Critics love David Lynch. Cinephiles love David Lynch. Casual movie-goers love David Lynch (or at least enjoyed Twin Peaks). Essentially everyone loves David Lynch, and many people will gladly tell you that he is the greatest living filmmaker. It is a fact I am proud to disseminate at every possible opportunity, including this one. However, David Lynch is considered the greatest living filmmaker by nearly everyone until you mention Lost Highway. Then suddenly that film becomes “his one true misstep” and a “dismal failure on the career of an otherwise extraordinary filmmaker” – and honestly, for everyone that hates Lost Highway for what it attempts to do (in their mind) makes me laugh, because there is something about Lost Highway that is so brilliantly subversive, and it flew over the heads of even the most profound of cinephiles, including the greatest of us all, the late Roger Ebert. But we’ll get to that a bit later.

Lost Highway is a film that remains almost completely indescribable. Fred Madison (Bill Pullman) is a musician who lives with his wife, Renee (Patricia Arquette), and after some mysterious threats launched against them, Fred somehow ends up murdering his wife and being sent to prison, where some strange turn of events transforms him into Pete (Balthazar Getty), a young mechanic who falls for Alice Wakefield (also played by Patricia Arquette), the mistress of the incredibly rich and influential Mr. Eddy (Robert Loggia), who has secrets of his own. The sprawling noir epic goes into places that are so abstract and surreal, they remain entirely impossible to describe, and most of this film’s story remains unexplainable and completely bizarre in its intentions, of which I am not entirely clear on.

Initially, I was reluctant to see Lost Highway because it features one of Lynch’s least-dynamic casts, at least in the lead roles. I was surprised to see that even though he isn’t the most exciting actor, Bill Pullman gives a solid performance as Fred, slightly sinister but more confused than anything else. Patricia Arquette, a talented actress in her own right, manages to navigate the dual roles in this film with class and finesse, being utterly mysterious as two very different femmes fatale. Balthazar Getty gets as much mileage as he can out of a character that isn’t necessarily complex in performance but rather exists in a landscape where odd events happen around him, requiring him to simply just react with suitable fear and worry, depending on the situation. The core cast is good, but not on the same level as some of Lynch’s previous star-ensembles. While Pullman, Arquette, and Getty were very good, they don’t linger on your mind as much as others in previous and subsequent Lynch films do. That isn’t a discredit to their performances, rather a criticism against the script that didn’t require these characters to be too entirely riveting in the first place.

However, Lost Highway  features some of Lynch’s most notable supporting performances, most importantly the highly controversial Robert Blake, who plays the Mystery Man, a figure who lives up to his epithet (or at least the “mystery” part, and we aren’t entirely sure if this character is actually a man or some celestial demonic entity out to destroy the lives of innocent people because of his waifish mischievousness). Gary Busey plays completely against type as a sympathetic father to the Getty’s character, a turn I found far too…normal. Either Lynch had never seen a Gary Busey film, or he decided to cast Busey in a role that was far from the actor’s comfort zone of deranged lunatics and sociopaths. Richard Pryor has a small but welcome role as Arnie, the owner of the garage that Getty’s character works at. Robert Loggia is terrifying as the enigmatic Mr. Eddy/Dick Laurent, and his breakdown scene towards the beginning of the arc involving him is acting at its finest (and loudest, but that’s another discussion). I also will never refuse seeing Jack Nance in anything, as he is the actor to which Lynch gave the best moments, even when his role is incredibly small and insignificant here.

I alluded to something in the introduction to this review – something about how Lost Highway is a film that possesses something that flew over the heads of many people who watched it and would subsequently go off to criticize it and deride it as Lynch’s lowest moment. Lynch is one of the most careful and methodical directors out there, mainly in the way he conveys the meanings of his films. He wouldn’t make something as pretentious and meandering as Lost Highway if it wasn’t purposeful, and I assume Lost Highway is what I assume to be Lynch’s attempt to criticize those who look for needless meanings in his films, those who are looking for something to understand what these films are trying to say. This is precisely the brilliance of David Lynch and Lost Highway, as it is a film that understands exactly what it is trying to do by being an enormous insult to those that try and ignore the overarching meaning of film, always looking for something technical or meaningful to keep it together and remind us that we still reside in a world that makes sense, whereas there couldn’t be anything farther from the truth.

This all goes back to my central argument that David Lynch is one of our most truly audacious postmodern artists. His films feature some of the most exquisite examples of postmodernist theory, and Lost Highway is one film that takes his obsession with the elements of postmodernism to the extreme. I think one could understand precisely what Lynch was trying to achieve here through looking at this film (and all of Lynch’s films, to be honest) through a postmodern lens. Jean-François Lyotard defined postmodernism as “incredulity towards metanarratives” – and Lynch’s films subscribe to this belief as well. There is nothing to explain these films. No over-arching, omnipotent meaning to explain these films. Honestly, to be completely reductive, Lynch’s films (like the majority of postmodern works) are weird for the sake of being weird.

Lynch himself refuses to answer as to what his films mean, and by his own admission, Lost Highway is an incoherent, rambling story without any meaning. The fact is that not everything needs to have to mean, and it is joyful to see people find his more acclaimed films such as Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire and Eraserhead as being profound and filled to the brim with existential surrealist meaning, while being so completely puzzled by this film, frantically searching for meaning amidst the genuinely bewildering nature of what Lynch has created here. Don’t get me wrong, there are quite a few people who have disliked Lost Highway for genuine reasons, but those who just don’t understand it and thus criticize it don’t fully realize what Lynch was trying to do here. There are no meta-narratives, there are no celestial answers. There is just the reader and the text, and a world of infinite possibilities between them.

Honestly, as much as I did like Lost Highway and did understand what Lynch was trying to do, I do have to say it wasn’t my personal favorite of his films. I did find it a bit too contrived, and at times it felt like Lynch was making a self-parodic, overly-excessive mess that mocked his own surrealist tendencies. The lack of coherence, while praise-worthy in how it is essentially an enormous insult to those that try and search for meaning, does ultimately take the viewer out of the film and we don’t actually get to follow this film, because it goes way too far into exploring the themes of surrealist desire and human complexities for it to actually become something that we can connect to, even if that isn’t the point. It isn’t a lesser-work by Lynch, but it is certainly a film that leaves the viewer far too puzzled to actually have enjoyed it completely. However, I do see the true brilliance lurking in Lost Highway, and once you realize how Lynch constructed this film, one can understand why he made this film.

Visually, Lost Highway is stunning. It features some of the best filmmaking on the part of Lynch, and from the hypnotic opening credits (set to David Bowie’s hauntingly-apt “I’m Deranged”), to the beautiful composition of colour and lighting, to the best use of a Lou Reed song in any film (“This Magic Moment”, one of the most fitting songs for the context in which it appears here) and simply the way Lynch put a scene together, using the story and the actors as inalienable partners, working together to create a film that is memorable, but ultimately very confusing. The cinematography in Lost Highway was unbelievably good, and Lynch really lucked out with Peter Deming, who Lynch would use again in arguably his best film yet, Mulholland Drive.

I don’t know what to say about Lost Highway other than it is a truly disturbing film that makes very little sense but still leaves the audience exhilarated. It isn’t the kind of film that will leave you in a particularly good mood, but it is still a masterpiece in its own right. It may not be considered one of Lynch’s best films, but there is certainly merit in giving this film another chance because it certainly deserves to be seen as the great work it is, just as long as we can leave this ludicrous notion that a film needs to make sense behind. If you can lose yourself in the experience of this film, you’ll see the extraordinary brilliance under the surface.