‘Lost Highway‘ belongs to a category of movies that confuses many viewers, thrills many others, generates endless discussions and triggers extreme reactions. Welcome to the universe of most of David Lynch‘s films, a universe in which cinematic story telling and time-lapse have their own laws, where reality and dream are meddling with each other. Lynch is the latest great surrealist artist. I do not know if he is the last one, but for sure, the most important of the surrealists among our contemporaries.
Like any complex film or artwork, we can approach ‘Lost Highway‘ from several angles. It’s a ‘film noir’ in which we are dealing with crimes, gangsters, cops, violence and eroticism. It’s an art film where we find the cinematic aesthetics of David Lynch‘s films that we already know well from ‘Blue Velvet‘ and ‘Twin Peaks‘ at the time of the release. We can try to follow the logic of action, read the explanations of Lynch‘s fans (including the IMDB viewers comments) or we can build our own theory in which we try to find explanations for the duplication of the main characters (the same male character embodied by two actors – Bill Pullman and Balthazar Getty, two female characters played by the same actress – Patricia Arquette). We can immerse ourselves in the horror atmosphere that is smartly built using Hitchcock‘s techniques amplified in Lynch style. Or we can just let the imagination of the director carry us, accepting that we are in a dream. Or in a nightmare.
In a way, I think it’s easier to track and accept ‘Lost Highway‘ today than two decades ago. Spectators are a little more familiar nowadays with the ambiguities in film scenarios where not everything is explained in detail and not everything fits into Cartesian logic and linear time. The quality of the film can also be found in the perfection of its production. From any point of view we watch the film, it satisfies – as horror, as a surrealist movie, as an erotic thriller, as a mystery. The extraordinary soundtrack places Lynch alongside Hitchcock and Polanski in the category of the film directors who know how to handle the sound as well as the image. ‘Lost Highway‘ is not an easy film and requires efforts to watch, but efforts must be directed elsewhere than finding ‘logical’ explanations of everything that we see on the screen. Most viewers will find, I think, that their efforts were rewarded.