Lost Highway. By
Barry Gifford David Lynch. Dir. David Lynch. Perf. Patricia Arquette Bill
Pullman. Ciby 2000. 1997. DVD.
From the bizarre
mind of David Lynch springs a film of obsession and the yearning for the mind
to escape the self-inflicted torment of being neurotically fixated on a person
who has no interest in the subject. Here, Fred Madison is married to beautiful
Renee in a loveless marriage. They begin receiving videotapes of an intruder
filming within their home; a strange man speaks enigmatically to Fred at a
party, telling him that he is "at his house right now" even though he
is standing right before him. The next morning Fred gets another tape, and is
horrified to see that it contains footage of him murdering Renee. He is
arrested, tried and convicted to die. As he sits on death row he goes through a
Kafkaesque transformation, becoming Pete Dayton. Releasing this person from
prison, he ends up coming in contact with Alice. She looks exactly like Renee
except with a different hair color. Being the girlfriend of a local mobster,
she and Pete start an affair where they secretly meet in shabby motels. They
form a plot whereby they will steal some money and leave town out of fear that
the mobster boyfriend would kill them. The movie climaxes in a scene in the
desert where Pete tells Alice "I want you," to which she replies
"You'll never have me" and disappears. Pete turns back into Fred, and a sequence of events discovers his wife Renee
cheating on him with the mobster. The strange man appears and tells him that
Renee is the same person as Alice, and bringing the mobster out to the desert
he executes him. The movie ends with police chasing Fred down the highway.
A difficult
movie to comprehend on the first viewing, and maybe only slightly better by the
31st, the escapist connotation of Fred denying either the murder of
his wife or his wife cheating by metamorphosing remains unclear. Lynch’s modus
operandi per rigor is a dreamlike atmosphere, made up of thematic strokes and
open to many interpretations. As such, what we can recognize is that although
Fred/Pete tries to possess Renee/Alice in an absolutely unrealistic chain of
events, she still repels him, and thereby raises the unrequited connection to
the second power. Nothing hurts quite as bad as self-inflicting a wound in the
same exact spot.