The Mind in the Mangle of the Genius (Lost Highway (DVD))

Name: menelik79

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Product:	Lost Highway (DVD)
Date:	18/03/02 (62 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: everything else is just cinema, great pictures, great music

Disadvantages: really fixes you up, you never know whats really going on

Here, at the beginning of a film-review, there ought to be some kind of plot synopsis, shouldn´t it? No chance, not with this film!
Sure, one can try and write about the couple the story starts with, and how they find a mysterious videotape in front of their house one morning, and one more on each following day, showing out of his perspective the intrusion of their house by the even more mysterious film-maker, a bit further inside on every day, until he even films them peacefully sleeping in their bed.
One can also write about the husband ( Bill Pullman in what is most probably his best role ever), who – after meeting a strange pale man who seems to have the rather useful talent to simultaneously be at many places and in many times – wakes up besides his brutally slaughtered wife one morning and of course is the primary suspect.
But when this husband is finally locked up in death-row, only to turn into a young and – more important – innocent car mechanic, then, at the very latest, one has to put up quite an effort to follow the story. Almost impossible on the first try, it doesn´t really get any easier on the second or third, too.

What all this is supposed to mean? That´s a piece of information, which will most probably stay hidden forever, somewhere in the deepest recesses of the mind of writing and directing genious David Lynch.
And he won´t tell a single thing. Never. As a principle.
The viewer is being completely left alone in his interpretation of extremely expressive pictures and some of the most complicated twists and turns of the storyline in film-history.
To my knowledge not even the so called “respected critics” were so far able to find an interpretation with some kind of “universal validity” one could adapt in order to have some kind of guiding rope – if a rotten one – through Lynch´s fantasy.
In spite – or maybe because – of this “Lo
st Highway” is one of the most fascinating pieces of art I know.
Whenever you think you found an island in the story, a short plot-line you believe to understand and hope to be able to follow until the end of the film, whenever you feel safe, Lynch comes out with another completely surprising turn.
Like a tsunami he washes the viewer of his island and pulls him down, again and again, in a sea of wild associations and interpretations, which generate a weird feeling of creepy oppression.
And this oppression lasts. After watching the film for the first time, I couldn´t get it out of my head for days. My brain, and the brains of all the people I watched it with, just couldn´t digest this complete refusal of rational explainability.
The amazing ( and insidious) thing is that – if you really let yourself get involved in it – you can´t even put away this irrationality as simply unrealistic.
When you realise something as illogical in an action-film, you immediately smile about it, criticise it or something else like it. In any way you can definitely designate it unrealistic and forget it.

The irrationality of “Lost Highway” however always gives the impression of a system, it never seems unrealistic but simply not tangible to the rational mind.
And as in watching it you always find yourself in the completely hopeless situation of trying to press the events of the story in an understandable continuity and a tangible system ( you really have to give in to absolute irrationality, to be able to even try to get into this film in any way, a time-loop is only one of an infinite number of possible interpretations), this singular feeling of oppression is generated, which makes this film such a special one.
Actually, I would rather put this film in the category of music than in the category of film, if in one of “optical music”, as in its system of seemingly illogical associations, which doesn´t tel
l a tangible story but generates a feeling and an atmosphere, “Lost Highway” is much closer to a symphony than to film, as one generally defines it.

Fantastic, extremely dark pictures ( the short moments of daylight seem to be alien elements in an otherwise dark body) and the soundtrack – produced by Nine Inch Nails´ Trent Reznor and consisting of instrumentals, some especially composed for the film by Reznor, and songs by NIN, Marylin Manson, Rammstein, Bowie, Smashing Pumpkins etc. – do their bit in generating the film´s unique atmosphere.
Even the songs by Rammstein, the “shock-rockers” most people in Germany usually smile or even laugh at, fit in wonderfully and strengthen the mosaic of actual music in the optical symphony called “Lost Highway”.

Absolutely unrestricted recommendation for everyone who isn´t under psychiatric treatment for schizophrenia or depressions already and expects more of cinema than cool heros and storytelling-standards.

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