Road to Nowhere
"It's a film made with a certain breezy contempt for audiences. I've seen it twice, hoping to make sense of it. There is no sense to be made of it."
-- Roger Ebert
"I wasn't really aware of it at the time, but it must have been inspired by, subconsciously anyway, the O.J. Simpson trial. And how O.J. Simpson's mind had to be tricked, so that he could go out and play golf, rather than commit suicide for the deed he did."
-- David Lynch
Magician or charlatan, surrealist or nutjob: extremes rule the day when it comes to judging the work of David Lynch. Those with fond memories of Twin Peaks and Blue Velvet (and even Wild at Heart) will be forgiving of the master -- others with nightmares of Eraserhead or Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me will scoff and dismiss. I myself find myself poised at the center. When Lynch is on, he stirs together a brew of dread, absurdism, genre, and honest emotionalism like few other directors. When he's off, he becomes an overdetermined, tawdry parody of himself (see the misplaced Wizard of Oz meets Elvis in Hell shenanigans of Wild at Heart, for example).
Examined within the context of Lynch's career (especially 2001's Mulholland Dr., which stands as the perfect summation of his work to date), Lost Highway plays like a free-jazz riff similar to the one that morose saxophonist Fred Madison (Bill Pullman) unleashes early on in the picture. Anyone with even a glancing knowledge of Lynch's work will see his stylistic fingerprints everywhere: a murdered woman, colorfully vulgar psychopaths, deadpan humor that hits home a beat or two later than it ordinarily would, the sense of malign, otherworldly forces at work. It doesn't have Mulholland Dr.'s discipline or cumulative power, but when it succeeds, it reminds us why we can always do with a little Lynch-ing.
The plot, which folds back on itself like a Moebius strip, first follows Fred and his brunette wife Renee (Patricia Arquette). Frozen in a clipped, loveless marriage (Fred keels over in agony when he is unable to "perform," while Renee pats him as if he is a forlorn dog and merely says, "It's okay"), their lives are upended by a succession of unmarked, snowy videotapes that arrive on their doorstep. In a creepy harbinger of The Ring (the current Japanese horror wave owes a great deal to Lynch), we see the outside of Fred and Renee's stucco house, followed by a jump cut to the interior, up the stairs, into their bedroom where they lay sleeping. Who is the filmmaker-intruder? All indications point to the Mystery Man (Robert Blake), who Fred meets at a party whilst Renee flirts with sleazy Andy (Michael Massee in a pencil mustache, natch). In the film's most unnerving scene, the Mystery Man orders Fred to call his own house -- and the Mystery Man answers the phone. In unison, both Mystery Men cackle, and the film's major theme of dual, displaced personalities emerges.
The first 40 minutes
of the film may well stand as Lynch's finest cinematic achievement -- with langorous
economy, he lays bare the implosion of a psyche, as the videotapes, Fred's feverish
visions, and eerie uses of mirrors and darkened spaces generate an almost unbearable
tension that cumulates in Renee's shocking murder. Pullman has often been dismissed
as a lightweight actor, and many may deride his performance here as glowering
and nothing more, but he hits all the right notes (no pun intended) as he rides
the down escalator from bemused to broken. And thus Fred ends up in prison and
destined for the electric chair, his headaches worsening, but within the flash
of a hallucinogenic montage, he has been transformed ... into hunky Pete Dayton
(Balthazaar Getty), an unassuming mechanic. From this point on, the plot thickens: Freed from prison and returning to his job at the auto shop (where Richard Pryor makes a distracting cameo), Pete runs afoul of gang boss Mr. Eddie (Robert Loggia) -- or is his real name Dick Laurent? (Nearly every major character adopts and discards names and identities like cheap suits.) Soon Pete is involved with Mr. Eddie's moll, Alice, who bears more than a passing resemblance to Renee in a platinum wig, and before long he spirals down into Lynch Land: porn rings, grotesque killings, visions of desert houses that explode and re-form themselves, doppelgangers and displaced perversity. It takes pivotal reappearances by Andy and the Mystery Man to wrap the whole thing up, as much as such a schizoid mess allows itself to be wrapped up.
It is clear where
Lynch is going with all this: Pete is a character invented by Fred's disintegrating
mind, a virile rough-houser who is the fulfillment of Fred's wish fantasies, right
down to getting the girl (Renee/Alice), but like the titular character of Alice
in Wonderland, one must eventually reemerge from the rabbit hole, and thus
Fred reappears, and the cycle begins anew. It would have worked if Lynch had invested
the second half of the movie with the same craftsmanship and intensity that permeates
the first half, but the longer the film runs, the slacker it gets. The actors
make do with their thinly sketched characters, but none of them distinguish themselves.
As an urban cowboy, Getty is surprisingly charisma-free, channeling Charlie Sheen,
of all actors. Arquette bravely doffs her clothes and does her best to embody
the fetishistic pin-ups she plays; indeed, as in every Lynch film that delineates
the psychosexual hangups of its callow male protagonists, women are abused in
myriad ways in Lost Highway, not least a strip scene performed at gunpoint.
But Arquette does herself no favors with her vacant stares and Bo-Beep voice;
contrast that to the superior performances offered by Isabella Rossellini, Cheryl
Lee, and Naomi Watts as other Lynchian ladies in peril. Loggia's Mr. Eddie/Laurent
has an amusing vignette with a tailgating driver, but is only a pale echo of Dennis
Hopper's landmark loony from Blue Velvet. You know that Lynch's mind
is elsewhere when he enlists the help of creepazoids like Trent Reznor and Marilyn
Manson on the film's soundtrack -- that's like shoveling parody on top of parody.
In the end, only Pullman and Robert Blake, giving his cryptic lines a terrific
spin with his patented tough-guy attitude, rise completely above the murk. (Blake's
participation in the project is doubly ironic considering Lynch's remark at the
top of this essay.) Still, there is no denying Lynch's ability to combine sound and image to blood-curdling effect (Angelo Badalamenti's soundtrack may well be his best for Lynch), and some of the most jolting moments (Blake's face superimposed on Arquette's body) have the pull of a nightmare. And then there are those shots of the lost highway at night, unspooling at supersonic speed while David Bowie croons "I'm deranged" over the title and end credits -- the movie may end up exploded in a messy heap like that house in the desert, but the image underlines the allure and danger of a Lynch film. All highways may come to dead ends, but whatever we may find, the view from the driver's seat is certainly enough to intoxicate along the way.