444 Miles From Madison to Dayton
In 1997 I went to see David Lynch's Lost Highway. I didn't understand it, but I liked the performances by Robert Loggia and Bill Pullman. It was also enjoyable watching Patricia Arquette and Natasha Gregson Wagner (Natalie Wood's daughter). I was most impressed by the cinematography of Peter Deming. I had never seen darkness used in such an expressive and "lit up" way. The shot of Pullman walking down a black hallway in his house, away from the camera, looks as if he's walking into a Mark Rothko painting.
That special look of the film, along with Lynch's masterful use of sound, congeal with the strange dual plot dealing with a man, Fred Madison (Pullman in a great performance), sinking into a series of actions, most of them performed in a twilit state of mind, that surround him eventually with violence and the ghastly murder of his wife, Renee (Patricia Arquette). This descent into criminal madness takes place during only the first fifty or so minutes of the movie, with about an hour and a half remaining.
Alfred Hitchcock, when he made Psycho, was intrigued by the idea of the lead character getting bumped off halfway through the movie. Bill Pullman appears to leave Lost Highway after only fifty minutes, replaced by Pete Dayton (Balthazar Getty), who takes Madison's place, incredibly, in the latter's Death Row cell. Dayton, let go by the law, becomes the film's focus character, interacting with threads familiar from Madison's time on screen. He is particularly wrapped up in the motivations of Alice Wakefield (a blonde Patricia Arquette, while Fred's wife Renee is brunette, though they both have 1940s hairstyles in keeping with a femme fatale noir look).
Alice is the girlfriend of Mr. Eddy (craggy old Robert Loggia in a bigger than life gangster-type performance), a Pete Dayton enthusiast who values the young man's skill with automobile engines. Mr. Eddy does his own driving, making his two bodyguards sit in back. Pete has a way with the big black Mercedes Benz, and later is given the task of fixing Mr. Eddy's beautiful old Cadillac. Pete meets blonde Alice, they exchange a lingering look, and she begins coming on to him. They engage in a very unwise affair, meeting in motels. Alice wants Pete to help her rob a pornographer, Andy, a dude with a skinny mustache who makes stylized porn for Mr. Eddy--or is it for Dick Laurent?
Laurent, also played by Loggia, makes less appearances in the film, but we hear his name coming through the intercom in Fred's house during the first scene. After that, Fred's wife Renee goes to her house's front stairs to get the newspaper. She sees a manila envelope that hasn't been sealed, but contains something bulky. Bringing it inside, she takes out a videotape. They watch it. The footage is black and white, showing a view of their house's exterior.
Someone is obviously fucking with them. They receive two more videotapes, the second one showing the interior of the house and footage of the couple sleeping in their bed.
The third tape deals with how Fred ends up on Death Row.
I've revealed a lot of the plot, but one thing is for sure: watching this film the first time is like entering a dream in someone else's head. It's not a pile of nonsense, though. I've seen it three or four times and I've come to regard it as a coherent movie with a recognizable, though weird, structure.
The film's parallelism is the key to understanding it, even though, as with Lynch's other work, one may as well admit defeat when approaching his film logic with a sense of rational critique. His movies are not about solving mysteries, but are mysteries. A human being doesn't fully understand another person, much less understand all of the elements making up him- or herself. Is Pete Dayton a doppelgänger of Fred Madison? An alter ego?
Their two worlds interpenetrate, as when Pete, at work in the auto shop, complains about the intense saxophone-highlighted jazz coming out of the radio. The same sax music is played early in the film in a nightclub by Fred (a professional jazz musician). Pete gets headaches, just like Fred. They both have encounters with Robert Blake's spooky character, an unnamed pale-faced man in black who seems to know their secrets. In a career spanning fifty-eight years from when he was a child actor, Lost Highway was Blake's last film. In 2001 his second wife was murdered, he took the rap. His performance as the strange pale man shows an actor fully in charge of his craft--it's tragic that Blake didn't continue on after working with Lynch; he probably had many great performances left in him.
Lost Highway also features the last movie performance of Richard Pryor and also of Jack Nance, who played the lead role in Eraserhead, Lynch's first feature film.
This is not my favorite Lynch film (I'm not sure what the answer is to that), but I admire its look, and especially I appreciate the director's daring push to create new artistic frontiers by using classic film noir elements, but blended with something far beyond ordinary storytelling--a depiction from inside a man's mind (Fred/Pete) of a life coming apart and delving deep into psychical chaos, where memory gets recovered (by Fred) only after becoming another person.
Vic Neptune
In 1997 I went to see David Lynch's Lost Highway. I didn't understand it, but I liked the performances by Robert Loggia and Bill Pullman. It was also enjoyable watching Patricia Arquette and Natasha Gregson Wagner (Natalie Wood's daughter). I was most impressed by the cinematography of Peter Deming. I had never seen darkness used in such an expressive and "lit up" way. The shot of Pullman walking down a black hallway in his house, away from the camera, looks as if he's walking into a Mark Rothko painting.
That special look of the film, along with Lynch's masterful use of sound, congeal with the strange dual plot dealing with a man, Fred Madison (Pullman in a great performance), sinking into a series of actions, most of them performed in a twilit state of mind, that surround him eventually with violence and the ghastly murder of his wife, Renee (Patricia Arquette). This descent into criminal madness takes place during only the first fifty or so minutes of the movie, with about an hour and a half remaining.
Alfred Hitchcock, when he made Psycho, was intrigued by the idea of the lead character getting bumped off halfway through the movie. Bill Pullman appears to leave Lost Highway after only fifty minutes, replaced by Pete Dayton (Balthazar Getty), who takes Madison's place, incredibly, in the latter's Death Row cell. Dayton, let go by the law, becomes the film's focus character, interacting with threads familiar from Madison's time on screen. He is particularly wrapped up in the motivations of Alice Wakefield (a blonde Patricia Arquette, while Fred's wife Renee is brunette, though they both have 1940s hairstyles in keeping with a femme fatale noir look).
Alice is the girlfriend of Mr. Eddy (craggy old Robert Loggia in a bigger than life gangster-type performance), a Pete Dayton enthusiast who values the young man's skill with automobile engines. Mr. Eddy does his own driving, making his two bodyguards sit in back. Pete has a way with the big black Mercedes Benz, and later is given the task of fixing Mr. Eddy's beautiful old Cadillac. Pete meets blonde Alice, they exchange a lingering look, and she begins coming on to him. They engage in a very unwise affair, meeting in motels. Alice wants Pete to help her rob a pornographer, Andy, a dude with a skinny mustache who makes stylized porn for Mr. Eddy--or is it for Dick Laurent?
Laurent, also played by Loggia, makes less appearances in the film, but we hear his name coming through the intercom in Fred's house during the first scene. After that, Fred's wife Renee goes to her house's front stairs to get the newspaper. She sees a manila envelope that hasn't been sealed, but contains something bulky. Bringing it inside, she takes out a videotape. They watch it. The footage is black and white, showing a view of their house's exterior.
Someone is obviously fucking with them. They receive two more videotapes, the second one showing the interior of the house and footage of the couple sleeping in their bed.
The third tape deals with how Fred ends up on Death Row.
I've revealed a lot of the plot, but one thing is for sure: watching this film the first time is like entering a dream in someone else's head. It's not a pile of nonsense, though. I've seen it three or four times and I've come to regard it as a coherent movie with a recognizable, though weird, structure.
The film's parallelism is the key to understanding it, even though, as with Lynch's other work, one may as well admit defeat when approaching his film logic with a sense of rational critique. His movies are not about solving mysteries, but are mysteries. A human being doesn't fully understand another person, much less understand all of the elements making up him- or herself. Is Pete Dayton a doppelgänger of Fred Madison? An alter ego?
Their two worlds interpenetrate, as when Pete, at work in the auto shop, complains about the intense saxophone-highlighted jazz coming out of the radio. The same sax music is played early in the film in a nightclub by Fred (a professional jazz musician). Pete gets headaches, just like Fred. They both have encounters with Robert Blake's spooky character, an unnamed pale-faced man in black who seems to know their secrets. In a career spanning fifty-eight years from when he was a child actor, Lost Highway was Blake's last film. In 2001 his second wife was murdered, he took the rap. His performance as the strange pale man shows an actor fully in charge of his craft--it's tragic that Blake didn't continue on after working with Lynch; he probably had many great performances left in him.
Lost Highway also features the last movie performance of Richard Pryor and also of Jack Nance, who played the lead role in Eraserhead, Lynch's first feature film.
This is not my favorite Lynch film (I'm not sure what the answer is to that), but I admire its look, and especially I appreciate the director's daring push to create new artistic frontiers by using classic film noir elements, but blended with something far beyond ordinary storytelling--a depiction from inside a man's mind (Fred/Pete) of a life coming apart and delving deep into psychical chaos, where memory gets recovered (by Fred) only after becoming another person.
Vic Neptune
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