Lost High­way at 20 – In praise of David Lynch’s eerie LA neo-noir

“Dick Lau­rent is dead.” These are the first words Bill Pullman’s char­ac­ter hears in Lost High­way, and his ner­vous response hints to some sub­con­scious under­stand­ing of the seem­ing­ly ran­dom mes­sage. The voice speak­ing the words is com­ing through his home’s inter­com sys­tem, and a quick look out the win­dow shows no signs of any­one out­side. A dis­em­bod­ied voice, a pro­tag­o­nist who seems to haunt their home rather than live in it, a fore­bod­ing sense of unease – this film has David Lynch’s strange fin­ger­prints all over it from the start.

For many, the director’s 1997 psy­cho­log­i­cal thriller serves as a pre­lude to his 2001 mas­ter­piece Mul­hol­land Dri­ve, but it is a mys­te­ri­ous, enthralling neo-noir in its own right. Briefly put, Lost High­way tells the odd tale of Fred Madi­son (Pull­man), a sax­o­phon­ist in the sleazy night-time world of Lynch’s eerie, twist­ed Cal­i­for­nia, who mys­te­ri­ous­ly finds him­self on death row for the mur­der of his wife Renee (Patri­cia Arquette) despite hav­ing no knowl­edge of her death. While on death row, he inex­plic­a­bly morphs into Pete Day­ton (Balt­haz­ar Get­ty) and begins lead­ing a com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent life.

Mul­hol­land Dri­ve per­plexed and enter­tained in equal mea­sure before offer­ing some mea­sure of cathar­sis by its con­clu­sion, but Lost High­way steers us firm­ly down the road away from ratio­nal thought. Madison’s visions of strange fig­ures dri­ving down desert­ed roads, and of a pale man who seem­ing­ly knows every­thing about him, typ­i­fy the Lynchi­an desire to dis­rupt small-town Amer­i­ca and replace it with a mirage.

Lynch’s idio­syn­crat­ic use of Los Ange­les’ icon­ic topog­ra­phy, with its dis­tinct streets and slop­ing hills imbu­ing his vaude­vil­lian freak shows with dif­fer­ent kinds of evil, is as com­pelling in Lost High­way as it is in Mul­hol­land Dri­ve. And then some. Robert Loggia’s angry, mer­cu­r­ial gang­ster, Dick Lau­rent, is a men­ac­ing force that holds the sun­set strip on a string – in one of the film’s best scenes, he near­ly dri­ves a tail­gater off the hill­side and drags him out of his car in a vul­gar, aggres­sive show of machis­mo. LA gets under the skin of Lynch’s char­ac­ters; they bear its secrets like a crim­i­nal Atlas.

When Lau­rent shows up at Pete’s car garage, it’s hard to deny the influ­ence that found its way into Nico­las Wind­ing Refn’s Dri­ve, with its Hol­ly­wood Hills back­drop, blue-col­lar shop fronts and oth­er recur­ring motifs. Both films fol­low moral­ly dubi­ous char­ac­ters as they nav­i­gate a non­lin­ear, large­ly noc­tur­nal world. It’s this dream-like set­ting that seems to have crept out of the Black Lodge itself, one which Lynch was keen to return to after the crit­i­cal fail­ure of Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me. The mys­te­ri­ous pale man at the cen­tre of Lost High­way embod­ies much of the hor­ror present in Twin Peaks, and marks a com­ing togeth­er of Lynch’s folk­loric par­al­lel worlds, haunt­ed towns and name­less spectres.

Though not as uni­ver­sal­ly laud­ed as Blue Vel­vet or Lynch’s oth­er LA neo-noir, Lost High­way deserves to be spo­ken of in the same breath as the cult director’s best work. So before Twin Peaks returns for its third sea­son and the world falls at the feet of this sur­re­al­ist mas­ter, per­haps you should take the first exit and head into the hills. Go get lost, again.