Lost Highway (dir. David Lynch, 1997)
Fred Madison (Bill Pullman) is a jazz musician who think his wife Renee (Patricia Arquette) is unfaithful. One morning a voice over the intercom of their home informs him that “Dick Laurent is dead.” They then begin receiving video tapes showing footage of their home. At a party, Fred meets the white faced Mysterious Man (Robert Blake), capable of being in two locations at once and claiming they have met before. A final video tape arrives depicting Fred brutally murdering his wife, though Fred has no memory of this happening. He is found guilty of her murder and sentenced to death. One morning, Fred has seemingly vanished and a 24 year old auto mechanic named Pete Dayton (Balthazar Getty) has taken his place. He is released and becomes involved with Alice Wakefield, the blonde doppelganger of Renee and mistress to a gangster called Mr. Eddy (Robert Loggia).
Lost Highway was David Lynch’s first of three films to be set in Los Angeles and among the entertainment industry [1]. Like Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire, it’s concerned with issues of identity and has a fractured structure reflecting the seeming transformation of Fred into Pete. Lynch continues to be fascinated with the tropes of film noir and Hollywood mysteries. Vertigo is explicitly referenced in the double roles played by Arquette and a shot of Alice’s disembodied head against a background mirroring one of James Stewart in Hitchcock’s film, and the affair between Pete and Alice has all the hallmarks of James M. Cain. The emphasis placed upon videos and recording feels self-reflexive when in the context of these old fashioned cliches and standard stories.
Lynch has admitted in an interview that an influence on the film was the O.J. Simpson murder trial:
“What struck me about O.J. Simpson was that he was able to smile and laugh. He was able to go golfing with seemingly few problems about the whole thing. I wondered how, if a person did those deeds, he could go on living. And we found this great psychology term– ‘psychogenic fugue’–describing an event where the mind tricks itself to escape some horror. So, in a way, Lost Highway is about that. And the fact that nothing can stay hidden forever.”
I am not Roland Barthes, so I am inclined to listen to what authors say about their own work, though I would rather not want to listen to what an older white man thinks of O.J. Simpson even if I think he is guilty. With this idea in mind, I started thinking more about other elements of the film. While we only get the briefest glimpse of Renee’s dead body in the video tape, it resembles the bifurcated corpse of Elizabeth Short. O.J. Simpson and the Black Dahlia are two of the most notorious cases in Los Angeles history.
And then I started looking at the cast of the film and realized that Lost Highway might be a cursed film. It’s practically a nexus of violent death that happened either before the film was made or after. It’s spooky.
The most obvious one of these is Robert Blake, appearing here as the Mysterious Man in one of the most unsettling things you’ll see on celluloid. In 2001, Blake’s wife Bonnie Blakely was murdered in a car outside the restaurant that they were just at. Blake was brought up on murder charges, but was ultimately acquitted. I am not terribly familiar with the details of case, but I remember public opinion being that at the very least something hinky had happened. Regardless it gives an aura around the Mysterious Man that he didn’t need to be a living nightmare.
Balthazar Getty is the son of John Paul Getty III, whose abduction and disfigurement in 1973 is complicated enough to have been dramatized twice in recent years. The issue at hand is whether John Paul was complicit in his own kidnapping in order to get money from his billionaire grandfather J. Paul Getty. Regardless, it cost him an ear.
Sheila, Pete’s on-and-off-again girlfriend, is portrayed by Natasha Gregson Wagner, whose parents are Natalie Wood and Robert Wagner. Wood died by drowning in 1981 while boating with her husband, and the circumstances of it are up for debate. Some believe it was accident, others believe it was a marital argument gone wrong, and others still think fellow passenger Christopher Walken had something to do with.
Andy, a Hollywood Hills creep, is played by actor Michael Massee. Massee is the one who fired the gun that killed Brandon Lee in a tragic workplace accident while filming The Crow in 1993. I hate bringing that up, because he wasn’t responsible for the man’s death, but the presence of it lingers.
David Lynch’s frequent collaborator Jack Nance, appearing here as the mechanic Phil in his final role, died shortly after production wrapped in a bizarre incident. He got into an altercation with a stranger outside a donut shop, developed a subdural hematoma which killed him. Nance’s life had already been marred by the death of his second wife by suicide several years previously.
Henry Rollins appears in a small part as a corrections officer. He narrowly avoided being killed in a robbery at his and his housemate Joe Cole’s Venice Beach home in 1991. Cole was unable to escape and was shot to death by the perpetrators who remain unknown.
Finally, there’s a detective investigated the tapes sent to the Madison household who is played by Louis Eppolito. Eppolito is a former NYPD detective and son of a member of the Gambino crime family. He retired from the force in 1990 after a corruption scandal and got bit acting parts after meeting Joe Pesci. It would eventually come to light in the 2000s that Eppolito and fellow NYPD detective Stephen Caracappa were intimately involved with the mafia. Among the crimes for which they were found guilty and sentenced to life terms were eight counts of murder and conspiracy.
I think we can all agree that’s a staggering amount of violence for one group to have experienced. If you were completely unaware of any this extratextual information and just watched the film, you would still see a story about murder and how a guilty person excuses in their mind. But with all that knowledge? It makes it even more disorienting and weighty as you are forced to face this grim reality amid all the fantastical elements.
It almost feels like the stuff of Hollywood legend, and I suspect that the haunted film from Inland Empire might owe something to these unusual circumstances.
[1] For our purposes here, avant garde jazz and underground pornography count.
October 19, 2018
oliveresque 