Image copyright © by Marcus Trahan

Lost Highway

(1997)

What are you going to do about a guy like David Lynch? He went right from Eraserhead, one of the only independent “underground” films I thought was really brilliant, right to the big-studio and equally brilliant The Elephant Man, produced by Mel Brooks, of all people. Then he made the disastrously awful and expensive Dune and should have been washed up, but followed it with the extremely disturbing masterpiece Blue Velvet and the wonderfully weird “Twin Peaks.” And just when you think he’s the oddest man on the planet he makes a little mainstream gem like The Straight Story, or the noir Mulholland Dr.

But along the way are a few bits of roadkill like Lost Highway. We went into it having read a few reviews, knowing it wasn’t going to make much sense. That can be okay, sometimes the world doesn’t make much sense, does it? You have to acknowledge that once again, it is a film fetchingly shot, everything looks very good. Once more the music of Angelo Badalamenti is capable of making you think you’re seeing a lot more than you’re really seeing. (The music is usually an important high point of a Lynch film, and it always seems to be by Angelo B.) But there’s really nothing here but an exercise in weird futility, and I was left empty and uninvolved, all the way through. If it hadn’t been Lynch, I probably wouldn’t have finished it.