Lost Highway

The Movie Most Guaranteed to Get You Into a Fight With Your Date, "Lost Highway" is going to polarize anyone brave enough to watch it. The story—if you care to use such an arcane, longitudinal word like "story" to describe this thing - is about an L.A. jazz musician Fred Madison (Bill Pullman) who is haunted by a weirdo in pancake makeup (Robert Blake) who seems to break into his apartment and films him while he sleeps. Driven to murder—or was he?—Fred is sentenced to death row, where he transmogrifies—or does he?—into teenage punk Pete Dayton (Balthazar Getty) who begins a secret love affair with a mob boss' girlfriend (Patricia Arquette, who was also Fred Madison's wife). Sound confusing? David Lynch doesn't care. More concerned with presenting the idea of a nightmare rather than the specifics, the movie works if approached like a tone poem—a set of circumstances and pictures that work to create a *feeling* rather than a story. This is fine with me, but too often Lynch just seems like he trying to be clever. With an attention to detail that suspends us in a hyper-aware world, he leads the audience on an incredible wild goose chase that suggests a payoff that never comes. Why is the Mystery Man (Blake) able to be two places at once? Who killed Fred's first wife? Or is she really dead? What did Pete Dayton's parents see that horrified them so much? And how are Pete Dayton and Fred Madison related at all? When I first walked out of this movie, I felt like I was fettered to my Western concepts of storylines and cause-and-effects, and needed to relax. Now I'm just pissed off.

—Ian Williams

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