Lost Highway

Lost Highway

1997

Director- David Lynch

Cast- Patricia Arquette, Bill Pullman, Balthazar Getty, Robert Loggia, Robert Blake, Gary Busey, Richard Pryor, Lucy Butler, Michael Massee, Henry Rollins,

           

    Trying to describe a David Lynch movie by summarizing the plot is like describing the taste of a steak by telling you how it was cooked. The MPAA rating says “Bizarre violent and sexual content.” That’s probably as good of a description as any but here goes.

The movie begins with a ritzy Hollywood-esque couple. Fred (Bill Pullman) is a saxophonist married to his glamorous wife Rene (Patricia Arquette) looking like a modern day Bettie Page complete with dark hair and bangs. Something has created tension in their marriage but we don’t know what. It seems like it’s either infidelity or impotency (or maybe both) but we don’t know. Strange circumstances occur including  videotapes arriving at their house with footage of them sleeping and Fred meeting a mystery man (Robert Blake) who seems able to be in two places at once. Fred’s grasp on reality seems to be loosening until he finds a videotape of him having brutally murdered his wife, something he has no memory of. Fred is sentenced and put on death row.

            One day Fred disappears from his prison cell and is replaced by young Pete (Balthazar Getty). Pete doesn’t know how he wound up in the prison cell and no one knows where Fred went. The mystery unsolved, Pete goes home, trying to make sense of this strange occurrence. He is a mechanic and his best customer is Mr. Eddy (Robert Loggia) a violent mobster with a drop dead gorgeous girlfriend, Alice, who looks exactly like Fred’s dead wife Rene except blonde. Alice (also Arquette) puts the moves on Pete, and despite his fear of her violent boyfriend, he starts a sexual relationship with her that descends into murder as she manipulates him.

            This film is a somber meditation on evil. Fred’s house is dark, everyone wears black. There is a long dark hallway that Fred disappears into, symbolic of the abyss. The characters are undone by their own base lusts and greed.

            As for Patricia Arquette’s twin characters of Rene and Alice well there are a few different possible interpretations. I think she is some kind of succubus, reincarnating and tempting men into evil. Both men, Fred and Pete, resort to murder. One kills her and another kills for her. Another interpretation could be that they are simply pawns themselves, sisters, used by the film’s evil architect, the mystery man.

     Regardless of any other interpretations, I don’t see any way to view Robert Blake’s

mystery man other than as a satanic figure. He looks like an imp, menacing and vile .He seems to be omnipresent  and omniscient. He is also there, behind the scenes, manipulating all of the characters, pushing them toward a catastrophic end.

            The movie seems, superficially, to be a rather grim noir crime story with unexplained supernatural elements. The film doesn’t resort to symbolism but rather the emotion of imagery, most of which is very dark. It also has  a great heavy metal/ industrial soundtrack with the likes of Nine Inch Nails and Marylin Manson. Some of the movies best scenes are like short music videos combining disturbing imagery with unsettling music. This is a love it or hate it movie and I doubt most folks will feel ambivalent about it.