Mobius Lynch

Title: Lost Highway

Rating: 4 Stars

Every now and then, I go back and re-watch a David Lynch film. I’ve re-watched Eraserhead, Blue Velvet, Mulholland Drive, and now Lost Highway. My favorite is probably still the short What Did Jack Do? It legitimately made me laugh.

Lost Highway is probably most famous for the big switch in the middle. Bill Pullman plays Fred, a saxophonist. At the start of the film, someone buzzes his house’s intercom and says “Dick Laurent is dead”. He looks outside and no one is there. One morning, Fred’s wife Renee (Patricia Arquette with black hair (the hair color becomes important later)) goes out to get the paper and sees a plain brown envelope. Inside it is a VHS tape. When they play it, it’s a recording of the outside of their house. Another morning they find another tape and this time it’s a recording of them inside the house sleeping. They understandably are freaked out.

At a party, Fred has a strange conversation with a Mystery Man (Robert Blake, and yes, Mystery Man is his official film credit). Standing in front of Fred, the Mystery Man claims to be inside Fred’s house at that exact same moment. Fred calls his house, and sure enough, the Mystery Man answers. As can be imagined, Fred freaks out.

The next morning, another VHS tape is on the front doorstep. When Fred watches it, he is horrified to discover that it shows him standing over Renee’s dismembered body. Fred is convicted of the murder and is sentenced to die.

All of this is kind of weird but pretty straightforward. It stops being straightforward when a prison guard checks in on Fred’s death row cell one morning and discovers that, not only is Fred not in the cell, but another, completely different man is now there. The man is Pete (Balthazar Getty). Pete’s parents come to the penitentiary and take him home. Pete’s followed by a couple of detectives trying to figure out what’s going on.

The film now follows Pete. He’s an auto mechanic. One of his main customers is Mr Eddy (Robert Loggia). Mr Eddy appears to be some kind of gangster with anger management issues. We later learn that he puts out porn under the name of, wait for it, Dick Laurent. He has a girlfriend named Alice (Patricia Arquette with blonde hair (see, I told you)). There is instant chemistry between Pete and Alice and they commence a torrid affair.

Mr Eddy becomes suspicious and threatening. Alice convinces Pete to rob a guy (Andy) she knows. It turns out that Andy hosted the party where the Mystery Man met Fred. In a struggle, Pete accidentally kills Andy. Later, Alice taunts Pete. It appears that she’s been playing him the whole time.

Apparently the shock of the betrayal is enough to turn Pete back into Fred. Fred kills Mr Eddy. Fred then drives to his house, goes up to to the intercom, presses the button, and says “Dick Laurent is dead”. He then leaps into a car and takes off, with the two police that were following Pete in hot pursuit. The film ends with Fred driving maniacally down a dark highway while being pursued by the police.

Got all of that?

What’s interesting to me is that the two halves of the film, within themselves, actually kind of make narrative sense. What makes it surreal is the bridge between the two halves, when Fred turns into Pete and then turns back. There is some imagery that seems to imply that maybe Pete is some kind of psychotic break from Fred. At times during the Pete section, the film framing gets fuzzy and you can see Fred. Is perhaps the Pete section some kind of vision that Fred is having on death row?

Someone referred to this film as a Mobius strip. Most people probably know what it is, but a Mobius strip is a loop that contains a twist. This analogy makes sense to me because the film does loop back on itself. After all, the first words of the film and the last words of the film are exactly the same. Being a David Lynch film, it does so with a twist. The twist is the duality of Fred and Pete and what that actually means.

The Mystery Man is a whole other kettle of fish. Who is the Mystery Man? Is he the devil? Is he perhaps some dark spirit within Fred? Who knows?

For the role, Robert Blake shaved off his eyebrows and painted his face white. In his scenes, he never blinks. What’s fascinating to me is that Blake made those choices himself. Lynch told him to make his own choices and loved what Blake came up with. On the other hand, Blake, historically a notoriously difficult actor to work with, told Lynch that he would give Lynch absolutely no trouble because he didn’t understand the script at all.

Casting Robert Blake in 1997 was a bold choice. He hadn’t yet been tried for murdering his second wife, but by 1997 he was barely still acting. Lost Highway would be his last role.

More than other Lynch films I’ve seen, he employed stunt casting on Lost Highway. Notoriously, he cast Richard Pryor, clearly ailing from MS, as the auto shop owner. One of the performers in the porn film was Marilyn Manson. Henry Rollins appears as a prison guard. Gary Busey is Pete’s father. Although I didn’t actually see her, apparently Mink Stole of John Waters fame has a role. As per usual, Jack Nance, most famous as Eraserhead, makes an appearance. Robert Loggia was up for a major role in the earlier Blue Velvet, and when he didn’t get it, he left a raging, vitriolic message on Lynch’s answering machine. Eight years later, for Lost Highway, that message inspired an important scene where we see Mr Eddy completely lose his shit over a guy tailgating him.

As with nearly every David Lynch film I’ve seen, the fluid nature of identify is a major theme. We have the confusion of two distinct actors playing two different parts that might actually be the manifestation of just one character. We also have the same actor, Patricia Arquette, play two different characters. However, given the linkage between Fred and Pete, we can probably infer some kind of similar linkage between Renee and Alice.

I’d probably give the nod to Mulholland Drive, but this was another fine example of David Lynch playing games with the neo-noir genre.