Finding the Truth

Lost Highway (1997) was one of those movies I initially hate for having one weird thing happen after the other to the point that it causes me to completely disconnect from the story. Because we’ve seen weirder in this class, my patience was extended and I gave it a fighting chance. It was a good thing I did.

My group was assigned to lead the discussion about this movie, so I really had to force myself not to pull away from it too early on. The beginning reminded me of Fahrenheit 451 (1966) where everything in the house was super plain and interactions between married couples were quite robotic. I did cringe at how Renee was portrayed as the “perfect” wife, being submissive to her husband and always looking put together like never not wearing makeup, blow-dried hair, and six-inch heels in the house. From then on, I was equipped to watch a movie set in a dystopian society, but the later scenes proved to me otherwise. It wasn’t really about a dystopian society; this movie was centered on a single story with multiple perspectives. It took a turn when they played the tape showing someone or something entering and going around the house. They could have taken it any way from that point on. I didn’t know if it was going to go a Sci-Fi or Horror path, so the entity that entered the room could’ve really been anything. There were extremely long silences and the tension stimulated by the score made the movie pretty hard to watch. The build-up to scenes leading to nowhere but darkness got old fast. Later on, we’re shown the mystery man behind the videos at the party, and suddenly, things got a little more interesting. His glare was the most haunting part of this whole movie. Even with identifying who was videoing, there were still unanswered questions like how he was able to video inside the house while he was physically at the party. Mystery man is clearly no ordinary human stalker, but possibly a figment of Fred’s imagination or a representation of something greater like the concept of technology robbing all of us of any degree of privacy.

Besides this new character being added to the mix of chaos, there was another plot twist that made the movie even more interesting. A different man was found in Fred’s prison cell. Now, they really could’ve taken this anywhere. At first, I thought Pete was a completely different man, but after some discussion with my groupmates, I realized that he was the same guy, but it was the perspective of the story that simply changed.

Looking into it, we realized that this whole movie was just playing with the idea of how people can manipulate memories and recall different events as they choose. In one of the tapes, we were shown a glimpse of this murder scene that took place in Fred and Renee’s home. Fred was soon found guilty of the murder of his wife and was sentenced to death. The transformation took place when he looked up at the ceiling and had a series of hallucinations. In addition to the angles we were shown from the camera footage and Fred’s memory, a new one is added and it takes on Pete’s life after prison. This angle of a new character seems to be the fantasy timeline of Fred’s life taking into consideration how Pete is living a life considered ideal by some including Fred himself. If we were to assume that it was indeed Fred’s biased memory in the first few scenes, it makes sense how he manipulated his own mind into thinking Renee was this perfect and beautiful wife that was always there to please his sexual desires to possibly erase any possibility of him being pointed at as the murderer. Of course, the video footage (which is supposedly objective) does show that he did the murder. At this point, anything—whether it may be a recalled memory or a video—can be classified as a lie, but there’s no way of truly knowing which angle showed the truth of what happened or who is who. I’d like to believe that the makers of this movie deliberately made answers to these questions vague or even nonexistent to leave it up to the viewers. Lost Highway tackled a mind boggling concept as is anyways, so it would make less sense if this movie had one correct answer for everything.

There are a lot of theories that try to make sense of this movie and I thoroughly enjoyed reading up on each one. It was definitely a more likeable movie for me after I researched more about it and watched interviews with the director. David Lynch has a mind unlike any other, and him explaining his inspiration and treatment for Lost Highway changed my view of reality and film. Though I’ve never watched any other David Lynch movie before, Lost Highway was enough for me to see his ingenuity and wit. The industry is lucky to have a mind like his in it. He created something that has kept a conversation about its story going for decades, and that sounds like a great movie in my book.