LOST HIGHWAY: Blu-ray (Universal/Ciby 2000, 1998) Kino Lorber

David Lynch’s Lost Highway (1997) is one of those darkly-lit and elusively compelling neo-noir misfires that you just wish would get assessed for what it is without any aspersions to real ‘reel’ art. Scripted by Lynch and Barry Gifford, like virtually anything Lynch touches, at a first glance Lost Highway appears to be more impressively ‘out there’ and ingeniously crafted than it actually is. Lynch’s film-maker’s acumen is virtually all about style at the expense of substance. His visual indulgences work, to a point, and Lost Highway contains some of the most arresting and surreal visuals yet, thanks to Peter Deming’s lushly saturated cinematography. But in the end, Lynch becomes enamored in just being odd and his movie unravels into a series of disjointed hallucinogenic nightmares that go around in ever-constricting circles until nihilistic revenge and grotesque bloodshed are the only ‘take away’ from the experience. And so, it remains with Lost Highway; badly maligned by the critics in its day because it somehow failed to meet their level of expectations – too twisted for color TV, yet somehow, not insanely weird enough to satisfy Lynch aficionados, expecting another warped masterpiece. Fragmented, is more like it; our anti-heroic jazz musician, Fred Madison (Bill Pullman), miraculously morphing into Balthazar Getty’s grease monkey, Pete Dayton while in prison for the murder of his wife, Renee (Patricia Arquette – who also plays the blonde porn star, Alice Wakefield). Duality is a theme in Lost Highway– characters running into one another in this off kilter parallel universe whose timeline is anything but linear.

Although Lost Highway get the nod for its noir influences, it also borrows heavily from German Expressionism and the French New Wave. Pullman and Getty’s characters are a page torn straight out of the doomed and desolate world of the tragic noir anti-hero, consumed by compulsive sexual desires and an external looming darkness, leading them from temptations into rank self-destructive acts of violence, murder and death. Arquette’s Alice is the picture’s femme fatale; well…sort of – a mushy, nondescript sop in either incarnation, sporting platinum or jet-black Morticia Addams’ wigs, and intermittently flashing us her assets as she slinks about the proscenium half or completely naked, mumbling generally inaudible, yet somehow flirtatious, dialogue into the ears of the three silly lovers she bizarrely charms into suicide and murder. It is difficult – if not impossible – to assess, much less embrace a picture like Lost Highway because Lynch is not going for the ‘big bear hug’ in social acceptance. He doesn’t want you to love his movies – he wants you to ponder them, much in the way Stanley Kubrick fired up the contemplation of life through his fascination with overlapping images in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) but with a serious distinction to be made. Whereas, Kubrick’s imagery eventually draws the viewer deeper into this hyper-realism where mental clarity and multiple interpretations of his visualized texts are not only possible, but endlessly debatable, the modus operandi for Lynch’s own visual layering appears chronically – and rather deliberately – to be obfuscating and distorting reality to the point where even attempting a basic ‘head or tails’ analysis becomes a head-scratching, futile and defeatist act for which no comprehension is possible.  There is no context or introspection applied. Lynch denies us either luxury. So, we are left with arresting visual compositions at face value, unable to deconstruct the madness to the methods by which Lynch has brought us to this moment of pure head-scratching purgatory.   

Upon release, Lost Highway was met with indifference from the critics, and in retrospect, it’s easy to see why. The picture – quite literally – does not make sense. That said, it is much more an effective, even oft brilliant exercise in style, with occasional substance and some strong performances to recommend it, but otherwise, entrenched in its’ desire to be odd and moody for its’ own sake, yet, strangely, never to completely satisfy as a noir thriller. The other grave misfire here is the lacking of a single character on which the audience can pin their empathy. Granted – Lynch’s milieu is always populated by sinister aberrations of humanity at large who test our patience, either by reacting or contributing to vial situations with even more repugnant motives, or simply, by making the primary mistakes that lead them down these darkened recesses into a world of pending doom and self-destruction. But the characters who populate Lost Highway represent some of the most unappealing miscreants yet conceived for the movies. They neither charm us with their mismanaged and illogical thought processes, nor seem even capable of reaching to the back of the house to remind us of their own innate fragility. Even Balthazar Getty’s Pete Dayton, whose parents, Bill (Gary Busey) and Candace (Lucy Butler) show obvious concern after he has been inexplicably teleported into Fred Madison’s prison cell, is a shell – showing little reaction to any of the grave situations thereafter presented to him, except a certain addictive and paralytic pang.

It has been argued that Lynch’s originality gets submarined by the noir style in Lost Highway, the nudity and sex scenes, perfunctory and gratuitous at best, without ever creeping us out, either in Lynch’s usual verve for the ‘weird’ fear factor, or generating even a flint spark of erotica to tantalize and tease from the peripheries. As the minutes wear on, it just seems as though Lost Highway’s motley crew of cutthroats is either going through the motions or trying much too hard to win its audience by forcing them to coexist in their parallel universe of pontificating perversity. Lynch, who relishes creating a slow, steady sense of advancing dread has quite forgotten that in order to do so effectively he needs at least one seeker of the truth who is not the epitome of ugly, soulless, and sadomasochistic suffrage, but, in fact, the stand-in for the audience, meant to unearth a revelation, not just to satisfy the conventions of that particular character’s narrative arc, but also to draw the audience to their side, as well as tie up – at least most – of the loose ends so that we actually care about what happens between points ‘A’ and ‘B’ where, undeniably, the rest of the alphabet intervenes. And yet, despite these deficiencies, Lost Highway manages to hold our attention for long stretches of its run time; perhaps, because one of the grave flaws in being human is to constantly ‘make meaning’ out of what we see, even when the particulars never add up. Whether one chooses to consider this as Lynch’s audacity of genius working overtime, or merely a filmmaker drunk on his own desire to be clever is, frankly, moot because Lost Highway is allegorically interesting only in a jejune sort of way – like a jigsaw puzzle with too many pieces provided to complete the mystery and yet, not enough of them that actually fit.  

Our odyssey into the strangely unsettling begins thus: on an ordinary morning, as saxophonist, Fred Madison hears a cryptic message on his intercom informing him that ‘Dick Laurent is dead.’ Fred’s wife Renee discovers a VHS tape on their front porch. The couple view it and discover someone has filmed the outside of their house. After another vicious set of penetrating jazz at the club, Fred and Renee have sex. Only tonight, Fred opens his eyes to see an old man in drag on top of him. No, it’s only a dream – startling the couple from their slumber. Fred confides, he has had a dream where Renee is being attacked. Now, more VHS tapes begin to arrive on the couple’s stoop, each adding several more shots to the original footage until the last one shows an intruder sneaking into their home and filming Fred and Renee as they lay asleep. Terrified, Fred and Renee call the police. However, Det. Ed (Louis Eppolito) is somewhat disinterested in the crime – if, indeed, one has been committed. Now, Fred and Renee attend a hedonistic house part given by her ‘friend’, Andy (Michael Massee) who Renee gives every indication, either to be attracted to now, or once was Andy’s lover. Naturally, this puts Fred off his game. At this juncture, Fred is introduced to ‘The Mystery Man’ (a shaved head/Kabuki make-upped Robert Blake in an unreservedly eerie performance) who, with a modicum of insidious pleasure claims to have met Fred before – at his house – and further to, now suggests he is at Fred’s house at this very moment, even as he stands before him at the party. To prove this, the Mystery Man hands Fred his cell phone and tells him to dial his own phone number. Now, the Mystery Man answers the other end of the line. Wickedly amused, the man takes back his phone and retreats from their conversation. Rattled by the encounter, Fred asks Andy to identify the man and Andy tells Fred, although he doesn’t know him personally – or even his name, for that matter - he is a very good friend of Dick Laurent. More miffed than muddled, Fred hurriedly escorts Renee home. The next morning, another tape arrives on the couple’s front porch. Fred elects to watch this one alone and, much to his horror, witnesses himself, blood-soaked and hovering over Renee's dismembered body in their bedroom.

From this disturbing hallucination, we are fast tracked to Fred’s death sentence for Renee’s murder. On death row, Fred suffers paralytic migraines and disturbing visions of the Mystery Man and a burning cabin in the desert. During a routine cell inspection, one of the prison guards (Jack Kehler) discovers that the man in Fred’s cell is now Pete Dayton, a young auto mechanic who has no idea how he arrived in this predicament. Unable to explain his whereabouts, or how he magically transplanted into Fred’s cell with several abrasions on his face and hands, Pete is released into the care of his concerned parents, but dogged by Det. Ed who is not buying his confusion for a second. Pete returns to his job at the garage, asked by mobster, Mr. Eddy – a.k.a. Dick Laurent (Robert Loggia) to fix his car. Eddy then takes Pete for a ride, during which Pete witnesses Eddy ruthlessly run a tailgater off the road and then assault the driver. The next afternoon, Eddy revisits the garage; this time, with his platinum-haired mistress, Alice Wakefield. Mutual sparks fly between Alice and Pete. She returns to the garage hours later to invite Pete to dinner. Knowing what Eddy is capable of, and also well aware of what she means to this mobster, Pete rather idiotically engages Alice for a lurid affair. Fearing to be caught, Alice concocts an elaborate scheme to rob her friend, Andy so she and Pete can run off together. Along the way, Alice also reveals Eddy to be an amateur porn producer named Dick Laurent.

Receiving two cryptic phone calls, one from Eddy, the other, The Mystery Man, a frightened Pete elects to follow through with Alice’s idiotic plan of entrapment. He ambushes Andy but accidentally kills him before noticing a photograph of Alice and Renee together. However, when police arrive at Andy’s to investigate the murder, this same photograph only shows Renee.  Pete and Alice arrive at the abandoned cabin in the desert – the same one Fred observed ablaze in his nightmarish visions. Pete and Alice begin to make love on the sand just outside of the cabin – an act concluding with her getting up and going into the cabin alone. Now, Pete is transformed back into Fred, stalked by The Mystery Man, who is filming him with a video camera. Fred escapes and drives to the Lost Highway Motel where he finds Eddy and Renee having sex. After she leaves, Fred kidnaps Eddy and slits his throat. The Mystery Man reappears and shoots Eddy dead, whispering something inaudible to everyone except Fred. Now, Fred drives to his old house, buzzes his own intercom and says, “Dick Laurent is dead.” Det. Ed arrives. Fred takes off in his car, pursued by the police. As night falls, Fred leads the police on a perilous chase down the dark and abandoned highway, suddenly convulsing and screaming uncontrollably.

Lost Highway possesses elemental threads, not only owed honorable mention to some of the greatest noir thrillers ever made a half a century before it, including 1945’s Detour and 1955’s Kiss Me Deadly, but also heavily influenced by Hitchcock’s own psycho-analytical themes plumed in 1958’s Vertigo. Lynch’s disjointed ‘cause and effect’ construction of Lost Highway has also been compared to Maya Deren’s experimental short film classic, Meshes of the Afternoon (1943). And yet, somehow, Lynch never quite manages to make anything more – much less ‘better’ – of these homages. We can sort of see where he hopes to lead us, though arguably, he never quite gets us there. And Lynch, cagey as always, never offers an ‘explanation’ for what we see. So, Lost Highway becomes an increasingly frustrating experience whose logic – if, indeed logic is to be prescribed – never materializes. Applying a psycho-analytical approach to the picture only further muddles its concrete representations. Is Fred actually going mad as he leads police down this ‘lost’ highway; the character of Pete, a total figment of his warped imagination or is Fred Pete’s alter ego – the one truly responsible for all of this mayhem? Hmmm.  

Lynch was just coming off of Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992) his big screen ‘prequel’ to the TV series, Twin Peak (1990-91), begun with an outstanding – if singularly premised first season - a murder (who killed high school senior, Laura Palmer) before unravelling in a convoluted mess during Season Two and cancelled without ever to have resolved the mystery. If nothing else, and in retrospect, Twin Peaks – the TV series – illustrated David Lynch’s creative Achilles Heel – an unsustainable narrative arc he seems fairly disinterested to pursue, much preferring the indulgences in creating an unsettling atmosphere into which he can insert various characters and situations. This only works for so long as, again, audiences demand ‘an explanation’ for what has made them invest their time in the exercise of amateur sleuthing, or at least, the opportunity to assemble ‘logic’ from their own powers of deduction and the clues strewn like arsenic-laced breadcrumbs for them to discover. Lost Highway defies a ‘convenient’ dénouement. In fact, it rather blatantly suggests none is possible; Lynch laughing at us as the Mystery Man to Fred. Do we feel cheated by this? Yes. Does it work upon renewed viewings? No. I detest cyclical logic, but in Lost Highway’s case, it is what it is and regrettably, nothing more. Nothing better. Lynch conceived of the idea for Lost Highway from a rough scenario involving videotapes and a couple in crisis. And, from this rather nimble premise, and inspiration gleaned from the O.J. Simpson murder trial, he wrote a rough draft that no studio would finance, although Universal would eventually step up to distribute the picture. But the money necessary to make the picture actually came from French production company, Ciby 2000. It may have taken Lynch only a month to write the final draft screenplay to Lost Highway, but it has taken the rest of us 22 years to try and figure out what he meant by it. So, is it art or trash? A little of both, perhaps, and never the twain shall meet to find a common ground of appreciation. You either love Lost Highway or hate it. Personally, I have elected to find it disturbingly surreal. Trash – yes – but of the oddly beguiling ilk.

By now, most are aware of the major brouhaha between David Lynch and Kino Lorber, who have elected to distribute Lost Highway for Uni on Blu-ray. Lynch claims his masterpiece has not been afforded due diligence in its video mastering and, in no way, represents the picture as he originally intended it. Okay, so what’s here has probably been culled from a print master rather than an original camera negative. But Lynch has also suggested Kino Lorber did not engage him in their plans to release the Blu-ray – an inference vehemently denied by Kino’s management who have gone on record as having extended the proverbial ‘olive branch’ to Lynch for his participation, only to be rejected outright by the film maker, before proceeding on their own. Hype or sour grapes?  Hmmmm. So, how does Lost Highway fare on Blu-ray? Pretty well, actually. If this is not the picture as Lynch had intended, then it nevertheless faithfully represents the contributions of its cinematographer, Peter Deming. The palette here is mostly dark, with richly saturated colors and excellent contrast. There are a handful of scenes where speckling is observed. But fine details pop as they should and there is a modicum of film grain looking very indigenous to its source. The DTS audio is another issue. Both the 5.1 and 2.0 have been recorded at levels so low that even turning up the volume well beyond normal listening levels still requires an investment of ear strain to hear what is going on. Yes, Lynch is experimenting here with overlap of dialogue and SFX. But there are moments where just trying to hear what is being said is more of a frustration than a cleverly evolved sound-mix. Also, not exactly certain what occurred here, but the audio over the opening Universal logo is suffering from some egregious digitization, cutting in and out and sounding as though it were bootlegged from a badly recorded mp3 off the internet. Apart from a few trailers to promote this and other Kino Lorber product, there are no extras. Bottom line: Lost Highway is not a great movie. The Blu-ray, with minor caveats, has been afforded consideration and looks wonderful. Judge and buy accordingly.

FILM RATING (out of 5 – 5 being the best)

2.5

VIDEO/AUDIO

3.5

EXTRAS

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