Lost Highway (1997) David Lynch’s Neo-Noir Multiverse of Interpretation (Blu-Ray Review)

Back in 1997 Tony Blair became Prime Minister for the first time, Katrina and the Waves won the Eurovision song contest for the UK, and Batman and Robin, complete with George Clooney’s wobbly-headed rubber-nippled caped-crusader, sunk a comic book movie franchise for eight years. It was also the year that Lost Highway came out, a dark and surreal fever dream of a film. Directed by David Lynch and starring Bill Pullman, Patricia Arquette, and Balthazar Getty, it also features an eclectic cast, with Richard Pryor and Gary Busey in minor roles, and appearances by Marilyn Manson and Henry Rollins, among others.

If you’re not familiar with Lynch’s work, it has a well-deserved reputation for being hard to follow. If you’re looking for something accessible you won’t find it here, or with many of his other films either, which tend to vary between slightly off-kilter to downright incomprehensible. 

Lost Highway has no standard hero’s journey plot and is instead open to multiple interpretations. It starts by following Fred (Pullman), a saxophonist who lives in a palace of a house in Los Angeles with his wife Renee (Arquette). They are cold and distant from each other, and the only time Fred is animated and lively is when he is playing his sax. One day Fred hears a voice on his intercom saying “Dick Laurent is dead” but finds no one there. The couple begins receiving videotapes of someone who has been filming their house, until one arrives filmed inside their house, of them in their bed. Fred has a dream about his wife, or someone like her, being attacked and her face then turns into that of a strange old man.

They get the police involved, who look around the house and give Fred the hairy eyeball. Then the two of them attend a party with shady characters among the guests. The shadiest is a man with a ghoulish look – the strange old man from Fred’s dream, who he learns is a ‘friend of Dick Laurent’. Uncle Fester claims to be at Fred’s house right now and gets Fred to call his home where the man answers, seemingly proving him able to be at two places at once.

Fred gets another tape which appears to show him having murdered Renee. He then finds himself arrested and awaiting execution by an electric chair. Fred seems to suffer from headaches with blue light and seizures until he turns into another man – literally – a young car mechanic called Pete (Getty). He is released from prison, and we follow his story, a sort of gangster thriller plot with a crime boss called Mr Eddy, and a femme fatale called Alice (also played by Arquette) with the tension being that Pete is having a sexual relationship with Alice and if Mr Eddy finds out, he’ll kill him.

If you haven’t watched a film from the 80s or 90s in a while which isn’t an action movie you forget how slow they can be. But this isn’t necessarily a bad thing when you’re trying to build tension and unease with the pacing, and that’s what’s used to good effect here. It’s also ‘90s cool’ with music by David Bowie, Nine Inch Nails, The Smashing Pumpkins, Rammstein, and others, with lots of sex thrown in for good measure.

This is a movie open to multiple interpretations, but with some clues as to what might be going on. Early on Fred says, tellingly, that he doesn’t like videotapes, as he likes to remember things his way, suggesting that he is an unreliable narrator and that what we see and hear isn’t necessarily what is happening. 

Pete, working in the garage, hears Fred’s sax playing from earlier and turns it off in disgust. Alice and Renee are played by the same person, and are implied to be one and the same, or that ‘Alice’ is, and has always been, really Renee.

If the plot feels like the nightmare of a man with a guilty conscience, perhaps it is. Certainly, trying to take it at face value will just leave you confused. You’re left with the strong impression that Fred is the one recording himself and his wife, but as he is in the video that would seem to be impossible, just like Fred talking to himself on the intercom. Videotapes – and other elements of his old life coming into the world of Pete could be a symbol for the harsh truth breaking through into a fantasy of who Fred would like to be – young, desirable, cool. “You’ll never have me,” says Alice, towards the end. It’s also suggested that Fred’s dislike of videotapes is connected to Alice being in porn films on them.

Is ‘Pete’ a memory of Fred’s previous early life as a low-level criminal? Are the headaches, blue light, and seizure moments suggestive of being in an electric chair? Who did Fred (or Pete) really kill, if anyone – his wife, Dick Laurent / Mr Eddy (who may be the same person), Andy (another gangster character)? It’s strongly implied that the strange gothic man isn’t real, but is, perhaps, Fred’s conscience, the truth catching up with him, or his impending death.

The whole thing has a neo-noir vibe, with smoking, drinking, and the film dripping with darkness, even during the day. It feels like two short films blended together. If you finish the whole thing and feel lost, well, I think that’s kind of the point. Perhaps the feeling the film evokes is more important than internal logic, as the plot fits together like an impossible shape; a Penrose triangle or Mobius strip looping back into itself, against the laws of time and physics. Maybe the least believable bit is a man called Fred making a decent living out of playing the saxophone – but this could be a clue that his money doesn’t come from music.

This is more of an emotive, sensory film, like that other 90s phenomenon, the magic eye picture. It’s unsettling, and evocative, suggesting a visual and auditory illustration of an out-of-control mental state, a car driving erratically on a lost highway as the police of memories race after. Lost Highway isn’t one of Lynch’s most famous films, and is probably not his best, but it’s certainly worth a watch. Especially if you enjoy a ‘What was all that about then?’ chat with a friend afterwards.

LOST HIGHWAY (1997)

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