Lost Highway (film)

Saxophonist Fred Madison receives a cryptic message on his intercom in the Hollywood Hills, informing him that "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 that shows eerie footage of their house. That night, Fred struggles to have sex with Renee and confesses that he had a dream about 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 sleeping in bed. They call the police, but the detectives offer little help. Fred and Renee attend a party hosted by her friend Andy, where Fred encounters a pale man who acts strangely and claims they have met before. The man insists he is currently at Fred's house, which he demonstrates 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 that shows 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 pale man and a burning cabin in the desert, before being enveloped in light. The prison guards check on him, only to discover that he has inexplicably been replaced by Pete Dayton, a young auto mechanic from Van Nuys.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 (identified by a detective as Laurent) 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, who resembles Renee. 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. Pete later receives a disturbing call from Mr. Eddy and the pale man, which pushes him to agree to Alice's plan. Pete confronts Andy at his house, but Andy dies after falling headfirst into the corner of a glass table. Pete discovers a photograph of Dick (who looks identical to Mr. Eddy), Andy, Alice, and Renee together, which causes his nose to bleed. Disoriented, he retreats to the bathroom but finds himself wandering the hallways of a hotel instead. Pete and Alice arrive at a remote desert cabin to sell stolen goods. They have sex outside, during which Alice taunts Pete by 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 pale man, who tells him that Renee exists and Alice does not. He pursues Fred with a video camera, but Fred escapes and tracks down Dick Laurent at the Lost Highway Hotel, where Laurent is having sex with Renee. After Renee leaves, Fred kidnaps Dick and takes him to the desert. The pale man reappears and hands Fred a knife, with which he slits Dick's throat. Dick, confused, asks what they want. The pale man plays a pornographic video featuring Renee and made by Dick. Cutaways show Renee and Dick watching the video, aroused. Back in the desert, the pale man shoots Dick dead and whispers something inaudible to Fred before vanishing, leaving Fred with the pistol. When police investigate Andy's death, Alice is inexplicably absent from the photograph Pete found. Fred drives to his home, buzzes the intercom, and says, "Dick Laurent is dead." As detectives arrive, Fred flees and leads police on a frantic chase on the highway through the desert. Amid flashes of light and distorted screams, Fred's fate is left ambiguous. ==Cast==

The film's screenplay refers to it as a "21st-Century Noir Horror". Although Lost Highway is generally classified as a surrealist neo-noir horror film, Thomas Caldwell of Metro Magazine 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 of the film is the femme fatale found in Alice Wakefield, who misleads Pete Dayton into dangerous situations. The film was also noted for its graphic violence and sexual themes, which Lynch defended by stating that he was simply being honest with his own ideas for the film. Some of the film's elements reference earlier works: the film Detour (1945) also focuses on a disturbed nightclub musician. The film's setting and mysterious recorded messages were seen as a reference to the film Kiss Me Deadly (1955), while its nightmarish atmosphere has been compared to Maya Deren's short film Meshes of the Afternoon (1943). Like Alfred Hitchcock's film Vertigo (1958), the film examines male obsessions with women who merely represent emotions that relate to them. Sean Murphy of PopMatters considers the film a possible homage to Ambrose Bierce's short story "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" (1890), in which much of the main narrative is imagined by the protagonist as he is executed. ==Interpretations==

The film's circular narrative has been likened to a Möbius strip. He agreed 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". She later elaborated, "He hates women, he doesn't quite trust [Renee], 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". ==Production==

Development the screenplay with Lynch. 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; 2017). Filming Filming took place in Los Angeles. Marilyn Manson's contributions include a cover of Screamin' Jay Hawkins' "I Put a Spell on You", which was previously released on the EP Smells Like Children (1995), and "Apple of Sodom", which was specifically written for the film. ==Release==

Box office 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. It was then given a limited release in 12 theaters on February 21, 1997, grossing nearly $213,000 at the U.S. 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, two decades after its initial release, and grossed $28,347. Overall, the film grossed nearly $3.8 million worldwide. Home media 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, "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 the release was sourced from the Universal Pictures master, and that they had intended to work with Lynch on the release but had "sent email after email without one response". The Criterion Collection released a 4K Blu-ray with a restoration supervised and approved by Lynch on October 11, 2022. ==Critical reception==

Contemporaneous reviews Upon release, Lost Highway received mixed reviews. Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert gave the film "two thumbs down", which Lynch would later tout as "two more great reasons to see" the film. ==Adaptation==

In 2003, the film was adapted as an opera by the Austrian composer Olga Neuwirth, with a libretto by Elfriede Jelinek. ==References==