In Which We’ve Met Before, Haven’t We.

David Lynch has always been an underground filmmaker. Throughout his career Lynch’s narratives have snaked around the world to find the throbbing and humming forces that crawl just beneath the surface. That the reality we perceive is not the totality of experience, and levels of dreams and dimensions exist just beyond our grasp, created by, or responding to our actions as people. That the collective hypnagogic process of culture has birthed something more real then reality itself.

The labyrinthine tunnels that Lynch has been able to excavate in the world of relatively mainstream filmmaking (he has two best director nominations and a hit TV show under his belt) are impressive to say the least, and it allows him to frequently elude the trends of the moment to chase after his own fixations. His work is frequently seen as that of an anachronistic artist, a man deliberately out of step with the times and chasing the phantoms and terrors of mid-century American culture.

That sells Lynch’s work a little short. He is a man of fetishes (curtains, noir, classic Hollywood) but he’s also an artist that knows his way around contemporary culture and art. His embrace of the digital with Inland Empire, the parade of hip and with it musical guests in the third season of Twin Peaks,  and the pervasive underlying fear of something gone wrong in the late 20th century with  Lost Highway. A film that indulges in literally every single one of Lynch’s peccadilloes, while also slithering into the contemporary angst of the culture.

I can’t quite parse with exactitude what Lost Highway is about (even on this, my third watch of the film) but I can say that it drills deep into some of the most pervasive fears of the 90’s. That technology would prove to be a delivery system of bizarre terror, that digital video can deconstruct the life around you, and that there’s something inherently wrong about the successful married man living a seemingly satisfied life.

The elliptical  neo-noir starts with jazz musician Fred (Bill Pullman) fretting over the fidelity of his wife Renee (Patricia Arquette) as he is simultaneously tortured by the arrival of mysterious VHS tapes that are of his own home. Things twist even further when said tapes show him murdering his wife, and he’s suddenly thrown on death row. Another twist again is that he turns into a completely different person called Peter (Batlhazar Getty) who works as a mechanic and gets involved with a gangsters moll named Alice (also Arquette), all this before looping back around to the beginning. Both men are menaced by a bizarre figure known as the Mystery Man (Robert Blake), who both haunts their lives and seems to be the source of their suffering.

The whole thing is a knotted plot of associative ideas and themes. One event doesn’t necessarily lead to the next in a classical narrative frame, but instead suggests a form of emotional connection between moments. And while I can’t tell you precisely what this movie is about, it does suggest a world that’s fraught with fear about the relationship between identity, and technology.

Obviously there’s the narrative split in the film where Fred turns into Peter. But there’s also the vampiric specter of the Mystery Man. An individual whose presence contorts the world to his whims, and personifies the terror technology can wreak on our sense of self and surroundings. Lynch is a master of dislocation, rending images and sounds from each other in a fashion that chills the viewer to the bone, and the Mystery Man is the arbiter of such fear in Lost Highway. 

Consider the movie’s most famous scene. The Mystery Man approaches Fred at a party and proclaims, “we’ve met before, haven’t we.” It’s a statement, not a question, from the figure. He knows they’ve met before, and giving the circular nature of the film, it’s hard to say if this the moment they’ve met repeated forever. The Mystery Man then goes on to demonstrate how he exists outside the realm of the possible. He gives Fred a cellphone and says, “I’m at your home right now, call me.” Fred nervously obliges, and is greeted with the Mastery Man’s voice on the other end of the line. Both voices laugh, and there’s just a second of desync in the audio that suggests a fracturing in the world. A fundamental violation of reality, someone can indeed be in two places at once.

 

The Mystery Man’s terror stems from pieces of technology. Later on he pursues Fred with a video camera attached to his face. Recording the fear he is producing. He appears to be the source of the haunting video tapes, and his only interaction with Peter is over the phone. The Mystery Man is then some omen of death associated with the world of technology. A presence that can insinuate itself into your home easily because of our needs for a VCR or telephone. Lynch doesn’t explicitly say that technology is bad here, but instead implicitly lays out the worrying possibilities it provides. The opportunity for voyeurism, confused identity, and unknown entities entering into our lives.

Lost Highway then can be viewed as a dreamscape version of a tech thriller, with haunting visions and grainy VHS tapes replacing the whirling mechanisms of VR and cyberpunk aesthetics. The film also touches in on other of the moment trends in the 90’s. Lynch has always been fascinated by noir trapping, and the culture happily provided him with an amped up version of that genre that lends itself perfectly to his proclivities. A decade full of nasty crime stories and erotic thrillers allowed Lynch to twist his knife into iconography that he holds so dear. This ends with Lost Highway being a deeply unnerving watch when it comes to the realm of the flesh. People’s bodies split open from sudden violence, and when sex does occur it’s stylized to the point of abstraction, subsuming lust with terror and grief, never allowing the audience to enjoy anything remotely carnal.

It is then somewhat surprising that Lost Highway was met mostly with bemused indifference. In the decade of alt-rock and indie film, Lynch’s trip to the psychosphere proved to be too much. But the needling and uneasy quality has led to a life that extends beyond the context of its release. A film whose qualities and ideas are tied to so much of what was happening at the time of its debut, but whose presence and beguiling inscrutability have extended much further. Lynch imagined a nightmare world where a mysterious voice over a cell phone could turn your life inside out, and we certainly live in a place closer to that then we might like.

Odds and Ends

• Despite being a critical and commercial flop at release  Lost Highway’s soundtrack went gold and topped out at number 7 on the Billboard 200. This dichotomy between the success of an intentionally alienating movie and intentionally alienating music seems like it could a fruitful bit of cultural history.
• The fact that Robert Blake got shunted off to prison for murder pretty soon after this movie’s release makes all of his scenes that much more menacing. It’s seriously disquieting.
• The relationship between Lynch and other American Auteurs who came to prominence between the New Hollywood Era and the Indie Era (including folks like the Coens, Spike Lee, Jim Jarmusch, and Oliver Stone) and the directors of the Indie era (Tarantino, PTA, Kevin Smith) would be an interesting area to explore.

As always, twitter, letterboxd, and I Chews You (the podcast about cooking and eating Pokemon).

Next week Millennial Malaise gets lost in the woods with 1999’s The Blair Witch Project.