Lost Highway

Started by ono, July 23, 2003, 08:48:09 PM

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NEON MERCURY

:yabbse-grin:  i just recovered!!

this is awesome!  it has been an incredible time for lynch fans with INLAND EMPIRE (which i promise to finish my review), twin peaks, and now lost highway...which is a complete masterpeice in every way.  finally, i can toss the old widescreen vhs copy.  wonder when i can get lynch media in high def?  to finally complete the puzzle we still need those fwwm deleted scenes.

MacGuffin

"Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art." - Andy Warhol


Skeleton FilmWorks

ono

One of the many DVDs I bought thanks to Hollywood Video going under was this one.  Thought I'd give it another go since last time I was underwhelmed.  What strikes me now is how nihilistic and straightforward most of Lynch's films are, you know, underneath all the obfuscation.

Spoilers and stuff.  I like his language now, 'cause he doesn't come right out and say it, something I demanded way too much of last time around.  And this... this is truly one of the creepiest, most unnerving films I've seen.  At times Mulholland Drive played like horror -- imagine if Lynch went all out in that respect.  For someone as amicable as he is in interviews, he's really, well, as I said, dark.  Blue Velvet, another film I revisited, ended on an up note.  Crazy, for what had just transpired.  And it was basically just a "guy-gets-in-over-his-head" mystery done more stylistically than anyone else ever had.

But I digress.  I think my objections at first were how we had no entry point.  The protagonists were both pretty cold, making it hard for viewers to form a bond and care.  Not always necessary, fine.  The gist of the flick is straightforward though.  This guy is in denial and rage about his wife cheating.  He hates videotape (says he likes to remember things his own way) -- manifested with the taunting, haunting tapes he receives and the interactions with the mystery man, and can never have the woman he loves -- chances back to himself the moment he hears her whisper it to him when they're cavorting in the desert.  So, just as in Mulholland Drive, half the movie is a predeath dream/fantasy, in this flick, the middle is the what-if of a maybe younger/alternate reality protagonist just as he's about to meet death.  Note the convulsions, of course, as he speeds down the highway in the film's final shot.  And is that music that plays over the final credits great or what?

I don't know what to make of the imploding cabin other than it's one of the most indelible images I've ever seen in film.  Lynch sure has a way of taking ideas that could go horribly awry and making them work.

I don't know that I'm a convert.  I like my movies with a side of hope.  The Twin Peaks Pilot, which bored me to tears the first time around, will be revisited in due time.

MacGuffin

Traveling Back Down David Lynch's 'Lost Highway'
By Hillary Weston, Black Book

One morning, David Lynch awoke to hear his intercom buzzing. A man's voice on the other end spoke, referring to him as "Dave." Lynch answered, "Yeah?" and the man said, "Dick Laurent is dead." Lynch said, "What?" but there was no one at the door. And he'd never heard of a Dick Laurent. He looked out to the large window on the other side of his house by the door, but again, no one there.

A typical morning for the man who has provided us with some of the most powerfully psychological fright and pleasure? Maybe. An inspiration for one of his greatest films? Definitely. If a Lynchian universe all exists within the mind, somewhere between waking and consciousness, Lost Highway is that moment in a nightmare where your body begins to panic, knowing this is not quite reality but you're stuck, you cannot wake yourself up and in dreams you must visualize physically prying your eyes open and screaming aloud in order to escape.

Beginning with the inky black night, speeding down the highway with nothing around save the absolute black, we're immediately given a sense of severe anxiety, which only unravels into complete mental collapse as the film progresses. Very loosely, Lost Highway tells the story of a bizarre encounter at party sparks a jazz saxophonist being framed for the murder  of his wife and is sent to prison where he morphs into a young mechanic and begins a new life.

In an article that continues to be my favorite piece of journalistic film writing, David Foster Wallace visited the set of Lost Highway in 1996, and after giving his famous academic definition of just what "Lynchian" is,  he discusses what different members of the crew and production staff—"some of whom have been to film school"—have to say about the Lost Highway:

DAVID'S IDEA is to do this, like, dystopian vision of L.A. You could do a dystopic vision of New York, but who'd care? New York's been done before."

"If s about deformity. Remember Eraserhead? This guy's going to be the ultimate Penishead."

"I'm sure not going to go see it, I know that."

"This is a movie that explores psychosis subjectively."

"It's some reflection on society as he sees it."

"This is his territory. This is him taking us deeper into a space he's already carved out in previous work-subjectivity and psychosis."

"He's doing a Diane Arbus number on L.A., showing the, like, slimy undersection of a dream city. Chinatown did it, but it did it in a historical way, as a type of noir history. David's film's about madness; it's subjective, not historical." " It , s like, if you're a doctor or a nurse, are you going to go buy tickets to see an operation for fun in your spare time, when you're done working?"

"This film represents schizophrenia performatively, not just representationally. This is done in terms of loosening of identity, ontology, and continuity in time."

"Let me just say I have utmost respect-for David, for the industry, for what David means to this industry. Let me say I'm excited. That I'm thrilled and have the utmost respect."

"It's a specialty film. Like 7he Piano, say. It's not going to open in a thousand theaters."

"Utmost is one word. There is no hyphen in utmost."

"It's about L.A. as hell. This is not unrealistic, if you want my opinion."

"It's a product like any other in a business like any other."

"David is the Id of the Now. If you quote me, say I quipped it. Say ' "David is the Id of the Now," quipped______, who is the film's_____.

David, as an artist, makes his own choices about what he wants. He makes a film when he feels he has something to say. Some are perceived as better
than others. David does not look at this as his area of concern."

"He's a genius; you have to understand that. He's not like you and me."

"The head-changes are being done with makeup and lights. No CGIs." (21 'Computer-generated images,' as in Jumanii).

"Read City of Quartz. That's what this film's about right there in a nutshell."

"Some of them were talking about Hegel, whatever the hell that means."

"Let me just say I hope you're not planning to compromise him or us or the film in any way."

He then goes on to describe what Lynch seems to want from his audience:

David Lynch's movies are often described as occupying a kind of middle ground between art film and commercial film. But what they really occupy is a whole third kind of territory. Most of Lynch's best films don't really have much of a point, and in lots of ways they seem to resist the film-interpretative process by which movies' (certainly avant-garde movies') central points are understood. This is something the British critic Paul Taylor seems to get at when he says that Lynch's movies are "to be experienced rather than explained." Lynch's movies are indeed susceptible to a variety of sophisticated interpretations, but it would be a serious mistake to conclude from this that his movies point at the too-facile summation that "film interpretation is necessarily multivalent" or something-they're just not that kind of movie. Nor are they seductive, though, at least in the commercial sense of being comfortable or linear or High Concept or "feel-good." You almost never from a Lynch movie get the sense that the point is to "entertain" you, and never that the point is to get you to fork over money to see it. This is one of the unsettling things about a Lynch movie: You don't feel like you're entering into any of the standard unspoken and/or unconscious contracts you normally enter into with other kinds of movies. This is unsettling because in the absence of such an unconscious contract we lose some of the psychic protections we normally (and necessarily) bring to bear on a medium as powerful as film. That is, if we know on some level what a movie wants from us, we can erect certain internal defenses that let us choose how much of ourselves we give away to it. The absence of point or recognizable agenda in Lynch's films, though, strips these subliminal defenses and lets Lynch get inside your head in a way movies normally don't. This is why his best films' effects are often so emotional and nightmarish. (We're defenseless in our dreams too.)

This may in fact be Lynch's true and only agenda-just to get inside your head. He seems to care more about penetrating your head than about what he does once he's in there. Is this good art? It's hard to say. It seems-once again-either ingenuous or psychopathic. It sure is different, anyway.

And today, fantastic film blog Cinephilia and Beyond posted about Lost Highway, sighting Wallace's first encounter with Lynch—and naturally he was of course peeing on a tree:

This is on 8 January in L.A.'s Griffith Park, where some of Lost Highway's exteriors and driving scenes are being shot. He is standing in the bristly underbrush off the dirt road between the base camp's trailers and the set, peeing on a stunted pine. Mr. David Lynch, a prodigious coffee drinker, apparently pees hard and often, and neither he nor the production can afford the time it'd take to run down the base camp's long line of trailers to the trailer where the bathrooms are every time he needs to pee. So my first (and generally representative) sight of Lynch is from the back, and (understandably) from a distance. Lost Highway's cast and crew pretty much ignore Lynch's urinating in public, (though I never did see anybody else relieving themselves on the set again, Lynch really was exponentially busier than everybody else.) and they ignore it in a relaxed rather than a tense or uncomfortable way, sort of the way you'd ignore a child's alfresco peeing.

And for more on the one film that has managed to frighten me more than quite possibly anything else, check out Lynch's interview with Rolling Stone in 1997, thanks to C&B. Also, let's just listen to some of the killer soundtrack for the film, featuring everyone from Angelo Badalamenti to Trent Reznor and Marilyn Manson and Lou Reed.
"Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art." - Andy Warhol


Skeleton FilmWorks

SamFZGames

(Here I am, digging up another old topic, I hope I spark some more discussion rather than end up just bumping it to the top with no replies...)

I love Lost Highway. Mulholland Drive is still my favourite, but I think Lost Highway is equally as lucid and explainable. The UK Blu-Ray has the biggest clue on the back. The synopsis reads:

"A psychogenic fugue."

That's it. And that sums up the entire movie. Fred creates a whole new reality and identity in his mind to run away from what he has done. Even a lot of the stuff before he is arrested is inside his own head too, the videos being his memories of the real world (Fred says he hates cameras because he likes to remember things "his own way", and in his fugue state, videos are how his true memories are presented).

Really, I think there's no arguing with that theory, it fits perfectly and the film works well with it. On top of that, and Barry Gifford has even confirmed the fact that it is about Fred's fugue state.

The ending is super cool in how ambiguous it is though. Is he trying another new reality/personality? Or is he being executed in the electric chair? I very much believe in the latter, particularly with some of the deleted scenes.

Man, cool movie :D

Sleepless

This has possibly been covered earlier in the thread, but "a psychogenic fugue" is how Lynch has often described the film. The musical definition of fugue is relevant here: "a fugue is a contrapuntal compositional technique in two or more voices, built on a subject (theme) that is introduced at the beginning in imitation (repetition at different pitches) and recurs frequently in the course of the composition. [...] A fugue usually has three sections: an exposition, a development, and a recapitulation containing the return of the subject in the fugue's tonic key, though not all fugues have a recapitulation. [...] Most fugues open with a short main theme, the subject, which then sounds successively in each voice (after the first voice is finished stating the subject, a second voice repeats the subject at a different pitch, and other voices repeat in the same way); when each voice has entered, the exposition is complete. This is often followed by a connecting passage, or episode, developed from previously heard material; further "entries" of the subject then are heard in related keys. Episodes (if applicable) and entries are usually alternated until the "final entry" of the subject, by which point the music has returned to the opening key, or tonic, which is often followed by closing material, the coda. In this sense, a fugue is a style of composition, rather than a fixed structure."
He held on. The dolphin and all the rest of its pod turned and swam out to sea, and still he held on. This is it, he thought. Then he remembered that they were air-breathers too. It was going to be all right.

SamFZGames

Cool! :-) A psychogenic fugue (now mostly known as a fugue state) in psychology is very much what Lost Highway is too. A person "blacks out", forgets who they are and often creates a new identity, but it tends to be temporary.

Sleepless

I think we've all seen Breaking Bad here ;)
He held on. The dolphin and all the rest of its pod turned and swam out to sea, and still he held on. This is it, he thought. Then he remembered that they were air-breathers too. It was going to be all right.

SamFZGames

Oh hey, that's right! That was his excuse for "where he was" early on, yes? Damn, I almost forgot about that!

wilder

Coming to blu-ray from Kino on June 25, 2019


WorldForgot

We've always known that Lynch is concerned with 'veils' between reality and ineffable dimensions.
True, too, we understand that even beyond Transcendental Meditation, he's fixated on the Mystical.

Letterboxd Scribe and verbose cognizante, pd187, has an illuminating review on how Lost Highway fractals murders adjacent to David Lynch's personal life. Not mentioned in the review, and not a coincidence, the house featured in the film as 'Pullman' and 'Arquette's characters' home is Lynch's own

https://letterboxd.com/pd187/film/lost-highway/

Quote[...]

i get dave is verry interested in stories about men killing women but its actually a tulpa or extradimensional doppelganger //psychic twin or some shit cuz im also interested in our "many me"s (to quote sesame street) but a 1990 chicago tribune review* of twin peaks got me thinking how leland palmer gets "off the hook" thru its supernatural plot device of bob ("a mess of abdicated responsibility, victim-blaming and sexualized rape") & pondering why so many of davey's stories use this vaguely jungian philosophic/occult version of shaggys it-wasnt-me defense mostly wanting to know--has this transcendental meditationist ever tried to enact a mystical 'transference' ritual after a crime? are his obsessions with guilt & identity inspired by a tabloid wife-killer's' "delusions of innocence" (like he said lost hwy=OJ) or do these tales of powerful men falsely (??) accused of raping & killing their daughters & lovers (same thing) thru exonerating metaphysical dream-fog refer to a defense used by lynch's (alleged) college-era buddy ira einhorn for his murder of holly maddux? are they confessions, accusations, a fantasy? or just stories?

"I said to him, 'Mr. Lynch, you were attracted to this because it involves the psychological torture of a beautiful young woman.' And he said, 'Yes."' In fact, Lynch engaged in a little good-humored on-the-set torture himself. The veteran director made the spot's actress (newcomer Marisa Parker) actually take a pregnancy test so he could tape her real-life reaction. The twist: Lynch switched her results with those of a pregnant crew member. Says Mayer, "[Marisa] held her own, then as soon as the camera stopped rolling, she screamed, 'You bastard! Very funny."'

ew.com/article/1997/07/18/david-lynchs-commercial-break/

i dont wanna approach this in a neo-puritan steven universe callout way but theres a limit on how much "exploring evil"-ambiguity, virginal purity, charismatic demon magik & moralizing torture/murder wrapped in surreal symbolism & twilight language* i can take from the "panties in my mouth" guy [ youtu.be/ioKyxGkBRro ] (remember 3 weeks ago seeing the weird cpac stage defended as just the "owl cave" rune from "a TV show" like ohh ok not some weird occult evil its just the totally harmless & cool symbol from twin peaks) & couldnt stop thinking of...

MICHAEL J. ANDERSON'S FACEBOOK

--cuz aside from lynch's work the main source for this convo is the weird 2015 allegations of sinful-dwarf anderson so i should link those here:

etcanada.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/michaelanderson.jpg?quality=80&strip=all&w=1024

crazy, right? why say this? guess he just "lost it"! before meeting lynch, mike did computer tech for u.s. military contractor martin marietta (the "martin" in lockheed martin) where he helped convert titan ii ICBMs into NASA shuttle boosters.* not just fluent in programming languages, he also invented his iconic backwards speech later used for twin peaks years earlier as a child, and echoes some of its truth-telling-thru-reversal in these double-negative accusations ("he never...") which david's daughter jennifer lynch oddly responded to with another negative,* saying "none of what he says is true" (so..."he never had his best friend murdered"=NOT TRUE?)--never-whatever, still alot of bodies tho

*https://www.hollywood.com/general/jennifer-lynch-defends-her-dad-after-twin-peaks-stars-facebook-rant-goes-public-60619227/

DICK LAURENT IS DEAD*

...which maybe should be expected from anybody on the fringe of society (as much as an oscar-winner with a movie on disney+ can be "fringe") but gee-golly lynch himself is surrounded by unsolved & unexplained cold-case assaults, suicides & murders, like some cosmic-accident serial killer or psychic vortex of atrocity. lost highway was "best friend" jack nance's final film, released after his never-explained diner murder ("i mouthed off and i got what i deserved"*), and its the final onscreen vessel for acquitted wife-killer & original lil' rascal robert blake, doing his witchy mib thing alongside spousal-abuser gary busey and daughter of the murdered natalie wood (goddaughter of polanski cultist ruth gordon!) natasha gregson wagner.

*http://www.lynchnet.com/absent/nancepre.html

lynch also hooked up real-life "mafia cop" lou eppolito with a juicy role as the detective tracking balthazar's pete ("fucker gets more pussy than a toilet seat!") just a few years before lou's massive conviction for racketeering, extortion, narcotics, illegal gambling, obstruction of justice, and eight counts of murder & conspiracy to commit murder [...]

and later on in the essay

Quote[...]

DID DAVID LYNCH KNOW IRA EINHORN??

thx to hollie horror (who recognized the unicorn killer inspiring "beneath the skin"*) we know cecelia condit made early 80s art films working thru her feelings on dating a murderer, inc. last year's tiktok meme POSSIBLY IN MICHIGAN *https://letterboxd.com/holliehorror/film/beneath-the-skin-1981/

but as discussed here- letterboxd.com/pd187/film/the-earth-day-special/ -i must return to the knowledge that lynch took classes at penn while einhorn not only taught there but was deeply embedded in the philly art/experimental/avant garde cinema scene,* working & socializing with film students & appearing in shorts ("carrying a female mannequin") directed by letterboxd.com/director/christopher-speeth/

the fact that einhorn's laura palmeresque beauty-queen gf maddux was found "wrapped in plastic" or that he theorized her murder was at the behest of a demonic conspiracy, hypothesizing that he was brainwashed, possessed or embodied by some kind of evil obscuring spirit seems relevant to p much all the work lynch has done since his time living just a few city blocks from einhorn's corpse-trunk. ("philadelphia is percolating in me.") this local-to-lynch story was national front-page news - EARTH DAY FOUNDER FLEES. ACCUSING CIA OF SLAYING - not something you'd forget, but he's out here saying lost highway is about OJ?*

aside from biographical "coincidences" of david & ira, they're both 9/11 truthers* (lynch went on alex jones!) with shared interest in parallel dimensions, tulpas and time-loops, not to mention lynch's 50-year practice of transcendental meditation corresponding with einhorn's late 60s new age yoga-guru lessons on lynch's philly campus. david even cast the einhorn tv movie's holly maddux (naomi watts!) as his lead in mulholland drive (which also had the same sound dept guys??). einhorn spent decades on the run theorizing about UFOs with trump-connected spook physicists like jack sarfatti--can lynch-heads saucerpill me on lynch and UFOs? (*i havent seen tp3)--does every production feat. keelian phone-prank mibs like blake in this? does this end with a classic abduction? does lynch...believe?

so anyway, big deal, maybe he doesnt wanna admit a history with such a weird/controversial guy, right? well, lynch signed the 2009 free-polanski letter (another american countercult "genius" who, like einhorn, fled extradition in europe) so i cant see how "i hung out with ira in the 60s" would be worse, unless there's alot more to it than that. if we can plumb polanski & wxxdy xllxn movies for tells of perversions & pathology, why not david? ultimately, isnt lynch doing what einhorn did, mystifying simple crimes & abuses into a distracting esoteric stew of possession, dimensional jumps, dream logic and conspiracies? [...]