Hacker Cinema
Lost Highway
1997 · Film · 134 min
Directed by David Lynch
A tormented jazz musician finds himself lost in an enigmatic story involving murder, surveillance, gangsters, doppelgängers, and an impossible transformation inside a prison cell.
12 positive1 negative1 mixed11 neutralfrom 25 commenters
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26 comments on Hacker News
Thanks! Here's the full list: 2001: A Space Odyssey, 8½, Aguirre the Wrath of God, Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, All That Heaven Allows, Apocalypse Now, Ashes and Diamonds, A Woman Under the Influence, Barry Lyndon, Bicycle Thieves, Breathless, Casablanca, Céline and Julie Go Boating, Chinatown, Chinese Roulette, Citizen Kane, City Lights, City of Pirates, Contempt, Daisies, Damnation, Dishonored, Earth, Electra My Love, El Topo, Eraserhead, Eyes Wide Shut, Film Socialisme, Fitzcarraldo, Fuego en Castilla, Hiroshima Mon Amour, Holy Motors, Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome, In a Year with 13 Moons, India Song, Inland Empire, Irma Vep, Koyaanisqatsi, La Dolce Vita, La Jetée, Late Spring, L'Eau de la Seine, Le Voyage dans la Lune, Lolita, Los Olvidados, Lost Highway, Lucifer Rising, Man with a Movie Camera, Metropolis, Mirror, Mulholland Drive, Night Music, Ordet, Orpheus, Persona, Pickpocket, Playtime, Psycho, Rebecca, Rosemary's Baby, Rumble Fish, Scarface, Seven Samurai, Sherlock Jr., Singin' in the Rain, Stalker, Sunset Boulevard, Taste of Cherry, Taxi Driver, Testament of Orpheus, The 400 Blows, The Blood of a Poet, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, The Color of Pomegranates, The Green Ray, The Holy Mountain, The Isle, The Lady from Shanghai, The Night of the Hunter, The Passion of Joan of Arc, The Seventh Seal, The Spirit of the Beehive, The Tales of Hoffmann, The Tree of Life, The Turin Horse, Time of the Gypsies, Tokyo Story, Touch of Evil, Trans-Europ-Express, Ugetsu, Un Chien Andalou, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, Vampyr, Videodrome, Wavelength, Werckmeister Harmonies, Wild Strawberries, Moonlight Sonata, Stellar, The Haunted House Biased toward European art cinema, experimental work, and directors who broke conventional narrative rules.
The people who tout "you can pause it" as an advantage of home theater are just not consuming movies the way I consume movies.
If you are in the theatre, no one is going to talk to you about the movie, or comment on it for no reason, etc.
I still regret pausing Lost Highway (like 25 years ago) so we could go out and smoke a cigarette. It completely broke the spell and the movie just wasn't the same from then on.
Few works of art are great across all the metrics. A book (or a movie) can have a great overall premise and structure, but have lacking dialog, flow or other issues. Is it good? Perhaps for me, but not for you.
I just watched Lost Highway in the theaters. I had never had a chance to watch it on the big screen before, and I brought my SO. I love the movie since there's no clear cut interpretation, yet it also feels accessible. My SO hadn't seen it before, and while she thought it was fine overall, she really disliked that there isn't a canonical "this is what happened and this is what the things mean" explanation. The very thing that made me love the movie.
I think Ebert didn't grasp what Lynch was going for with the Dorothy character, because I don't think anyone else in Hollywood was thinking like Lynch at the time.
Blue Velvet challenges you as a viewer to look at the abuse Dorothy suffers and to be a witness -- and that's hard to do as a viewer because it is ugly. Ebert did what a lot of people did and attempted to defend Isabella Rossellini, who had signed on to the movie knowing full well what would be required.
Lynch made two other movies in that same "the audience needs to bear witness and empathize" theme (Fire Walk With Me, Lost Highway) before Ebert caught on with Mulholland Dr.
Surprised nobody has mentioned Lost Highway - to me it is the perfect film.
Other than the 1980's Dune movie he directed, I think it was either Lost Highway or Mulholland Drive that made me want to know more about David Lynch.
I had to watch Mulholland Drive at least 5 times to get a sense of what it's even about, and I think I must have been the audience for which he made that film, if it wasn't indeed just art to make himself happy (which is the BEST kind).
Anyway, it kind of endears another person to you when you connect with their work. So this one hit kind of hard.
I lost a fellow weirdo, and he'll be missed!
If someone is not into art films, to not start with Twin Peaks is absolutely insane to me.
First two seasons of Twin Peaks are his masterpiece IMO and his most watchable.
Those are some of the best characters of any film/tv show ever.
From there I would go to Lost Highway next for a stronger dose of the more out there stuff.
The late David Foster Wallace said one of the only directors he found interesting was David Lynch.
https://youtu.be/C0Cvtu2FfGw?si=1_wk8fPMeeHYLrxl
I love that DFW wrote an essay about Lost Highway and used the term “Lynchian” (something horrific sitting right next to something mundane in a scene).
Charlie Rose asked Lynch about the phrase and didn’t really know how to respond.
Rose then brings this up with DFW who kinda chuckles and implies that was what he would expect.
Two extremely talented and intelligent creatives, but where DFW cared quite a bit how he was perceived, I don’t think Lynch ever gave a shit.
Lynch was on another plane of creativity and I’m not sure he even really knew it. He just did what he wanted to do (except for the original Dune film…)and let people take away from it what they might.
I honestly cant say I “enjoy” Lynch films but I will be the first to admit there is heart and soul poured into them by a genius.
The soundtrack to Lost Highway is one of my top albums, all categories. Equally as fascinating, weird, violent and beautiful as the film itself. The tracks are masterfully sequenced, often blend into each other and form a complete work in itself.
It has long been my testbed for gapless playback on various hardware and software, often to my disappointment. (I'm not sure the experience is even available on streaming platforms, where things are normally playlists of disparate blobs of data, where perhaps "this track is not available in your region".)
How sad. Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive (the IMO under-appreciated pilot), and yes his Dune even though he didn't like it are some of my favourite movies of all time. RIP
> known for cult films like Mulholland Drive, Inland Empire and Wild at Heart
Really? No, really? Not Twin Peaks? Not Lost Highway? Not Eraserhead, not The Elephant Man? Not Dune?!
I don’t believe that’s true. Lynch uses characters as abstractions — they represent a concept, which when you understand them add up to a ‘statement’:
* Twin Peaks is an meta commentary about the lack of balance on the small screen (our desire for sex and violence). Interestingly this ended up being a meta-meta-commentary when the network forced them to reveal the killer of Laura Palmer prematurely. Laura Palmer is balance, Dale Cooper is the audience, Bob is our desire for sex & violence, …
* Mulholland Drive is about the casting couch and the destruction of the Hollywood dream for women. Rita is the casting couch, the cowboy is Hollywood, …
* Lost Highway appears to be a comment about plagiarism (namely other directors plagiarising David Lynch). But it also has a similar theme to Twin Peaks as a meta commentary about film — the shots of the road are meant to look like film, the vehicles are meant to represent movies, …
etc.
He always talks about being “true to the idea” — so all abstractions and all surreal elements must be true to the underlying concept. It’s up to us to work out what the underlying theme is (that links all of the abstractions together).
> The movie is pretty much incomprehensible
um, isnt that kinda his thing?
or can you explain Lost Highway to me?
I don't necessarily disagree with this as a rule of thumb, but I thought it would be fun to come up with a few counter-examples. Most of these I would consider "artsy-fartsy" or "artsy-fartsy lite" movies that are popular with audiences but less so with critics.
Lost Highway (1997) - 68% Tomatometer - 87% Audience Score
Fight Club (1999) - 79% Tomatometer - 96% Audience Score
American Psycho (2000) - 68% Tomatometer - 85% Audience Score
Requiem for a Dream (2000) - 78% Tomatometer - 93% Audience Score
Dancer in the Dark (2000) - 69% Tomatometer - 91% Audience Score
Oldboy (2003) - 82% Tomatometer - 94% Audience Score
The Prestige (2006) - 77% Tomatometer - 92% Audience Score
Joker (2019) - 69% Tomatometer - 88% Audience Score
It really is a revelation to watch an older movie on UHD Blu-ray after being subjected to the mush that streaming services put up.
Services like Apple TV+ do pretty well on 4K when it's their own flagship content, but none of them care about movies that were shot before digital. They'll serve a terrible automatic encoding that loses all the detail from the original film.
I just bought Lynch's "Lost Highway" on UHD Blu-ray from the Criterion Collection, and this 1997 movie has probably never looked this good in any format. Even the original film prints shown in theatres were second-generation compared to this 4K. It's mastered from the negative and perfectly encoded to preserve the massive film grain in the indoor scenes.
I currently "own" 493 movies on iTunes. I don't use any streaming servies because my experience with them has been horrible--a couple dozen movies I want to watch with hundreds or thousands of filler movies that I have no interest in. When I started buying, I went into it with my eyes open. Apple seemed to be the safest option for companies that would be around for some time and unlikely to pull the plug on a service that wasn't doing as well as hoped. I've never had content pulled.
I'm the sort of person that like to rewatch things. As a kid I rewatched Star Wars so many times that I knew the lines in the entire movie by heart, these days the Big Lebowski is comfort food that I'll throw on when I'm bored. So the "rent" option on iTunes never made sense to me. And my concern with something like Netflix is--will it be there when I want to rewatch it?
If Apple ever gets out of the game I hope they give an out for people who have bought things, but I'm not optimistic. I'm less worried about them pulling content they lost a license to because I hope that licensing for purchase is a different world than licensing for free streaming.
(Also, remember that this is exactly the same for app stores. I did have an app pulled that I paid for. So it does happen, I'm just hopeful that it doesn't very often.)
EDIT: I just looked and I own two copies of David Lynch's "Lost Highway" (a mistake since I already owned it, and later saw it on sale and bought it without checking my list. It had changed hands and was being sold by a different distributor.) I searched for it on a non-logged-in computer and its not available to purchase at all. While this is a guarantee of nothing, it suggests that Apple's licensing with the movie rights owners may retain rights beyond the termination of the license.
Interestingly there are two David Lynch movies (Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive) that can be interpreted as just that: someone's disorienting nightmare as they are dying.
Take Dark City. I believe the studio forced a new opening that more or less explained everything rather than letting you puzzle it all out. I didn't find the movie too hard to work through, but I think Hollywood execs have a fairly low estimation of the audience's intellect.
Lynch is a bit harder. Lynch is atypical in two ways that play off of one another. First and most obviously, he has been developing as a film-maker (as one would hope over the decades), but he expects that his audience would have kept up with him, introducing a kind of filmic vocabulary. I would say that Mulholland Drive is much, much more comprehensible once you have understood what Lost Highway is on about. In turn, Lost Highway is an extended riff off of the dualism you would see in Twin Peaks and Fire Walk With Me. As to the second factor, Lynch is very heavy into TM and he would like to present images, sounds, and such to the viewer, and then find out what the viewer thinks of them. Not in a "this is up to you to puzzle out," rather he is pitching rocks and skipping stones off of what he likely believes is to be a collective unconscious or a shared cultural experience, then being excited about what might pop up. It's a genuine interest, I think.
> the disappointment with Lost Highway
It's OK to not like David Lynch's work, it isn't for everyone, what with the "doing surrealism in a highly literal medium" and the logic of nightmares used.
To state that Lynch is "obviously awful movies ... had no clue .. disaster ... incapable" as an objective truth is just a category error.
it's like saying that a Mondrian is an obviously awful painting because it's not a good landscape composition, or that Jackson Pollock has no clue, because he paints trees in an unrealistic colour.
I have been a cinephile for at least ten years, watching several movies per week. I agree with some of the sentiments expressed here, and I can say I have been in a similar place in my film-watching hobby. It used to feel that "I've seen all the good ones", but no, not really. You certainly go into more obscure teritorry, but reasons for obscurity differ: it can be a bad movie, or it could be produced in Mexico, or it could have been produced sometime in 1934, or only available on torrents in 240p, or all of the above. Another thing that helps is knowing how you watch the movie: you're not watching Tarantino and Tarkovsky the same way. That would explain the disappointment with Lost Highway which has been rather coherent (compared to post Mulholland dr. Lynch). With this attitude, the author is locking himself out of a class of directors that are not catering to you (like Marvel does, lol), but require active participation and adapting from the film watcher. You can not enjoy El Topo or The Mountain by passively consuming.
Apt user name. TIL, thank you:
> Making The Shining, Stanley Kubrick announced Eraserhead was his favourite film and showed it to his cast and crew, “to put them in the mood”.
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2017/mar/22/david-lynch-eraserhead
So I was actually thinking of Lynch's later works (Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive, Twin Peaks) that definitely came after "The Shining" But yeah, they share things big and small, from tone to camera angles.
There's a scene in The Shining, about 3 /4 of the way through, where Jack is walking down a corridor in a rage, and it's _just weird_ (1), so reminiscent of The Man from Another Place in Twin peaks, and it's hard to say what's wrong, to unpick what's going on technically.
I only noticed this on the rewatch last week. I'd guess it's a combination of the acting and sound, camera angle and framing, lens choice, and the camera moving with him over the patterned carpet.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MzZP-OXA-zY
Might be worthwhile taking a break and watching "The Straight Story". It's one of Lynch's films that you could uncharacteristically call "charming".
Then saddle up for "Lost Highway" :)
It would have been amazing if Jodorowsky's Dune actually got made and released. He really was too far ahead of his time for the studio.
I feel that in order to make a roughly 2-hour long film on as complex a subject as what the novel portrays, the only way to illustrate that complexity properly is to ascribe to surrealist elements. That is the only form that can provide the necessary density, if done properly. Lynch knew this, which is why he took on the project, but was later pressured by the studio and his vision was lost. He did a pretty admirable job considering.
Lynch's pedigree speaks for itself:
Blue Velvet: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0090756/?ref_=nm_flmg_wr_23 Lost Highway: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0116922/?ref_=nm_flmg_wr_16 Mulholland Drive: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0166924/?ref_=nm_flmg_wr_14 Twin Peaks... etc...
I need to watch Lynch movies a couple of times to understand them. The first round goes with just an excitement about the themes, the atmosphere, the music. On the second round I got more pieces together and the movie finally hits me on the third watch.
Good examples are Mulholland Drive, a movie about dreams and reality. And Lost Highway, a movie about denial and jealousy.
Opinions on some of the movies from the list I've seen:
Idiocracy – Basically an ordinary comedy, with an above average plot, but overall nothing that special or interesting. Overrated.
Fight Club – One of my favourite movies, perhaps in my top 10. Really loved it.
The Game – Another great movie from David Fincher, I love the mysterious atmosphere of his movies.
The Man From Earth. – Huge disappointment, I never understood why people like this movie. It's basically one guy telling a predictable and boring story. One of the most overrated movies ever. (I mean overrated in subjective sense obviously.)
Traffic – One of the best movies about drugs and organized crime.
Inception – Above average but overrated, logically inconsistent, nothing really special about this movie. The Cell is another movie where people enter someone else's dreams and even though it has only 6.2 on IMDB, I think I enjoyed it more. The depictions of the dreams were definitely more creative and looked more dreamy.
Of the top of my head I would recommend these:
* Something from David Lynch – Lost Highway, Blue Velvet or Mullholland Drive.
* Requiem for Dream
* Evil (2003)
* Sin City
* Crank – not very known, but wow, this is the best action movie ever.
* Elite squad – another great action movie, very realistic, borderline documentary.
I agree.
I recently re-watched David Lynch's Lost Highway. That is a wonderful and complex film that on the surface seems nonsensical and surreal, but - once you make certain revelations - reveals its beautiful and elegant construction.