Lost Highway

Look up the definition of “mind fuck” and you’re likely to see a picture of David Lynch’s Lost Highway (1997) next to it. No surprise, as the legendary filmmaker’s work has even inspired an adjective to describe this unique brand of mind fuckery (“Lynchian”), thanks especially to the television series Twin Peaks and films like Blue Velvet (1986) and Mulholland Drive (2001). While the latter film might be Lynch’s cinematic masterwork, Lost Highway is possibly the most deliciously outre of all his films—Lynch at his most Lynchian.

As he would again later with Mulholland Drive, Lynch disorients us with fractured narrative devices in Lost Highway. This dark, neo-noir plays with our preconceptions of identity and time as a linear construct. While not a perfect film (casting the terrible Balthazar Getty is a huge misstep), it’s a wonderfully subversive experience, the kind of film you want to watch over and over, just for the moody atmospherics alone. Explaining the nonexistent plot is futile, as you need to experience all of the film’s twisting detours in real time to best appreciate Lost Highway.

The most iconic scene is probably when a devilishly grinning stranger—Robert Blake, in some eerie casting, just a few years before he was arrested for the murder of his second wife—tells Bill Pullman’s character Fred Madison they’ve met before at Fred’s house, and, in fact, he’s there right now. “Dial your number. Go ahead.” The tension is unbearable, as Fred calls his house phone, only to be met by the mystery man’s voice on the other end of the line at the same time he’s standing right in front of him. Truly the stuff of phantasmagoric nightmares.

Another disturbingly memorable moment is when an almost impossibly sexy Patricia Arquette is forced to strip at gunpoint. Lynch and cinematographer Peter Deming frame the shot beautifully, with Arquette shedding items of clothing until she’s down to her black bra and panties, while the gun-toting goons stand by watching. It’s intensely creepy, but the artistic compositions and Arquette’s masterful transition from trembling vulnerability to defiant sensuality (“Shoot me daddy. I dare you,” she purrs) work together in perfect harmony. It certainly doesn’t hurt that Patricia Arquette* is a total mood in the film.

A willingness to place mood above plot, to make no concessions at all to a traditional narrative sense, is a hallmark of Lynch’s work. With Lost Highway, David Lynch crafted a film so disinterested in “making sense” that its obliqueness becomes its greatest virtue.

---

*Happy belated birthday to the always terrific Patricia Arquette, born on April 8.

---

Special thanks to our Gal Friday Yvette for nudging us to finish up and post this one, after a very sparse version had been sitting in the drafts folder since last year.

Yvette: Vous êtes les bienvenus, monsieur. Ze timing c’est magnifique, with Patricia Arquette’s birthday earlier in ze week. As always, my timing, well, c’est impeccable.