Lost Highway


To ride on the Lost Highway is to seek understanding. But for most, the understanding is not easilly won. This movie is one of the most interesting and complex pieces of cinemagraphic excellence I have ever seen. The critics hate it, the viewers love it and no once can figure it out. I think that is exactly what David Lynch was trying to do. There is no way for me to explain what happens in this movie. I could chronicle the events but what is the point. I would end up putting opinion into my words and affect the mood that the movie creates. So at that I will only highlight the images and emotions that I found to be enchanting or perplexing.

The opening act is so formal it is almost cynical. Every sentence spoken has a long enough pause afterward to go out to dinner. But it is this strict formality that makes first few scenes so tense. It's hard to determine it Lynch did this for comedic purposes or for dramatic tension. Either way, it does both (which may also have been his intention) and it puts you in a lighthearted yet uncomfortable mood for the rest of the film. The following is an excerpt (from memory, so it may not be completely acurate) of one of the more comically formal scenes:


As the movie progresses it becomes more surreal, a Dali painting on a canvas of light. You have to be prepared to watch a dream when you sit down because this movie does not flow like any other I have seen. The film is very noir, a high contrast of lights and darks like old German Cinema. But unlike thos old black and white fillms, this one adds color to the lights to make the mood even more dramatic.A red face, a stage that is blue, a grey cell, these are things that if in normal color tonal range are standard and common but in single tones are striking and intense. Film (and Art) is interesting that way. They can take the mundane, the banal, and change them into the interesting or the unusual. It is a great part of the creative process to know what to change to make something live artisticly. I, as an artistand film maker, am still working to learn those subtle ideas. David Lynch has got them and has used them to the fullest extent possible wihtout going too far. It is an intricate ballance of the real and the surreal that make this movie visually appealing and emotionally wrenching at the same time. But with film, as opposed to standard art (painting, photography, sculpture) there is more synaptic input. The theater, and thus the movie, encompases you completly in sight and sound so that the movie is all that you experince (barring any extraneous audience interference).

So not only do you have image to work with but also sound. And with that sound you can create voice, effect, music, or any combunation of the three. On this project David Lynch pulled together three very unrelated artists to create a very interwoven sound for the film. Angelo Badalamenti, Barry Adamson, and Tren Reznor make up all the music and general instrumental sound that roars in the background. Whenever there is a sound on the screen aside from dialogue or sound effect it is one of those three ( with a few exceptions). And the compsition of music with the images in this film is spectacular. The music lives on the images and mounts the emothins to new highs. Fantastically driving the viewer forward into a new level of involvement.