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

Greatest Movie of All time of the Week: After Hours!

Martin Scorsese is now mostly famous for telling zoomoids marvelshit isn't cinema, but to olds like me, he was mostly famous for making gangster flicks where people talk like people talk, you know? With the you-knows and the whatnots. And this sort of gradually overlapped with and morphed into biopics and theological navelgazing and other things of that lofty nature.

Yeah, this ain't one of those.

But, like those few strips where Garfield became an existential horror comic, in 1985 Scorsese suddenly decided, just once, to make a David Lynch film, which was an audacious move, because Blue Velvet didn't drop until the following year, and Lynch's formula (one part Hitchcock, one part Kafka, one part The Wizard of Oz) was yet to be articulated*. Nothing Scorsese did before or since was anything like After Hours, which is a shame because it's his best movie, but is also kind of great because it implies any mainstream filmmaker or entertainer in general might just take a sudden detour into bizarre territory for no reason at all.

Horrifying sculpture of Gregor Samsa-mode abjection, or YouTuber reacting to the new slop to drop on Disney Plus? As always, you decide.

Griffin Dunne plays Paul Hackett (who, we will learn, can't), a hapless everyman whose efforts to live out the plot of a romantic comedy with Rosanna Arquette (Buffalo 66) go awry due to a storm of what begins to seem like targeted bad luck. Events contrive to strand him in the Soho district of New York, unable to get home. Like Dorothy, this becomes his singular focus, but things get worse and worse for him as his neurosis leads to poor decisions and his poor decisions lead to crippling fear and guilt, none of which is warranted because he's clearly in a situation so absurd that no decision he could make could save him from it.

"Can't we just get over the rainbow?" - Dorothy Gale, Paul Hackett, and everyone living in currentyear+9.

To say much more would be to give away a lot of the twists and turns of the piece, so I'll pontificate on Kafka instead. Kafka's main theme was abjection, which he understood so well that he completely covered everything there is to say on it, at least from the inside. Despite this, every other person I pass in the street wears a Nirvana T-shirt, indicating that abjection as a topic has never been more popular. Social media is mostly people whining about (and demonstrating) their collection of mental illnesses. Characters in TV and movies are made unlikable and dysfunctional so people can "relate" to them. What none of these posers realise is that Kafka was laughing at them (and himself) because unlike Burt Cobain and his shit Pixies knock-off band that blew up over their only good song (read: riff), Kafka had a sense of humour.

The longer you look at this still, the funnier it becomes.

*Ingmar Bergman also made a Lynch film, 1968's Hour of the Wolf, long before even Eraserhead dropped, but since it's Bergman it has only the dark Kafka stuff, because Bergman is Shadow the Hedgehog.