Lost Highway (1997)

Film: Lost Highway (1997)

Stars: Bill Pullman, Patricia Arquette, Balthazar Getty, Robert Blake, Robert Loggia, Richard Pryor

Director: David Lynch

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

Throughout the month of June we will be doing a Film Noir Movie Marathon, featuring fifteen film noir classics that I'll be seeing for the first time.  Reviews of other film noir classics are at the bottom of this article.

We're going to end our series (thanks for playing along!) in the 1990's, a bit further than we normally go with film noir month, but there's a reason for that.  While the 1970's and early 1980's were the most fruitful period of neo-noir, the genre continues into today, and had something of a unique transformation in the 1990's, both in terms of throwbacks (Miller's Crossing, LA Confidential) and then a series of reinventions or surrealistic takes on the genre.  This was primarily driven by one director, who has spent most of his career doing takes on neo-noir: David Lynch.  Lynch's most famous works almost entirely are driven by the concept of noir; Twin Peaks, Blue Velvet, and Mulholland Drive are heavily borrowing from the genre.  In picking our film today, I hadn't seen the first of the three "Los Angeles" trilogy pictures that Lynch made from 1997-2006, and thought it would be appropriate to end with the director and Lost Highway.

(Spoilers Ahead) We'll get into it in a second, but this is a David Lynch film, so plot, even if you're watching with a magnifying glass, is hard to summarize but I'll give it a go.  The film opens with Fred Madison (Pullman) a musician who is suffering with sexual impotency in his marriage to wife Renee (Arquette).  The two are receiving strange videos of their house, and then eventually of them sleeping, with no indication as to who it is until one night when Pullman meets a Mystery Man (Blake) at a cocktail party, and he pulls a trick, calling essentially himself on a phone with no explanation as to how he did it.  We see in the next video that Fred gets sent that he is murdering his wife in it, and he is sentenced to death row, until one day...he disappears, and in his place is a young mechanic named Pete Dayton (Getty).  Pete works for a crook (and small-time porn producer) named Mr. Eddy (Loggia), whom we understand later is also named Dick Laurent, whom we hear mentioned in the opening scene by a disembodied voice when they tell Fred "Dick Laurent is dead."  Pete is having an affair with Alice, who looks just like Renee (and is also played by Arquette).  The film ends in a bit of a conundrum, with Pete transforming back into Fred, the Mystery Man shooting Mr. Eddy dead, and then whispering something to Fred that we don't hear.  The movie ends with Fred fulfilling his own destiny by turning out to be the man who says "Dick Laurent is dead" before going on a police chase, likely to his doom.

In 1997, the film was dismissed by critics who claimed it made no sense, but it developed a cult following (likely by gaining easy comparisons to Lynch's better-received Mulholland Drive a few years later), and is generally considered to be a good movie now (it just got a 4K restoration from Criterion).  Watching it having already seen Mulholland Drive, I can see the corollaries, but honestly-it's Lynch's clear obsession with older film noir, specifically two classics of the genre (Detour and Kiss Me Deadly, both of which we've done in past seasons and have reviews at the bottom of this article) that kind of give you a guide to the film.  So for the rest of this article, we're going to also issue a double spoiler alert for both of these movies.

Detour, in particular, is easy to spot here.  Lost Highway is about a man who cannot sexually fulfill his wife, and is dealing with the violent anger he feels as a result of that.  This is true to a degree to Detour, which shows a man who cannot land the woman he wants & is on the run, likely from the law, and being seduced (like Lost Highway) by a woman who is far beneath the "station" of the woman he wants, but still he has sex with her (in Detour, metaphorically, and in Lost Highway, literally).  In both movies, though, it's clear that the main protagonist is lying to the audience.  In Detour, this was to get around the Hays Code, while in Lost Highway it's to heighten the metaphor.  Pullman's Fred can't please his wife, so he transforms into someone he thinks can-a hyper-virile, sexy younger man in the form of Balthazar Getty, who is so horny he has both a hot girlfriend and a hotter side piece.

The film's odes to Kiss Me Deadly are also quite evident.  That movie is focused in large part on interchangeable women, but ones whom the audience knows are more important to the story than the men using them as props realize.  In that film, Cloris Leachman starts the film as a doomed figure who knows more than she's letting on (just like Arquette's Renee) while Gaby Rodgers is the embodiment of Arquette's Alice, an at-first sweet, likely victim...who turns out to have a sociopathic side that also includes agendas that we as the audience never entirely understand.

All of this is to say, I liked Lost Highway, but I didn't love it in the same way I did those two films, even though writing about it it's clear Lynch was showing off and maybe this will play better if I ever revisit.  Pullman & Getty are both intriguing, but the camera pulls back too much, perhaps not wanting to give away the ending.  I wanted more hints of Pullman's madness within (I think it's clear in retrospect that he did kill Renee, or at least some form of him did, because he was angry he couldn't fulfill her sexually), while I wanted more sexuality from Getty's character.  We see multiple sex scenes where Arquette is objectified, which is perhaps the point (this is Fred's fantasy...he doesn't care that the audience also wants to fuck Getty), but it maybe would've helped the cause more if they'd objectified their leading man too.

The best part of the movie, and I can't deny it, is Robert Blake.  Blake was in his late sixties when this came out, and had already had a really long career.  Blake was the very rare child star of the Golden Age of Hollywood (he appeared in the Little Rascals comedies and the Red Ryder westerns), before finding success as an adult in In Cold Blood and TV's Baretta.  He is superb as the Mystery Man, totally nailing the very tricky tone of the character, especially in the opening scene where he feeds off of Pullman's intrigue & terror as he confesses to being the man who is taping him...and may in fact be a manifestation of Fred's own evil.  

The film becomes more complicated (or at least more scandalous) when you know what happened next in Blake's career though.  Blake would be arrested and charged, just like Fred Madison, with the murder of his wife in real life several years after Lost Highway was released.  Like Fred, Blake maintained his innocence in real life, and (unlike Fred) was acquitted, though debate still rages as to whether or not he was guilty.  With that weird crossover into real life, we'll end another season of Film Noir Month, with us hopefully returning next year for another round of grizzled detectives, shady criminal enterprises, and beautiful women...who may be deadlier than they appear.

1940's: Act of Violence, The Big Sleep, The Blue Dahlia, Blues in the Night, Brighton Rock, Criss Cross, Crossfire, Daisy Kenyon, Dead Reckoning, Detour, Fallen Angel, The Fallen Idol, Force of Evil, Gilda, High Sierra, I Walk Alone, I Wake Up Screaming, The Killers, The Lady from Shanghai, Leave Her to Heaven, Ministry of Fear, Moonrise, Murder My Sweet, Nightmare Alley, Out of the Past, The Postman Always Rings Twice, Raw Deal, The Reckless Moment, Ride the Pink Horse, Scarlet Street, Sorry, Wrong Number, The Strange Love of Martha Ivers, They Won't Believe Me, Too Late for Tears, The Woman in the Window, The Woman on the Beach

1950's: Ace in the Hole, Affair in Trinidad, The Asphalt Jungle, Beat the Devil, The Big Combo, The Big Heat, The Blue Gardenia, The Breaking Point, The Burglar, Cast a Dark Shadow, The Crimson Kimono, Elevator to the Gallows, Gun Crazy, The Hitch-Hiker, House of Bamboo, In a Lonely Place, The Killing, Kiss Me Deadly, Murder by Contract, Night and the City, Odds Against Tomorrow, On Dangerous Ground, Pickup on South Street, The Prowler, Slightly Scarlet, Sudden Fear, Sweet Smell of Success, They Live By Night, While the City Sleeps

Neo-Noir: Blade Runner, Body Heat, Farewell My Lovely, Fargo, From Afar, The Late Show, The Long Goodbye, Night Moves, Nightcrawler, Le Samourai