“Two thumbs down!” crowed the ad for David Lynch’s 1997 neo-noir “Lost Highway,” turning the double negative reviews by film critics Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert into a selling point. “Two more great reasons to see . . . ‘Lost Highway’!”
A critical and commercial flop in its release, at the time “Lost Highway” felt like a transitional movie for Lynch, a dry run for some of the images and themes he’d perfect in his 2001 masterpiece “Mulholland Drive.” A new Criterion Collection Blu-ray released last month provides a chance to give the polarizing film another look.
“Lost Highway” on one hand feels dated in a way Lynch movies rarely do, as if Lynch was trying to join the neo-noir craze of 1990s indie cinema that Quentin Tarantino started with “Pulp Fiction” and “Reservoir Dogs.” But the best parts of the movie still work like a night terror, with haunting and confounding imagery.
The movie opens with Fred Madison (Bill Pullman), an L.A. saxophone player living in a stylized black and-red apartment with his wife Renee (Patricia Arquette). The relationship is strained and chilly, with Fred harboring unfounded suspicions about Renee’s infidelity.
He’s thrown further off balance when anonymous packages show up in the mail, containing videotapes of the couple sleeping in bed. In the film’s most famous sequence, Fred meets a demonic imp at a party (played by the supremely creepy Robert Blake), who claims that he’s inside Fred’s apartment at that very moment. When Fred calls home, the imp somehow answers the phone, even though he’s also standing right in front of him.
Another videotape shows up, of Renee gruesomely murdered, and Fred is arrested and convicted of the crime. He goes into his jail cell — and emerges as a different character, a young mechanic named Pete (Balthazar Getty). As the old saying goes, prison really does change a man.
While Fred’s half of “Lost Highway” has been claustrophobic and stylized, Pete’s half plays like more of a straightforward noir, as Pete falls for Alice Wakefield, the girlfriend of a local mob boss (Robert Loggia). The girlfriend is also played by Arquette, but while Renee was a confused innocent, Alice is a tempting femme fatale who lures Pete into a murderous scheme, and his downfall.
The connection, I think, is that Pete is a manifestation of Fred’s psyche. Unable to face the crime he’s committed, he’s rewritten the story in his mind, casting his dead wife as the villain and himself as Pete, the unwitting patsy. “Mulholland Drive” pulls a similar trick, with Naomi Watts playing a failed would-be actress who imagines herself as a bright young ingenue.
But that explanation feels too simple and pat for such an elusive and disturbing film, which plays with mirrors and double images, and the kind of lurid, dreamlike images that could only be called Lynchian. Lynch has done it better than “Lost Highway,” but nobody else has done it like Lynch.
The Criterion disc includes a feature-length documentary, “Pretty as a Picture: The Art of David Lynch,” that was released the same year as “Lost Highway,” along with archival interviews with the actors.
Share your opinion on this topic by sending a letter to the editor to tctvoice@madison.com. Include your full name, hometown and phone number. Your name and town will be published. The phone number is for verification purposes only. Please keep your letter to 250 words or less.