Lost Highway

"Dick Laurent is dead."

This is the cryptic message delivered to the haggard Fred Madison one mysterious morning that opens up the even more inscrutable cinematic classic that follows. This is via intercom, and by the end of the film, it will be revealed why. But the meaning of it all will remain, essentially, a mystery.

I first saw Lost Highway in 1997 was non-plussed, although I bought it on VHS (!) anyway. It advertised itself as a "noir horror film," directed and conceived by David Lynch and his partner Barry Gifford (who wrote the novel and film Wild at Heart), and I suppose that description is correct. It stars Bill Pullman and Patricia Arquette, Balthazar Getty, Natasha Gregson Wagner, Robert Loggia, and Robert Blake, with appearances by Richard Pryor, Jack Nance, Henry Rollins, Gary Busey, Mink Stole, and Marilyn Manson. (Did I miss anyone?) Some of those folks are dead; others were more or less left back in the 1990s. Such are the inscrutable ways of fate.

The film is incredible and often riveting. It's also often strained due to cinematic references that seem kitsch and camp (noir lips whispering on a telephone, James Dean Highschool Confidential bullshit scenes, bad detective thriller outtakes amidst what, otherwise, is a very skillful and artistic cinematic Moebius strip), but that is not to say that it is a bad film at all. No. Watching it twenty-five years later, I'm more impressed with it now than I was at the time.

The movie begins with a mind-numbingly slow, detached, and very brooding preface, wherein a hornblower at chi-chi nightclubs, Fred Madison (Bill Pullman) is sleepwalking through a dreamlife that includes manic bursts of jazz music, alternating with impotent and mechanistic sex with his ravishingly beautiful wife Renee (Patricia Arquette), whose long, gorgeous body is disrobed and photographed with all the eroticism of a clinical examination of a flank of beef. Fred is impotent and frustrated. Both of them speak in barely audible whispers. Life is shrouded in darkness, and fireplaces burn bright and seem as if they have a nearly organic function or purpose.

Renee retrieves, one morning when the somnolence of their existence seems on the wane, a package, a manilla envelope containing an old-fashioned VHS tape. When Fred and Renee watch the tape, they realize that someone has filmed the outside of their house. Later, at a party with "Andy" (Michael Massee) a wealthy and sleazy pornographer, Fred meets the "Mystery Man" (Robert Blake), who is a sort of pancaked makeup horror troll with slicked back hair and a cellphone (uncommon then). He does a gag wherein Fred "calls" him, and is by inference supposed to be in two places at once. The next tape shows a more disturbing scene of someone who has "broke into our house and taped us, while we slept."

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And then after two witless detectives arrive on the scene, wherein we learn that Fred "hates video cameras," because he "like to remember things, how I remembered them. Not necessarily the way they happened," a final videotape reveals a scene of her bloody corpse lying on a bed, Fred beside her, and then he is on death row.

He becomes ill, and it is at this point that the film undergoes a complete transformation. Fred has some sort of organic metamorphosis, where he becomes Pete Dayton (Balthazar Getty), who is released from prison and goes back to his job as an auto mechanic. He begins an affair with "Alice" (also portrayed by Patricia Arquette), the girlfriend of volcanic-tempered gangster "Mr. Eddy" (Robert Loggia). At the same time, Pete is still the boyfriend of Sheila (Natasha Gregson Wagner), and the whole thing begins to take on a sordid, sleazy romance magazine aspect. Yet, why we are here instead of in a cell with Fred, the audience does not know.

Who is the Mystery Man? What is the "Lost Highway" to which the title refers? Is it the hotel called "Lost Highway Hotel", or is it something else? The ending is ambiguous, the movie moving toward a climax of a cabin on stilts that burns eternally, the Mystery Man the videotaping seeming go-between between two alternating or parallel worlds; lives and destines raced towards as if careening out of the blue yonder of eternal dreams and possibilities. Is Pete's life simply an extension of Fred's impotent rage, his fantasy of young male virility brought to poisoned life? Why are Renee and Alice portrayed by the same woman? Is she a bridge or a go-between? Awash in the car headlights, in the desert, not far from the burning shack, she is a cinematic image worthy of Fellini or Bergman, something so searingly beautiful, she makes love to the tune of "Song to the Siren" by This Mortal Coil. We cannot see the definition of her, because, bathed as she is in the headlight's brilliance, she is now an angelic being, delivered to the viewer from some realm that is transcendent and beyond.

She is still an enigma.

The film closes promising no exit from the continual loop of transformation, the harsh juxtaposition of the lives of Fred and Pete. "Dick Laurent is dead," Fred tells Fred, before being chased out along the darkness on the Lost Highway, the camera shooting the line at breakneck speed as the viewer becomes the driver on this directorial tour-de-force.

Well, dead he may be. But as it is said of old, the "Dead travel fast." Even along the highways of the lost.