LOST HIGHWAY
Should've stayed lost

  I admit, I enjoy Entertainment Weekly as much as the next guy.  They greatly amused me with their "Top 25 Scary Movies Of All Time" list, of the 25 I think I'd reviewed something like 18 in the previous two months.  (No, I'm not suggesting that I'm being spied on by EW writers who can't be bothered to come up with their own list; merely that few favorite films are favorites to just one guy)  Lost Highway came in around #23 or so; it's not a movie that I'd ever heard referred to as a horror movie, but soon after this some discussion on alt.horror cropped up about the film and my curiosity was piqued.

Then I remembered that it is, after all, David Lynch.  So my curiosity fell away like a protester on El Capitan.

Lynch is, er, not one of my favorite directors.  I once considered his films to be an acquired taste I hadn't yet acquired; later, simply movies I didn't "get" and didn't care to either.  Today, I'm less reticient to call a movie a shit-dripping turd-bladder with extra crap on the side.  Lost Highway is Lynch at his Lynchiest.  I've lit candles in here to help get rid of the smell.

Now, here's the plot.  Yeah, right - I know, I just said plot, but try to squint at the word until it blurs into something illegible.  That oughtta capture just how much of a plot this plot is.  Bill Pullman, who spends his screen time looking like he's staring right at an eclipse, plays Fred, a jazz saxophonist (as if there's some other kind).  I have no idea if he's supposed to be a good one - the crowd he plays to seems pretty impressed (they appear to be moshing, which jazz fans are wont to do), but what he's playing sounds bloody awful.  Maybe I'm not one to judge, having taken years to figure out just how good a band like Slayer is.  So if there's some jazz fan out there with a discerning ear, please let me know if that is or is not total shit coming out of that man's saxophone.

Anyway, the Bird here and his live-in girlfriend (or wife, or whatever) (Patricia Arquette, throwing her career down the crapper one shitty movie at a time - Jesus, did you see Stigmata?) are getting videotapes delivered anonymously to their apartment.  The videotapes are of their home - first from the outside ("Maybe it's a real estate agent", says Arquette, playing another Special Ed graduate), then from the inside, ending in a quick look at the two of them sleeping.  They call the police, who view the tape and question them.  "I like to remember things my own way" Fred tells them.  I suggest everybody out there use that line the next time a policeman asks you to remember something, and just see what kind of a response you get.

The next night, at a party, Fred is approached by a weird little stranger (Robert Blake).  This guy has no eyebrows and is graced with a makeup job that makes him look like a seventy-year-old woman.  I fully expected him to have a weird voice, but no, he sounds normal, and he says that even though Fred has no memory of meeting him, they have met before, at his house.   "As a matter of fact, I'm there, right now."  Fred takes the prudent step of phoning home to prove this guy a phoney, but...yeah, you know.  Next tape he gets, while the chick's in the next room, he sees himself sobbing over her bloody corpse.  Sure enough, she doesn't come when he calls her to see the tape, and he's tried for her murder, convicted, sentenced to death, and locked up in solitary.  Then one day, the guy in the cell isn't him, it's a 24-year-old auto mechanic (Balthazar Getty).  We don't see Fred again for a long time.

Lynch is obviously not concerned with telling a linear story here.  I've heard some blather in the past about how the plot is not linear but a moebus strip.  Nothing in this movie suggests to me that a detailed examination of the likelihood of this possibility is a more rewarding worthy than counting how many times my rabbit's nose twitches in 135 minutes.  Lynch isn't just not telling a linear story; he's not concerned with making any sense at all.  Arquette pops up again soon playing a gangster's girlfriend.  Fred talks to himself over an intercom.  A house explodes in reverse, for some reason.  Said gangster takes the kid out for a drive saying that there's something he doesn't like.  Fortuitously, we find out just what it is he doesn't like - tailgaters, and it's a good thing for this scene that a tailgater happens right along.

Operating under wacky rules and twisted logic is one thing; operating under none at all is quite another.  There's a big difference between creativity and hiding behind weirdness.  Any idiot can throw weird shit on the screen.  But in a movie where anything at all can and does happen, how can anything matter, how can the viewer be genuinely surprised by anything, or even care what's going on?  Why even bother watching the screen?  Anything you see happening is likely to be refuted ten minutes later anyway.  Lost Highway is the cinematic equivalent of an 8000-word essay composed mostly of words plucked at random from the dictionary.  You look on, dazed, and wonder if it even matters what's coming next.  It doesn't.  For 135 minutes, it doesn't.  I didn't even tell you about when the kid turns back into Bill Pullman, or when Loggia turned into a giant penis-monster and ate Arquette with his urethra.  (okay, that last one I made up, but would it have made a difference?)

Is time a moebus strip here?  Is everything happening inside Fred's head?  Is there some hidden logic to unravel?  Guess what?  Don'tgiveashit.  I just don't care.  I'm happy to think about movies in order to enjoy them, but when it doesn't toss me a bone in the form of something, ANYTHING interesting, I don't bite.  (I've never seen more slabs of pretentious drivel than the heap of "If you don't get it, go back to watching [fill in your fitfully entertaining mainstream film here]" comments at the IMDb) Anybody confident that he can explain the plot of this movie in 100 words or less is invited to do so, but any longer than that and I'm just not interested.

I can't count how many times I've heard this movie described as "hypnotic".  There's a difference between being hypnotic and being boring.  Remember how in Eyes Wide Shut, every scene was drawn out to about four times its necessary length, as people talked slow, or didn't say anything, and you just kind of waited for something to happen?  This is about four times as bad, and doesn't have nearly the payoffs EWS did.  Sure, there's the occasional cool moment, like Loggia's beating of that pesky tailgater (although I was inevitably let down - likewise, I'd heard about it so much I'd expected a much sounder thrashing).  And you've gotta love the way one guy is killed with a glass table.  But it's rough digging, rough digging for 'em indeed.

The performers are almost all having a bad day here, except for Loggia, who's at home in his role and could probably deliver it over the phone.  I already told you about Pullman's constant "squinty" look that substitutes for acting here.  Getty seems more confused than the audience, and Arquette?  Jesus, could you pick anybody worse for this role?  Not only can't she act, never could, but if you're going to cast somebody to play the part of the Irresistibly Tempting Gangster's Girlfriend, don't stick her in a set of wigs that make her look like something from my sister's creepy "Weimreiner Puppies Pose As The Cast Of Sleeping Beauty" books.  Sure, she has a good body (and you sure get to see it a lot), but she's a dead ringer for her brother Alexis, who (while showing some promise as an actor) is not very good looking as a guy, and much worse as his drag-queen alter-ego Eva Destruction.  So in this movie, she basically looks like Eva Destruction in a particularly bad set of wigs.

Additionally, this movie should qualify for any award out there for bad sound.  There are only two states in this movie.  One is really really quiet, so quiet you have to turn the sound WAAAAAAAAY up to hear the dialogue at all, the roar of static hiss waking up neighbors two floors up.  The other is the sudden burst of something loud (like that saxophone) that wakes up neighbors two blocks away.  The awful music doesn't help either (much of it Trent Reznor, Marilyn Manson, and Rammstein, none of it stellar examples of each act's craft).

I dunno, guys.  Lynch's crowning achievement to this day remains his bringing some attention to the talents of short-lived Minnesota thrash band Powermad. The rest...take it, you can have it.  

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