And but so when Balthazar Getty’s new blue-collar incarnation of Bill Pullman and Patricia Arquette’s apparent blond incarnation of Bill Pullman’s wife make eye-contact, sparks are generated on a scale that lends the hackneyed “I-feel-I-know-you-from-somewhere” component of erotic attraction whole new fresh layers of creepy literality. Then there are some scenes that fill in the new blond Patricia Arquette incarnation’s seedy history, and some scenes showing how deeply and ferociously attached to the blond Patricia Arquette Robert Loggia is, and some scenes that make it abundantly clear that Robert Loggia is a total psychopath who is most definitely not to be fucked around with or snuck around behind the back of with the girlfriend of. And then we get some scenes showing that Balthazar Getty and the blond Patricia Arquette are — Getty’s forehead-carbuncle notwithstanding, apparently — instantly and ferociously attracted to one another, and then some more scenes where they consummate this attraction with all the heavily stilted affectless vigor Lynch’s sex scenes are famous for. 10
And then there are some more scenes that reveal that Robert Loggia’s character also has more than one identity in the movie, and that at least one of these identities knows both the decadent, lounge-lizardy, mysterious friend of Bill Pullman’s deceased wife and the Mephistophelian Mystery Man, with whom Loggia begins making creepy and ambiguous threatening phone calls to Balthazar Getty’s home, which Balthazar Getty has to listen to and try to interpret while his parents (who are played by Gary Busey and an actress named Lucy Dayton) smoke pot and exchange mysterious significant looks in front of the TV.
It’s probably better not to give away too much of Lost Highway’s final act, though you maybe ought to be apprised: that the blond Patricia Arquette’s intentions toward Balthazar Getty turn out to be less than honorable; that Balthazar Getty’s carbuncle all but completely heals up; that Bill Pullman does reappear in the movie; that the brunette Patricia Arquette also reappears, but not in the (so to speak) flesh; that both the blond and the brunette P. Arquette turn out to be involved (via lizardy friends) in the world of porn, as in hardcore, an involvement whose video fruits are shown (at least in the rough cut) in so much detail that I don’t see how Lynch’s movie is going to escape an NC-17 rating; and that Lost Highway’s ending is by no means an “upbeat” or “feel-good” ending. Also that Robert Blake, while a good deal more restrained and almost effete than Dennis Hopper was in Blue Velvety is at least as riveting and creepy and unforgettable as Hopper’s Frank Booth was, and that his Mystery Man is pretty clearly the devil, or at least somebody’s very troubling idea of the devil, a kind of pure floating spirit of malevolence à la Twin Peaks’s Leland/“Bob”/Scary Owl.
6b approximate number of ways Lost Highway seems like it can be interpreted
Roughly 37. The big interpretive fork, as mentioned, looks to be whether we are meant to take the sudden unexplained shift in Bill Pullman’s identity straight (i.e. as literally real within the movie), or as some Kafka-esque metaphor for guilt and denial and psychic evasion, or whether we’re to see the whole thing — from invasive videos through Death Row through metamorphosis into mechanic, etc. — as one long hallucination on the part of a natty jazz saxophonist who could very much benefit from some professionally dispensed medication. The least interesting possibility seems to be to the last, and I’d be very surprised if anybody at Asymmetrical will want Lost Highway interpreted as one long psychotic dream.
Or the movie’s plot could, on still another hand, simply be incoherent and make no rational sense and not be conventionally interpretable at all. This won’t necessarily make it a bad David Lynch movie: Eraserhead’s dream-logic makes it a “narrative” only in a very loose, nonlinear way, and large parts of Twin Peaks and Fire Walk with Me make no real sense and yet are compelling and meaningful and just plain cool. Lynch seems to run into trouble only when his movies seem to the viewer to want to have a point — i.e. when they set the viewer up to expect some kind of coherent connection between plot elements — and then fail to deliver any such point. Examples here include Wild at Heart—where the connections between Santos and Mr. Reindeer (the Colonel Sandersish-looking guy who commissions hits by pushing silver dollars through hit men’s mail slots) and the Harry Dean Stanton character and the death of Lula’s father are intricately set up and then don’t go anywhere either visually or narratively — and the first half hour of Fire Walk with Me, which concerns the FBI investigation of the pre-Palmer murder of another girl, and sets us up to think it’s going to have important connections to the Palmer case, and instead is full of odd cues and clues that go nowhere, and is the part of the movie that even pro-Lynch critics singled out for special savagery.
Since it might bear on the movie’s final quality, be apprised that Lost Highway is the most expensive movie Lynch has ever made on his own. Its budget is something like sixteen million dollars, which is three times Blue Velvet’s and at least 50 % more than either Wild at Heart’s or Fire Walk with Me’s.
But so it is, at this point, probably impossible to tell whether Lost Highway is going to be a Dune-level turkey or a Blue Velvet-caliber masterpiece or something in-between or what. The one thing I feel I can say with total confidence is that the movie will be: Lynchian.
8 what Lynchian means and why it’s important
An academic definition of Lynchian might be that the term “refers to a particular kind of irony where the very macabre and the very mundane combine in such a way as to reveal the former’s perpetual containment within the latter.” But like postmodern or pornographic, Lynchian is one of those Potter Stewart-type words that’s definable only ostensively — i.e. we know it when we see it. Ted Bundy wasn’t particularly Lynchian, but good old Jeffrey Dahmer, with his victim’s various anatomies neatly separated and stored in his fridge alongside his chocolate milk and Shedd Spread, was thoroughgoingly Lynchian. A recent homicide in Boston, where the deacon of a South Shore church gave chase to a vehicle that had cut him off, forced the car off the road, and shot the driver with a high-powered crossbow, was borderline-Lynchian.