Lost Highway

Infobox Film
name = Lost Highway


caption =
director = David Lynch
producer = Mary Sweeney
writer = David Lynch Barry Gifford
narrator =
starring = Bill Pullman Patricia Arquette Balthazar Getty Robert Loggia Robert Blake
music = Angelo Badalamenti
cinematography = Peter Deming
editing = Mary Sweeney
distributor = October Films
released = flagicon|USA 15 January, 1997
runtime = 135 minutes
country = USA
language = English
budget = $15,000,000 (estimated)
preceded_by =
followed_by =
website =
amg_id = 1:154436
imdb_id = 0116922

"Lost Highway" is a 1997 psychological thriller directed by David Lynch. It is arguably an example of contemporary film noir, but with surreal imagery and themes. Lynch co-wrote the screenplay with Barry Gifford, with Angelo Badalamenti composing the score. "Lost Highway" is also notable for the last film appearances of Richard Pryor, Jack Nance, and (as of 2008) Robert Blake.

Synopsis

Fred Madison (Bill Pullman), a saxophonist, is accused under mysterious circumstances of murdering his wife Renee (Patricia Arquette). On death row, he inexplicably changes into a young man named Pete Dayton (Balthazar Getty), leading a completely different life. When Pete is released, his and Fred's paths begin to cross in a surreal web of intrigue, orchestrated by a crime boss named Dick Laurent (Robert Loggia).

Plot

Fred Madison answers his intercom to hear the words "Dick Laurent is dead." Fred is a jazz musician who appears to share an extremely tense relationship with his wife Renee, who he suspects may be cheating on him.

The Madisons find a package outside their house one morning that contains a videocassette tape showing the outside of their home. The camera zooms in on their door before cutting out. Although they dismiss the tape as "from a real estate agent," the couple finds a second tape the next day. This tape is longer, and shows the camera moving through their living room, and eventually into their bedroom, where both Fred and Renee are clearly visible, asleep. Panicked, Renee contacts the authorities and tells them what has happened thus far.

Two police detectives, Al and Ed (John Roselius and Lou Eppolito), arrive to investigate, but they are unable to solve the mystery, as there are no signs of entry anywhere in the house. Fred mentions to the officers that they don't own a video camera because he "likes to remember things [his] own way ... not necessarily the way they happened." The Madisons tell the officers that they have disabled their security system due to "false alarms," but they agree to re-arm it. Later, Renee takes Fred to a party hosted by a sleazy man named Andy (Michael Massee), with whom it becomes obvious Renee has some sordid history. While Renee enjoys herself at the party, Fred meets a stranger (Robert Blake) whose name is not revealed, although Andy later mentions that he might be a "friend of Dick Laurent's." Fred and the Mystery Man begin an extremely cryptic conversation, in which the Mystery Man tells Fred that they have met before, and that in fact he is at Fred's house at that moment. Fred scoffs in disbelief, but agrees to call the house using the Mystery Man's cell phone as a proof test, only to hear the Mystery Man answer at the other end. Before Fred can learn how it is possible for the Mystery Man to be in two places at once, and how he got into the house, the Mystery Man walks away.

Shaken, Fred conducts a search of their house when he and Renee return, but he finds no intruder. While Renee is getting ready for bed, Fred walks through the house and finds himself standing in front of a long vortex-like corridor which he doesn't remember being there before. Fred walks down the long, dark corridor and disappears. Renee walks out of the bedroom looking for Fred, calling out to him as she stands at the foot of the corridor. A minute later, Fred emerges from the dark corridor, followed by a shadow figure. The next morning, Fred finds another tape outside the house. It seems the same as the last one, but as the camera moves into the bedroom, it shows Fred on the floor with the bloody, bisected body of Renee. We next see Fred in a chair at a police station, where he is punched in the face by the same two police detectives, Al and Ed, who now call him a murderer. Fred pleads his innocence, but then immediately becomes confused, and wonders if he truly has killed his wife.

Fred is incarcerated for murdering Renee — a crime he denies — and is sentenced to death by the electric chair. In prison, he suffers from tremendous headaches and begins to break down. During one of his sleepless nights, Fred sees visions of a burning house in the desert, after which he suffers some kind of seizure. In the morning, he has apparently changed into a young mechanic named Pete Dayton. The police are confused, disturbed, and unsettled as to how Fred Madison appears to have escaped a high-security prison, and how Pete Dayton has taken his place. As Pete has committed no crime, he is released and allowed to return home with his mother and father, a scruffy former motorcycle couple who live in the San Fernando Valley. Pete is then followed around by two police detectives, named Hank and Lou, to try to figure out why and how he ended up in Fred Madison's prison cell.

The following day, Pete returns to Arnie's (Richard Pryor) garage where he works, and he is visited by Mr. Eddy (Robert Loggia), a local gangster. One of the policemen following Pete recognizes Mr. Eddy by another name: Dick Laurent. Mr. Eddy intimidates Pete into taking him out for a ride in his Mercedes. On a narrow mountain road, Mr. Eddy waves a tailgater on, then rams into the man's car. Pete sees Mr. Eddy and his two cohorts attack and beat up the driver as Mr. Eddy screams a lecture about the dangers of tailgating.

The next day, Mr. Eddy returns to the garage for Pete to tune up his Cadillac. With Mr. Eddy is his mistress, the beautiful Alice Wakefield (also played by Arquette), whom Pete falls for immediately. She returns to the garage later that night alone to pick up the car, and the two soon begin an affair.

It becomes obvious that Pete is suffering from a similar level of the mental stress that afflicted Fred; he has no recollection of the incident that led to him being transported to the jail. His parents (Gary Busey and Lucy Butler) clearly do, but they refuse to tell him for some reason that is never explained. He begins cheating on his girlfriend Sheila (Natasha Gregson Wagner) with Alice. One day, Mr. Eddy arrives at garage while Pete is working and Mr. Eddy hints that he suspects that Pete and Alice are sleeping together. Mr. Eddy makes it clear to Pete that if he catches them together, he will kill them. During another of their secret trysts, Alice reveals that Mr. Eddy has involved her in pornography, and hatches a plan with Pete to run away together to escape Mr. Eddy's vengeance. The plan involves robbing Andy, who appeared as Renee's friend earlier in the film, and selling the stolen goods to a fence in the desert in order to start their new life together.

After a murderous warning from Mr. Eddy via the telephone — which includes a brief, threatening speech from the Mystery Man — Pete goes to Andy's house as planned. Andy dies a gruesome death during a struggle, impaling his head on the corner of a thick glass coffee table. Pete suffers anxiously, and whilst searching for the bathroom, he inadvertently opens the door to a room housing a porn film in which Alice is having sex with a man who may be Andy. After returning to the living room he notices a framed photograph of Dick Laurent/Mr. Eddy, Renee, Alice and Andy standing together. Alice pulls a gun on Pete, which she then hands to him, telling him to put it in the waistband of his jeans. Pete and Alice drive away in Andy's car with his valuables (but not before Pete suffers a nightmarish vision that hints that Alice will betray him).

The two drive into the desert, where Alice says the fence will meet them. They reach the same house that Fred envisioned in his prison cell, but no one is there. Alice and Pete make passionate love, but at its climax Alice tells Pete, "You'll never have me," before getting up and walking into the house naked.

When Pete stands up, he has transformed back into Fred Madison. Fred goes inside the house, where he finds the Mystery Man waiting for him, but Alice has disappeared. Fred asks where Alice is, and the Mystery Man admonishes him and tells him that her name is Renee. The Mystery Man then approaches Fred with a video camera; Fred runs to the car and drives away, frightened.

Fred pulls into the desolate Lost Highway Hotel, where Dick Laurent/Mr. Eddy and Renee/Alice are sharing a room. After Renee/Alice leaves, Fred storms into the room, beats Laurent, and bundles him into the trunk of the car before driving back to the desert. When Fred opens the trunk, Laurent leaps out and looks to have the upper hand in the ensuing fight, before a third person hands the spread-eagled Fred a dagger, which Fred uses to slice Laurent's throat.

Fred throws off his attacker, and we see that the third person is the Mystery Man. He hands Laurent a portable television, on which is playing a pornographic film featuring Renee/Alice (as well as Marilyn Manson and Twiggy Ramirez). The Mystery Man then shoots Laurent to death, whispers something to Fred, and then vanishes completely.

At Andy's house, the police arrive to investigate his murder with all four of the detectives: Al and Ed, and Hank and Lou. The detectives find the photo of Renee with Andy and Dick Laurent which connects her to the men and provides a motive for Fred's murder of Renee, however the image of Alice in it has mysteriously disappeared. After it is mentioned Pete's fingerprints are all over the house one of them states, "You know what I think? I think there's no such thing as a bad coincidence."

As morning breaks, Fred drives back to his original house, presses the intercom button, and utters the first (and now last) words said in the movie: "Dick Laurent is dead." Descending the steps back to his car, he notices the two detectives, Al and Ed, moving to apprehend him. Fred gets to his car and roars off with the police in pursuit. The film ends with Fred being chased down a highway by a large number of police cars. As it gets dark, Fred continues to drive down the highway which begins to turn into a dark vortex, and he appears to have another seizure similar to the one in the prison when he transformed into Pete, and we get a glimpse of a bestial, blurred image in place of his face before the credits roll.

Principal cast

Production

Lynch came across a phrase in Barry Gifford's novel "Night People" known as "Lost Highway" and mentioned to the writer how much he loved it as a title for a film.cite news
last = Lynch
first = David
coauthors = Barry Gifford
title = Introduction - Funny How Secrets Travel
work = Lynch on Lynch
pages =
language =
publisher = Faber & Faber
date = 1997
url =
accessdate = ] Lynch suggested that they write a screenplay together. Gifford agreed and they began to brainstorm. Both men had their own different ideas of what the film should be and they ended up rejecting each other's and also their own. On the very last night of shooting "", Lynch was driving home and thought of the first third of "Lost Highway" all the way up to "the fist hitting Fred in the police station - to suddenly being in another place and not knowing how he got there or what is wrong." He told Gifford and they began writing the screenplay. The two men realized early on that a transformation had to occur and another story developed which would have several links to the first story but also differ.cite news
last = Henry
first = Michael
coauthors =
title = The Moebius Strip - Conversation with David Lynch
work =
pages =
language =
publisher = Postif
date = November 1996
url =
accessdate = ] While they were writing the script, Lynch came up with an idea of a man and woman at a party and while they are there another man is introduced who is younger than the first and, "out of place, doesn't know anybody there, comes with a younger girl who knows a lot of the people. The girl is actually drawing him into a strange thing, but he doesn't know it. And he start talking to this young guy who says strange things to him, similar to what The Mystery Man says to Fred Madison." Lynch recalls that the character, "came out of a feeling of a man who, whether real or not, gave the impression that he was supernatural."cite news
last = Szebin
first = Frederick
coauthors = Steve Biodrowski
title = David Lynch on "Lost Highway"
work =
pages =
language =
publisher = Cinefantastique
date = April 1997
url =
accessdate = ] Gifford describes the Mystery Man as "a product of Fred's imagination" and is "the first visible manifestation of Fred's madness."cite news
last = Biodrowski
first = Steve
coauthors =
title = Lost Highway - Mystery Man
work =
pages =
language =
publisher = Cinefantastique
date = April 1997
url =
accessdate = ]

According to Lynch, the opening scene of the film where Fred Madison hears the words, "Dick Laurent is dead," over his intercom really happened to him at his home.

During filming, Deborah Wuliger, the unit publicist, came upon the idea of a psychogenic fugue which Lynch and Gifford subsequently incorporated into the film. Lynch recalls, "The person suffering from it creates in their mind a completely new identity, new friends, new home, new everything - they forget their past identity."cite news
last = Swezey
first = Stuart
coauthors =
title = 911 - David Lynch, Phone Home
work =
pages =
language =
publisher = Filmmaker
date = Winter 1997
url =
accessdate = ] In addition to being a mental condition, Lynch realized that a fugue was also a musical term: "A fugue starts off one way, takes up on another direction, and then comes back to the original, so it [relates] to the form of the film." Gifford researched psychogenic fugues with a clinical psychologist at Stanford University so that there would be some basis in fact. From that point, he and Lynch began "creating this surreal, fantastic world that Fred Madison lives in when he becomes Peter Dayton."

Blake, who portrayed The Mystery Man in the film, was responsible for the look and style of his character. One day, he decided to cut his hair short, part it in the middle and apply Kabuki white make-up on his face. He then put on a black outfit and approached Lynch, who loved what he had done.

The first cut of the film ran just over two-and-a-half hours. After a screening with 50 people, Lynch cut out 25 minutes of footage.

Interpretation

The storyline may have been influenced by Ambrose Bierce's famous story "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge", in which a prisoner is hanged, while imagining escaping and traveling home. [cite web| url=http://www.rochester.edu/in_visible_culture/Issue_8/thain.html#20| title= Funny How Secrets Travel: David Lynch’s Lost Highway] [cite web| url=http://metaphilm.com/index.php/detail/reading-inland-empire/| title= Reading Inland Empire - A Mental Toolbox for Interpreting a Lynch Film] The fact that the escape was a dying man's hallucination is, however, only revealed at the end of the story. A similar construction is thought to be used in "Lost Highway", where the protagonist is arguably electrocuted at the end of the movie. Other movies based on the same idea are "Jacob's Ladder" by Adrian Lyne, an episode of The "Twilight Zone" based on the aforementioned Bierce story and the final sequences of Terry Gilliam's "Brazil".

In his book "Catching the Big Fish", Lynch reveals that it was only years later that he realized what inspired the storyline: the O.J. Simpson trial.

Philosopher Slavoj Žižek interprets the film's bipartite structure as exploiting "the opposition of two horrors: the fantasmatic horror of the nightmarish "noir" universe of perverse sex, betrayal, and murder, and the (perhaps much more unsettling) despair of our drab, "alienated" daily life of impotence and distrust". [Slavoj Žižek's "The Art of the Ridiculous Sublime: On David Lynch's Lost Highway" (University of Washington Press, 2000); quoted in Emma Wilson's "Alain Resnais" (Manchester University Press, 2006, ISBN 0719064066). Page 142.]

oundtrack

For years, Trent Reznor had tried to contact Lynch to see if he would be interested in directing a video for his band, Nine Inch Nails, but had no success.cite news
last = Blackwell
first = Mark
coauthors =
title = Sharp Electronics
work =
pages =
language =
publisher = Raygun
date = February 1997
url =
accessdate = ] After his work on the "Natural Born Killers" soundtrack, Reznor received a call asking if he would be interested in doing the same thing for "Lost Highway". Reznor talked to Lynch on the phone and the filmmaker asked if he would also be interested in composing original music for the film. Reznor agreed and Lynch traveled to New Orleans, where the musician was living, and together they created music that accompanied the scenes where the Madisons watch the mysterious video tapes, a brand new song called "The Perfect Drug," and "Driver Down," featured at the end of the film. Reznor also produced and assembled the soundtrack album.

Lynch chose two Rammstein songs, "Heirate Mich" and "Rammstein". The band based the video for the latter song on this film. The majority of the video is made with clips from "Lost Highway".

The movie soundtrack has one song not included in the album, a cover of Tim Buckley's "Song to the Siren", performed by This Mortal Coil (with vocals by Elizabeth Fraser of Cocteau Twins), a song which was planned to be featured in Lynch's 1986 film Blue Velvet, but at the time proved too expensive to use.

Reception

The film received "two thumbs down" from Siskel and Ebert — though Lynch used this to his advantage by claiming it was "two good reasons to go and see "Lost Highway"." This 'two thumbs down' was used in newspaper ads. [cite web| url=http://www.newstalk980.com/incoming/20071114/movie-geek-archives-lost-highway| title= From the Movie Geek Archives: Lost Highway] [cite web| url=http://www.lynchnet.com/lh/promopic.html| title= Lost Highway promotional pictures]

The film received an average score of 52 out of 100, based on critics' reviews on the aggregate site Metacritic, making it one of Lynch's least acclaimed works. [cite web| url=http://www.metacritic.com/video/titles/losthighway?q=lost%20highway| title= Metacritic Review Of Lost Highway]

However, it was ranked among the 1,000 greatest films of all-time, according to "They Shoot Pictures, Don't They?", at number 766. [cite web| url=http://www.theyshootpictures.com/gf1000_ranking701-800.htm| publisher= They Shoot Pictures, Don't They? |title=The 1,000 Greatest Films of All Time]

DVD releases

"Lost Highway" has had a poor release history in North America, but the Region 2 and 4 releases have had a two-disc treatment, with improved audio and visual, as well as a "Making Of" featurette and numerous interviews.

The film made its official U.S. DVD debut on March 25, 2008 through Universal Studios' Focus Features label. The film is presented in anamorphic widescreen in the proper 2.35:1 ratio with Dolby Digital 5.1 audio. Controversy over the release concerns the video transfer, which differs considerably from DVD versions already available in Europe (the new R1 disc has a decidedly darker and redder tone) [ [http://www.dvdbeaver.com/film/DVDReview/losthighwayr4.htm Lost Highway - Patricia Arquette ] ] as well as the mysterious absence of a 10-part multi-angle interview with Lynch that had been touted as a special feature by Universal prior to the DVD's release. [cite news
last = Woodward
first = Tom
coauthors =
title = "Lost Highway"
work =
pages =
language =
publisher = DVDActive
date = December 11, 2007
url = http://www.dvdactive.com/news/releases/lost-highway.html
accessdate = 2007-12-11 ]

Opera

"Lost Highway" was adapted as an opera by Austrian composer Olga Neuwirth with the libretto by 2004 Nobel Prize-winner Elfriede Jelinek.

The opera was premiered in Graz in 2003 with the live-electronics and sound design realized at the Institute of Electronic Music and Acoustics (IEM) using the open source software Pure Data.

It made its American premiere at Finney Chapel in Oberlin, Ohio and at the Miller Theater in New York City in February 2007, in a production performed by students from the Oberlin Conservatory of Music.

It premiered in the UK in an ENO production at the Young Vic in April 2008. This production was directed by Diane Paulus, with set and costume design by Riccardo Hernandez, video design by Philip Bussmann, lighting design by Mimi Jordan Sherin and sound design by Markus Noisternig. The cast included Mark Bonnar as Fred Madison, Quirijn de Lang as Pete Dayton, Valérie MacCarthy as Renne/Alice, Christopher Robson as The Mystery Man and David Moss as Mr Eddy/Dick Laurent.cite news
last = Hewett
first = Ivan
coauthors =
title = "Lost Highway": into the dark heart of David Lynch
work =
pages =
language =
publisher = The Daily Telegraph
date = March 25, 2008
url = http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2008/03/25/btlost125.xml
accessdate = 2008-03-25 ]

References

Further reading

* "The Art of the Ridiculous Sublime: On David Lynch's Lost Highway", (ISBN 0-295-97925-9) Slavoj Zizek, 2000.
* [http://www.rottentomatoes.com/vine/showthread.php?t=409845 "Comparison between Lost Highway"] and Mulholland Dr.
* [http://www.jasonsweb.com/LostHighway/index.htm "Lost Highway" Explained]
* [http://www.hollywoodgothique.com/robertblake.html Robert Blake - Mystery Man of the Lost Highway]
* [http://hollywoodgothique.com/davidlynch.html David Lynch directs traffic on the Lost Highway]

ee also

*"Detour" (1945)
*"Caché" - a 2005 film by Michael Haneke which has some early scenes reminiscent of "Lost Highway".

External links

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