Lost Highway | Patricia Arquette, Robert Blake

Lost Highway | Patricia Arquette, Robert Blake | Hell is Repetition

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Lost Highway

	Lost Highway Patricia Arquette, Robert Blake Universal Studios, 2002 average customer review:based on 310 reviews view larger image
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Plot is a meaningless term when trying to describe Lost Highway. Here, more or less, is what happens: A noise-jazz saxophonist (Bill Pullman) suspects his wife (Patricia Arquette) of infidelity. Meanwhile, someone is breaking into their house and videotaping them while they sleep. The wife is murdered and Pullman is convicted of the crime. Then, in prison, he transmogrifies into a young mechanic (Balthazar Getty) who is subsequently released, since, after all, he's not the guy they convicted. Getty goes back to his life and meets a local gangster's moll, who happens to be played by Patricia Arquette... but none of this has much to do with what the movie is really about. Dreams are what intrigues director David Lynch. Not friendly, happy dreams; his dreams whisper that what we think is real is just something we made up, something to keep ourselves from falling into chaos. Characters are fragments. Events happen not because they make sense, but because deep down we want these things to happen. Of course, in Lynch's dreams, as in our waking lives, getting what we want is not always pleasant. In the movie's best moments, you really have no idea what you're seeing. The screen is a big rectangle of color and shadow, but what it represents, well, it could be anything. And yet, in those moments, you've been given just enough hints of place, character, and story that these elusive images elicit a genuine dread, a sense that you might not want to see this, yet you can't look away; a sense that we are living on borrowed time, that something is fiercely askew in our psyches. As a whole, Lost Highway is a failure: much of it is padded, gratuitous, and indulgent and pointless cameos bog down an already sluggish narrative. Yet within that failure are moments worth more than the entirety of most successful movies. --Bret Fetzer

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This is Elegant Dark Art

Yes, this film has Logic & a Plot!
It is not the familiar Logic and No familiar plot, nonetheless - it is a dark & elegant piece of art.
Here a witch-man played by Robert Blake curses and stalks a young monotonous couple to shake up their life - similar to the dumpster-witch in Mulholland Drive. (Witch herein is used in the popular sense, not the true respected sense).
Upon playing mind-games with the couple - Blake's character discovers where the plot should really take place - in an abandoned wooden hut in the middle of the desert, however to get to the plot - the mechanic, the cars and the jazz-playing couple need to get onto ... LOST HIGHWAY.
AWESOME, AWESOME, AWESOME!

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Hell is Repetition

There are those cinema experiences that will always stay with you for various reasons that sometimes even have little to do with the movie you saw, as I will always remember seeing "From Dusk till Dawn", at the midnight hour, not just because I loved the movie, but more so, that during that night in the next few hours the relationship with a girlfriend was initiated. Sometimes a movie is stuck in your memory, because you were deeply moved by it because you totally identified with one or several characters, while another movie you will never forget, because you had such high expectations and eventually so few of them you felt were met.

Seeing Lost Highway in the cinema for the first time was such an unforgettable experience but not for any of the reasons mentioned above. From the opening scene that showed me Fred's face lit by inhaling cigarette, I knew I was about to go on a journey that I had never before undertaken as a viewer, as it turned out to be a journey through a landscape, that never before was seen in any movie in this way, the landscape of the subconscious, in this case the subconscious of the character Fred Madison. Never before or since an exploration of this realm was undertaken in such a brilliant way and shows it as reality. Let's be honest, we all know how much our behavior, thoughts and feelings are determined and directed by it, so it's really quite astonishing, that this journey has been made so rarely.

It's not my intention to analyze the movie scene by scene, however great the temptation as I could talk about every scene for about an hour, but that's not the point. Everybody should get lost in their own fashion on this highway, which the movie travels and which proves to be so fateful for Fred Madison. I'd like to help the viewer along just a bit though and so there are two aspects I'd like to expand upon: `Moebius strip' and `Psychogenic Fugue'.

As is shown in a famous Escher painting a Moebius strip is a strip of paper of which both ends are tied together in a circle, which is however twisted in the middle, causing both in- and outside of the surface to be identical. This relates to the structure of the movie, where conscious-subconscious, fantasy-reality, have become entangled to such a degree that they have merged to the point of indistinction. It also is a structure that has no end and no beginning, only determined by identical starting and end point before a new loop is initiated.

Naturally there are multiple interpretations possible concerning this movie, but what is certain is that the medical condition, named by Lynch himself in relation to this movie, which plays a crucial part is "psychogenic fugue". This medical term refers to a state of mind in which the person suffering from it deals with a traumatic experience, let's say the violent death of a wife by their hand, by creating a construct for itself, a different personality with a different history and a different life trying to suppress reality.

It should be obvious that a combination of these two aspects applied to one character would signify a highly confusing life with no hope of escaping the vicious circle, as the personas the character adopts every time (the start of each loop) cannot prevent that in the end reality always determines the outcome with only the one escape to the next persona, as we can see at the end of the movie when Pete (Fred's alternate persona) has become Fred again and is being chased by the police, reality seeping in, starts to 'morph' again and this way initiates the start of a new 'loop'. Ultimate hell I'd say.

In Fred's 'fugue' existence Pete is the ideal made flesh for a man like Fred, who no longer wants to suffer from impotence caused by suspicions of infidelity on his wife's part. Pete doesn't have a wife, but dumps his girlfriend in favor of a mistress, femme fatale Alice, 'stolen' from underworld figure Mr. Eddie, known by Pete as a regular of the garage where he works as a mechanic. As Pete, Fred seems to have a firm grip on the reigns of his life, but that's only on the surface. Pete, as it turns out, is being completely manipulated by Alice and Mr. Eddie, Dick Laurent in Fred's reality who he suspected of the affair with his wife Renee, the blond version of Alice, is now the victim and threatening potential doom on Pete's and Alice's relationship and just as present between them as Laurent was in Fred's mind in his relationship with Renee. The only one not fooled by Fred's game with fantasy and reality is the so-called 'Mystery Man', a unique performance by Robert Blake, who, as a kind of Mephistopheles knows all about Fred's dark impulses, symbolically recording all his actions on video (also a comment about the relationship between the artist and his art, but that's a different discussion). As in the Faust legend of old he only goes where he's invited and he embodies the inescapability of Fred's doomed fate, the nexus where fantasy and reality touch. It's no coincidence that the metamorphosis from one persona into the next takes place in his cabin.

I do consider 'Lost Highway' to be the, hopefully temporary, pinnacle in Lynch' work and those that are willing to travel along this road of mystery, violence and sensuality, I wish them a similar spellbound experience that I have had so many times on this road to perdition.

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Lost Gem! Lynch's most underrated film

"Lost Highway" is a wonder of a movie. It is a compelling dream-film with its own haunting nightmare logic. Most critics didn't like it. I think this is a film that bothered critics because they didn't know how to react to it. It's hard to judge the film in a conventional manner because, in many ways, this is the ultimate renegade film. Like an abstract painting, it engages the audience (if they are willing) to come up with their own interpretation of, not only what it all means, but, fundamentally, what has transpired.

See it!

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