Lost and Found
David Lynch fans finally get to cruise the digital ‘Highway’
By Andy Klein
It’s bad enough that – more than a decade into the DVD revolution – there are still John Ford and Howard Hawks films that have never been issued on DVD; but those guys had long filmographies, including movies that have vanished or have confused legal situations. But why has taken so long for David Lynch’s 1997 Lost Highway to appear on DVD in America?
It’s neither his most difficult nor least popular title; the rights haven’t been tangled up in lawsuits. All of Lynch’s other features have been released here in digital form – some (Blue Velvet, Wild at Heart) more than once, one (Dune) even on HD-DVD (R.I.P.). Lost Highway itself has been out in numerous foreign versions. For years, the best edition available was the German version and, more recently, British and French releases – which, of course, require a region-free, PAL-to-NTSC-capable player.
Finally – just when I was hoping to stop buying standard DVDs and concentrate on Blu-ray Discs – Universal has gotten around to giving Lost Highway a DVD release.
The story and style have some similarities to Mulholland Dr.: Both have characters who literally change identities, under mysterious, not fully explained circumstances; both are haunted by ghoulish figures and shadowy conspiracies. At first, Lost Highway seems to center around jazz musician Fred Madison (Bill Pullman), who thinks his wife, Renee (Patricia Arquette with red hair), may be cheating on him. But Fred may just be nuts: he’s experiencing inexplicably weird stuff, much of it initiated by the demonic Mystery Man (a nearly unrecognizable Robert Blake).
Halfway through the film, without any clear explanation, Fred transforms into, or is replaced by, Pete Dayton (Balthazar Getty), a gen-X auto mechanic from Van Nuys. At first, it seems as though we are starting a new story, but soon little bits of Fred’s world begin to infect Pete’s reality. Alice, the moll of a gangster named Mr. Eddie (Robert Loggia), looks exactly like a blonde Renee.
If you equate Van Nuys with Hell – an amusing notion – then Lost Highway could be seen as a retelling of Orpheus and Eurydice: a musician descends into the land of the dead to try to reclaim his lover. I can see several likelier ways to read the film, none of them conclusive or wholly satisfying. The interweaving of repeated images, words, and events is almost as rich as in Blue Velvet but not nearly as neat. Like the last 10 minutes of 2001, it simultaneously challenges us to “figure out” its puzzle, while making any clean solution impossible. Like 2001, it took me two viewings to pick up half of what was going on. And, like 2001, it’s a film better absorbed and experienced than analyzed.
Some of its central elements seem to have been consciously reused by Michael Haneke in Caché (2005); and some were similar to ideas in Steven Soderbergh’s Schizopolis, shot almost simultaneously with Lost Highway. (In a 2001 interview, Lynch suggested to me a provocative explanation of the latter coincidence. Archive.salon.com/ent/movies/int/2001/10/12/lynch_interview/.)
Universal’s DVD is a strictly bare-bones affair: There are no extras, not even a trailer. There are 18 chapters, which suggests that Lynch – no fan of chapter stops – had no involvement with the release. (None is claimed by Universal.) As best as I could tell in a crude A/B comparison, the transfer is perhaps a little darker than the German DVD and has a superior sound mix. The box incorrectly lists the length as 2 hours and 25 minutes; the disc is, in fact, 11 minutes shorter than that, which coincides with the theatrical length. (The foreign versions are all sped up by seven minutes or so, as a result of the PAL transfer.)
I’m delighted that this is finally available, since Lost Highway is a very darkly shot film, and the VHS was close to unwatchable. In fact, it’s so darkly shot that it cries out for a new transfer and a Blu-ray edition. But, ‘till then, this will do.
Lost Highway. Directed by David Lynch. Written by David Lynch & Barry Gifford. Director of photography, Peter Deming, A.S.C. Music by Angelo Badalamenti; additional music composed by Barry Adamson. With Bill Pullman, Patricia Arquette, Balthazar Getty, Robert Loggia, Robert Blake, Michael Massee, Natasha Gregson Wagner, Gary Busey, Lucy Butler, Richard Pryor, and Jack Nance. Universal Studios Home Entertainment, $19.99.
Published: 04/09/2008
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