review of lost highway (1997) (spoilers ahead!!!)
after numerous years of cinematic pause, numerous failed television series and a long trajectory filming commercials (especially for cosmetic brands), lynch’s return to the big screen in 1997 after 5 years absent since fire walk with me could be considered one of the great returns of cinema, with a narrative that, while still preserving the ghostly and surreal aspects of twin peaks, goes one step further, since now what in twin peaks could happen by physically crossing spaces, in his following films would occur in the very mind of the characters, and would be completely alien to the rest of the cast.
in twin peaks, the black lodge was accessible through the infamous circle of trees that we could find in the forest bordering twin peaks. in lost highway however, everything is happening inside the mind of the character, as we will see happen in mulholland drive and in inland empire.
analyzing the film, i will begin first with its aesthetic vision. it is obvious that it is impossible to understand a david lynch film while it is being watched, due to the non linear narrative and because most of the time it is delivered by a narrator we cannot trust. regarding the cinematography, the shots are sublime, and lynch’s time working on commercials and advertisements is noticeable, many of the scenes are almost epic, taken from ads that could perfectly be for mac or for maybelline in the best possible sense. the use of colors and very muted gray, ochre and earth tones in the first part shows us the clear reality in which fred lives, who is not at all happy with his life, suffering a strong sexual impotence with his wife renee, since fred thinks that she is cheating on him.
in mulholland drive the reality/dream duality is much more obvious than in the other two films of his los angeles trilogy, the film being completely separated in two. however, in lost highway we are already presented with that broken world, with events that go completely beyond logic such as the tapes that keep arriving or with dialogues that sometimes feel forced or overacted.
after the pivotal point of the murder of his wife by fred, he is imprisoned and sentenced to death, so, unable to bear the guilt, he seeks that famous redemption that we also see in mulholland drive, creating a fantasy or psychic world to which he escapes transformed into pete, a young, sexually attractive man to whom women come easily. with his charms he gains the attention of alice, the counterpart of renee, who appears blonde and mostly wearing light colors, indicating to us that she represents her antithesis and everything that renee is not, almost like maria and mary in silent hill 2.
i have integrated this relationship mainly for two reasons, the first being that maria and mary represent the same person but with completely opposite qualities (renee in the film appears as a quiet, reserved woman, almost always dressed in black, with dark hair and wearing thin heels, which although always high are not like alice’s. alice however is an open, seductive woman, with totally different makeup, wearing light colors and creams, with completely loose blonde hair and who always uses much more imposing wedges than renee’s heels, which could mean that her presence indicates that men must kneel before her, indicating power and status). the second reason is less obvious, and it is that, in silent hill, just like in lost highway, our protagonist james resorts to a fictional or psychotic world because of the murder of his wife, in which he will be forced to suffer for his actions and to be punished by numerous characters, mainly pyramid head, whom we could associate with the mysterious man. both play the role of stalker who appears at important moments in the story and both represent guilt and fear.
fred’s fantasy and psychosis collapse when even in his own dreams he ends up being rejected by alice/renee, which leads him to commit the murder of alice’s husband (mr eddy/dick laurent), a murder he carries out thanks to the action of the mysterious man. the union of both to commit the crime is symbolic, fred totally succumbs to fear and joins him, indicating that there is no possible salvation for our main character, his mind was broken from the beginning.
unlike in mulholland drive, where we can see a clear resolution and a structured reality, fred never manages to end his pain (as diane did by committing suicide in mulholland drive), and this is shown to us with the final scene, where the phrase from the beginning is repeated, “dick laurent is dead”, making us see that fred lives in a constant loop of reverie and psychosis.
the film can also be interpreted as a mind or a superego that is trying to reconcile both parts of fred’s head (the real or fred and the unreal or pete), and that it does this through the sending of the tapes, which could serve as a transmission to fred from the superego to remind him where he really lives and as a last attempt to make him see that he must stop escaping from his reality. that is why the tapes stop arriving once fred completely accepts pete, the superego has identified that it makes no sense to continue with the healing, fred has collapsed and has completely shattered.
we can also resort to our own interpretation of mulholland drive, where clearly diana’s brain filled in with data from her real life the gaps that suited her in her fantasy. this can be seen with the character of andy for example, who appears both in the dream and in reality and who may mean that fred wanted to include andy in his dream to convince himself that what has happened is real and that he is not imagining it, wanting to self convince and redeem himself from his actions.
with the plot already more than chewed over, i want to highlight the film’s soundtrack, which seems sublime to me, the mixture of metal and industrial music (rammstein, marilyn manson or nine inch nails) with david bowie, elizabeth fraser and lou reed is exquisite, it adds great value to the film and to its enjoyment.
as a conclusion, this film shows us the beginning of a third phase in lynch’s cinema, which will last until his last great release (inland empire), characterized by encapsulating images, such as the scene of alice and pete in the desert to the sound of song to the siren, or the scene of alice getting out of eddy’s cadillac. david lynch is a great director of images and although his stories, always difficult to understand and without a clear meaning, so it is likely that we will never know what they may really want to convey, lead us to think about cinema in a way that few directors and screenwriters achieve, opening numerous doors to the study of his films from a psychological, philosophical, photographic, artistic and musical lens, forming an experience that brings together the best of all the pure arts that exist.
