Pete Dayton, fresh from his strange and barely recalled transition, resumes his life as a cool mechanic with a rock star sex life and now constant surveillance attention from a pair of detectives. Pete's favourite customer comes in one day for a tune on his Merc which involves a wild ride that includes one of the funniest road rage rants you are ever likely to see. On another day that customer, local gangster Mr Eddy, comes in with his golden girl on display. She is an ultra textbook feminine version of Renee now called Alice. She and Pete lock eyes and it's on.
The rest is a kind of twisted neo-noir plot with guns, gangsters and infidelity. It is also about responsibility and guilt and retribution and the notion of a circle leading back to fate. The film was the first in what came to be known as the psychogenic fugue trilogy (Mulholland Dr. and Inland Empire followed) by which a character's need to flee the scene of guilt or degradation was so powerful that they willed themselves into a new reality. Callbacks and crossovers between the Fred and Pete worlds abound and the sense of the overall arc being a circle grows with each viewing.
When I first saw this in 1997 it was already quite well established in my mind. I'd read a fair bit in things like Sight and Sound and online and a long piece in Premiere by David Foster Wallace. They didn't spoil the film or Barry Gifford's story but the fugue trope was well out of the bag before the lights went down in the Nova when I tore open the plastic of my choctop.
While I was wowed by the whole experience, it's an intense Lynchian entry, I left feeling emptied rather than filled, enervated. I understood the structure and appreciated the craft of the execution but ... I'll just repeat what a person on one of the newsgroups I frequented wrote: It's a cold film about a bad man. It's very hard to feel intimate with Lost Highway just as Blue Velvet or even the bizarre world of Eraserhead can offer warmth. It wasn't until much later that I began to return to it as though it was an unresolved problem. And watch after rewatch I only felt more familiar with it, not more comprehending of it.
I'd read many good, lucid ideas about it online in the great days of Usenet and discussions I had of the more searching kind were helpful in building a picture of what the characters were experiencing. There was a circularity I found pleasing as it allowed starting with either Pete or Fred as the bardo, reincarnation, fugue trigger rolled on, repeating endlessly. But it doesn't do that. The suggestion of the final moments is that the process is neither finishing nor moving levels but simply rebooting. Perhaps that was it all along: there was neither redemption nor clear punishment who was physically attempting to outrun both. Fred/Pete was forever in a loop. Any suggestion that he might break out of it is just projection by the viewer.
Lynch and Gifford only show us a bad young man and a bad mature one making bad decisions. I don't buy that the Alice/Renee are figures of downfall or temptation: is Renee really to blame if the increasingly high strung Fred has become unlovable (assuming she's even having the affair)? Alice isn't holding a gun to Pete's head (though one was held to hers earlier). The chill of the line, "you'll never have me," comes not from Alice/Renee's coldness as much as from Fred/Pete's bewilderment at not transforming into local gods by their risk or paranoia. Fred's jealousy of Andy becomes Mr Eddy's of Pete. Those switches are essential to understanding this piece as they prevent the expectation of an easy resolution. It's not just a film noir Freaky Friday, Fred's escape makes him the prey of a far more powerful version of himself in the Pete Dayton life. Andy's higher social clout contributes to Fred's sense of besiegement.
I have warmed a little to Bill Pullman's thankless performance over the years. It's a committed and courageous one for the still emerging actor that he was. While still young enough to present a trim professional in control of his life his increasingly unsexy presence that all but he know, keeps him at arm's length from all but the most worryingly identifying viewer. He is the bad guy in his own story. While his evident power has increased (from the absorption of Pete?) it has only made his bleak badness a little more lithe and leather clad. Balthazar Getty fares better from the get go as the cool young grease monkey ready for the best and fastest of the world. If he is as bad as Fred we might find ourselves using the filter of his youth to offer forgiveness. Getty is all winks, chewing gum and cool sexy phone voice, lithe and ready. Even under threat of a mob hit he falls into an action mode that hisses with animal magnetism.
A note here must be made about Robert Blake's Mystery Man. His white faced, eyebrowless severity, his tricks and that incising stare gave Lynch another unerasable bad guy. Blake himself got rid of the brows and put the greasepaint on. Did he recognise himself in the intense character the way Dennis Hopper said he had to play Frank in Blue Velvet because he was Frank? Robert Loggia's gangster is tough enough but he is earthly and at least understandable. Mystery Man with his unsettling insistence on having met Fred and how he speaks to Pete with such familiarity remind us that Fred has already said he prefers to remember things his own way, not necessarily the way they happened. Mystery Man is interdimensional, a cosmic standover boy, waiting around the corner of every escape. Unless you count the baby, the absence of a baddie from Eraserhead strikes me as why so many people consider it over-weird or even just boring: there's no engine to the events (no, the guy with the wrench isn't driving anything, he's just pulling a lever). When you have Blake's creation of this figure, a meta hit man, repeated viewings of Lost Highway make you bring yourself up that you shouldn't feel used to him but that's what happens and it only feels bad afterwards.
And then there is Patricia Arquette. As Renee she is an L.A. socialite beset with creeping boredom. In ankle-length black satin and a fringed mane that would seat her comfortably beside the femmes fatale of noir. She appears ornamental in the high-design house she shares with Fred which adds to the sense of breathless stasis that her days have become. The only time we see her animated is at the pool party in the company of anyone but Fred. At home she is back in storage. The sex she has with Fred is so ungiving and loveless she might as well be the inflatable that her husband appears to demand she be. Arquette gives us only a little more than her character gives Fred. However, she suffers, and not just from boredom.
As Alice, Arquette is so light and silky that she seems designed by a retail catalogue editor. Of the two she is the hardest and most ruthlessly ambitious and is far readier to manipulate. But the story plays fair about this. Remember that gun to the head? There's no bedrock loyalty she has with Mr Eddy. As it happens, she's been planning for the opportunity to present itself. That it was Pete, escaping from Fred or Fred who just couldn't get the love that his schmucky cry of unfair begs for. Alice isn't a queen bitch or really that much of a femme fatale, she's an escapee. Arquette's performance keeps this tightly under the ice queen face until the line that should tell Fred and/or Pete why they need to give up, the pacing of the syllables and the front and centre place in the soundmix present it like a ceremonial mace: "You'll never have me." All the fatal longing in the song on the audio (This Mortal Coil's version of Song to the Siren) becomes solid. And this is however many reiterations of Fred/Pete/whoever later and he still doesn't get it. As the cop cars are racing behind him on the dessert highway he begins to explode yet again into yet another manifestation, just the next station along the eternal futility of one who will not know.
I know, this is going on and on, but I'll finish with something more personal. When we change our minds about cultural artefacts it's because time has added something to ourselves in the interim. The movie is the same one I was initially cold on. A few years back now, a flatmate of mine was going through what he feared was a breakup. He told me about the other guy who was hovering around in the shadows and how his avowed love was drifting. He was slowly imploding as he sipped beer at the pub we'd gone to. He said through hard restrained pain: "what about loyalty?"
I didn't say what I wanted there and then as he was so close to collapse it might have ruined him but I noted it and brought it up later. It was a life lesson that had taken me too long to learn and if he'd caught me with his crisis only a few years earlier I might have just echoed everything he was snarling about in solidarity. But all I could think about (that I wasn't saying) was to ask him what he was doing to make himself attractive, to keep himself at something like the value he was giving to the relationship at the start. He was using the benefits of the thing like consumables and blaming the shop staff for running out of stock. He eventually was ready to hear that (well, not as callously put) and went off to do a lot of thinking about the many things he had been avoiding. I haven't seen or spoken with him at all for years but I gather he's closer to being ok than he was which is the best I can say.
My point is that while I can wrap that anecdote up in a bow I know, as I type this, that I can still dispense advice more easily than follow it at times. These days that amounts to little but given the kind of stakes that promise the rewards that this figure is chasing I have far less of a problem finding the empathy on screen here. That it isn't always for Fred or Pete and now more likely be for Renee or Alice is telling as well. When Mr Eddy grins despite a fatal wounding, looks at himself in the video, dying, he still manages to reach Fred: "You and me, mister, we can really out-ugly them sumbitches!"
Lost Highway is a poem of denial which I've finally got.
Viewing notes: I'd put this one off for most of the year as I was waiting for Criterion's extraordinary 4K presentation which is the deepest looking and most immersive sounding I've experienced since first seeing it at the Kino twenty-five years ago.
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