I'm tickled to see "Lost Highway" in the Onion's AV Club. It's one of my favorite David Lynch movies. People usually gush about "Eraserhead" and "Blue Velvet," and "Mulholland Drive," but "Lost Highway" is a keeper in so many ways -- a tasty, horrific lil' film noir with so much going for it, in terms of atmosphere. Some of the shots of it are so unsettling (one of my favorites is this slow pan of Pullman's character's bedroom, where the camera moves very slowly across it and you don't even realize you've gone into absolute darkness until you're already there -- wonderful shot).
I remember seeing it in the theaters when it came out, dragging a high school buddy to see it (Exene came along, too), sometime in 1997, when it came out. Hard to believe -- 27-year-old Dave! Long ago! Anyway, it was a stunning, horrifying movie. I remember walking out in a daze, everybody silent for about 20 minutes, and then my friend said "What the HELL was that movie all about?" I had my theories, and I expounded on them, what I thought had happened.
I think the "key" to "Lost Highway" is entirely there, and the ONION guy appears to mostly get it in his review. The key is Bill Pullman's talk of how he likes to remember things in his own way, not how they necessarily actually happened. That's it. And the two halves of the movie, in my view, reflect this dichotomy -- the impossible seems to happen midway through the movie, and we see what seems to be a second plot emerge out of the blue, but really, it's all interwoven -- it's all Pullman's nightmare, his fantasy -- he projects himself into that second plot, as somebody else. The second plot is really a shadow image of the original plot, what Pullman's character did to try to come to terms with what he actually did. The clues and keys are all there (especially in the VIDEO -- the videotaping is the key to it, because Pullman's character has this aversion to objective reality when it comes up against his ego, and so the videotape motif of it is vital to getting what was actually going on, versus what was appearing to go on. The video doesn't lie, and that's vital).
The trick of "Lost Highway" is that you have an unreliable narrator (really not a narrator, but an unreliable protagonist). Lynch's game he plays with the audience is having us, the audience, experience Pullman's character's world through his eyes, with reality periodically intruding and disturbing him (as reality surely must disturb the delusional). It's a brilliant movie (and is definitely a teste flight for what he did with "Mulholland Drive" -- which more people like, and which revisits those ideas he established in "Lost Highway.")
Pullman's character is so out of touch that he creates these extensions of self to shield his "real" (?) self from the consequences of his actions. It's kind of like "Fight Club" without the big revelation in the mix (and, again, video plays a role in that revelation, too, if you'll remember). The revelation in "Lost Highway" (which makes the movie make much more sense) is gradual, and isn't so nakedly apparent as in Fincher's movie.
Therein lies the brilliance of it -- people get distracted by Lynch's tendency to quirk the fuck out of his movies, but in this one, he trusted his audience to be sharp enough to get what was going on, without spoon-feeding them. The trouble is, most of his audience were Americans, not Europeans, so the indirect approach in his movie likely left people not sure what the hell was happening.
Seeing the ONION blurb above makes me want to get "Lost Highway" on DVD again. I loved that movie, and it's still one of my favorites of Lynch's. One of the best scenes in it, and scariest...
Mystery Man
Now, if you view the above as objective reality, then there's this bogeyman giving Bill Pullman shit at this party, and this entity is doing what seems to be impossible. But really, the Mystery Man is an extension of Pullman himself, and doesn't actually exist. He's a projection of his murderous guilt, essentially. The Mystery Man IS Pullman, and Pullman is the demonic Mystery Man. But Pullman sees himself as a good guy, not a demon, and so he recoils from this part of himself, and what horrible things that part of himself actually did.
