Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: Lost Highway!

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With the passing of David Lynch, a great sadness has descended. Unless Vincent Gallo returns to releasing his films, we are unlikely ever to see another work from a great master of the form. Most tributes I have seen play up his warmth, humour and deep love of beauty and nature, as you might expect. But for me, the greatest of his several masterworks was by far his coldest and most alienating: 1997's still-unnerving meditation on the mind of OJ Simpson, Lost Highway.

In this scene, Lunch evoked the relatable horror of someone wanting to speak to you in the morning.

I have no more interest in explaining Lynch's work than he did: he was known to say only that he disliked talking about his films because "the film is the talking". Personally, if I were a genius (well, even more of one), I doubt I'd be able to shut the fuck up about everything I did, but Lynch was the Platonic Chad shape-rotator in a world of virgin wordcels. Lost Highway's plot may indeed be perfectly intelligible with a bit of analytical attention, as are those of Mulholland Drive and the rest, but the immediate impression of being hopelessly lost in an endless Möbius strip of nightmares should be experienced first and examined later.

Warning: David Lynch harboured an inexplicable hatred for epileptics and devoted at least one scene in each of his films to murdering them en masse with intense strobe lights.

Lynch wanted to use This Mortal Coil's heartbreaking, oceanic "Song to the Siren" (which might constitute the most brutal mogging of an original by a cover this side of Hardline's "Hot Cherie") in Blue Velvet, but couldn't get the rights, so collaborated with regular soundtrack maestro Angelo Badalamenti and their muse-of-the-day Julee Cruise to pen "Mysteries of Love" instead. A happy frustration, both because it yielded that serene exultation and because "Song to the Siren" fits much better in Lost Highway, Lynch's MTV nightmare, where its devastating ode to irretrievable loss crowns a soundtrack packed with bleak industrial bangers that capture a fleeting moment in popular music ignored by other films and thus forever sonically welded to this dark noir.

Which is crueller: showing this kino to an epileptic or to a zoomer with telephone anxiety?

Lost Highway remixes motifs from the greatest noirs, Kiss Me Deadly and Detour, but somehow effortlessly elevates them, just as Twin Peaks did for Laura. Patricia Arquette's blonde and brunette iterations recall Hitchcock's Vertigo. The scenes featuring Robert Blake as the Mystery Man are particularly redolent of Bergman's Hour of the Wolf, another Lynch favourite. Robert Loggia (The Sopranos) was cast as a particularly volatile gangster after a blowup over casting from the Blue Velvet days. Lynch always said ideas were like fish, and he never threw a good one back. But for all he hoarded inspiration from eclectic sources, there was still some mystery X-factor that made his endlessly imitated style somehow impossible to cap. Let's let his fellow late enigma and Lost Highway soundtrack alum play us out with a song that might as easily have been written for Lynch as for himself.

Article theme: I Can't Give Everything Away - David Bowie