Lost Highway
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| Lost Highway | |
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| Directed by | David Lynch |
| Produced by | Mary Sweeney |
| Written by | David Lynch Barry Gifford |
| Starring | Bill Pullman Patricia Arquette Balthazar Getty Robert Blake |
| Music by | Angelo Badalamenti |
| Cinematography | Peter Deming |
| Editing by | Mary Sweeney |
| Distributed by | October Films |
| Release date(s) |  15 January 1997 |
| Running time | 135 min. |
| Country | USA |
| Language | English |
| Budget | $15,000,000 (estimated) |
| All Movie Guide profile | |
| IMDb profile | |
Lost Highway is an English language 1997 psychological thriller directed by David Lynch. It is a crime film, arguably an example of contemporary film noir, but with surreal imagery and themes. Lynch co-wrote the screenplay with Barry Gifford; the score is by Angelo Badalamenti.
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[edit] Synopsis
Fred Madison (played by Bill Pullman) answers his intercom to hear the words "Dick Laurent is dead". Initially, this message means nothing to him. Fred is a jazz musician who suspects that his wife, Renee (played by Patricia Arquette), is cheating on him. The couple share an extremely tense relationship that pushes Fred dangerously close to the breaking point.
The Madisons find a package outside their house one morning, which contains a tape showing the outside of their home. The camera zooms in on their door before cutting out. Dismissing the tape as "from a real estate agent", the couple find a second tape the next day. This tape is longer, and shows the camera moving through the Madisons' living room, and eventually into their bedroom, where both Fred and Renee are clearly visible, asleep.
Two police detectives, named Al and Ed, arrive to investigate, but they are unable to solve the mystery, as there are no signs of entry anywhere in the house, and the Madisons agree to increase their home security. Renee takes Fred to a party hosted by the sleazy Andy, whom it becomes obvious Renee has some sexual history with. While Renee enjoys herself, Fred meets a stranger identified only as the Mystery Man (played by Robert Blake), who begins an extremely cryptic conversation with Fred. 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 as a proof test, only for the Mystery Man to 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, he walks off.
Shaken, Fred conducts a thorough search of the house when he and Renee return, but finds no intruder. Fred finds himself entranced with a dark vortex-like corridor, which he walks down and disappears. When Renee calls out for Fred, he emerges, followed by a shadow.
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, Fred is on the floor with the bisected body of Renee. Fred suddenly wakes up in a chair at a police station, where he is being beaten by the same two police detectives, Al and Ed, who 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, and in the morning he has changed into the young mechanic, Pete Dayton (played by Balthazar Getty). 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 gotten in in his place. As Pete has committed no crime, he is released and allowed to return home with his mother and father, who live in the San Fernando Valley. Pete is then followed around 24/7 by two police detectives, named Hank and Lou, to try to figure out why and how Pete ended up in Fred Madison's prison cell.
Pete returns to the garage where he works, where he is visited by Mr Eddy (Robert Loggia), a local gangster. One of the policemen following Pete recognises Mr Eddy by another name: Dick Laurent.
Laurent returns to the garage one morning with his mistress, the beautiful Alice Wakefield (also played by Arquette, continuing the duality theme), whom Pete falls for immediately. She returns to the garage later that night, alone, and the two begin an affair.
It becomes obvious that Pete is suffering from a similar level of mental stress that afflicted Fred; he has no recollection of the incident from that night leading up to him being transported to the jail (his parents clearly do, but they refuse to tell him for some reason that is never explained), he is cheating on his girlfriend Sheila (Natasha Gregson Wagner), and Mr. Eddy has hinted that he has suspicions about Pete and Alice, and has made it fairly clear what he will do if he catches them. Alice reveals that Mr. Eddy has involved her in pornography, and hatches a plan with Pete to run away together and escape Mr. Eddy's vengeance. The plan involves Andy, Renee's friend from earlier in the film, robbing him and meeting another associate of hers, who will provide them with everything they need 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. He kills Andy during a struggle, and he 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 her associate will meet them. They reach a small house (the same one Fred had envisioned in his prison cell), but no one is there. Alice and Pete make passionate love, but at its climax Alice utters the words "you'll never have me", before getting up and walking into the house.
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 advances on Fred with a video camera — potentially confirming him as the man who broke into the Madisons' house — and Fred drives away, frightened.
Fred pulls in at the 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 knife, 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 a porn film with Renee/Alice. 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, present where they find a photo of Renee with Andy and Dick Laurent which makes the connection between her and the men, and the motive for Fred killing her, as well as Pete's fingerprints all over the house and the body. One detective 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 house, pressing the intercom button and utters the first (and now last) words said in the movie, "Dick Laurent is dead." Apparently he says this to himself as someone indeed answers the intercom. Descending the steps back to his car, he notices the two detectives, Al and Ed, who move to apprehend him. Fred gets to his car first, and roars off with the police in pursuit. The film ends with Fred being pursued down a highway by a large number of police cars. As it gets dark, Fred has 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.
[edit] Psychogenic fugue
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During the filming of Lost Highway, Deborah Wuliger, the unit publicist, came upon the idea of a psychogenic fugue which Lynch and Gifford subsequently incorporated into the film. They defined it thus: "The person suffering from it creates in their mind a completely new identity, new friends, new home, new everything—they forget their past identity." In addition to being a mental condition, Lynch also discovered[citation needed] 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 took the idea of a psychogenic fugue and ran with it. "This was something I researched with a clinical psychologist at Stanford, so we had some basis in fact here. After we found that freedom, more or less it was just a matter of creating this surreal, fantastic world that Fred Madison lives in when he becomes Peter Dayton." Gifford has elaborated further on this theory in interviews, stating, "The basic thing I can tell you is that Fred Madison creates this counter world and goes into it, because the crime he has committed is so terrible that he can't face it. This fugue state allows him to create a fantasy world, but within this fantasy world, the same problems occur. In other words, he's no better at maintaining this relationship, dealing with or controlling this woman, than he was in his real life. The woman isn't who he thinks she is, really, so all the so-called facts of his known life with Renee pop up again in Alice Wakefield."
Lynch also hinted that his interest in Buddhism may have played a role in the structure of Lost Highway. In an interview with Time Out magazine in the August 1997 issue, Lynch elaborated on the parallels with Buddhism. The interviewer talked of Fred resigned to continue forever, making the same mistakes over and over again, in a number of different realities/lives/modes of being, forever striving for the ideal that Alice represents. Lynch replied that, "He is not consigned to this fate forever... He is not traveling in a circle, but rather a spiral, and at the end of the film moves round onto the next level. Maybe eventually he can find release. The film is only a small part of the story." The filmmakers have also compared the structure of the film to a Möbius strip[citation needed].
[edit] Origins
Cultural critic Greil Marcus explains the essential connections with the 1945 noir film Detour, "Lost Highway is not a rewrite or remake of Detour, a sub-sub-B movie … Lost Highway is a reinhabiting of Detour."[1] Detour is the story of a man, a jazz pianist, whose life is forever sidetracked—he is forced to abandon his own identity and adopt a new one—by a suspicious death he stridently asserts was not murder. It stars Tom Neal as Al Roberts, whose eyes betray the very same qualities as those of Bill Pullman, and Ann Savage as Vera, a Hollywood-bound hitchhiker he picks up. "Opening with that broken line running down the middle of the road, Detour is just as indecipherable [as Lost Highway]. ‘Were these actors, hoping for careers, … or derelicts resolved to treat the idea of movie with contempt?’"[1] Lost Highway reestablishes from Detour other defining details as well: "Just as Pete Dayton can't listen to Fred Madison on the radio, here Roberts can't stand the sound of his neighbor's saxophone."[1] Al Robert's doppelganger in Detour, Charles Haskell, is heir to a family fortune that Vera and Al plot to steal. This is neatly mirrored by Lynch's casting of Balthazar Getty—scion of the Getty oil family—as Fred Madison's doppelganger Pete Dayton.
According to an interview he did with Chris Rodley in the Lost Highway screenplay book, Lynch had read a book that Barry Gifford had written called Night People. Within it was the phrase "Lost Highway" that Lynch was drawn to. He mentioned this to Gifford and suggested that they write something together. The two sat down and began to exchange ideas they had for the film. They had their own ideas about what the film should be and these differed quite radically—to the point where they rejected each other's ideas and eventually their own. Lynch remembers, "Then I told Barry about this series of things that came to me one night. The very last night of shooting Fire Walk With Me these things shot into my head. I was driving home with Mary Sweeney and I told her about them. What I told her sort of scared her and it sort of scared me too. And when I told them to Barry he said, 'Jeez, I really like that,' and that was the start of a brand-new direction."
According to Lynch, he had thought up, "the first third of the picture maybe, minus some scenes we had in the final script... This thing I had went 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."
The storyline might also be based on Ambrose Bierce's famous story An occurrence at owl creek bridge, in which a war prisoner is hanged, during which the victim imagines escaping and travelling home [1]. The fact that the escape was a dying man's hallucination is however only revealed at the end of the story. A similar construction seems 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, Terry Gilliam's Brazil and the Tobias Wolff short story Bullet in the Brain
[edit] Trivia
- Lost Highway marks both Richard Pryor's and Jack Nance's last film appearances. They both play auto-mechanics in the same scene. Robert Blake, while still alive unlike Pryor and Nance, has not acted in any films since "Lost Highway".
- Marilyn Manson and Twiggy Ramirez both appear as "porno stars" in one of Dick Laurent's porn/snuff films.
- Henry Rollins appears as Fred's guard while in prison.
- Lou Eppolito, who plays Detective Ed, was, years after his involvement in this film, convicted for an array of crimes, including murder, he committed while he was a real life New York City police detective. He and his partner were dubbed the "Mafia Cops" for their collusion with the Mafia in various crimes. A summary may be found here: http://www.americanmafia.com/Feature_Articles_346.html
[edit] Responses
Famously, 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." [2]
[edit] Principal cast
| Bill Pullman | Fred Madison |
| Patricia Arquette | Renee Madison/Alice Wakefield |
| Robert Blake | Mystery Man |
| Robert Loggia | Dick Laurent/Mr Eddy |
| Balthazar Getty | Pete Dayton |
| Giovanni Ribisi | Steve 'V' Vincencio |
| Henry Rollins | Guard Henry |
| Richard Pryor | Arnie |
| Gary Busey | William Dayton |
| Natasha Gregson Wagner | Sheila |
| Marilyn Manson | Porno star #1 |
| Jeordie White (as Twiggy Ramirez) |
Porno star #2 |
[edit] DVD Releases
Lost Highway has had a poor release history in the US, but the Region 2 & 4 releases have had a 2 disc treatment, with improved audio and visual, as well as a Making Of feature and numerous interviews. It has been suggested by at least one Lynch fan site that the US has never seen an official release of the film on DVD because of the murder trial (and subsequent acquittal) of Robert Blake [3].
The back of the region 4 DVD has a "Welcome to the universe of David Lynch" sign. It states:
- Don't look for it, there is no exit...
- Forget it, there is no way out...
- Forget it, it's a deadlock...
[edit] Soundtrack
The soundtrack album features a number of contributions from Angelo Badalamenti, a consistent Lynch collaborator, as well as Barry Adamson, and Trent Reznor, who has stated that he is a fan of Lynch's films. Also appearing are David Bowie, Nine Inch Nails, The Smashing Pumpkins, Lou Reed, Marilyn Manson, and Rammstein. The movie soundtrack has one song that was not included in the album, a cover of Tim Buckley's "Song To the Siren" performed by This Mortal Coil.
Some tracks were recorded at a sound studio in Prague.
[edit] Screenplay
Lost Highway has been published as a screenplay by David Lynch and Barry Gifford by Faber & Faber (ISBN 0-571-19150-9). The book also includes a 15 page interview of Lynch by Chris Rodley.
[edit] Opera
Lost Highway was adapted as an opera by Austrian composer Olga Neuwirth with the libretto by Nobel Prize winner 2004 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 will have its American premiere at Finney Chapel in Oberlin, Ohio and at the Miller Theater in New York City in February, 2007.
Principal cast, Graz 2003:
Constance Hauman (Renee Madison/Alice Wakefield), Vincent Crowly (Fred Madison), David Moss (Dick Laurent/Mister Eddy), Georg Nigl (Pete Dayton), Andrew Watts (Mystery Man), Kai Wessel (Andy)
Markus Noisternig (live-electronics, programming, IEM), Thomas Musil (programming, IEM)
Principal Cast, USA 2007:
Alice Teyssier (Renee Madison/Alice Wakefield), Barry Bryan (Fred Madison), Raphael Sacks (Dick Laurent/Mr. Eddy). Michael Weyandt (Pete Dayton), Chad Grossman (Mystery Man), Samuel Read Levine (Andy)
Tom Lopez (sound design), Leif Shackelford (performance technology design, FOH engineer)
[edit] References
[edit] Further reading
- The Art of the Ridiculous Sublime: On David Lynch's Lost Highway, (ISBN 0-295-97925-9) Slavoj Zizek, 2000.
[edit] See also
- Detour (1945)
- Caché - a 2005 film by Michael Haneke which has some early scenes reminiscent of Lost Highway.
[edit] External links
- Lost Highway at All Movie Guide
- Lost Highway at the Internet Movie Database
- Lost Highway at lynchnet.com
- Comparison between Lost Highway and Mulholland Dr.
- Lost Highway Explained
- Robert Blake - Mystery Man of the Lost Highway
- David Lynch directs traffic on the Lost Highway
| The work of David Lynch |
|---|
| Feature films: Eraserhead • The Elephant Man • Dune • Blue Velvet • Wild at Heart • Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me • Lost Highway • The Straight Story • Mulholland Dr. • Inland Empire TV series: Twin Peaks • American Chronicles • On the Air • Hotel Room Other work: Short films • Industrial Symphony No. 1 • Rabbits • Darkened Room • Dumb Land • The Angriest Dog in the World |
Categories: Articles which may contain original research | Articles with unsourced statements since February 2007 | All articles with unsourced statements | 1997 films | American films | English-language films | Neo-noir | Surrealist films | Cult films | Independent films | Films directed by David Lynch
