Help on the way!

"Lost Highway" by David Lynch stands out as one of the filmmaker`s milestones, having all the ingredients needed for a feast for imagination: the mystery, the psychosis, the drama. It is no surprise that the people there have some many faces, and this is not new, faces change, or rather, change their forms, as a ongoing theme through Lynch`s filmmaking, with the characters fully occupied in their all to common fight with questions of identity.

These identities can get garbled, with the person`s view of them through their individual looking-glass, and especially the balance between figuring out if this identity is moving towards it`s truer form, whatever that might be, or if it`s changing into something else.
This is not always so easy to know, and with all kinds of personal interests pressing on, the choice of how to view the situation will often be what seems like the simplest solution seen in the not no great distance of the forth-sight, but these "shortcuts" have the problem of garbling the distinction between what is real and what is made real, in your own experience of reality("because after all there is nothing real outside of our perception of reality, is there? You can see that can`t you?"... quote from Chronenberg`s "Videodrome").

And if reality then shows itself in the hardest of ways, this balance can be quite crucial, not just for the identity in itself, but also in the fight for life and death.
Or you could say that the search for this identity is that fight, since no real life is possible without it.

These issues are ever present and pressing for every one of this movie`s characters, as in most Lynch films, and since they end up meeting a reality that is both hard and confusing, these questions of identity, of what is the sign and who is the signifier, and of the not-so-easy task of finding out what is real and what is not, become vital for the characters` struggle for existence, and therefore also for the movies` plot.

This plot, therefore, is garbled as well, this being the clearest stand as to what kind of a style the movie "Lost Highway" has, and so it is more about finding out for yourself in your own way, than to have it explained in simple, and, since the questions raised are everything but simple, useless illustrations.

Therefore I will not try to explain it either, but just say from my heart: take a good crack at it, and even if you don`t clear out, you won`t come home empty handed!

If you are the type who hate that sort, who wants it all readymade for putting in the right box on the right shelf, and smile the smile of assurance when you cruise back home to the beats monotone, then "Lost Highway" will probably be just that; a highway where you will feel lost and not so good, and if you don`t think it`s worth it, you could maybe best spare yourself the trouble by avoiding it.

But if you are an adventurer-type, a lover of the unknown, taking the pill with the thrill and the confusion as a toy, then "Lost Highway" is a sure road to some spellbinding images, big themes, great soundtrack and most of those good old, all-to-human reasonable questions which, as prescribed by the very nature of reason itself, it`s not able to ignore, but which, as transcending all its powers, it`s neither able to answer.

But with a mind-bending Lynchorama like "Lost Highway", it can be a hell of a lot of fun! :)