I sure can’t. Good luck to you.
DaLovin’ Dj
Oh, that’s easy. Lynch just wanted to show off all that cool furniture he designed after the last time everyone told him his films were freaky and incomprehensible.
“Dick Larent is Dead”…makes perfect sense to me…
Actually, belive it or not, but a friend of mine wrote an extensive research paper on tryin to decrypt Lost Highway, he has yet to tell me what relevations he has come upeth with. Stay tuned…
Apparently it’s become something of a cottage industry.
I’m a big fan of David Lynch and couldn’t make any fucking sense out of that movie at all. It annoyed the hell out of me. Way too over the top.
Haj
Hey, Lost Highway!
It’s so strange, I have no idea whatsoever what this movie is about and I really like it. A lot.
I think it’s just really primal, like basic feelings put in to imagery, but as life. Wierd…
Also, the choice of music is excellent, especially Marilyn Manson’s version of “I Put A Spell On You”. I think that was back when they were Marilyn Manson and the Spooky Kids.
Love it. Couldn’t tell you one thing about the plot, if there is one.
LC
Actually, LOST HIGHWAY is relatively easy to decipher. The problem is that, when you do, you suck the fun right out of it. (As Kubrick said, "When you explain everything, it means nothing.)
Basically, the lead character (played by Bill Pullman) is jealous of his wife (suspects she’s cheating on him) and murders her. He can’t admit this to himself, so he has a nervous breakdown. The weird inexplicable things you see (including Robert Blake’s characters) are the early manifestation of this mental illness. When he finally snaps, he goes into a “psychogenic fugue,” in which he imagines that he has become a different character and has a second chance to get things right.
Unfortunately for him, elements of his previous life (his {“real life,” if you wil) intrude on this fantasy. That’s why the new character gets freaked out when he hears the radio playing one of Bill Pullmans’ saxaphone solos – it’s a reminder that he is the Bill Pullman character and that his new reality is a false one that will fall apart eventually.
Anyway, the blond-haired version of Patricia Arquette is just another version of his wife, representing his attempt to deny her death. Finally, the illusion crumbles and he returns to being Bill Pullman, on the run from the cops (hence on the “Lost Highway”).
The interesting thing is that the story isn’t that different from a simple TWILIGHT ZONE tale, which often featured characters getting a ‘second chance’ or escaping into an alternate reality. If some faery godmother had stepped into Bill Pullmans’ jail cell and explained that she was going to give him another chance at life (like the angel in IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE), then most of the confusion over the film would not occur to viewers, but the intriguing sense of mystery would have been lost. To be honest, the explanation I have offered above may be useful for convincing people that the film is not nonsense, but I don’t find it nearly as enthralling as simply abandoning myself to the imagery of the movie and not worry about the “logic” of it.
Steve Biodrowski
http://www.thescriptanalyst.com
Will wonders never cease? Another movie goer is trying to decipher a David Lynch movie!
Hint: He’s freaking nuts.
ScriptAnalyst, I’ve seen Lost Highway a couple of times and never understood it. Your post makes sense, but I didn’t see any of that in there.
I do like this movie, but I sure as hell can’t explain it.
Before the movie came out, ol’ Lynch guest starred on the Tonight Show (Jay Leno show, whatever it is called) and was asked about the movie. He said the short and sweet: “Its a story about a man in trouble.” Sho’nuff.
But really, was lost Highway that much more difficult to follow than Eraserhead? SHEESH.
Though I’ve heard the “mental anguish” scenario many times, I feel it doesn’t jive well with the third person limited style of filming. We don’t just follow Fred Madison/ (what the hell was the kid’s name? Pete-something) around, we see things that happen from all sorts of perspectives. If the camera followed BP and BG around the whole movie strictly I’d tend to agree, but since it doesn’t I’m inclined to be unimpressed with the mental analysis.
Though the mental analysis is, at least, consistent, and any other explaination would have to account for time travel, among other spatio-temporal anomolies. Not that that would stop Lynch, either 
An interesting idea, ScryptAnalyst, but far to neat and tidy for my taste. It smacks of the “Don’t you get it? At the end, it all turns out to have been a dream!” explanation. I’ve always liked to watch David Lynch movies knowing that anything that happens in them, no matter how bizarre, is ACTUALLY HAPPENING. I don’t find that he deals so much in real mental illness so much as he operates under the premise that the entire world is mentally ill.
So my take is simple: Lost Highway is about identity and self and how you never really know anyone, even yourself. It’s been a while since I’ve seen it, but I recall that characters change personas quite often, the most obvious of course being Bill Pullman’s character entering the jail cell as one person and exiting as another.
Also, I don’t think that Lynch’s movies can really be analyzed too deeply. You can only get so much out of them before they won’t give any more. He sets his shots and his movies up like paintings, and there are many surreal details that are meant more to make the audiendce FEEL than to UNDERSTAND.
Anyway, I think I have overdrawn my wank account at this point, so I’ll sign off.
I haven’t seen it, but I’ve heard that it’s plot is like a Moebius Strip, in that it does a half-twist and comes back to it’s starting point. From what I’ve read about it, this kinda makes sense.
It was great for me. Better than a sleeping pill. I haven’t slept that well in ages.
Didn’t I say (or at least imply) that in my post?
By the way, the idea of the psychogenic fugue is not mine. It was divulged to me during an interview with co-screenwriter Barry Gifford, who apparently felt the need to have some underlying rationalization for the film. When I interviewed David Lynch shortly thereafter, he seemed slightly put off by the thought of explaining the film rationally. He said something along the lines of, “It does no good for Barry to explain the movie that way.”
Steve Biodrowski
http://www.thescriptanalyst.com
er…yeah, actually you stated it quite clearly. Sorry. Missed it on the first reading.
All I can say is it ain’t no Wild at Heart or Blue Velvet
Still no one can top Hopper in BV. Who else thinks of Pabst Blue Ribbon now and forever as the ‘gas huffers beer of choice’
Fuck Heineken Man!
For some reason, I much prefer LOST HIGHWAY to BLUE VELVET or WILD AT HEART. I know I’m in the minority (at least in regard to BLUE VELVET), but LOST HIGHWAY is just much more intriguing to me. And I found Robert Blake’s Mystery Man much more menacing than Dennis Hopper’s Frank. (Blake himself, by the way, seemed quite surprised that Lynch thought of him for the role.)
Steve Biodrowski
http://www.thescriptanalyst.com
OOOOOOOOOOOH! NOW I GET IT!
NOT!
(i liked the porno scene, though!)
Oh, I think Lost Highway is Lynch’s second best work (my favorite is TP:FWWM). Though Blue Velvet is an incredible film with fantastic imagery, Lost highway seems to exemplify Lynch. The painfully slow beginning (he always has a thing for intense normality in his films), completely unexplained phenomena (sometimes as the plot, sometimes as a quick shot with no context whatsoever), a character’s struggle to understand what the fuck is going on (Sheryl Lee’s character in TP, Kyle McLaughlin’s character in BV, Balthazar Getty/Bill Pullman in LH, Jack Nance’s character in Eraserhead…), a sense of completeness without closure…
I am a pretty big Lynch fan. I think him an Aronofsky are my two favorites right now (though I’ve loved Lynch ever since I first saw Eraserhead).
What always had me scratching my head in Lost highway was the obvious red curtain in the hallway leading down to Fred’s bedroom. I think that that—though not a direct link to Twin Peaks—is certainly a hint of something larger than either of the characters. The curtain, the picture which changes, the character-swap in bright lights, the simultaneous existence of both realities (witnessed in all the cops standing together in the same room where Mr Loverboy was murdered), and the infinite loop seen in Fred giving himself information (the effect without a cause time travel dealie) all serve to undermine the credibility of the psychoanalysis schtick.
But I have heard many, many people suggest it. Just doesn’t feel like Lynch, to me.
A relief to me!