LOST HIGHWAY, David Lynch (1997)
What if I could be another person ?
par/by Peter Chung, réalisateur/film maker

Peter Chung est récemment le réalisateur de « Matriculated », peut-être le plus décalé et original des films Animatrix (2003), il est aussi le créateur de nombreux court-métrages d’animation, dont la série MTV « Aeon Flux » et à l’origine des fameux Razmokets. L’article qui suit est un hommage de Peter Chung sur le film Lost Highway de David Lynch.

Cadrage publie ce texte inédit car, outre notre vif intérêt et amitié portés à l’originalité des films de Peter Chung, il nous semble intéressant, voire fondamental, de mettre en lumière les réflexions écrites des réalisateurs. Les grands cinéastes sont nécessairement, par définition, de grands critiques. La réciproque est on le sait moins évidente.

Several years ago, the L.A. County Museum of Art ran a retrospective of the films of David Lynch. The L.A. Weekly ran a dismissive review by Paul Malcolm of Lost Highway which angered me enough that I sent them the following letter, which they then published (in much shortened form).

Fine if Paul Malcolm confesses to not understanding David Lynch's film Lost Highway -- but how he can then go on to assert that not only Lynch himself is unable to find the meaning and purpose in the film, and neither can anybody else, seems like baffling conceit. What's unfortunate is that Mr. Malcolm, who appears to have high regard for Lynch's earlier work, should have missed the point entirely of what is probably Lynch's most serious-minded film to date. In spite of the generally vacant response the film has engendered (especially among film critics), the logic of Lost Highway is actually quite simple and clear -- once you make the shift in consciousness the film demands.

In a nutshell: Fred (Bill Pullman) murders his wife, Renee (Patricia Arquette). The record of the carnage, captured on videotape, is enough to convict him. His guilt a fait accompli, he languishes in a cell, a condemned man with no way out. He'd need a miracle to redeem his life, and he gets one. He's granted a second life, a second chance. He gets to switch lives with an innocent younger man, Pete, (Balthazar Getty). The catch is, he has no memory of his original life as Fred. He encounters Alice (also played by Patricia Arquette), whom we recognize, but he doesn't. (The casting of Arquette in the double role is not gratuitous weirdness, but crucial in driving home the point that he has no memeory of his previous life. Also, it turns out that she is,in a way, the ghost of Fred's wife, come to lead young Pete astray...) Fred/Pete then proceeds to screw up his life all over again by making a series of unwise moves, which to him, seem like expressions of freedom (rebellion), but to the viewer, seem like a wasteful squandering of a precious reprieve from doom. Pretty soon, he's committed murder all over again. In the desert, he encounters the cosmic Joker (Robert Blake), time runs backward (the shack burning in reverse) and Pete reverts back to being Fred. The cruel joke played on him is revealed; he has learned his lesson, that there is no escape; that there is no advantage to being another person; that no matter who you are, your actions are your own.

I haven't the space here to elaborate on the subplots involving the Robert Loggia character (his involvement with Renee/Alice and Fred's suggested reason for killing her), the Robert Blake character (a kind of fairy Godmother figure with the ability to cross time and space), the police, the violation of linear time (in favor of interior time), not to mention the daring, expressive use of sound and image marking the work of a creative force unfettered with appeasing the conventional audience.

Lost Highway is an important film because its purpose is to invent new modes of expressing deeply personal and elusive notions. Lynch invites us to speculate on the meaning of what it means to be who we are -- that is, "how is it that I am who I am, and not someone else; what if I could be another person?". This question of "why wasn't I born as someone else, in another time and place", is the deepest mystery of life, and probably the most universal. For me, the most fascinating byproduct of having seen Lost Highway is the implication that if I've lived other lives, but have no memory of them, perhaps I can live as if I had that memory, and not like Balthazar Getty. As viewers, we wish that he might draw upon the wisdom he gained from Bill Pullman -- the film is indirectly in favor of collective consciousness.

Other Hollywood films have regularly put forth the idea of switching identities in Big, Switch, All of Me, Vice Versa, etc. but they are all cheats in that they allow the individual to retain his original awareness and memory while embodying the second identity. Lost Highway, as far as I know, is the first film to explore this theme seriously, with no punches pulled. (If I become you, I become someone who has no memory of having been me -- of course.)

For Lynch, the film marks a step up, in that there is no longer a clear line between good and evil characters. Whereas in Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks, he played on strong divisions between the innocent and the evil, in Lost Highway, these impulses are both present in the principal characters. Also, the palatability of Blue Velvet is largely due to the essentially spoofy tone of that film; as stunning a work as that is, it never ceases to be a film referential to (and a reaction to) a particular genre of film.

Lost Highway is a film highly interested in metaphysics and not at all in psychology, which may be why its meanings have so eluded audiences. When Bill Pullman kills his wife, I suppose that most viewers want to know why he did it. (The angle I'm sure most directors would have pursued, also). Lynch is not really interested in that question. In any work of fiction, answers to such questions are ultimately arbitrary. Lynch spends no time at all on either the trial, the question of guilt, or a psychological rationalization. The transference of one man's life to another's is the point, and having that man be a condemned soul raises the stakes dramatically.

In all Lynch films, understanding only comes as a result of a shift in one's frame of reference; our literal-minded, workaday consciousness is of little use. This is because with Lynch, there is no differentiation between internal and external events. He allows the internal states of his characters to be projected freely into the external world, and he does so without explanatory devices; this is the method of poetry.

After a year of hostile reviews, of critics shaking their heads in disappointment, and of popular indifference, Lost Highway deserves reevaluation as a vital contribution to modern American film. We malign our important contemporary artists at our own cultural peril.

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