David Lynch’s Lost Highway is a nightmarish noir about jealousy, repressed guilt and murder. As with many of the director’s best films it exists in an unsettling world between reality and a dream where events are not all they seem and a rigid internal logic is forsaken for a descent into the damaged mind of the film’s protagonist. Lost Highway, along with Eraserhead, might be the closest Lynch has ever come to making an out and out horror film. This is a foreboding and ominous work that is as gripping as it is bewildering.

As with much of the director’s work this is a hard film to explain and categorise. It is a film to be experienced first-hand with its…

What does the Black Lodge see when it sees us? A labyrinth of doors and exits? Loops and circuits in spacetime fissured and joined, continuous until discontinuous, unidentical at every point yet self-similar? A network to transit, an environment in which to be and to become.

What is noir? Like, what does it do and how does it do it? Noir is about unequal informatics, of landscapes that shift and dissolve based upon their inhabitants and their relative positioning to each other. Noir is the set-up and the execution of the set-up. The set-up necessarily precedes those who enter into it but the set-up is not a set-up until someone wanders in to activate it as such. Noir is a…

It seems that there are at least two ways to enjoy a David Lynch film. One is to expect it to make sense and do everything you can to analyze the shit out of it until it does. The other is to just revel in the weirdness and the creativity and not worry about making all the pieces fit together.

On my first watch of Lost Highway, I can't possibly put into words what the fuck happened. I feel like there are things I implicitly understood about the narrative and the connection between the two halves of the film, but what I took away from it was a wordless feeling of unease and anxiety. I don't want to think about…

Watching Lynch's films has always been a mental exercise, and Lost Highway is still perplexing even on a second viewing.

"I like to remember things my own way."
"What do you mean by that?"
"How I remembered them, not necessarily the way they happened."

Those lines speak volumes for the way Lynch interprets emotions through surreal, erratic, and often disconcerting, narratives. Lost Highway has straightforward themes (guilt, jealousy, rage, etc) but the story is nowhere near uncomplicated. The film delves into the depths of human psyche through images that resonate with and beyond the familiar; making the absurd seem sensible, and the rational seem unreliable.

Lost Highway is unconcerned with steering the viewers into a grounded conclusion, making it an…

I get it. I get what Lynch was going for (I think), and I appreciate it. The man knows how to direct actors and get good performances and though his work is surreal, it has obvious identifiable themes that are more important than the mechanics of the plots themselves...but this one just didn't land for me.

It felt overly dour. Oddly lacking in the Lynchian over-the-top theatrics and humor, as if the mixed reactions to Wild at Heart and failure of Twin Peaks Fire Walk with Me (and the way the series itself was twisted out of his control) had beaten him down, the movie just feels a little flat and uninspired.

Lynch is if nothing else, an artist, and…