In real life, mysteries are not always solved, people are not always understood, and situations are not always what they seem. We all know that these are facts of life, and we more or less accept them. But why is it that if a film doesn’t wrap things up nice and clean it makes most people angry?
I think almost everyone who has seen Lost Highway has been confounded by it on at least one level or another. It is a film that you can pick at forever, like peeling the skin from an onion, revealing layer after layer. There is always something new to be found: some dropped phrase, some second shadow, some color to give it an extra meaning. Lost Highway is a film where you get to form your own opinions and decide how intricate the story is-- how much (if any) of it is a dream.
I have often said before that if anyone else tried to do to me what David Lynch does to me through his films, I would probably come out of the theatre pissed off. But there is something about Lynch’s movies that are genuine-– the emotions and situations resonate. They touch us in strange ways that cannot be mistaken for falsehood or ambiguity for ambiguity’s sake.
I think that when Lynch makes movies, he purposefully doesn’t give us the answers because he wants us to own the film as much as he does. I think that he is genuinely surprised by some of the things he captures, and that the films change for him over the years. What was once thought to be the theme or main idea behind something later reveals something more subconscious. I have watched this film at least a dozen times, and every time I watch it I get a sense of what it is about-– a definite clarity about what things mean. But by the end something else comes up that does not gel with my carefully-formed hypothesis.
This film is not confined by a Hollywood formula-- it does not have a beginning, middle, and end. It circles around itself and goes for two separate journeys at the same time. It folds back upon itself, jumping backward and forward while staying in the same place. Characters become other characters, two women become one, lives intermingle. It is disorienting to have a movie do that to you. We feel like we’ve come to an agreement with film that it must take us from point A to point B.
The beauty of David Lynch’s films, this one in particular, is that it gives you images, ideas, and situations, but how you define them and order them says more about yourself than it does about the film. What can be taken as a fairly straightforward concept of a man unable to deal with the consequences of his own actions becomes a mirror of everything you know about life, movies, and people. True, Lost Highway takes you to some pretty dark and twisted places, and it does not give us the answers we want from a movie. There is no happy ending; if anything, it is purgatory. Lost Highway never ends-- it finishes at exactly the point where it began.
I know that this is not a movie for everyone. (Most movies that end up in Freak Films are not.) Most people see films as escapism. They don’t want their entertainment to engage them anymore than the two hours it takes to watch it. But love it or hate it, Lost Highway is an original moviegoing experience. Whether you can decipher it is beside the point-– just sit back and let it wash over you, and find out what it means to you. \"Buy the ticket, take the ride.\"