1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 74: Lost highway
David Lynch released The Straight Story in 1999. It told a tidy, linear, almost sentimental tale.
In 2001, he released Mulholland Drive. That puzzle-story was cohesive – even (shudder!) a bit affecting.
The question is whether Lost Highway (1997) belongs with this group or with such perversities as Lynch’s Blue Velvet and Wild at Heart. It does feel different from those earlier movies. Gone is (most of ) the campy cruelty. What remains is … just cruel.
Is that fatal to a movie? “It’s not the violence I mind,” Ebert says in his review of Wild at Heart, “it’s the sneaky excuses.” Lynch, in Lost Highway, seems to have done away with the excuses, but the residue sure ain’t for the squeamish.
Ebert gives Lost Highway half a star less.
What say you, John-Paul? Acquit or convict?
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
Much happens in Lost Highway that couldn’t. People inhabit two places at the same time. People disappear from photographs and from small, locked rooms. People change into other people.
It isn’t fantasy or science fiction.
The simplest explanation is that the movie depicts the thoughts of a man whose brain is being zapped in the electric chair. Some thoughts are memories; some are involuntary hallucinations; some, perhaps, are voluntary fantasies. They needn’t perfectly cohere.
Mulholland Drive consists of a similar brainstorm before death. So, for that matter, does American Beauty (1999; not one of Lynch’s movies, but charitably interpreted in that vein). A literary precedent, noted by others who have tried to make sense of Lost Highway, is Ambrose Bierce’s story, “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” (1890).
Never mind that in California in the 1990s, condemned people weren’t electrocuted. That sort of licence is permitted because the movie is tipping its fedora to the past. It wants to be like Detour, another movie that takes place inside one character’s thoughts.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
Fred (Bill Pullman) and Renee (Patricia Arquette) have a frosty marriage. Videos arrive on their doorstep. Fred and Renee view them. One shows the outside of their house. Another shows them sleeping. Fred views the third tape alone. It shows him with Renee’s bloody corpse. We haven’t seen Fred murder Renee, but the movie jumps forward, and we hear his sentencing. He is condemned to die. In prison he has headaches. One day (and this is the big spoiler), the guards find another person, instead, in his cell. This is young Pete – Balthazar Getty, who looks like James, the young biker in Lynch’s Twin Peaks – a mechanic with a less serious criminal record. The authorities have no choice but to release Pete. He returns to his job, his parents’ house, and Sheila (Natasha Gregson Wagner), his girlfriend. Through his garage work, he falls in with a gangster and his mistress, Alice (Arquette again, blond, not dark-haired); they are involved with pornographers. Pete has an affair with Alice. She tells of terrible abuse. She asks him to help commit a robbery. They do so (and manslaughter, too) and drive out into the desert to sell the goods … and then things get very strange. They have intense, loveless, arid, desert sex; Alice disappears; a house burns down. Things get even stranger.
It’s generally agreed that Fred imagines most of this and that Pete is his imaginary alter ego. I dunno. Pete, to me, hardly seems the manly sort that Fred is alleged to wish to be. I have a different theory. Pete is Fred, all right – a memory, not an alter ego; and Renee is Alice, who fled the gangster with Pete/Fred, taking the identity of Pete’s dark-haired girlfriend, Sheila, to throw the gangster’s minions off the trail. Sheila is sacrificed (perhaps in the fire). So Fred is guilty of his woman’s murder, but she isn’t the woman we think he’s accused of murdering. Living with Renee/Alice, Fred more-or-less wilfully conflates her personality with Sheila’s (he prefers the tamer girl, it turns out). Meanwhile, one of the gangster’s associates, who has obtained a video of Sheila’s murder, uses it and other video of Fred and Renee to coerce Fred into helping him to murder the gangster; he then lets Fred be blamed. This doesn’t tie up all the loose ends, but it makes sense of some puzzles, like why Sheila is in the movie, why she looks like Renee, and why Arquette plays both Alice and Renee (they’re the same woman, although Renee, in Fred’s thoughts, behaves like Sheila, or as he wishes Sheila had behaved). Why, in prison, does Fred change back into Pete? That’s escapist fantasy à la “Owl Creek Bridge” (back to one’s ancestral home; back to one’s obliging woman). Fred’s other dying thoughts may be distorted in detail, but they’re emotionally and morally true.
This could all be wrong. But if enough of it is right, I vote acquit.
But I don’t think I’d watch it again.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
David saw this movie not long ago. I haven’t heard his interpretation.
Virtually everyone agrees that Fred murders his woman. Lynch has said that he was thinking of the O. J. Simpson car chase while making this movie. What bugs me is: Which woman, exactly, does Fred murder? And does he have to kill her, or would it be murderous enough to replace her, in his thoughts, with someone else?
For a different account that I’m sympathetic to, see this book.
In 2001, he released Mulholland Drive. That puzzle-story was cohesive – even (shudder!) a bit affecting.
The question is whether Lost Highway (1997) belongs with this group or with such perversities as Lynch’s Blue Velvet and Wild at Heart. It does feel different from those earlier movies. Gone is (most of ) the campy cruelty. What remains is … just cruel.
Is that fatal to a movie? “It’s not the violence I mind,” Ebert says in his review of Wild at Heart, “it’s the sneaky excuses.” Lynch, in Lost Highway, seems to have done away with the excuses, but the residue sure ain’t for the squeamish.
Ebert gives Lost Highway half a star less.
What say you, John-Paul? Acquit or convict?
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
Much happens in Lost Highway that couldn’t. People inhabit two places at the same time. People disappear from photographs and from small, locked rooms. People change into other people.
It isn’t fantasy or science fiction.
The simplest explanation is that the movie depicts the thoughts of a man whose brain is being zapped in the electric chair. Some thoughts are memories; some are involuntary hallucinations; some, perhaps, are voluntary fantasies. They needn’t perfectly cohere.
Mulholland Drive consists of a similar brainstorm before death. So, for that matter, does American Beauty (1999; not one of Lynch’s movies, but charitably interpreted in that vein). A literary precedent, noted by others who have tried to make sense of Lost Highway, is Ambrose Bierce’s story, “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” (1890).
Never mind that in California in the 1990s, condemned people weren’t electrocuted. That sort of licence is permitted because the movie is tipping its fedora to the past. It wants to be like Detour, another movie that takes place inside one character’s thoughts.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
Fred (Bill Pullman) and Renee (Patricia Arquette) have a frosty marriage. Videos arrive on their doorstep. Fred and Renee view them. One shows the outside of their house. Another shows them sleeping. Fred views the third tape alone. It shows him with Renee’s bloody corpse. We haven’t seen Fred murder Renee, but the movie jumps forward, and we hear his sentencing. He is condemned to die. In prison he has headaches. One day (and this is the big spoiler), the guards find another person, instead, in his cell. This is young Pete – Balthazar Getty, who looks like James, the young biker in Lynch’s Twin Peaks – a mechanic with a less serious criminal record. The authorities have no choice but to release Pete. He returns to his job, his parents’ house, and Sheila (Natasha Gregson Wagner), his girlfriend. Through his garage work, he falls in with a gangster and his mistress, Alice (Arquette again, blond, not dark-haired); they are involved with pornographers. Pete has an affair with Alice. She tells of terrible abuse. She asks him to help commit a robbery. They do so (and manslaughter, too) and drive out into the desert to sell the goods … and then things get very strange. They have intense, loveless, arid, desert sex; Alice disappears; a house burns down. Things get even stranger.
It’s generally agreed that Fred imagines most of this and that Pete is his imaginary alter ego. I dunno. Pete, to me, hardly seems the manly sort that Fred is alleged to wish to be. I have a different theory. Pete is Fred, all right – a memory, not an alter ego; and Renee is Alice, who fled the gangster with Pete/Fred, taking the identity of Pete’s dark-haired girlfriend, Sheila, to throw the gangster’s minions off the trail. Sheila is sacrificed (perhaps in the fire). So Fred is guilty of his woman’s murder, but she isn’t the woman we think he’s accused of murdering. Living with Renee/Alice, Fred more-or-less wilfully conflates her personality with Sheila’s (he prefers the tamer girl, it turns out). Meanwhile, one of the gangster’s associates, who has obtained a video of Sheila’s murder, uses it and other video of Fred and Renee to coerce Fred into helping him to murder the gangster; he then lets Fred be blamed. This doesn’t tie up all the loose ends, but it makes sense of some puzzles, like why Sheila is in the movie, why she looks like Renee, and why Arquette plays both Alice and Renee (they’re the same woman, although Renee, in Fred’s thoughts, behaves like Sheila, or as he wishes Sheila had behaved). Why, in prison, does Fred change back into Pete? That’s escapist fantasy à la “Owl Creek Bridge” (back to one’s ancestral home; back to one’s obliging woman). Fred’s other dying thoughts may be distorted in detail, but they’re emotionally and morally true.
This could all be wrong. But if enough of it is right, I vote acquit.
But I don’t think I’d watch it again.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
David saw this movie not long ago. I haven’t heard his interpretation.
Virtually everyone agrees that Fred murders his woman. Lynch has said that he was thinking of the O. J. Simpson car chase while making this movie. What bugs me is: Which woman, exactly, does Fred murder? And does he have to kill her, or would it be murderous enough to replace her, in his thoughts, with someone else?
For a different account that I’m sympathetic to, see this book.