Lost Highway: The Fist of Love

Lost Highway: The Fist of Love © 2023 Scott Ryan

All Rights Reserved.

Reproduction in whole or in part without the author’s permission is strictly forbidden. All photos and/or copyrighted material appearing in this publication remains the work of its owners. This book is not affiliated with MK2 Diffusion, Asymmetrical Productions, Ciby 2000, Criterion, or David Lynch. This is a scholarly work of review and commentary only, and no attempt is made or should be inferred to infringe upon the copyrights of any corporation.

Cover designs by Scott Ryan

Cover photos courtesy of Peter Deming

Back cover photos courtesy of Janus Films

Author photo by Faye Murman

All photos/captures from Lost Highway are courtesy of Ciby 2000/Criterion

All full page photos courtesy of Peter Deming except Jack Nance collage by Scott Ryan

Edited by Alex Ryan

Special Thanks to David Bushman

Book designed by Scott Ryan

Published in the USA by Tucker DS Press

Columbus, Ohio

ISBN: 9781959748021

eBook ISBN: 9781959748038

For Alex Ryan

Who stopped me from watching Lost Highway in 1997 and then edited this book in 2022.

"You said you loved me.

Or were you just being kind?

Or am I losing my mind?"

—Stephen Sondheim

Losing My Mind, Follies (1971)

You’ll never have me.

—Alice

Lost Highway

David Lynch’s Lost Highway could be a companion piece to a lot of great works in other media, but one that resonates especially strongly is Robert Frost’s The Road Not Taken, which ends with

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

This is the film where David Lynch’s career took the road less traveled, and the filmmaker never looked back. In the time that has elapsed since its original release, we can see Lost Highway, an experimental neo-noir that loops back on itself like an ouroboros or Möbius strip, as the fork in the road of Lynch’s identity as a filmmaker. Its release steered him away from the mainstream success that he’d inexplicably found between the mideighties and early nineties, and recommitted him fully to the unconscious and uncanny images he’d explored as an art school student and deepened as a creator of experimental fine art. Lynch’s film and TV works after Lost Highway are intended to be looked at and reacted to, not understood in any conventional way, and certainly not solved. They aren’t puzzles or riddles, but works of personal expression. And they seem oblivious to viewers’ desire to explain and solve everything that they consume. There are many theories about what happens in this film. None of them explain it because the film is not meant to be explained. It’s meant to be absorbed, felt, and discussed.

Lost Highway is broken into halves and swaps leading men (from Bill Pullman to Balthazar Getty and back again) while keeping the same leading lady (Patricia Arquette) in each half. It ends with a sequence of shots that makes it seem as if the film could start again in the same place, and unfold in an endless, seamless loop until the end of time. One story is sort of a film noir murder mystery, about a saxophone player named Fred Madison (Pullman) whose homelife with his wife, the dark-haired beauty Renee (Arquette), is disrupted when somebody begins sending them invasive videotapes of their private lives, and a menacing figure known as the Mystery Man (Robert Blake) repeatedly appears to Fred in both reality and in his dreams. By the end, Fred is convinced (based on video evidence) that he’s murdered Renee and goes to jail for the crime, and is inexplicably replaced by Balthazar Getty’s Pete Dayton, a mechanic who fixes cars for gang boss Mr. Eddy (Robert Loggia) and who ends up falling in love with Eddy’s platinum blonde trophy girl Alice Wakefield (Arquette again) and getting into a standard-issue film noir plot to help her escape her brutal husband and start a new life.

The movie doesn’t judge anyone morally, but nevertheless there are intimations of purgatorial punishment attached to the characters’ actions. They seem to be fated (or cursed) to do certain things and have certain things done to them as a result, or in response. Perhaps all of Lost Highway’s characters are doomed to live out this narrative loop, and maybe karma is involved—but whose karma is whose? Is one universe cause and the other effect? Or are they causing and affecting each other constantly—as suggested when both Fred and Pete see glimpses of life as the other man, and in the scene where Fred dreams of walls and corridors of red curtains that, when parted, unveil a different life, timeline, or plane of existence? Even this doesn’t quite track, because Fred becomes Pete and then Pete becomes Fred in a single story loop, and it appears that Alice and Renee both exist within that loop. (Like so many Lynch films, this one is haunted by the aftertraces of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, about a man who becomes fixated on transforming his new girlfriend into a replacement for an obsession object that he lost, unaware that the first woman was never actually lost, and that in fact they’re the same person.)

Every attempt to pin Lost Highway’s meanings down to a fixed definition or interpretation is bound to end in failure because the entire construction is permeable on both narrative and symbolic levels, in a way that obliterates all rational thoughts that viewers try to apply to it. What is geography in this film? What is time? Fred sees Pete and Pete sees Fred and they both see visions of Alice and Renee and the Mystery Man. A house on struts is on fire, but the flames and smoke move backward, and later in the movie, you see it standing intact but about to explode (in one sense or another). The Mystery Man perhaps causes Fred to murder Renee (or entices him into it) or maybe he doesn’t. When characters die in this film, is it in reaction to something that another iteration of their character did, and if so, which action is in the past and which is in the future? We don’t know. We can’t know. It’s not that kind of movie.

Lynch burst onto screens with 1977’s Eraserhead, a surrealism-inflected domestic horror movie that was plotted like a dream and packed with haunting and sometimes horrifying images, but was told in a more-or-less linear manner, and set in a universe whose dreamlike internal logic was not difficult to understand if the viewer resolved to commit to Lynch’s unique vision. From Dune and Blue Velvet through Wild at Heart and its prequel film Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, Lynch had always challenged (or provoked) his audiences by creating worlds that felt simultaneously modern and old, and that were perched on the edge of abstraction but never pitched themselves over the brink. After Lost Highway, Lynch made one fully rational and linear drama, The Straight Story (though with a slightly surreal flavor at times) and from there he did Mulholland Dr., Inland Empire, and Twin Peaks: The Return, each more defiantly opaque yet engrossing than the one that came before. The work doesn’t just loop back on itself and tear holes in itself so that you can see what’s inside or outside, it disintegrates and re-integrates as you watch, and ends and begins itself repeatedly, and creates little interludes where narrative is meaningless and it’s all about the experience of time passing, and thoughts passing through your mind, and before your eyes. Lynch chose this branch of the highway in 1996, and he’s been on it ever since.

In discussing his film Lost Highway for a DVD release, David Lynch said, "I didn’t ever say anything at the time, but I had a fixation on O. J. Simpson, the trial, and I think some of [Lost Highway] grew out of O. J. Simpson. Because here is a guy who, at least I believe, committed two murders, and yet is able to go on living, and speaking, and golfing. So what is in the mind? When after a horrific murder and that experience, how does the mind protect itself from that knowledge and go on? That’s interesting to me and the mind is interesting for sure."

On October 3, 1995, more than 150 million viewers, 57 percent of the US, tuned in to watch the live broadcast of the O. J. Simpson verdict. When you take into account the above quote, David Lynch must certainly have been one of them. I was not. Most times when pop culture tells me to Macarena, I leave the dance floor immediately. I believe it’s the Gen X in me. My peers raised me to believe that if everyone else likes it, then I shouldn’t. I was also a huge David Letterman fan and while his competitor, The Mystery Man of late-night television Jay Leno, was covering the trial nonstop, Letterman was not mentioning the national obsession on his late-night show and told guest Howard Stern, I guess I just don’t find double homicide as amusing as I used to. America did, still does, and always will.

The good ol’ US of A ate up that trial and every detail about a football player turned murderer like it was something that mattered. Since I never consumed any of the trial back in the nineties, I am often told that I should watch this documentary about the Simpson trial. I should read that book about it. I should watch this limited series about it. The common refrain is you’ll learn that the trial was about more than just a double homicide. I smile and lie, saying that I’ll check it out, but I never will. I am not big on actual murder for entertainment. I do not do true crime because of the first word in the description. I just don’t find real homicide as amusing as my country does. Instead, I tell them that they should check out Lost Highway. It’s also about O. J., and they will learn something. As I walk away, I laugh as if I am Mr. Eddy leaving someone I caught tailgating. I know exactly what I did to them, and I feel no guilt about it. I wasn’t the only one who wasn’t amused by all that murder. David Lynch didn’t find it amusing either. He found it baffling. And just like a truly great artist should, he took his bafflement and constructed one of his most challenging films. And in his filmography, that is really saying something.

Out of this national obsession, David Lynch went fishing in the pond of ideas and caught a new big idea. He would make a movie about the idea of what the mind must go through to convince itself that a murderer didn’t do anything wrong. He conceived his film in a moment that over 150 million people were interested in and ended up making the lowest-grossing, most-forgotten film of his career. I have no firsthand knowledge of what effect that had on David Lynch. He would never talk about box office expectations with someone like me. Who am I kidding? He would never give an interview to an author like me. But I do know from the plethora of interviews he gave to major publications that he does worry about the number of people that consume his work. He told Rolling Stone magazine the year the film came out, I hope it would be possible to make a film that has some depth to it but that still has a strong story and great characters, and that people would really appreciate. He reiterated his desire for the masses to love his work in his book with Kristine McKenna, Room to Dream, where he relayed a story about interacting with one of the most successful directors of all time, Steven Spielberg.

Lynch told Spielberg at a party, You’re so lucky because the things you love millions of people love, and the things I love thousands of people love. Spielberg replied, "David, we’re getting to the point where just as many people will have seen Eraserhead as have seen Jaws."

David Lynch, like any artist, wants his work to be seen, but none of Lynch’s films have truly rocked the box office Jaws-style. The fact that he got his initial idea from something that he knew everyone was watching and it still didn’t light up the box office or the culture just had to sting. I submit that no film in Lynch’s canon has been more forgotten than Lost Highway. Several of his films were released and were loudly hated, several were nominated for awards, and several were critical darlings, but only Lost Highway came out and was just ignored. For so many years, the film was lost itself. It was hard to find, and the existing versions were released with an extremely low quality. The picture was dark and blurry, and the sound was abysmal. All these qualities matter in a Lynch film more than most. Plus, no one was really screening the film in theaters outside of Lynch film fests that showed all of his work. Disagree that it’s his most forgotten film? Here is a quick trip through his filmography up to 2023.

1977’s Eraserhead became a midnight screening sensation that still plays around the globe at midnight. If it isn’t the most popular student film of all time, it sure as heck is in the top two. (Gross: $7 million)

1980’s The Elephant Man was nominated for numerous Oscars, including his first best director nomination, and put Lynch on the Hollywood map. The quote I am not an animal is ingrained in pop culture and was even quoted on an episode of Seinfeld. (Gross: $26 million)

1984’s Dune was much maligned and taught Lynch that he must have final cut or there was no point in making a film. This was also his first time working with Kyle MacLachlan (Dune, Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks). Even though Dune was not embraced at the time, it is his highest-grossing film to date. (Gross: $30.9 million)

1986’s Blue Velvet was a critical darling and certainly is seen as the film that cemented Lynch’s legacy as one of the most idiosyncratic directors of his time. Oscars and critics came a calling with Lynch’s second nomination for best director. This film brought him together with his lifelong muse, Laura Dern (Blue Velvet, Wild at Heart, Inland Empire, Twin Peaks: The Return). Film lovers never dismissed or forgot Dennis Hopper (Frank Booth) and his breathing mask. (Gross: $8.5 million)

1990’s Wild at Heart might not have been embraced in America, but it won the Palme d’Or award at the Cannes Film Festival and did well at the box office for an independent film. Critics were split on whether the film was a classic or classless, but everyone took a side, and that is better than being ignored. (Gross: $14.5 million)

1992’s Fire Walk With Me was hated just about everywhere and in every way a film can be hated, but it certainly was not forgotten. Twin Peaks fans weren’t going to allow that to happen. (I’ve even heard that there was a book written about this film for its thirtieth anniversary. But that can’t be true, can it?) The film might have started at the bottom of the heap, but over the last thirty years it has risen to the top with critics and fans who finally came around to the story. I don’t know the exact tally, but I wouldn’t be surprised if this film has been released and repackaged more than Jaws has ever been. (Gross: $4 million)

1997’s Lost Highway came and went in a videotaped blip. It performed even worse than Fire Walk With Me, and that was a film that was taken to the train car of hateful reviews. Lost Highway had a lackluster release on VHS with one of the worst transfers ever and didn’t get a special edition release or restoration until 2022. Only the soundtrack made a splash, hitting number seven on the Billboard Hot 100 chart and achieving gold status. (Gross: $3.6 million)

1999’s TheStraight Story was released by Disney, and while by Disney standards it might not be remembered like The Lion King, Lynch did receive some of the best reviews of his career. Once again, Oscar took note with Richard Farnsworth receiving a nomination for lead actor. (Gross: $6.2 million)

2001’s Mulholland Dr. needs no help from anyone in securing its legacy. It was picked as the best film of the new millennium by the United Kingdom newspaper The Independent. (And it had to compete with twelve Spiderman films and forty-eight Batman films, so that honor really means something.) The film brought Lynch another directing nomination and turned Naomi Watts into a megastar. (Gross: $7.2 million)

2006’s Inland Empire might draw the best argument against my claim that Lost Highway is Lynch’s most overlooked film, but if you think about the amount of gruff people gave Inland Empire for the poor quality of the digital film, that alone makes the film memorable. Now, add in the cow and Laura Dern incident (no, I won’t explain what that means because it’s fun to write that collection of words without explanation) along with the fact that Inland Empire had a 4K restoration before Lost Highway and there is enough evidence to push it past Lost Highway. Both films were rereleased in 2022 with new restorations. Inland Empire grossed an additional $200,000 plus and Lost Highway just $50,000 more—another win for Inland Empire. Finally, if you have ever met a Lynch fan who has sat through this three-hour movie, they will always wear that act like a badge of honor. They need to let you know that they have seen the film and