A terrifying ride down the Lost Highway...

Updated 8.28.2000

"Lost Highway"...wow, where to begin?

It's a confusing movie, because the plot presents us with a man who transforms into somebody else. Are we to take this literally? Are we seeing another dimension, where everybody is slightly different? Or is it all the dreams of an insane man?

The movie's about a man named Fred (Bill Pullman), and his wife Renee (Patricia Arquette with black hair). All sorts of weird incidents begin happening in their lives: they meet a strange man at a party, and receive tapes of the inside of their house in the mail. Eventually, it seems that Fred has killed Renee. He's tried (one of the jurors being played by Mink Stole) and sentences to death. On Death Row, he changes into another man, named Pete (Balthazar Getty). Pete's involved with all sorts of organized criminals...and he starts having an affair with a woman named Alice (Patricia Arquette with blond hair). The movie gets weirder and weirder as it comes to an end. The man from the party makes another appearance, there's a death by coffee table, Marilyn Manson and Twiggy Ramirez play porn stars, the two Patricia Arquettes show up together in a photograph, Bill Pullman comes back, and there's a terrifying ride down the lost highway. And that's only the beginning of how strange the ending is.

In this movie, David Lynch almost seems to revel in the weirdness of his incredibly original vision. He takes delight in confounding the audience. The question is, how do you interpret the plot? David Foster Wallace wrote that the main problem with the plot of this movie is whether the events are literal or symbolic - that is, does Fred actually change into Pete, or is it all a metaphor? The movie offers no answer. Maybe it's like a Rorschach test, where the answer you give tells you something about yourself.

Of course, the quality of the movie is top-draw.

The acting is great - Patricia Arquette is appropriately enigmatic, and Bill Pullman seems harrowed and desperate. The Mystery Man at the party Fred and Renee attend, played by Robert Blake, seems to be another incarnation of Ben from "Blue Velvet" (who I've always found to be a great, sinister character). The Mystery Man is a great character because his role in the movie is so hard to figure out - he seems to be a devil, or a version of the Man in the Planet of "Eraserhead" (there's even a shot near the end of the movie where the Mystery Man is in the same position, at a window, as the Man in the Planet). And Robert Loggia plays one of the gangsters Pete hangs out with...his character inevitably reminded me of Frank Booth from "Blue Velvet".

And the way the film is made makes it a joy to watch. The colors of the movie are mainly lurid shades of red, orange, gold, brown, and a lot of black - with flashes of bright blue, yellow, and white every now and then; these get your attention. I've never seen a color scheme as deliberately bright and gaudy as in this movie (except maybe for that of "Suspiria").

The soundtrack is also great. Music by people like Marilyn Manson, Rammstein, and Nine Inch Nails complements the visuals perfectly, and even adds an emotional wallop (one example: "This Magic Moment" playing when we first spot the blonde Patricia Arquette - a sublime moment; it's hard to describe, but the music is a perfect counterpart).

So, visually and aurally, the film is of top quality. The real question, though - how to interpret it? David Foster Wallace's essay, "David Lynch Keeps His Head", made a good point in saying that the film can be interpreted in two ways, and that interpretation makes all the difference. Can we interpret everything as a complex metaphor? The character of Pete Dayton seems totally unrelated to that of Fred Madison, aside from their mutual carnal knowledge of Renee/Alice.

A few points in the film that need clarification, in order to truly interpret it:

- Where does the Mystery Man fit into things? Lynch said "I don't want to say what he is to me, but he's a hair of an abstraction." Is he a devil figure? A prime mover? Who can say?
- Why did Fred change into Pete Dayton, a man who's apparently completely unrelated to him? What happened to Pete on "the other night" that his parents and his girlfriend Sheila constantly refer to? Was that the night he disappeared (to become Fred?) and ended up in jail? And incidentally, is there any possibility that Fred was someplace else during the Pete Dayton segment of the film? Pete has a background - friends, family, a job. Why did all these people seem unfazed at the apparent fact of his disappearance?
- Where does Andy and the job he told Renee/Alice about fit into things? Was the job he told Renee about the same one he told Alice about? The answer is obviously yes, but why were the circumstances of his telling the women about the job exactly the same ("We met at a place called Monk's, and he told me about a job")? Which leads us to -
- Are there actually two Patricia Arquettes? If not, how is it possible that they show up together in a photo? And why does the blonde one disappear from the photo after Pete Dayton disappears? Perhaps something happened to them in the fence's cabin that Alice and Pete go to near the end that caused them, at that point, to disappear and Fred to reappear? (At the point when Fred reappeared, Renee apparently did so as well - but it's possible that she never disappeared. But if so, how to explain the videotape of her corpse?)
- What about Mr. Eddy/Dick Laurant, and what of his relation to the Mystery Man? And what was so important about the video that the Mystery Man showed him as he was dying (an echo of Johnny Farragut's death in "Wild at Heart"?) (By the way, I like how at the end of the film, Fred tells himself over the intercom that "Dick Laurant is dead", and then ends up on the lost highway - the fact that his doing this brings us back to the beginning of the film, which conjures up the thought of an infinite series of Fred Madisons, hopelessly changing into an infinite number of other identities on the lost highway. Am I reading too much into this?)

However, these points and the fact that they're never explained doesn't detract from the film - obviously, it was intentional that they were never explained, and if it was unintentional (i.e., if these things were plot holes), that would be a problem.

"Lost Highway" is like a peek into another universe - maybe two other universes. The plot is so unfathomable that you can't really interpret it - all you can do is sit back and try to make sense of it all. It's that rarest kind of movie - one where the plot is just as interesting as the way the movie is made.