert Blake) at a party who smilingly defies the laws of physics. Then Renee is brutally murdered and Fred is convicted of the crime. Awaiting execution he complains of a terrible headache, and becomes someone else entirely. When the guards check the cell the following morning, Fred has been replaced by a young, very confused man named Pete Dayton (Balthazar Getty). With no connection to the crime, and no idea how he ended up in the cell, Pete is released and returns to his job as a mechanic. There he meets Alice, the mistress of local gangster Mr Eddy, one of Pete’s best clients. Alice is also played by Patricia Arquette, and therefore looks exactly like the murdered Renee, albeit blonde rather than brunette. Both Alice and Renee are styled to look like 1940s femme fatales, and on one level this is clearly Lynch’s attempt at a film noir. Yet a sense of dread hangs over events that takes the production much closer to a kind of existential horror. The violence and sex may be no more extreme than in some of Lynch’s other films, but here there is little hope or levity to act as balance. Fred has none of the sympathetic qualities associated with noir’s flawed heroes. Pete is better, but is he even real? In a film that so prominently features violence against women, the presence of Blake, Marilyn Manson and Richard Pryor (the latter two in minor roles) among the cast retrospectively contributes to the ugly tone. As the boundaries between characters, and between reality and imagination collapse, the result is one of Lynch’s bleakest works.
The Disc
Compared to previous editions of Lost Highway, both the blu ray and the UHD discs presented by Criterion are superb. So much of the atmosphere of the film relies on deep, enveloping shadows, and here the blacks are truly black while retaining detail for what manages to escape. Both the HD and UHD presentations feature consistent film grain, but it is much more apparent on the UHD disc, to the extent that it can be distracting if you’re too near the screen. There’s also a surprising level of difference between the colour presentation of the two transfers. I found the blu ray to be warmer and more natural, while the UHD sometimes gave characters a ghostly, washed-out appearance (and not just Robert Blake). The UHD definitely had the edge in terms of shadow detail, but I preferred the blu ray.
For extras, Criterion have assembled a decent range of pre-existing extras without commissioning anything new themselves. There’s an excellent hour-long making-of documentary that was shot on set and features interviews with cast and crew, and shorter promotional interviews with Lynch, Arquette, Loggia and Pullman. There’s also 40 minutes from the audiobook of Lynch’s recent Room to Dream cowritten with Kristine McKenna that details the history of the project and what else Lynch as up to in the 1990s. It’s all good stuff, but it would have been nice to get more of a critical appraisal, or retrospective thoughts from Lynch’s collaborators.
Review by Jim Whalley
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