The film opens with Fred Madison (Bill Pullman), a contemporary sax player skulking around his apartment, smoking. When a visitor, through the intercom, informs him that "so and so is dead," it's hard to gauge his immediate reaction-it could be relief, and it could be fear. It's also hard to gauge his relationship with his wife Renee (played to satisfactory sexiness by a brunette Patricia Arquette). Renee and Fred speak haltingly to one another and don't seem to have the most functional relationship in the world-at one point, we see Fred making unsuccessful love to Renee, at which point she pats him on the back motherly and tells him "It's okay." Ugh-Freudianism? Et tu, Lynch?

The mystery develops when the couple start receiving anonymously labeled videotapes in the mail. The first one is just a shot of the exterior of the house, but the follow up was taped by someone walking around their bed while they were sleeping. Fred and Renee's reactions are careful and fearful, as are their dialogue with the investigating police. Later on, when attending Andy's (Michael Massee) party, Fred meets the Mystery Man (Robert Blake), a pancake-faced joker who tells him they've met before. Fred can't remember meeting, but the Mystery Man assures him they have-at his house. "I'm there right now," he tells him. "Call me if you don't believe." Fred calls and hears a voice-the Mystery Man's voice-tell him I told you so. It sounds goofy in writing, or in a script, but Blake's performance raises hackles effectively.

Fred and Renee return home, and upon viewing more of the tape, Fred makes out a grainy black and white image of his wife dead on the floor. Then Lynch makes one of his famous en meda res switcheroos and we find that Fred has been charged with, and convicted of, murdering his wife. While awaiting his sentence on death row, Fred suffers splitting headaches and blurred vision, but only for so long-when making a morning check, the guard finds twenty-four year old Pete Dayton (Balthazar Getty) inside the cell instead. Fred is nowhere to be found.

Pete is eventually released and delivered back to his parents (Gary Busey and Lucy Butler). He goes back to work at an auto garage, taking especially care for the maniacal gangster boss Mr. Eddy (Robert Loggia). Pete strikes up a love affair with Mr. Eddy's girl Alice (Patricia Arquette again in blonde hair), although he keeps up his affair with good girl next door Sheila (Natasha Gregson Wagner) whenever Alice is unavailable. Soon enough, Mr. Eddy begins to suspect, Sheila finds out about the affair, Pete's parents remain cryptic about the night before he got arrested and Eddy calls with the Mystery Man, who assures him they have met before-at his house. "In Asia, they isolate you when you're sentenced to death so you never know when the blow will fall," Mystery Man tells him. How ironic-an hour and a half into this film and I'm still waiting for comprehension to fall on me.

Of course, Lynch is following a pattern he would explore to greater effect, not to mention success, in Mulholland Drive--the "psychogenic fugue." Fred, in an attempt to escape the reality of murdering his wife over a love affair with what's his name, constructs a new life in which he has greater control over both his passion and the woman in question. Renee becomes Alice so that he becomes the cuckolder, not the cuckolded. Fred becomes Pete, someone who looks good in leather jackets, carouses at night and is strong and independent (yet still cared for-witness Pete' parents). However, it all comes crashing down as the tools Fred constructs for his escape turn against him and betray him. The Mystery Man remains The Mystery Man, either active antagonist or shadowy accomplice. Alice talks him (as Pete Dayton) into robbing Andy (the party host from before who turns out to be a pimp of sorts) and running away, but Pete accidentally murders him. Alice and Pete make for the fence and, while waiting, make passionate love in the sand, during which Car boy tells her "I want you" and Alice smirks back "You can't ever have me." Ouch, bulls-eye, bitch, we think, and apparently so does Pete, because that's when he and Fred switch places once again, leaving Fred ready to follow the reins of the story through his wife Renee's adultery and his subsequent murder of her.

If Lynch were into morals, we might postulate it's that you can't escape who you are or what you've done, but a second glance tells us differently. Fred may not be able to escape, but he can certainly stay lost-lost in morality and the lack thereof, for example. An easier moral is to suggest that there's no moral-that the peripheral elements of the film don't really add up to anything but a kind of intellectual anarchy. I would personally suggest a synthesis of the two. Lost Highway is definitely more than the sum of its parts, but it still doesn't add up to its intention, no matter how much Lynch would have us poke and prod at it. "Movies like this have to grow on you," someone once told me. Maybe so. But tumors also need to grow on you in order to have any effect, and I can't help drawing such a comparison any time you need to use inductive reasoning to prove a filmmaker's brilliance, even one as enigmatic and moving as David Lynch.

--Long

Copyright 2002 Tso Long Productions ©