Lost Highway is a 1997 surrealist neo-noir horror film directed by David Lynch, who co-wrote it with Barry Gifford. The film stars Bill Pullman, Patricia Arquette, and Balthazar Getty, as well as Robert Blake, Jack Nance, and Richard Pryor in all of their final film roles. It follows a man who receives unmarked VHS tapes showing footage of his home before he is abruptly arrested for his wife's murder, at which point he mysteriously disappears and is replaced by a young man leading a different life.
Financed by French production company Ciby 2000 and Lynch's own Asymmetrical Productions, the film was largely shot in Los Angeles, where Lynch collaborated with cinematographer Peter Deming and frequent producer and editor Mary Sweeney. The film's surreal narrative structure has been likened to a Möbius strip, while Lynch has described it as a "psychogenic fugue" rather than a conventionally logical story. Angelo Badalamenti and Barry Adamson scored the film, while the soundtrack, produced by Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails, features songs by David Bowie, Lou Reed, and Rammstein, as well as new recordings from Nine Inch Nails, Marilyn Manson, and the Smashing Pumpkins.
Lost Highway received mixed reviews upon release, with most critics initially dismissing it as incoherent; it has since been reappraised, garnering a cult following and scholarly interest. It was a box office failure, grossing $3.8 million on a budget of $15 million after a modest three-week run. It is the first of three Lynch films set in Los Angeles, followed by Mulholland Drive (2001) and his final film Inland Empire (2006). The film was adapted into an opera by Austrian composer Olga Neuwirth in 2003.
Plot
Saxophonist Fred Madison receives a cryptic message on his intercom in the Hollywood Hills: "Dick Laurent is dead." Moments later, he hears tires screeching and sirens racing past his house. The next morning, his wife Renee finds a VHS tape on their porch that shows eerie footage of their house. That night, Fred struggles to have sex with Renee and confesses that he had a dream about her being attacked. As he looks at her, he briefly sees the face of a pale old man.
The following day, another tape arrives, this time showing footage of Fred and Renee sleeping in bed. They call the police, but the detectives offer little help. Fred and Renee attend a party hosted by her friend Andy, where Fred encounters a pale man who acts strangely and claims they have met before. The man insists he is currently at Fred's house, which he demonstrates by answering Fred's call to his home phone. Andy identifies the man as an acquaintance of Dick Laurent. Unnerved, Fred leaves the party with Renee.
The next morning, a new tape arrives that shows Fred standing over Renee's dismembered body. Fred is arrested and sentenced to death for her murder. On death row, Fred experiences intense headaches and visions of the pale man and a burning cabin in the desert, before being enveloped in light. The prison guards check on him, only to discover that he has inexplicably been replaced by Pete Dayton, a young auto mechanic from Van Nuys. Pete, seemingly unaware of how he ended up there, is released to his parents but remains under surveillance by detectives.
Pete returns to work, where his gangster client Mr. Eddy (identified by a detective as Laurent) visits for car repairs. Mr. Eddy takes Pete on a drive, where he and his men violently assault another driver, before offering Pete a pornographic VHS. The next day, Mr. Eddy arrives at the garage with his mistress, Alice Wakefield, who resembles Renee. Later that night, Alice returns alone and seduces Pete, initiating an affair. Alice grows fearful that Mr. Eddy suspects them and devises a plan to rob Andy and flee town. Meanwhile, Pete's girlfriend Sheila discovers the affair and leaves him. Pete later receives a disturbing call from Mr. Eddy and the pale man, which pushes him to agree to Alice's plan.
Pete confronts Andy at his house, but Andy dies after falling headfirst into the corner of a glass table. Pete discovers a photograph of Dick (who looks identical to Mr. Eddy), Andy, Alice, and Renee together, which causes his nose to bleed. Disoriented, he retreats to the bathroom but finds himself wandering the hallways of a hotel instead. Pete and Alice arrive at a remote desert cabin to sell stolen goods. They have sex outside, during which Alice taunts Pete by saying "you'll never have me" before disappearing into the cabin. In a flash of light, Pete transforms back into Fred.
Fred searches the cabin and finds the pale man, who tells him that "Alice" is in fact Renee. He pursues Fred with a video camera, but Fred escapes and finds Dick Laurent having sex with Renee at the Lost Highway Hotel. After Renee leaves, Fred kidnaps Dick and takes him to the desert. The pale man reappears and hands Fred a knife, with which he slits Dick's throat. Dick, confused, asks what they want. The pale man plays a pornographic video made by Dick which features Renee. Cutaways show Renee and Dick watching the video, aroused. Back in the desert, the pale man shoots Dick dead and whispers something inaudible to Fred before vanishing, leaving Fred with the pistol.
When police investigate Andy's death, Alice is absent from the photograph Pete found. Fred drives to his home, buzzes the intercom, and says, "Dick Laurent is dead." As the detectives arrive, Fred flees and leads police on a frantic chase through the desert. He screams helplessly amid flashes of light as the scene dissolves to a darkened highway.
Cast
Style and influences The film's screenplay refers to it as a "21st-Century Noir Horror".
Although Lost Highway is generally classified as a surrealist neo-noir horror film, the film borrows elements from other genres, including German Expressionism and the French New Wave. The term psychological thriller has also been used to describe its narrative elements. Thomas Caldwell of Metro Magazine described Fred Madison as "a typical film noir hero, inhabiting a doomed and desolate world characterised by an excess of sexuality, darkness and violence". Another film noir feature of the film is the femme fatale of Alice Wakefield, who misleads Pete Dayton into dangerous situations. The film was also noted for its graphic violence and sexual themes, which Lynch defended by stating that he was simply being honest with his own ideas for the film.
Some of the film's elements reference earlier works: the film Detour (1945) also focuses on a disturbed nightclub musician. The film's setting and mysterious recorded messages were seen as a reference to the film Kiss Me Deadly (1955), while its nightmarish atmosphere has been compared to Maya Deren's short film Meshes of the Afternoon (1943). Like Alfred Hitchcock's film Vertigo (1958), the film examines male obsessions with women who merely represent emotions that relate to them. Sean Murphy of PopMatters considers the film a possible homage to Ambrose Bierce's short story "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" (1890), in which much of the main narrative is imagined by the protagonist as he is executed.
Interpretations The film's circular narrative has been likened to a Möbius strip. Lynch described it as a "psychogenic fugue" and insisted that, while the film is about "identity", it is abstract and is left to the audience to interpret. However, when asked by an interviewer in 1997 whether Pullman's character is "trapped in [a] time loop, doomed to repeat his murders and mistakes forever and ever", Lynch replied, "Well, maybe not forever and ever, but you can see how it would be a struggle. Yeah, that's it." He agreed to a comparison with the Buddhist conception of saṃsāra, elaborating that "it's a fragment of the story [...] it's not so much a circle as like a spiral that comes around, the next loop a little bit higher than the one that precedes it".
Co-writer Barry Gifford, in contrast, endorsed a rational explanation for the film's surreal events. According to him, Fred is experiencing a literal psychogenic fugue, a mental break which is manifested when he transforms into Pete. Arquette described her own interpretation: "To me, it's sort of a movie about looking at women through the eyes of a misogynist... so he's totally obsessed with her, can't love her enough, can't have her to himself enough, can't kill her enough times.""Lost Highway: Bill Pullman and Patricia Arquette interview" (1997). U TV. She later elaborated, "He hates women, he doesn't quite trust [Renee], even though she is his wife. He kills her but can't remember it, then he recreates himself as this virile young man and meets her again. And now, she actually wants to fuck him and she is in love with him. But even in this version, she is a dirty whore. In this man's mind, a woman is always the monster. No matter what."
Jeremiah Kipp of Slant Magazine called the film "an embodiment of a pensive male anxiety" and ascribed its mixed reception to the fact that "for some cultural reason it's easier for audiences to accept female hysteria than the insecurities of men". Kipp noted that most critics interpreted the film as concerning the "distortion and reshaping of memory". Philosopher and critic Slavoj Žižek considered the narrative's circularity as analogous to a psychoanalytic process: "There is a symptomatic key phrase ['Dick Laurent is dead'] (as in all of Lynch's films) that always returns as an insistent, traumatic, and indecipherable message (the Real), and there is a temporal loop, as with analysis, where the protagonist at first fails to encounter the self, but in the end is able to pronounce the symptom consciously as his own." He also interprets the film's bipartite structure as exploiting "the opposition of two horrors: the phantasmatic horror of the nightmarish noir universe of perverse sex, betrayal, and murder, and the (perhaps much more unsettling) despair of our drab, alienated daily life of impotence and distrust".
Production Development
Lost Highway was directed by David Lynch as his first feature film since Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992), a prequel to his television series Twin Peaks (1990–1991; 2017). He came across the phrase "lost highway" in the book Night People (1992) by Barry Gifford. As Lynch knew Gifford well and had previously adapted his novel Wild at Heart (1990) into a film of the same name, he told Gifford that he loved the phrase as a title for a film, and the two agreed to write a screenplay together. Each initially had their own ideas of what Lost Highway should be, but ended up rejecting all of them. Lynch then told Gifford that, during the last night of shooting Fire Walk with Me, he had a thought about videotapes and a couple in crisis. This idea would develop into the first part of the film until Fred is put on death row. Lynch and Gifford then realized that a transformation had to occur and another story, which would have several links to the first one while differing from it, developed. It took them one month to finish the script.
Lost Highway was partially inspired by the murder trial of O. J. Simpson and Simpson's ability to return to his normal life afterward. The scene where Fred hears the words "Dick Laurent is dead" over his intercom was inspired by a similar incident that happened to Lynch at his own house, which he ended up using as a shooting location for the film. Unlike the sinister nature of the scene in the film, Lynch assumed the stranger who left a message on his intercom had simply mistaken his house for that of actor David Lander, who lived next door. Lynch said the idea of the Mystery Man "came out of a feeling of a man who, whether real or not, gave the impression that he was supernatural". The film was financed by the French production company Ciby 2000 and Lynch's own Asymmetrical Productions.
Casting