In her August 1997 BFI piece “Voodoo Road,” the historian Marina Warner wrote, “the plot of Lost Highway binds time’s arrow into time’s loop, forcing Euclidian [sic] space into Einsteinian curves where events lapse and pulse at different rates and everything might return eternally.” She continues, “But this linearity is all illusion, almost buoyantly ironic, for you can enter the story at any point and the straight road you’re travelling down will unaccountably turn back on itself and bring you back to where you started.”

Lost Highway, David Lynch’s seventh feature film and his first after Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, has all the markings of a quintessential LA film noir, but with a Lynchian nightmare spin. It’s a Moebius strip of a movie: multiple plots loop around and on themselves, and storylines run along parallel lines but never fully link together for total resolution. The film takes its title from a phrase in the book “Night People” by Barry Gifford, who also wrote the literary version of “Wild at Heart.” However, rather than adapting the source material, Lynch and Gifford decided to base the film on videotapes and a couple in crisis. 

As Lynch detailed in his autobiography “Room to Dream”:

“Another beginning idea was based on something that happened to me. The doorbell at my house was hooked to the phone, and one day it rang and somebody said, “Dick Laurent is dead.” I went running to the window to see who it was, but there was nobody there. I think whoever it was just went to the wrong house, but I never asked my neighbors if they knew a Dick Lau-rent, because I guess I didn’t really want to know.”

The result is a two-tale story: in the first, Jazz saxophonist Fred Madison (Bill Pullman) is fixated that his wife Renee (Patricia Arquette) is having an affair, and suddenly finds himself in prison, accused of her murder. In the second, you have the young mechanic Peter Dayton (Balthazar Getty) and the blonde temptress/ adulterous gangster’s moll, Alice. The only constant is Arquette in her dual roles, and, as Warner says at this middle point, “the film changes from an ominous Hitchcockian psycho-thriller to a semi-parodic gruesome gangster pic.” Arquette’s dual femme fatale roles also heighten the noir element, she is Uma Thurman-esque with her blunt brunette fringe, then Marilyn Monroe-like with her soft blonde waves. We also have the brunette/blonde dual role – or self – in Mulholland Drive.

The film’s casting is inspired. Robert Blake – who did not understand the script at all – is incredibly creepy as the sinister mystery man, his portentous appearance taking on a new significance since the Millennium. Best known as the 1970s television detective “Baretta,” in 2005 Blake was acquitted of murdering his then-wife Bonny Lee Bakley (following her murder in 2001). Richard Pryor appears in what was to be his final film role, and Robert Loggia. Loggia, previously annoyed about missing out on the role of Blue Velvet’s Frank Booth to Dennis Hopper, has an on-screen rant in Lost Highway that was unscripted and genuine. 

Another LA-appropriate influence was O.J. Simpson, particularly his ability to return to regular life despite an infamous high-profile court case. 

In her essay, “Funny How Secrets Travel: David Lynch’s Lost Highway,” the academic Alanna Thain writes, “David Lynch’s 1997 film Lost Highway is haunted by the specter of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), itself a ghost story on many levels.” Vertigo is a film about male obsession, aggression, and visual control, described as a deconstruction of the male construction of femininity and of masculinity itself. The critic James F. Maxfield suggested that Vertigo is an interpreted and variation on Ambrose Bierce’s 1890 short story “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge”, in which Scottie imagines the main narrative of the film as he dangles from a building at the end of the opening rooftop chase.

Thain continues, “Inspired by the spiral form that dominates Hitchcock’s masterpiece, Lost Highway explores the effects of living in a world characterized by paramnesia. A form of déjà vu, paramnesia is a disjunction of sensation and perception, in which one has the inescapable sense of having already lived a moment in time, of being a witness to one’s life.” In Lost Highway, did Fred murder his wife and then construct the rest of the outcome in a dream? And did that dream turn inwards into a nightmare? 

These themes have appeared in Lynch’s other works, most recently Twin Peaks: The Return – Agent Cooper/Dougie, and that ending – in which characters are caught in a never-ending cycle of purgatory, dreams, nightmares, doppelgängers, and déjà vu. As the Mystery Man says, “We’ve met before, haven’t we?”

Lost Highway is an uneasy film and one of the most unsettling in terms of how deep it goes in terms of Lynch’s dream/nightmare logic. In “Room to Dream” Lynch wrote, “it’s not a funny film because it’s not a good highway these people are going down. I don’t believe all highways are lost, but there are plenty of places to get lost, and there’s some kind of pleasure in getting lost. Like Chet Baker said, let’s get lost.” 

On that note, it’s time to get lost in Lost Highway.