I quit updating this blog in part due to my unwillingness to write about Lost Highway. This is Lynch, and Lynch is creepy, and I don't like to revisit creepy if I can help it. Lynch is not good creepy, like Jeepers Creepers scream-in-equal-parts-delight-and-fright creepy, or plot twisty Charlie-is-your-split-personality creepy. Lynch is under your skin, under your consiousness creepy. It unsettles on a deep level and stays with you for days, coloring the world a sickly, uncomfortable sepia. Lynch is a master in stream-of-consciousness. The loose narrative he throws in only serves to confuse as the audience tries to grab onto it, only to have it switch tracks or disappear altogether halfway through the film.
Summary/Spoilers:
Plot summary might be the most challenging part of reviewing a Lynch film. This one's actually pretty straight forward compared to his other works. Some hotshot young hollywood couple start receiving creepy footage of their own house in the mail. The footage becomes longer and longer with each tape, until finally it pans inside the house, through the living room, into the bedroom, aaannnd darkness. In between receiving the tapes the couple goes out to a party, have a seemingly unimportant conversation, and have sex during which the man hallucinates a creepy pasty man-face as his wife's. They receive one last video tape, in which the camera finishes panning to the bedroom, to the man screaming, cradling his dead wife in his bloody hands. The lines between TV and reality disappear, and it seems the man really did kill his wife, although he doesn't admit it, doesn't remember it. He is locked up in jail, and then Lynch started working his magic.
The rest of the movie is too nonsensical to summarize. Basically the man disappears completely, to be replaced by a young man random and unrelated. This young man, with a different life, differently family, somehow meets the man's wife. Some confusing Lynchian mindfuck ensues, a long drive along a dark highway later, the young man transforms back into the husband.
Thoughts:
Lynch is so good at setting up a mood, a tone, at making the viewer feel whatever uneasiness he wants them to. The overly slow pan-overs mixed with sudden explicable phenomenons makes sure the viewer has zero comfort level throughout. Case in point all the appearances of Creepy Pasty Man. I am highly susceptible to non sequitor freak outs. His mini series Rabbits nearly did it in for me, while everyone I showed it to thought it was boring, or even funny. There's something so disconcerting about grown ups prancing around in animal suits (see The Shining's Furry Freakout).
Basically this is a great film. As a film lover, or even liker, it has a lot to offer. Its challenging, but not so much when compared to Muholland Drive or Inland Empire. There's loads to say about it, like all Lynch films its open ended and up to individual interpretations. It makes the most sense to treat the second half of the film as an extended dream or fantasy sequence, during which the man makes up a legitimate reason for the death of his wife, in which he's not the murderer.
I'd like to think behind the fucked up narrative about some sex murder story, Lynch is taking another stab at Hollywood, at the general materialistic lifestyle the couple leads. The man finds peace of mind living the simple life of a young mechanic, reveling in the youthful virility and simple mindedness. It is when he falls once again for the wife, the beautiful seductress, a symbol of the material, does he lose grasp on his newly forged reality.
I really didn't want to put any screencaps, really really, but Lynch's cinematography is too impressive to ignore.
Notable scene 1: Creepy Pasty Man
Creepy Pasty Man, or CPM, shows up in the midst of a crowded party. He walks straight to the protagonist, and proceed to have creepy-bananas conversation. “I'm at your house, but I'm also right in front of you, so who was phone?”
Notable scene 2: Highway Cuss-Out
Lynch is funny, there's no denying it, and this scene is proof.
Another thing, the wife:
I knew there was something familiar in her breathy voice. She's Kissing-Kate Barlow from Holes!
TL;DR:
Conclusion: hell is being trapped in a Lynch movie.
How many times did I use 'creepy' in this review?
