Lost Highway revisited: When a decade brings second thoughts
If you look over in the DVD reviews posting today you'll find my review of the long-overdue DVD release of David Lynch's Lost Highway. As I allude to in the review, this is my second go at reviewing the film. My first was back in 1997 when I tackled it for this publication. At the time, it was a pretty big assignment. I had less than a full year of film-reviewing under my belt. Heck, I wasn't even doing it full time. After completing a year of grad school in English at UW-Madison–enough to get me an MA but try taking an English MA on the job market and see what it gets you–I'd dropped out and taken a job at a video store. Thanks to the encouragement of former editor (and current NPR mover and shaker) Stephen Thompson, I'd started doing some freelance movie reviews for what was then called The Onion A.V. Club between shifts spent checking in soft porn, steering customers to a virtually direct-to-video movie called Bottle Rocket, and buying coupons in the student newspapers in my capacity as "Marketing Specialist." (Would a true marketing specialist have had to open the store at 8 a.m. and do change runs to the bank? I'm thinking not.)
Within a year I'd be working for the publication full time, but all that was ahead of me when I walked into the now-defunct Majestic Theater in Madison, WI in 1997 to see the latest Lynch film. I emerged with this opinion:
The latest offering from David Lynch, the first in nearly five years, is a slow, ponderous, ultimately unsuccessful exercise in cerebral nihilism. Bill Pullman plays a tortured sax player who begins to receive mysterious videotapes that intimate dark things about his wife (Patricia Arquette). Then he seems to kill her and turn into Balthazar Getty. (You kind of have to be there.) This is Lynch's most challenging, experimental film since making his debut with Eraserhead, but it's also among his weakest. Perhaps the biggest flaw may be the jettisoning of the strand of dark humor that has run throughout his work. Lost Highway is as somber and oppressive as a Presbyterian sermon, and though it's visually impressive, so was the last video from Bush, and this is about as emotionally engaging.
Why Presbyterian? I now have no idea. Maybe because it sounded especially severe. And Scottish. Who knows?