Interview, February 1997

Lost Highway By: Graham Fuller David Lynch's Lost Highway, opening this month, makes his Twin Peaks (ABC, 1990-91) and Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992) phase seem like a bad dream, as in bad career move. But it wasn't the kind of bad dream that leaves you feeling, all day, that something has gone wrong with your life and you're never going to be able to fix it. It wasn't the best kind of bad dream, the kind that permeates Eraserhead (1978), The Elephant Man (1980), Blue Velvet (1986), and now Lost Highway. The film is an elliptical horror noir that begins and ends with the same whispered statement: "Dick Laurant is dead." Fred Madison (Bill Pullman) hears these words through the intercom of the sparse, cold house he shares with his wife, Renee (Patricia Arquette), and we eventually learn that he is the man who says them, too. What takes place inside those metaphorical quote marks might be a dream (like the one Kyle MacLachlan sank into after looking into Blue Velvet's severed ear). If so, it's a very bad dream indeed, one prompted by excruciating sexual paranoia. It's a dream of obsessively loving someone who's fucking someone else. Hurts to think about it, doesn't it? Renee, a listless brunette with Betty Page bangs, treads carefully around Fred, a strung-out sax player with a permanently fretful look on his face. Fred is living on the knife-edge of betrayal. Renee, it's implied, has been unfaithful, although maybe Fred just thinks she has. Whatever the problem between them, she lays beneath him passively when they have sex and he's unable to sustain his erection. At a party, Fred meets a baby-faced bogey man (Robert Blake) who has apparently stepped out of his own psyche to taunt him. But this weirdo is a pale equivalent of Dennis Hopper's Frank in Blue Velvet. Fred butchers Renee - or so it seems - in their bedroom and is consigned to death row. There he metamorphoses into a dazed youth, Pete (Balthazar Getty), who is collected from prison by his bemused parents. Pete has no problem sustaining his erection with both his girlfriend, Sheila (Natasha Gregson Wagner), and Alice, the sweetly slutty, bleached-blonde porno-actress mistress of a dangerous gangster and snuff-film aficionado called Mr. Eddy (Robert Loggia), a.k.a. Dick Laurant. Like Renee, Alice is played by Patricia Arquette - the first real clue that Pete (Fred's virile alter ego), Mr. Eddy (emasculating Oedipal father), and Alice herself (whore) exist only in Fred's tormented imagination. After Alice lures Pete into murder, they escape to the desert, where she evaporates - her final words, "You'll never have me," hanging in the air - and Pete turns back into Fred. The Chinese-box structure of the movie then turns back in on itself as Fred's reality and his highly organized fantasy coalesce. As byzantine as Lost Highway is, I suspect Lynch is less concerned with narrative logic than with scorching the air in the room where you're watching the movie. Since Eraserhead, we've looked to Lynch to visualize moods and feelings so perverse or horrific that they appal and titillate us simultaneously. Eraserhead and The Elephant Man were less like films than industrial experiments (or accidents) over which Lynch presided like a deadpan Dr. Frankenstein, intrigued by the confluence of oil, electricity, and putrefying human flesh. The Blue Velvet-to-Twin Peaks era was a lurch into abstraction dominated by the idea - it quickly became a cliche - that white-picket-fenced small-town America is a facade for sexual deviance and general corruption. By the time Lynch made Wild at Heart and the multimedia project Industrial Symphony #1 (both 1990), it seemed he was dishing up weirdness by rote. A year or so after Twin Peaks dribbled away, the snappy, casually violent neo-hipsterism of Quentin Tarantino had eclipsed Lynch's strange brew of Magritte and Rockwell. With Lost Highway, Lynch has moved on to the foul, glittering L.A. described by James Ellroy in his novels. He's infused it with the dankness and electricity of his early films, but he's trimmed away the faux folksiness of his TV work. Watching it a second time, I was reminded of the least representative song by the languid hippy minstrel Kevin Ayers on his 1972 Whatevershebringswesing album. Against a cacophony of preindustrial rock on "Song From the Bottom of a Well," Ayers growled of a place where "My imagination begins to blur/Things don't happen, they just occur," and where he drowns his body "so my mind is free/To indulge in pleasurable fantasy/There's something strange going on down here/A sickening implosion of mistrust and fear/A vast corruption that's about to boil/A mixture of greed and the smell of oil." Listening to Ayers now, he might be singing of Fred imploding as he does at the end of Lost Highway. Or he might be hymning the fact that Lynch is back with a movie that is darker, kinkier, nastier, and more thoughtfully disturbing than anything he's done in years. And since American movies have been lapsing into Milquetoastiness for months now, that's a cause for celebration.