March 5, 1997
Web posted at: 4:45 p.m. EST
From Movie Reviewer Paul Tatara
(CNN) -- David Lynch should be extremely happy to have his ever-shrinking audience. There are people who still swear by his ridiculously self-conscious, masochistic twaddle, and this can be traced to the fact that the man actually used to make emotionally-anchored films. Even "Eraserhead," which is as dark and disorienting as anything he's ever done, had an undercurrent of humanity that guided the audience through the nightmarish landscape of Lynch's imagination. The darkness in "Eraserhead" was occasionally leavened with humor, the horror with sympathy. When I was in college back in 1984, I wrote a piece on Lynch in which I called him the most exciting, uniquely talented new director in America.
Well, here we are several years and, with the release of "The Lost Highway," five films later, and Lynch is still strikingly original. He is also a painter, and his movies have an immediately identifiable look to them, with soundtracks that are painstakingly compiled mixes of disturbing, industrial-based roars and hums. How sad, then, that (for several films now, and with no end in sight) he has taken every pointless, misanthropic impulse he's ever had and run with it. The highway isn't the only thing that's lost in Lynch's new movie. So is his vision.
This is where I'm supposed to describe what "The Lost Highway" is about, but it isn't about anything at all. Lynch and his self-congratulatory cult surely think this is a wonderful, knowing joke on the movie-going public. I have news for them. Vaguely related scenes strung end-to-end constitute nothing more than self-gratifying laziness when a person this talented is responsible. Lynch is supposedly working some dark, psychosexual vein of his imagination. Again. I'll give you a taste of what goes on, without besmirching the good standing of the word "plot." Bill Pullman, who squints, is Fred, an avant-garde tenor saxophonist living in the Hollywood Hills with his girlfriend, Renee. Renee is played by Patricia Arquette with a tinny voice that sounds exactly like a real cheap transistor radio tuned to NPR. Fred and Renee have a tendency to eye each other menacingly while the soundtrack goes rumble-rumble. They also, in the usual Lynchian manner, have remarkably joyless sex.
Soon, their blissful existence is turned on its ear when they start receiving videotapes of their home, inside and out. Someone has been taping them while they are sleeping. Later, at a party, Fred encounters a mysterious stranger played by Robert Blake. Blake has no eyebrows, wears pancake makeup, and refuses to blink, which is supposed to be incredibly creepy. If you happen to be 7 years old, I'm sure it is. At this point I couldn't have rolled my eyes more if I took them out of my head and tossed them across a dice table.
There's no way to make this long story short, so suffice it to say that Fred ends up brutally murdering Renee and being sent to death row. This is where Pullman's character turns into Balthazar Getty. I'm not making this up. He actually "becomes" another character. Of course, when prison wardens suddenly find a different person in the cell of a now-missing condemned man, they call the new guy's parents and have them take him home. Getty then falls for the girlfriend of a (surprise!) brutal mobster, played by Robert Loggia. The girlfriend is played by Patricia Arquette, and, despite the fact that she is now a blonde, she may very well be Pullman's wife, who was murdered earlier by Pullman before he became Balthazar Getty. Lynch's fans would call this stuff "brave," and "visionary." I have another word for it, and it has to do with the excretory functions of cattle.
This comes close to editorializing, but I think something needs to be addressed here. Lynch manages, during the course of this film, to strip and photograph Patricia Arquette from every conceivable angle. Arquette is very attractive, but any tinge of eroticism is erased by Lynch's insistence on degrading the women in his films. This is what "Blue Velvet" is actually about, and, if that had been the only time Lynch dwelled on the topic in his movies, I would accept it. By now, however, it's become increasingly obvious that Lynch is fascinated by the brutalizing of sexually inviting women. When forced sex at gunpoint is presented as bluntly as Lynch likes to handle things, it's not metaphorical- it's onscreen rape, and we're lying to ourselves if we think there aren't a great many people out there who get their jollies from watching it. People can argue that David Lynch is not one of his characters, and I'm not claiming that the man himself participates in anything like this. I do think, though, that audiences should eventually say enough is enough.
"Lost Highway's" so-called conclusion hinges on the showing of a snuff film, in which a woman is murdered during sex ... while Patricia Arquette services Robert Loggia in front of the screen. This is a free country, and people can (and should be allowed to) make the films that they want to make. I just think that David Lynch needs to cool his jets already. If there's a point, and I seriously doubt that there is, surely it's been made by now.
During this movie, an extremely well-known (and critically lauded) film director, whose heyday was the late 1970s, took a seat directly in front of me. I was interested in talking to him about "The Lost Highway" because his films also dealt (during his peak) with sexual psychoses, but in a much broader, more popcorn movie-ish manner. He also has a great gift for visual storytelling, a talent for which Lynch is often applauded even though his recent movies make little sense visually or verbally. I never got a chance to talk to this filmmaker. He left after about an hour. Could it have been Lynch's insistence on belaboring his rapes? Could it have been the lack of plot? Or could it have been that, at long last, David Lynch has become an utter boor? I saw Lynch being interviewed on TV a few nights ago, and he said he didn't mind criticism as long as it was constructive. Well, I have some constructive criticism for him: Focus on your painting.
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