By Peter Keough

For David Lynch, Lost Highway is a transitional film, of sorts, a limbo-like zone between the innocence redeemed in Blue Velvet and the innocence corrupted in Mulholland Drive.

An introduction to the Independent Film Festival of Boston screening of Lost Highway, which will take place on August 28 at 7 p.m. at the Somerville Theatre as part of the Hot Summer Nights series.

Patricia Arquette and Balthazar Getty in scene from Lost Highway. 

Somewhere between Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive, perhaps by way of Twin Peaks, you might come across David Lynch’s Lost Highway. Some find it a bit of a detour in Lynch’s 10-feature career. Not many warmed to it when it came out in 1997 and it has a 53 on Metacritic. Some comments include “a virtuoso symphony of bad vibes,” from David Edelstein. “Soulless and dull,” says Manohla Dargis. Ebert and Siskel gave it two thumbs down. Lynch blurbed the downturned digits on the movie poster saying that it was “two more great reasons to see Lost Highway.^”

But Michael Sragow in the New Yorker kind of liked it, calling it “a compelling erotic nightmare.” In my review in the Boston Phoenix I wrote “an exuberant tour of the dark side where the fact that things don’t make sense is exactly the point.” I must confess that I’ve used the word exuberant at least a hundred times since then but still have trouble spelling it.

Perhaps Jonathan Rosenbaum summed it up best, saying that “The enigmatic plot” is “shaped like a Möbius strip.” “Despite the shopworn noir imagery and teenage notions of sex this beautifully structured (if rigorously nonhumanist) explosion of expressionist effects has a psychological coherence that goes well beyond logical story lines, and Lynch turns it into an exhilarating roller-coaster ride.”

I like a critic who can include “rigorously nonhumanist” and “roller-coaster ride” in the same sentence.

Some reviewers decried the film’s depiction of women, and I can see why. There’s a crime scene that slips by in an eyeblink and is shot in a strobe-like style but if you look closely and are familiar with the case you can see it mimics the notorious Black Dahlia murder.

But the men don’t get off easy either, and it becomes clear, or at least it does to me, that Lynch is exploring the demonic depths of patriarchal power. He doubles down on the dynamics, themes, and structure of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, in which that toxic influence is analyzed and condemned. Maybe that’s why Lynch’s next features (The Straight Story excepted) would focus on women as protagonists who insist on their own identity in a world structured by misogynistic stereotypes.

So Lost Highway is a transitional film of sorts, a limbo-like zone between the innocence redeemed in Blue Velvet and the innocence corrupted in Mulholland Drive. Unlike the uninitiated protagonists in the other two films, Fred, a jazz musician played by Bill Pullman, starts out already pretty compromised and with a lot more challenges ahead, not least being a mind-blowing identity switch. But then again, none of the characters in the film have a fixed identity. And adding to this disorienting effect are some startling casting choices. These bizarrely familiar, out of context faces add a special diabolical resonance to lines like “We’ve met before, haven’t we.”

It is kind of like when Dennis Hopper makes his entrance in Blue Velvet. I saw that film in a Chicago screening room and I still remember the Chicago Tribune’s Dave Kehr cackling at the scene and saying, of course. There are at least three such epiphanies in Lost Highway, which I won’t spoil by identifying them, but I will say one is the most horrifying and hilarious example of the-call-is coming-from-inside-the-house horror movie trope. I should also note that for some of those performers this would be their last film, so perhaps Lost Highway is kind of a film maudit, cursed like Poltergeist or The Exorcist, and bringing ill fortune to some who participated in it.

Robert Blake in a scene from Lost Highway.

Take for example Louis Eppolito, who plays the policeman, Ed. He’s the one who asks Fred if he owns a video camera and Fred says no I like to remember things my own way. Eppolito might be familiar to you from playing heavies in films like Goodfellas (1990) and Bullets over Broadway (1994). In real life he was a cop with the NYPD and a few years after Lost Highway he and his partner were convicted of arranging and carrying out murders for the Lucchese crime family. He was sentenced to life plus 100 years in prison, where he died in 2019.

Be that as it may, what does it all mean? Usually very reticent about explaining such things, Lynch has offered a clue to interpreting this, perhaps his most cryptic film, in an interview in Filmmaker magazine. He says, “Sometime during the shooting, the unit publicist was reading up on different types of mental illness, and she hit upon this thing called ‘psychogenic fugue.’ The person suffering from it creates in their mind a completely new identity, new friends, new home, new everything — they forget their past identity. This has reverberations with Lost Highway, and it’s also a music term. 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.”

Makes sense to me, kind of. It’s as helpful perhaps as Charlie Kaufman referring to maladies like the Capgras and Fregoli Syndromes in explaining his maddening  cinematic provocations. So I agree with Rosenbaum, who advised people to see Lost Highway more than once before drawing any conclusions. To those seeing it for the first time, all I can say is, good luck.

Peter Keough writes about film and other topics and has contributed to numerous publications. He had been the film editor of the Boston Phoenix from 1989 to its demise in 2013 and has edited three books on film, most recently For Kids of All Ages: The National Society of Film Critics on Children’s Movies (Rowman & Littlefield, 2019).