1152 Lost Highway

[Farley Flavors]

Plus the remixed audio sounds incredible.

Did it ever not sound incredible?

I was at a 35mm screening at the BFI with Barry Gifford doing a Q&A and he'd passed on to the projectionist Lynch's wish to have the volume cranked up. That was quite the experience.

[flyonthewall2983]

Usually when Marilyn Manson started singing

[flyonthewall2983]

I have a real bone to pick with Criterion using the term “science fiction” in it’s plot summary. I realize how difficult a job it must be to put anything David Lynch made in however many words or less (even his shorts) but I can’t let it slide any longer after seeing the new restoration, which is kind of a funny word to use in the context of how this looks because it has always looked like a nightmare. The vivid picture quality did me in a little the same way the last episodes of The Return did.

[beamish14]

Plus the remixed audio sounds incredible.

Did it ever not sound incredible?

I was at a 35mm screening at the BFI with Barry Gifford doing a Q&A and he'd passed on to the projectionist Lynch's wish to have the volume cranked up. That was quite the experience.

Lynch left letters to projectionists in prints for Mullholland Dr. to let them know exactly how many hertz the volume shod be set at. The sound designs in his films is uniformly extraordinary

[flyonthewall2983]

I appreciate the inclusion of a stereo track on this. I’m just on a simple soundbar at the moment and it is indeed extraordinary.

[therewillbeblus]

I have a real bone to pick with Criterion using the term “science fiction” in it’s plot summary

Yeah, applying a scientific method to Lynch doesn't really work when he's all about abstract dreams and emotion trumping logic. Though time travel and split worlds was such an important part of Twin Peaks: The Return that I put that on my sci-fi ballot

[colinr0380]

I think Lynch used the term "psychogenic fugue state" to describe this era of his films. Although I suppose that's less catchy than "sci-fi"!

[therewillbeblus]

Well, at least half of the runtime in each movie within this ‘era’ of his are fantasies (the condition of the ‘dreamer’ unknown) of a character in the smaller sections. I feel like fantasy would be the more appropriate genre categorization, if we had to pick between those oft-conflated signifiers

[colinr0380]

I was just popping back in to say the same thing twbbs! If you had to choose between the two broad churches, "Fantasy" would be much more appropriate than "Sci-fi". The only real sci-fi Lynch film is Dune (although I think it could be argued that Eraserhead is on that borderline as a proto-cyberpunk film with its industrial landscape and mutated bodies), and even that could be classed as being on the "Sci-fi/Fantasy" border with its arcane lore and monstrous creatures.

The only problem with the "Fantasy" classification is that (when it is not about Marvel and DC comicbook characters) it has been so colonised by Tolkein and George R.R. Martin's towering achievements in that genre (and Dungeons & Dragons/Warhammer/Terry Pratchett, etc) that it immediately conjures up images of orcs and dragons which have ironically rather constrained a genre within certain limited notions when it should be about flights of the imagination into obviously unrealistic but more metaphorical and allegorical directions in all forms. I'm just coming off having played that Scorn videogame and would class that as much more of a fantasy world (on a par with any From Software game) than a sci-fi one because of how ineffably strange its world is that goes into areas beyond anywhere that technological innovation could conceivably progress to. Or at least I hope technology does not progress to that stage!

I wonder if not just "Fantasy" but maybe the best sub-category of fantasy to put Lynch's film (and some of Guillermo del Toro's films for that matter) adjacent to, if not entirely into, are adult "Fairy Tales". Little moral fables about other possible worlds that it is pleasurable for the characters and audiences experiencing the world through the eyes of those character to linger in, before having to return back to reality again, albeit with a slightly differently skewed perspective on their otherwise mundane reality.

[therewillbeblus]

Yeah that's why I default to horror because it's broad and inclusive (though some have strongly disagreed!)

[FrauBlucher]

Beaver on the 4K

[Boosmahn]

^ It should be mentioned there are unmarked NSFW images. Why have an NSFW section when you put a very much NSFW image outside of it? :-s

[Matt]

Gary has been doing this for DECADES. It’s like the #2 thing his site is known for.

[mteller]

^ It should be mentioned there are unmarked NSFW images. Why have an NSFW section when you put a very much NSFW image outside of it? :-s

I believe the answer is he didn't always have an NSFW section. So if there's an old review with NSFW images, he'll just put to new comparison image below it without moving it to the new NSFW section. So, basically laziness.

[Boosmahn]

Oh, I'm aware of his reputation! I just thought it was amusing to include a separate section and then ignore it, but mteller's explanation makes sense.

[FrauBlucher]

I really enjoyed the Pretty as a Picture: The Are of David Lynch. I usually don't have high expectations for the supplements attached to his films but this was a good one. It's a very thorough look at the process for this film

[Drucker]

I just watched this for the first time tonight and enjoyed it a great deal. Sausage's post from over a decade ago certainly aligns with (and helps clarify) my reading of the film, and I have little to add by way of explanation. I really do enjoy though that even in Fred's fugue state, he ends up exactly where he was in real life, unable to keep reality at bay. I thought the way the film depicted the feelings of infidelity was incredibly well-grounded and effective, with Pullman really pulling off a great performance. Lastly, I can't tell if it's just assumed but the film's nod and wink to Double Indemnity was really cool as well.

[Mr Sausage]

I got to watch the film again in theatres this weekend, and it gets better every time I see it (and contra another user's claims, the movie is just bathed in shadows). It was nice to hear so many people laughing at the absurdist humour, too. I didn't remember that from the first time I saw it in theatres a few years ago.

I still agree with my interpretation above (forgot I had even written that), but it is a very psychological explanation. One of the big problems with a purely psychological interpretation is that Fred is present in the videotapes that a psychological interpretation requires Fred to be filming. There's a way around that: Fred is plainly dissociating even during the first part of the film, so he is imagining himself present in the tapes when he's not. Hence the two detectives' seemingly irrational suspicion of him. But handwaving this away via hallucination is not a great answer and it's never sat well with me. Here are some alternative readings:

-Fred is both filming and appearing on camera. We never see the Fred at the end of the film get caught by the police. He could've eluded them in the desert and returned to haunt himself. He could even have murdered Renee, meaning the Fred we begin the movie with is technically innocent of that Renee's murder (and maybe even Dick Laurant's). That said, in a time loop events are ontologically prior to themselves, so the Fred we start with is technically guilty even if that isn't his subjective experience (or ours, given the point at which we've entered the time loop).

-The Man in Black did it. A common reading, and the film suggests it by having him carry the video camera at the end, post-Pete. But something that occurred to me, given the themes of doubling and transformation: Fred begins to transform into something grotesque at the end of the film, accompanied by flashing lights and electricity similar to when he'd transformed into Pete. My wild theory: he's transforming into the Man in Black. He's transformed into the Man in Black many times, so there are many such men wandering around that particular loop (and who can be simultaneously at a party and inside someone's house). They torment Fred and themselves with his/their crimes. Fred haunts himself in the guise of the ghoul he later becomes. Maybe, too, some of those Freds do not become Men in Blacks, but return to that house to try to live a normal life free of their crimes, only for the other Freds/Men in Blacks to constantly drag him back into murder and insanity.

-Stanislaw Lem always asks in his comedic time loop stories: what the hell even started this loop? So what really kicks off Lost Highway? An easy guess is that Fred murders his wife and her lover in ordinary circumstances (no tapes, no doorbell messages, just banal ugliness), then compels himself (psychologically or otherwise) into another reality where he's innocent, only to find himself in a loop where his perception of innocence allows his old jealousy and therefore own crimes to return to him, forcing him to endlessly compel himself back into innocence, learning nothing and splitting off all the while into separate selves, always in the process of discovering he's an animal. The movie is a hell of his own creation, an extreme representation of the jealousy loop that goes on in people's heads, ruminating endlessly, convincing themselves things are fine before returning again to suspicion, on and on.

Lynch's bleakest movie? Even his other ones offer some vision of heaven, some version of the Lady in the Radiator from Eraserhead. Even Fire Walk With Me's endless brutalities culminate in Laura getting her angel. But Lost Highway's most ecstatic moment, the sex scene on the beach, is only heaven to a deluded mind. The audience, even on a first viewing, knows otherwise, especially if they've seen even one noir in their life. Hellish.

[therewillbeblus]

Lynch's bleakest movie? Even his other ones offer some vision of heaven, some version of the Lady in the Radiator from Eraserhead. Even Fire Walk With Me's endless brutalities culminate in Laura getting her angel. But Lost Highway's most ecstatic moment, the sex scene on the beach, is only heaven to a deluded mind. The audience, even on a first viewing, knows otherwise, especially if they've seen even one noir in their life. Hellish.

That's a good reading of why it felt like the most definitive "horror" Lynch to me, enough so to include it near the top of my Horror list project ballot. Just ruthlessly abrasive

[colinr0380]

Lynch's bleakest movie? Even his other ones offer some vision of heaven, some version of the Lady in the Radiator from Eraserhead. Even Fire Walk With Me's endless brutalities culminate in Laura getting her angel. But Lost Highway's most ecstatic moment, the sex scene on the beach, is only heaven to a deluded mind. The audience, even on a first viewing, knows otherwise, especially if they've seen even one noir in their life. Hellish.

That's a good reading of why it felt like the most definitive "horror" Lynch to me, enough so to include it near the top of my Horror list project ballot. Just ruthlessly abrasive

I love that reading Mr Sausage! One thing that really struck me on watching Blue Velvet again was that after all the darkness of the human soul that Jeffrey in particular comes face to face with during that film, the final scene of that film has Jeffrey returned to 'innocence' and 'normality' with the (spoiler) sunlounger-set final scene. That really suggests that somehow he has 'come out of the other side' of the darkness and back to a kind of state of grace in a way that few of the characters in Lynch's work ever get the opprtunity to do. In Lost Highway there seems to be a really pointed call back to the Blue Velvet scene in the sequence straight after Fred has transitioned into Pete. That might be the only moment of peace that Fred/Pete achieves in the film, purely through having had his personality wiped to start afresh. But even there it feels like an ersatz one and we see Pete starting to become slightly perturbed as he inevitably becomes conscious of his surroundings and his environment again - Fred/Pete is already planting the seeds of his own return to bitter awareness in spite of himself, much as Betty/Diane is going to in Mulholland Drive (her equivalent of the hounding and gnawing at her conscience/consciousness "Man in Black" figure being the mocking elderly couple). The moment of free-floating serenity simply cannot last forever, but that is what makes such moments in Lynch's films feel so moving in how fleeting they turn out to be.