Bill Pullman is a jazz saxophonist whose relationship with his wife, a brunette Patricia Arquette, is creepy and occluded and full of unspoken tensions. They start getting incredibly mysterious videotapes in the mail that are of them sleeping or of Bill Pullman’s face looking at the camera with a grotesquely horrified expression, etc.; and they’re wigging out, understandably, because they regard it as pretty obvious that somebody’s breaking into their house at night and videotaping them; and they call the cops, which cops show up at their house and turn out in best Lynch fashion to be just ineffectual blowholes of Dragnet-era clichés.
Anyway, while the creepy-video thing is under way there are also some scenes of Pullman looking very natty and East Village in all-black and jamming on his tenor sax in front of a packed dance floor (only in a David Lynch movie would people dance ecstatically to abstract jazz), and of Patricia Arquette seeming restless and unhappy in a kind of narcotized, disassociated way and generally being creepy and mysterious and making it clear that she has a kind of double life involving decadent, lounge-lizardy men, men of whom Bill Pullman would doubtless not approve one bit. One of the creepier scenes in the movie’s first act takes place at a decadent Hollywood party held by one of Patricia Arquette’s mysterious lizardy friends. At the party Bill Pullman is approached by somebody the script identifies only as “The Mystery Man,” who claims not only that he’s been in Bill Pullman and Patricia Arquette’s house but that he’s actually there at their house right now, and he apparently is, because he pulls out a cellular (the movie’s full of great LA touches, like everybody having a cellular) and invites Bill Pullman to call his house, and Bill Pullman has an extremely creepy three-way conversation with the Mystery Man at the party and the same Mystery Man’s voice there at his house. (The Mystery Man is played by Robert Blake, which by the way get ready for Robert Blake in this movie — see below.)
But so then, driving home from the party, Bill Pullman criticizes Patricia Arquette’s decadent friends but doesn’t say anything specific about the creepy and metaphysically impossible conversation he just had with one guy in two places, which I think is supposed to reinforce our impression that Bill Pullman and Patricia Arquette are not exactly confiding intimately in each other at this stage of their relationship. This impression is further reinforced in some creepy sex scenes in which Bill Pullman has frantic wheezing sex with a Patricia Arquette who just lies there blank and inert and all but looking at her watch. 9
But then so the thrust of Lost Highways first act is that a final and climactic mysterious video comes in the mail, and it shows Bill Pullman standing over the mutilated corpse of Patricia Arquette — we see it only on the video. And then Bill Pullman’s arrested and convicted and put on Death Row.
Then there are some scenes of Bill Pullman on a penal institution’s Death Row, looking about as tortured and uncomprehending as any noir protagonist ever in the history of film has looked, and part of his torment is that he’s having terrible headaches and his skull is starting to bulge out in different places and in general to look really painful and weird.
Then there’s this scene where Bill Pullman’s head turns into Balthazar Getty’s head. As in the Bill Pullman character in Lost Highway turns into somebody completely else, somebody played by Lord of the Flies’s Balthazar Getty, who’s barely out of puberty and looks nothing like Bill Pullman. The scene is indescribable, and I won’t even try to describe it except to say that it’s as ghastly and riveting and totally indescribable as anything I’ve seen in a U.S. movie.
The administration of the penal institution is understandably nonplussed when they see Balthazar Getty in Bill Pullman’s cell instead of Bill Pullman. Balthazar Getty is no help in explaining how he got there, because he’s got a huge hematoma on his forehead and his eyes are rolling around and he’s basically in the sort of dazed state you can imagine somebody being in when somebody else’s head has just changed painfully into his own head. The penal authorities ID Balthazar Getty as a 24-year-old LA auto mechanic who lives with his parents, who are apparently a retired biker and biker-chick. Meaning he’s a whole other valid I Dable human being, with an identity and a history, instead of just being Bill Pullman with a new head.
No one’s ever escaped from this prison’s Death Row before, apparently, and the penal authorities and cops, being unable to figure out how Bill Pullman escaped, and getting little more than dazed winces from Balthazar Getty, decide (in a move whose judicial realism may be a bit shaky) to let Balthazar Getty just go home. Which he does.
Balthazar Getty goes home to his room full of motorcycle parts and Snap-On Tool cheesecake posters and slowly gets his wits back, though he still has what now looks like a wicked carbuncle on his forehead and has no idea what happened or how he ended up in Bill Pullman’s cell, and he wanders around his parents’ seedy house with a facial expression that looks the way a bad dream feels. There are a few scenes of him doing stuff like watching a lady hang up laundry while an ominous low-register noise sounds, and his eyes look like there’s some timelessly horrific fact that’s slipped his mind and he both wants to recall it and doesn’t want to. His parents — who smoke dope and watch huge amounts of TV and engage in a lot of conspiratorial whispering and creepy looks, like they know important stuff Balthazar Getty and we don’t know — don’t ask Balthazar Getty what happened… and again we get the feeling that relationships in this movie are not what you would call open and sharing, etc.
But it turns out that Balthazar Getty is an incredibly gifted professional mechanic who’s been sorely missed at the auto shop where he works — his mother has apparently told Balthazar Getty’s employer, who’s played by Richard Pryor, that Balthazar Getty’s absence has been due to a “fever.” At this point we’re still not sure whether Bill Pullman has really and truly metamorphosized into Balthazar Getty or whether this whole turning-into-Balthazar-Getty thing is taking place in Bill Pullman’s head, a sort of prolonged extreme-stress pre-execution hallucination à la Gilliam’s Brazil or Bierce’s “Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.” But the evidence for literal metamorphosis mounts in the movie’s second act, because Balthazar Getty has a fully valid life and history, including a girlfriend who keeps looking suspiciously at Balthazar Getty’s hellacious forehead-carbuncle and saying he “doesn’t seem himself,” which with repetition stops being an arch pun and becomes genuinely frightening. Balthazar Getty also has a loyal clientele at Richard Pryor’s auto shop, one of whom, played by Robert Loggia, is an extremely creepy and menacing crime-boss-type figure with a thuggish entourage and a black Mercedes 6.9 with esoteric troubles that he’ll trust only Balthazar Getty to diagnose and fix. Robert Loggia clearly has a history with Balthazar Getty and treats Balthazar Getty with a creepy blend of avuncular affection and patronizing ferocity. And so on this one day, when Robert Loggia pulls into Richard Pryor’s auto shop with his troubled Mercedes 6.9, sitting in the car alongside Robert Loggia’s thugs is an unbelievably gorgeous gun-moll-type girl, played by Patricia Arquette and clearly recognizable as same, i.e. as Bill Pullman’s wife, except now she’s a platinum blond. (If you’re thinking Vertigo here, you’re not far astray. Lynch has a track record of making allusions and homages to Hitchcock — e.g. BV’s first shot of Kyle MacLachlan spying on Isabella Rosselini through the louvered slots of her closet door is identical in every technical particular to the first shot of Anthony Perkins spying on Janet Leigh’s ablutions in Psycho—that are more like intertextual touchstones than outright allusions, and are always taken in weird and creepy and uniquely Lynchian directions. Anyway, the Vertigo allusion here seems less important than the way Patricia Arquette’s Duessa-like doubleness acts as a counterpoint to the movie’s other “identity crisis”: here are two different women (for a while) portrayed by what is recognizably the same actress, while two totally different actors portray what are simultaneously the same “person” (for a while) and two different “identities”)