Lost Highway (film)

Lost Highway is a 1997 surrealist neo-noir horror film directed by David Lynch, who co-wrote the screenplay with Barry Gifford. It stars Bill Pullman, Patricia Arquette, and Balthazar Getty. The film also features Robert Blake, Jack Nance, and Richard Pryor in their final film performances. The narrative follows a musician (Pullman) who begins receiving unmarked videotapes of his home before he is abruptly convicted of murdering his wife (Arquette). While imprisoned, he mysteriously disappears and is replaced by a young mechanic (Getty) leading a different life.
Financed by French production company Ciby 2000 and Lynch's own Asymmetrical Productions, the film was largely shot in Los Angeles, where Lynch collaborated with frequent producer Mary Sweeney and cinematographer Peter Deming. The film's surreal narrative structure has been likened to a Möbius strip, while Lynch has described it as a "psychogenic fugue" rather than a conventionally logical story. The film's soundtrack was produced by Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor, featuring an original score by Angelo Badalamenti and Barry Adamson as well as contributions from Nine Inch Nails, David Bowie, Marilyn Manson, Rammstein, and the Smashing Pumpkins.
Upon release, Lost Highway received mixed reviews and grossed $3.7 million in North America after a modest three-week run. Most critics initially dismissed the film as incoherent; it has since garnered a cult following and scholarly interest. It is the first of three Lynch films set in Los Angeles, followed by Mulholland Drive (2001) and his final film Inland Empire (2006). The film was adapted into an opera by Austrian composer Olga Neuwirth in 2003.
Saxophonist Fred Madison receives a cryptic message on his intercom in the Hollywood Hills: "Dick Laurent is dead." Moments later, he hears tires screeching and sirens racing past his house. The next morning, his wife Renee finds a VHS tape on their porch showing eerie footage of their house. That night, Fred struggles during intimacy with Renee and confesses he dreamed of her being attacked. As he looks at her, he briefly sees the face of a pale, old man.
The following day, another tape arrives, this time showing footage of Fred and Renee asleep in their bed. They call the police, but the detectives offer little help.
Fred and Renee attend a party hosted by her friend Andy. At the party, Fred encounters a strange, pale man—The Mystery Man—who claims they've met before. The man also insists he is currently at Fred's house and demonstrates this by answering Fred's call to his home phone. Andy identifies the man as an acquaintance of Dick Laurent. Unnerved, Fred leaves the party with Renee.
The next morning, a new tape arrives, showing Fred standing over Renee's dismembered body. Fred is arrested and sentenced to death for her murder.
On death row, Fred experiences intense headaches and visions of the Mystery Man and a burning cabin in the desert, before being enveloped in light. During a cell check, the guards discover that Fred has inexplicably been replaced by Pete Dayton, a young auto mechanic from Van Nuys. Pete, seemingly unaware of how he ended up there, is released to his parents but remains under surveillance by detectives.
Pete returns to work, where his gangster client Mr. Eddy visits for car repairs. Mr. Eddy takes Pete on a drive and violently assaults a man for tailgating. The next day, Mr. Eddy arrives at the garage with his mistress, Alice Wakefield. Later that night, Alice returns alone and seduces Pete, initiating an affair.
Alice grows fearful that Mr. Eddy suspects them and devises a plan to rob Andy and flee town. Meanwhile, Pete's girlfriend Sheila discovers the affair and leaves him. Later, Pete receives a disturbing call from Mr. Eddy and the Mystery Man, which pushes him to agree to Alice's plan.
At Andy's house, Pete confronts him, but Andy accidentally dies after falling headfirst into a glass table. Pete discovers a photograph of Dick, Andy, Alice, and Renee together, which triggers a nosebleed. Disoriented, Pete retreats to the bathroom but finds himself wandering the hallways of a hotel instead.
Pete and Alice arrive at a remote desert cabin to fence stolen goods. During sex outside, Alice taunts Pete, saying, "You'll never have me," before disappearing into the cabin. In a flash of light, Pete transforms back into Fred.
Fred searches the cabin and finds the Mystery Man, who tells him there is no Alice, only Renee. The Mystery Man pursues Fred with a video camera, but Fred escapes.
Fred tracks down Dick Laurent at the Lost Highway Motel, where Laurent is with Renee having sex. After Renee leaves, Fred kidnaps Laurent, taking him to the desert. The Mystery Man reappears and hands Fred a knife, which he uses to slit Laurent's throat. Laurent, confused, asks what they want. The Mystery Man plays a video of a pornographic film Laurent produced, featuring Renee as a participant. In cutaways, Renee and Laurent watch the film, aroused. Back in the desert, the Mystery Man shoots Laurent with a pistol, whispers something inaudible to Fred, and vanishes, leaving Fred with the gun.
When police investigate Andy's death, Alice is inexplicably absent from the photograph Pete found. Fred drives to his home, buzzes the intercom, and declares, "Dick Laurent is dead." As detectives arrive, Fred flees, leading them on a frantic chase through the desert. Amid flashes of light and distorted screams, Fred's fate dissolves into the darkness of the highway.
Although Lost Highway is generally classified as a neo-noir film, the film borrows elements from other genres, including German Expressionism and French New Wave. The terms psychological thriller and horror film have also been used to describe its narrative elements. Writing for the Australian Metro Magazine, Thomas Caldwell described Fred Madison as "a typical film noir hero, inhabiting a doomed and desolate world characterised by an excess of sexuality, darkness and violence." Another film noir feature that is present in the film is the femme fatale (Alice Wakefield), who misleads Pete Dayton into dangerous situations. The film was also noted for its graphic violence and sexual themes. Lynch defended these images, stating that he was simply being honest with his own ideas for the film. Some of the film's elements reference earlier works: the 1945 film Detour also focuses on a disturbed nightclub musician. The film's setting and mysterious recorded messages were seen as a reference to the 1955 film Kiss Me Deadly, while its nightmarish atmosphere has been compared to Maya Deren's 1943 short film Meshes of the Afternoon. Like Alfred Hitchcock's 1958 film Vertigo, the film examines male obsessions with women who merely represent emotions that relate to them. Some viewers consider the film an homage to Ambrose Bierce's 1890 short story "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge", in which much of the main narrative is imagined by the protagonist as he is executed.
The film's circular narrative has been likened to a Möbius strip. Lynch has described it as a "psychogenic fugue" and insisted that, while the film is about "identity", it is abstract and is left to the audience to interpret. He does not favor advancing a specific interpretation. However, when asked in a 1997 interview whether Pullman's character is "trapped in [a] time loop, doomed to repeat his murders and mistakes for ever and ever," Lynch replied, “Well, maybe not forever and ever, but you can see how it would be a struggle. Yeah, that's it". He assented to a comparison with the Buddhist conception of reincarnation, elaborating that "it’s a fragment of the story. It’s not so much a circle as like a spiral that comes around, the next loop a little bit higher than the one that precedes it".
Gifford, in contrast, endorsed a rational explanation for the film's surreal events. According to him, Fred Madison is experiencing a literal psychogenic fugue, a mental break which is manifested when he transforms into Pete. Arquette described her own interpretation: "to me, it's sort of a movie about looking at women through the eyes of a misogynist... so he's totally obsessed with her, can't love her enough, can't have her to himself enough, can't kill her enough times". She later elaborated: "He hates women, he doesn't quite trust her, even though she is his wife. He kills her but can't remember it, then he recreates himself as this virile young man and meets her again. And now, she actually wants to fuck him and she is in love with him. But even in this version, she is a dirty whore. In this man's mind, a woman is always the monster. No matter what".
Jeremiah Kipp of Slant Magazine called the film "an embodiment of a pensive male anxiety," and ascribed its mixed reception to the fact that "for some cultural reason it’s easier for audiences to accept female hysteria than the insecurities of men". Kipp noted that most critics interpreted the film as concerning the "distortion and reshaping of memory". Philosopher and critic Slavoj Žižek considered the narrative's circularity as analogous to a psychoanalytic process: "there is a symptomatic key phrase ["Dick Laurent is dead"] (as in all of Lynch's films) that always returns as an insistent, traumatic, and indecipherable message (the Real), and there is a temporal loop, as with analysis, where the protagonist at first fails to encounter the self, but in the end is able to pronounce the symptom consciously as his own". He also interprets the film's bipartite structure as exploiting "the opposition of two horrors: the phantasmatic horror of the nightmarish noir universe of perverse sex, betrayal, and murder, and the (perhaps much more unsettling) despair of our drab, alienated daily life of impotence and distrust".
Lost Highway was directed by David Lynch as his first feature film since Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992), a prequel to his television series Twin Peaks (1990–1991). He came across the phrase "lost highway" in the book Night People (1992) by Barry Gifford. Because Lynch knew the writer well and had previously adapted his novel Wild at Heart (1990) into a film of the same name, he told him that he loved the phrase as a title for a movie. The two agreed to write a screenplay together, each having their own ideas of what Lost Highway should be. They ended up rejecting all of them. Lynch then told Gifford that, during the last night of shooting Fire Walk with Me, he had a thought about videotapes and a couple in crisis. This idea would develop into the first part of the film until Fred Madison is put on death row. Lynch and Gifford then realized that a transformation had to occur and another story, which would have several links to the first one but also differ, developed. It took them one month to finish the script.
Lost Highway was partially inspired by the murder trial of O. J. Simpson and Simpson's ability to return to his normal life afterward. The film's opening scene, where Fred Madison hears the words "Dick Laurent is dead" over his intercom, was inspired by an analogous incident that happened to Lynch at his own house. Because his house was next to actor David Lander's house and both men have the same first name, Lynch thought the stranger must have been wrong about the address. The idea of the Mystery Man "came out of a feeling of a man who, whether real or not, gave the impression that he was supernatural," Lynch explained. The film was financed by the French production company Ciby 2000. Lynch's Asymmetrical Productions, whose offices are near his house in the Hollywood Hills, was also involved in the film's production.
Lynch cast Bill Pullman, a friend and neighbor of his, as the film's central character. Actress Patricia Arquette agreed to be cast as Renee and Alice because she was interested in portraying a sexually desirable and dangerous woman, a role she had never done before. She had also been a fan of Lynch for a long time and felt that it would be an honor to work with him. Actor Balthazar Getty was chosen for the role of Pete Dayton after Lynch saw a picture of him in a magazine and said that he was "the guy for the job". Because the script was so open to interpretation, Getty and Arquette did not know what kind of film Lost Highway was supposed to be. According to Getty, "Part of David's technique is to keep his actors guessing, because it creates a certain atmosphere on set."
Actor Robert Blake was cast as The Mystery Man because Lynch liked his previous work and was always interested in working with him. Although Blake did not understand the script at all, he was responsible for the look and style of his character. When Lynch told him to use his imagination, Blake decided to cut his hair short, part it in the middle, shave his eyebrows, and apply white Kabuki make-up on his face. He then put on a black outfit and approached Lynch, who loved what he had done. Actor Robert Loggia, who had previously expressed interest in playing the role of Frank Booth in Lynch's Blue Velvet, was cast as Mr. Eddy and Dick Laurent. Lynch recalled that, upon learning of Dennis Hopper's casting as Booth, Loggia launched a profanity-laden rant at him, which would eventually become Mr. Eddy's road rage scene. Lost Highway also features the final motion picture performance of Richard Pryor.
Lost Highway was shot in Los Angeles, California, in about 54 days, from November 29, 1995, to February 22, 1996. Some of the film's exterior and driving scenes were shot in Griffith Park, while the scenes of the Lost Highway Hotel were filmed at the Amargosa Opera House and Hotel in Death Valley. Lynch owned the property that was used for Fred and Renee's mansion, which is located on the same street as his own house in the Hollywood Hills. The house was configured in a particular way to meet the requirements of the film. A corridor that leads to the bedroom was added and the façade was remodeled with slot windows to make Fred's point of view very limited. The paintings that are on the wall above the couch were done by Lynch's ex-wife and producer Mary Sweeney.
The scenes that involved nudity and sexual contact proved to be very difficult for Arquette, who considers herself a modest and shy person. Nevertheless, she felt protected by Lynch and the film crew, who would always give her robes at any time. The love scene between her and Getty in the desert, which was shot on a dry lake bed 20 miles outside Baker, was a closed set and only key crew were allowed on it. The sequence where Fred transforms into Pete was not computer-generated, but rather accomplished with in-camera techniques: a makeup expert constructed a fake head that was covered with artificial brain matter, which was then intercut with shots of Pullman. The final car chase was shot with two different cameras running at different frame rates. The footage was then sped up to make the scene more aggressive.
Lynch worked with cinematographer Peter Deming to give the film a surreal look. Because the script did not include many descriptions, the film's visual approach evolved as filming progressed. Deming would occasionally pull out the lenses of his camera to defocus a particular scene, while Lynch would often listen to music in his headset and to a scene at the same time to visualize the screenplay. According to him, "Sound and picture working together is what films are [...] So every single sound has to be supporting that scene and enlarging it. A room is, say, nine by twelve, but when you're introducing sound to it, you can create a space that's giant". The notion of a psychogenic fugue was incorporated into the film after the unit publicist read about it in a book on mental illnesses. Lynch felt it was a musical term, stating that "a fugue starts off one way, takes up on another direction, and then comes back to the original, so it [relates] to the form of the film."
Originally, Lynch wanted to shoot Lost Highway in black and white, but the idea was discarded due to the financial risks it could cause. Nevertheless, the film was shot in varying levels of darkness and features few daylight scenes. Some sequences became so dark that it was difficult for viewers to see what was happening. According to Deming, "The thing I wanted to achieve was giving the feeling that anything could come out of the background, and to leave a certain question about what you're looking at. The film is working under the surface while you're watching it." The film's darkness was intentionally not adjusted during post-production. The first cut of the film ran two and a half hours, and a test audience of 50 people was given a preview to give Lynch an idea of what needed to be cut. The film was ultimately cut down to two hours and ten minutes. Most of the deleted scenes were about Pete's life, including a scene where Pete would go out with his friends to a drive-in before going to the bowling alley.
The film's original score was composed by Angelo Badalamenti, with additional music by Barry Adamson. Badalamenti had previously worked with Lynch on Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks. Although most of the score was recorded in Prague, additional compositions were done in London. In New Orleans, Lynch collaborated with musician Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails to provide additional music. Together, they created music that accompanied the scenes in which Fred and Renee watch the mysterious VHS tapes. Two songs by Reznor and Nine Inch Nails, "The Perfect Drug" and "Driver Down", were specifically composed for the film. Reznor then produced a soundtrack album that includes the film's score and songs by artists such as David Bowie, Lou Reed, Marilyn Manson, The Smashing Pumpkins, and Rammstein.
Marilyn Manson's contributions include their cover of Screamin' Jay Hawkins' "I Put a Spell on You", which was previously released on their 1995 EP Smells Like Children, and "Apple of Sodom", which was specifically written for the film. The Smashing Pumpkins' frontman Billy Corgan wrote "Eye" after Lynch rejected an early version of "Tear" from the band's 1998 album Adore. Two songs by Rammstein—"Rammstein" and "Heirate Mich"—were included after Lynch listened to their 1995 debut album Herzeleid while exploring locations for the film. The track "Insensatez", an instrumental version of the bossa nova song "How Insensitive" by Antônio Carlos Jobim, was also included as part of the film's soundtrack. The album, which was released on November 26, 1996, reached No. 7 on the Billboard 200 chart and was certified Gold status in the US and Platinum in Canada.
Lost Highway was released in France on January 15, 1997. The film received its North American premiere in January 1997 at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. The film was then given a limited release in 12 theaters on February 21, 1997, grossing nearly $213,000 at the US box office weekend. The film expanded a week later in 212 theaters and, after a modest three-week run, went on to make $3.7 million in North America. Lost Highway was released in Russia on May 19, 2017, and grossed $28,347. Overall, the film grossed nearly $3.8 million worldwide.
Lost Highway was released on DVD on March 25, 2008, by Universal Studios Home Entertainment. The DVD is presented in anamorphic widescreen in the 2.35:1 ratio with Dolby Digital 5.1 audio. The film was then released on Blu-ray format in France in 2010, and in Japan and the United Kingdom in 2012. The British edition includes a collection of short, experimental films that Lynch had previously sold on his website. However, it was encoded in 1080i resolution at a 50 Hz frame rate, as opposed to the 1080p resolution at 24 frames per second of the French and Japanese editions. In the United States, Lost Highway was released on Blu-ray on June 25, 2019, by Kino Lorber using the 2008 Universal master. Lynch did not participate in the release, saying that "It was made from old elements and not from a restoration of the original negative. I hope that a version from the restoration of the original negative will happen as soon as possible." Kino Lorber responded saying the release was sourced from the Universal Pictures master, and they had intended to work with Lynch on the release but "sent email after email without one response". The Criterion Collection released a 4K Blu-ray with restoration supervised and approved by Lynch on October 11, 2022.
Upon release, Lost Highway received "mixed or average" reviews from critics. On Metacritic, the film holds a score of 53 out of 100 based on 21 reviews. Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert gave the film "two thumbs down", a rating Lynch would later tout as "two more great reasons to see" Lost Highway. Ebert argued that, while Lynch effectively puts images on the screen and uses a strong soundtrack to create mood, the film does not make sense, concluding that Lost Highway "is about design, not cinema". Similarly, Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times wrote that Lost Highway is a "beautifully made but emotionally empty" film that "exists only for the sensation of its provocative moments". Both Stephanie Zacharek of Salon and Owen Gleiberman of Entertainment Weekly felt that the film was superficial, especially when compared to Blue Velvet. Zacharek said that Lynch "traded some of his disturbing originality for noir formula and schticky weirdness", while Gleiberman compared the film's sex scenes to those of "mediocre Hollywood thrillers".
In a more positive review, The New York Times journalist Janet Maslin felt that, while the film's perversity is unoriginal and resembles that of Blue Velvet, Lost Highway still "holds sinister interest of its own" and "invites its audience to ponder". Metro editor Richard von Busack praised Lost Highway as a "true horror" film due to its confusing and unpleasant screenplay. He explained that horror "ought to transcend logic and ordinary reality" and, unlike with popular horror films like Scream (1996), where the difference between screen violence and real violence is obvious, Lynch "present[s] horror as horror, willing to baffle us, willing to wound us". In another positive review, Andy Klein of the Dallas Observer felt that Lost Highway was a return to form for Lynch and considered it his best work since Blue Velvet. Klein compared the film's unanswerable concerns to the "Star Gate" sequence from 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), stating that Lost Highway is "better absorbed and experienced than analyzed".
Writing for the Chicago Reader, critic Jonathan Rosenbaum felt that Lost Highway was "an audacious move away from conventional narrative and back toward the formal beauty of Eraserhead". He credited Lynch's "masterful and often powerful fusions of sound and image" for giving the film a very expressionist style. However, he criticized the noir iconography for its lack of historical context. For example, he explained that, while Arquette's clothes fit in a noir setting, The Mystery Man's video camera is very contemporary and feels out of place. Todd McCarthy of Variety concluded that, although Lost Highway is "uneven and too deliberately obscure in meaning to be entirely satisfying", the result "remains sufficiently intriguing and startling to bring many of Lynch's old fans back on board".
At the 1997 Stinkers Bad Movie Awards, Lost Highway was nominated for Worst Picture and Worst Director, but lost to Batman & Robin in both categories. In 1998, it was nominated for the Belgian Film Critics Association's Grand Prix, but lost to Lone Star.
Lost Highway has retrospectively attracted both critical praise and scholarly interest. On review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, 69% of 61 critics gave the film a positive review, with an average rating of 6.6/10. The website's critical consensus reads, "Marking a further escalation in David Lynch's surrealist style, Lost Highway is a foreboding mystery that arguably leads to a dead end, although it is signposted throughout with some of the director's most haunting images yet." Lost Highway received five votes in the 2012 Sight & Sound critics' poll of The Greatest Films of All Time, ranking 323rd.
As a cult film, Lost Highway was included in The A.V. Club's "The New Cult Canon" section. Editor Scott Tobias viewed it as "more cohesive than it might appear at first blush", and argued that Lynch "goes digging for truths that people don't know or won't acknowledge about themselves—within dreams, within the subconscious, within those impossibly dark hallways where we fear to tread". Lucia Bozzola of the AllMovie online database claimed that Lost Highway retrospectively remains "a sound/image tour de force". Jeremiah Kipp of Slant Magazine claimed that the film was not an artistic failure but rather "in many ways, it's Lynch at his most daring, emotional, and personal," and described it as "a fitting companion piece to, and inversion of, Mulholland Drive." Writing for Little White Lies, William Carroll also connected the film to Mulholland Drive due to "Los Angeles' iconic topography", and felt that it deserved to be regarded as one of the director's best works. Daily Vanguard editor Victoria Castellanos remarked that the film "serves as a wonderful companion to Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire, and in many ways is more surreal and emotional than some of Lynch's other films".
Lost Highway served as an inspiration for the 2001 video game Silent Hill 2.
In 2003, the film was adapted as an opera by the Austrian composer Olga Neuwirth, with a libretto by Elfriede Jelinek.