“A FEAR OF FUGUES”

By Raymond Benson

David Lynch’s challenging 1997 feature, Lost Highway, has had a tortured home video release history. After an initial VHS release, and then one on DVD, rights issues and a lack of interest by media companies prevented a Blu-ray release in the USA for many years. Less-than-ideal quality imported Blu-ray editions from various countries were circulated among Lynch fans and collectors. Kino Lorber finally put out a decent Blu-ray in 2019, but it was criticized by home video review sites and by Lynch himself as having inferior quality, as it didn’t go through the stringent approval process to which the director was accustomed. Cinema Retro reviewed that edition, finding it not terrible and certainly adequate enough since it seemed that it was all that we were ever going to get.

Now, however, The Criterion Collection has issued a new, director-approved 4K UHD edition that is an astonishingly gorgeous digital restoration with a new 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack and an alternate one of uncompressed stereo. Criterion’s Lost Highway can be purchased as a 2-disk set containing a 4K UHD disk of the film alone plus a Blu-ray disk of the film and all the supplements, or in a single disk Blu-ray package.

Much of what this reviewer has to say about the film itself is repeated from the earlier 2019 review.

Lost Highway is a disturbing and surreal work of art from Luis Buñuel’s heir apparent, and it’s a doozy. Lynch described the film as a “psychogenic fugue,” which is a fancy term for a dissociative disorder. The story concerns musician Fred Madison (Bill Pullman), who is having marriage trouble with his beautiful wife, Renee (Patricia Arquette). An outside force seems to be watching and harassing the couple by leaving intimate videotapes of themselves on their doorstep. Throw in some nightmares and the appearance of a “mystery man” (the very creepy Robert Blake) with powers that could only exist as dream logic, and Fred eventually loses it. Suddenly he’s arrested for killing his wife. But then—uh oh—while he’s sitting in a jail cell, he becomes… someone else. The cops find Pete Dayton (Balthazar Getty) in Fred’s place. Puzzled, they let Pete go, since he’s not the man they want. Now there’s a kind of alternate universe thing going on, because Patricia Arquette now plays Alice, the mistress of the cruel Mr. Eddy (Robert Loggia), who may in truth be a porn producer named Dick Laurent.

Confused? Many audience members were baffled at the time of Lost Highway’s initial release. The picture marked the first in what might be called the “fugue trilogy” (the other parts being Mulholland Drive and INLAND EMPIRE), in which main characters become other people during the flow of the tales. After a second or third viewing and examining Lynch’s narrative conceits in the other movies, one can get a sense of what it’s all about.

And this reviewer is not going to tell you. Just know that Lost Highway is about a man who murders his wife, and he is unable to live with himself—or inside his own mind—because of it. The film generates a good amount of dread, and it is pure Lynch. It marks a transition from earlier, more narrative-friendly pictures, to more dreamlike, experimental works of art that defy description—other than that they are “David Lynch Films.”

Peter Deming’s cinematography is fully exploited in Criterion’s new restoration. His use of light and shadow is remarkable, and the bits in which Fred walks into a dark hallway and disappears, and then later reappears from the blackness, are canny metaphors for the themes in the movie.

As opposed to the earlier Kino disk, Criterion has included some choice supplements. Most notable is the 1997 feature documentary, Pretty as a Picture: The Art of David Lynch, which served as a behind-the-scenes “making of Lost Highway” piece as well as a look at Lynch’s career as an artist (painting/sculpture) and filmmaker. Highway cast members and crew are interviewed along with Lynch himself, and there are clips from earlier films, too. An audio-only excerpt from the audiobook of Lynch and Kristine McKenna’s biography, Room to Dream, covers the period in the mid-90s when Highway was made. Two archival featurettes about the making of the film and interviews with cast/crew are also welcome. The theatrical re-release trailer rounds out the package. The booklet feature interview excerpts from the publication Lynch on Lynch. Note that the feature film does not have chapter breaks, in keeping with other Lynch-approved Blu-ray and DVD releases.

Lost Highway has become more mysterious and admirable with age, and Criterion’s new release does the work justice. For fans of David Lynch, dark—very dark—crime dramas, surreal cinema, and bravura filmmaking.

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