I assumed he was transforming into someone new at the end, so when he was stopped by a police car, they'd find a different guy in there. I always thought there was something very Twin Peak-y about Lost Highway and could easily imagine Fred and Renee/Alice popping up in a Twin Peaks project.
This is my interpretation too.
I dont see LH or any of Lynch work this way. The fugue explanation, the dream explanation, they all seem limiting and lacking ... and honestly... lazy
LOL, thanks. With all due respect, I’m entitled to my opinion and that doesn’t make it lazy. I’ve heard a zillion opinions on the various meanings of Lynch’s work that I disagree with, but I respect people’s right to their own interpretation and I’d never think to call them lazy, but you do you! What is your brilliant interpretation, pray tell?
I take it at face value: a man gets dropped into some weird supernatural stuff, gets accused of killing his wife, turns into someone else, investigates, time loops, then turns into someone else again in some sort of hellish loop. And the Mystery Man is from the Black Lodge and probably hangs out above the convenience store... I don't look for anything deeper: it's just a fun ride of a fantasy film.
That was a deeply odd film!! I saw it a friend's house! I found it pretentious and not really my 'thing'. I'm sure it has its fans and I should probably write a review of it sometime. Lost Highway was a case of wondering what the hell would happen next. It was a weird and truly wonderful fantasy-horror-film noir mashup with shades of Vertigo - as so much David Lynch material does have.
for me LH is the most endless and eternally mysterious movie ever, ive seen it perhaps 50 times... at least 6 times on a BIG screen, at least 4 in 35mm. The first time i saw it was when i was 16, on VHS... back in 1997. Every time i see it is a different experience,.. I dont get why THE THEMES of the movie have to become THE ACTUAL "OBJECTIVE" (?) narrative of the film. To me LOST HIGHWAY is a sci fi noir film, with yeah, a lot a depth, a lot of psichological implications (sorry if i misspell some words, english is not my first languague)
I don’t think the psychogenic fugue of LH or the dream world of MD is where the buck stops with those interpretations of those films. I think they’re often a springboard for viewers to start dreaming themselves and going as deep into the psychology of those films and even to another degree apply that psychology to the world the films exist in, especially Mulholland Drive where the psychology and the setting are so clearly inseparable. Like most mysteries, sometimes a clue can actually open up more questions even though it might only provide one answer.
That's the thing: I see Lost Highway as an eerie dark fantasy: a Twilight Zone tale 'on steroids.' It reminds me of Neil Gaiman books such as American Gods. Other people may take it as a 'commentary' on this, that and the other in storytelling structure and I hope they enjoy it that way. That way, for me, lies misery.
Literally no one here is doing or thinking or advising that. The mind just wanders and follows multiple trains of thought at once. And as you allude, Lynch is such an instinctual filmmaker that an image or idea is bound to tap into many different meanings at once.
I agree with you on academia getting in the way of itself but as far as the enjoyment of the film goes you can have your cake and eat it too. Characters can exist both as people and as symbols and there can be many many different layers to things that can be felt, sensed, thought over and much more all at once. I think we’re all trying to convey here that the film is “this” but ALSO “that” rather than boil it down into something simple. Much like Lost Highway’s möbius structure, someone’s conclusion they arrive to is often the beginning of their own search for meaning beyond that conclusion. If MD exists within a dream then WHY is that important. Not that anyone has to exclusively intellectualize that, they can feel it as well. You can’t just deny anyone asking “Who Killed Laura Palmer?” by saying “How can you boil it down to something so simple as her having even been killed in the first place?” And I say that with 110% self awareness that even that answer gets a bit fuzzy by the end.That's the thing: I see Lost Highway as an eerie dark fantasy: a Twilight Zone tale 'on steroids.' It reminds me of Neil Gaiman books such as American Gods. Other people may take it as a 'commentary' on this, that and the other in storytelling structure and I hope they enjoy it that way. That way, for me, lies misery.
My aversion to 'meta' goes back a long way. When I studied English Literature in the 1980s into the 1990s, when neo-Marxist Critical Theory, created by the Frankfurt School, was really getting a grip on education, it stripped the joy and life out of the books and plays we had to study. It reduced The Merchant of Venice to writing a series of essays about racism. Lord of the Flies was purely a study about human behaviour. The wonderful writing was ignored. The storyline was ignored. The characters were reduced to ciphers: methods of delivering 'The Message', whatever that happened to be. If you read the essays we had to write - if we wrote anything that contradicted what the teacher said, we were marked down - you wouldn't be able to discern anything about the storyline and characters, merely spurious claims about technique and things the teacher, via his curriculum guide, claimed the author was supposed to be saying.
When I studied film for A Levels, Critical Theory raised its head again. Everything was about oppressors and oppressed. Once again, the richness of storytelling, the beauty of the visuals, the performances of the actors, was ignored. It's like vivisecting a frog: You get to understand what makes it work, but when you put all the bits back in there, it's dead and it'll rot.
Self-awareness had lurked in the past with the occasional nod in a film, such as Bond using the Close Encounters melody to access Drax's HQ and Moonlighting was an amusing example of playing with breaking the fourth wall, but, as we saw after the success of the excellent Scream in the 1990s, continually mocking the conventions of the horror film destroyed the horror genre for half a decade. It took J-Horror and torture porn to restore the horror movie.
So I can't reduce Twin Peaks, Lost Highway, Mulholland Dr and the like to mere commentaries and academic analyses of narrative conventions. That strips out the joy of them. To me, they're like a dark, velvet blanket: rich, exotic, bizarre dreams that teeter on the edge of nightmares, full of our primal nighttime fears of violence and eroticism. I watched my preferred theatrical cut of Apocalypse Now again last night (review pending, although I want to watch all three versions and re-read Heart of Darkness first) and that falls into a similar category to films like Lost Highway for me. With its first-person narration and assassination storyline, it's got a touch of film noir about it amidst the war and surreal horror. I can't strip all the aspects I love away to reduce it to a list of elements and use long words in strange combinations.
And I think David Lynch seems far too much of an instinctual filmmaker to sit there thinking 'Hmmm... if I shoot this scene from this angle I can address the dialectical, transgressive nature of the alleged heterogeneity of the thirty seconds leading up to a commercial break in broadcast media.' He seems to try out lots of ideas and go with the ones that appeal to him in the edit. His writer-collaborators might have different ideas, of course.
TLDR: I love wrapping myself up in Lynch's worlds and characters too much to reduce them to mere academic concepts. And if people think that makes me dumb and they snicker and think I'm too stupid to watch a Charlie Kaufman film, then let them. As I say with my extremely catholic tastes in music: 'I like it because I like it and if I don't like it, I don't like it! So there! '
No, I know. It's a trap to fall into that, though, and due to the education pushing so much of that analysis, I'm afraid many of us (me included) have to fight that instinct to analyse more than appreciate.
The worst thing about English Lit was that there was no exam. Our grades were based entirely on coursework and our teacher marked that. To validate the grade he gave us, he was required to submit six essays from our entire class of 25 to the exam board to validate his marking. I found myself frequently at odds in these classes, because I would question where his conclusions came from. In a sign of times to come, I was physically assaulted by pupils in my class for arguing against his views. At the end of the two years, we were told our grade and given three weeks to submit replacement essays. I literally had to tear up essays I'd worked hard on and replace them with regurgitated crap. And I got a B grade in the end. I got a '2' for oral communication. Kids who got A grades got '1's when they hadn't even participated in discussions.
I'm absolutely not against that and I think it's valid. Like I say, there's a huge amount of Vertigo in much of Lynch's work. Lost Highway is arguably reminiscent of the second half of Vertigo, Twin Peaks had the brunette Maddy Ferguson (whom Cooper fails to save) and Wild at Heart repeatedly references the 1939 version of The Wizard of Oz.
Totally. As I say, I think it's worth bearing in mind. And I said I'll look at Lost Highway again with the electric chair in mind...
Agreed. Funnily enough, I once helped a friend of mine shoot a film based on the same concept that he managed to get shown at a David Lynch film festival in the UK! I get around!
Totally. Like I say, Lynch allows us to dream and wallow in a warm darkness. Strangely enough, it's why I found Twin Peaks season three a bit alienating. It's far more cynical and nihilistic and somehow feels more shallow: almost a greatest hits reel of Lynch's other work. I wonder how much of that was Mark Frost.
Just as dreams have layers. When I'm very tired, I often dream that I'm very tired and have to sleep. At some point, unable to sleep in the dream (because I'm already asleep) I become aware of someone shifting my position, turning me. What that is, freakily enough, is my body turning itself in my sleep in the 'real' world.
Yeah, I find Mulholland Dr a difficult one to enjoy. The join between the (rather mean-spirited) TV pilot and the additional footage is terribly obvious to me. Watching that final section, I had the same frustration I did with episode 18 of Twin Peaks season three: that the most intriguing material is simply going to run out of time.
Yep! The key line for me is Bobby's claim that they all killed Laura Palmer in their own way. It's why I like the town/county of Twin Peaks and its characters so much and why I missed that aspect so much in season three.
