Lost Highway

4K restoration (thanks, Cinema Detroit!). Some of Lynch's meanest, dirtiest, most battering work, a film from the perspective of the insecure male monsters that terrorize the female protagonists of his other post-80s films. This one is kind of like a reverse-Mulholland Drive, but even more slippery than that film in its intense blurring of the lines between dream and reality - my delineation between the two from here on out, as with any Lynch film, just represents how I see things. It's a "reversal" of that film in the sense that here, we get what appears to be the "reality" first, followed by the fantasy, at least until the final section, which makes those lines much less clear. Not that they were really clear to begin with. The strange thing is that what I think is reality feels much more dreamlike than the ostensible "fantasy" section, with its soundtrack composed solely of low drones, weird and uncanny set design, and scenes broken up almost solely by fades in and out, the unbroken soundtrack making it feel like a constant stream-of-consciousness from dreamscape to dreamscape. Bill Pullman's Fred is an impotent nothing of a man who can't satisfy his wife sexually or emotionally, occupying with her a strange, uncanny home with next to nothing adorning the walls and bizarre, impersonal furnishings. He pours the frustrations his inadequacy causes into his art, like all artists do - this film isn't about Hollywood per se, but, like, it's totally about Hollywood - but it eventually results in his psychological deterioration and murder of his wife. And it's all filmed, of course, Fred's personal digital-era angel/demon making sure there's a tape record of his nastiness, not allowing him to "remember" it any differently. "Fucker gets more pussy than a toilet seat." But in Fred's desperation to run from what he's done - to "remember" things differently - he creates a whole new version out of the pieces. Now he's Pete, a cool leather-jacket wearing young punk with all kinds of women fighting over him, an exciting life with gang ties, and bizarrely coexisting with that, a group of friends who he just hangs out and bowls with, a weirdly healthy family life, even a boss at a car shop who's disarmingly excited to have him back. This part feels much less dreamlike than the Pullman section, at least to begin with, though it's still uncanny - to put it as simply as I can, it's more Twin Peaks seasons 1-2 than The Return. The soundtrack, rather than a void of aimless buzzing, comes to the fore with a bunch of grunge - the "dreamlike" moments are based in human behavior, like Pete's parents (one of whom is Gary Busey lol) sitting in rapt attention before a documentary on fruit, or tough-guy gangster Mr. Eddy delivering an angry rant on road safety. Pete starts banging Mr. Eddy's wife, played, as was Fred's murdered wife, by Patricia Arquette. He reimagines her as a femme fatale trophy wife who throws herself at him and who he effortlessly satisfies, who wants him desperately to run away with her even if it means murder. Of course, the fantasy starts to split, and the film begins to resemble the Pullman section more and more, reality breaking under his feet, finally reaching a nexus at the cabin in the desert, where he finally reverts back to Fred. And it's this final section that I'd frankly forgotten all about since I first saw the film, and that makes it all much more slippery than I remembered. It seems that the Pete section of the film wasn't strictly fantasy, but Fred quite literally having molted from his own head and spiritually taken over the life of another, who was then influenced by Fred's own projections. This section introduces tons of contradictions that muddy the waters beyond visibility as to What Really Happened, what was Just in Fred's Head, and or how much of it was some weird in-between state, whether any of it can actually be said to have happened or not. Near as I can tell, Fred's wife Renee - the brunette Arquette - was really having an affair with Mr. Eddy (actually Dick Laurent) and making porno films for him, and Fred-as-Pete dealt with that by reversing it, constructing a scenario where he stole the girl of the guy who stole his - a scenario where he'd have never committed his evil deed, as a way of escaping both the guilt from and consequences of it - it breaks down once he realizes both paths would have ended in violence, because he's a fundamentally violent spirit, aren't all Hollywood men? Those consequences finally catch up to him in the form of that hellish final scene, being chased by shadow-people in police cars before finally going out in an electric blaze of glory. I fucking hate that this review ended up basically just being a plot description lol. I think my interpretation is frankly a little too straightforward - there are so many little complicating elements here, and nothing I've written really gets at what a strange, slippery experience watching the film is. That's why this is my first attempt at an actual proper review of a Lynch film; I always feel like I'm suffocating them when I try to write something like this, and I'm far from talented enough to go the sensual route and try to write at length on how watching the movie actually makes you feel. Anyway, I knew I loved this one, but I didn't expect it to shoot past Blue Velvet in my Lynch ranking and actually threaten to break into the ironclad top three of Mulholland, Eraserhead & Inland. It's maybe his scariest, most blunt work, fitting for a film from the perspective of the tortured oppressors of his female protagonists, in sheer grinding spiritual agony driven by their utter impotence and banality.