Who knows how I got into David Lynch. I believe I had heard the name at some point in my early teens, and it is possible my good buddy in high school Ben introduced me to Lost Highway possibly. We liked it cuz it was insane, had Marilyn Manson and Rammstein in it, and was very transgressive.
I have rewatching both Lynch and Cronenberg throughout the years, revisiting my old teenage favorites, and seeing what does near-middle-age me think of them? Lost Highway is memorable for many things, one of which being the standard Lynchian weirdness, but also I think in a lot of ways it serves as an interesting bridge from what Lynch was to who he became later, I see a lot of the relaunch of Twin Peaks in this, as well as a lot of Eraserhead, in a mashup perhaps a bit like Balthazar Getty turning into Bill Pullman.
It's somewhat hard to describe the plot (no surprise) but basically Fred (Pullman) and his wife (Patricia Arquette) begin receiving scary VHS tapes on their steps. They call in cops, who have no answers, and then a tape reveals Pullman killing his wife, which he is then pronounced guilty for. He randomly disappears from his cell and is replaced by Balthazar Getty, a delinquent non-related guy who soon enough gets involved with a woman that creepy mob dude Nice Guy Eddie is dating, also played by Patricia Arquette, and from there a creepy underworld is exposed.
Filled with Lynch moments, there are individual sequences in this which you've never seen anything like before and really will not again. I simply do not understand how some things have not been copied, drawn from, influenced the cinema of others. Sure, he has some thematic copycats, but I don't really understand why people don't copy this.
Thematically, hell, I'll throw in my take about the two real questions to ask: What happens in the movie, and then, What is the movie about?
What happens: I think if we look at this as literally as possible, it is about a man discovering his wife is cheating on him. Pullman sees Arquette at his jazz club, and if we accept there are not two Arquette's, she's also maybe mixed in with Nice Guy Eddie. Pullman goes a little crazy and grows distant from her before murdering her one night, killing Eddie and a few of his men as well. He is caught and arrested. He embarks into a fugue state and imagines himself as someone innocent (Getty), and draws many psychotic conclusions about her life that justify him murdering her.
Thematically, I think it is about growing distant from people, and the sort of bizarre moments we wish that someone was dead or gone or would just get lost or whatever. This film explored the reality of how dark those thoughts are, how evil exists even in the mind of innocent people, and how we use justification in different ways to explore the dark recesses of the human mind.
This movie is worth a rewatch, y'all. It stands up. I would love to see a high def transfer, the full screen pan and scan DVD I watched is an awful experience.
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