2h 14m
USA, 1997
Director: David Lynch
Cast: Bill Pullman, Patricia Arquette, Balthazar Getty, Natasha Wagner, Robert Blake
Language: English, Subtitles: Norwegian
Age restriction: 18+
Tickets are available at Odeon Kino Stavanger.
In collaboration with Odeon Kino Stavanger, Cinemateket presents a selection of David Lynch’s films this spring.
Lost Highway is the closest one can get to a pure nightmare on film. Lynch himself describes it as a "gothic noir horror adventure," and you should leave all expectations of a conventional film experience at home. The story of Lost Highway is not easy to decipher, and Lynch recommends viewing it as a visual journey rather than a logically or chronologically structured narrative.
From the opening scene, we sense that something is wrong. One morning, married couple Fred and Renee receive a videotape showing them sleeping. The police get involved, but before they can uncover anything, Renee is dead, and Fred is in prison. While incarcerated, he transforms into a young car mechanic named Pete, who later begins a passionate affair with Renee’s doppelgänger, Alice—also played by Patricia Arquette, this time as a blonde. This sets the stage for an intensely gripping cinematic experience. With music by Rammstein, Trent Reznor, and Marilyn Manson, David Lynch brings to life his darkest and most anxiety-ridden fantasies.
Lynch became interested in transcendental meditation in the early 1970s, and this fascination permeates all his work, both in visual art and film. A central theme in his films is the hidden corridors of the mind—dreams and nightmares—and how they can trigger actions in the real world. Almost all of his films feature a dreamlike logic, a surreal or nightmarish visual style, or actual dream sequences. For instance, Eraserhead contains dream sequences, The Elephant Man dreams of his mother, Agent Cooper in Twin Peaks frequently has dreams and visions that guide his investigations, and Mulholland Drive includes a chilling subplot about a nightmare involving the man behind Winkie’s.
Lost Highway is deeply infused with a nightmare-like structure, including repetitions, false memories, characters saying eerily illogical things in otherwise normal settings, and personalities that shift entirely.
In classical storytelling, dreams are usually clearly marked with cinematic conventions—such as close-ups of a sleeping face transitioning into the dream sequence. However, in Lynch’s films, this transition is not always so distinct. The dream world, the subconscious, and reality are never entirely separate.