Fear Factor

Lost Highway was one of the most unnerving and creepy films I have watched in the last couple of years. The film was not like most horror, or maybe thriller would be the better genre for the movie, films because the thing that was causing all the paranoia and fear was just a person. To be clear, the mystery man is no ordinary person as made obvious by the scene when Fred first met the mystery man in a party where he was both at the party and inside Fred’s house to answer the phone call. In my opinion, this first encounter of Fred and the mystery man perfectly introduced the audience to the main antagonist of the film because we were able to see what was stalking the couple and he was just as creepy as I imagined him to be if not more. This creepy vibe from the mystery man perfectly coincides with the film’s feel because the movie does not try to scare its audience outright by showing a scary figure or shocking them with jump scares like most horror movies employ today. Instead, the movie relies on keeping the audience on its toes and always making them think that something scary is going to happen even though nothing usually does. I’m not saying that the film does not use these things at all because I think we were all shocked and terrified when the mystery man’s face replaced that of Renee after Fred and her did the deed, but these are not their main methods in keeping the audience on the edge of their seats. A good example of the film makers building up the tension without actually showing anything scary is during the scene where Fred and his wife, Renee, go outside their room and look into the vast darkness of the hallway. This scene was one of the most stressful and disturbing sequences for me because I had no idea what was going to happen next. There were so many possible outcomes to that scene such as the mystery man popping out that I could not prepare myself for what was to come. In the end, nothing really happened in the dark hallway except for the couple walking through it. All in all, I think Lost Highway is one of my favorite “horror” movies that I have ever watched because of how it builds up the tension as well as misdirection to make the audience lower their guard for their more terrifying scenes to be more impactful. Another noteworthy thing about the film is how they tie up all, or at least most, of the loose ends they scattered throughout the film. From the message Fred receives at home that Dick Laurent is dead to the different dreams that Fred has, we see the importance of all of these things come later on in the film and even though there may be some scenes where the audience are confused with what the meaning is as to why these were shown, the film makers did a great job at tying everything together. I hope that more modern horror films try to emulate the fear inducing method that was used in Lost Highway because it is, in my opinion, how real horror can be achieved.

in memory of the Lost Highway

Written by Emerson Enriquez 170819

People tell different stories about the same events. I’m only licensed with three units worth of a general psychology class, so I am no expert when it comes to the human mind and how it functions. Although, the way I understand things, individuals tend to recall the same happenings in different ways, given that each person has had that event colored in a unique manner. Whatever what one person was feeling or going through when a certain event transpired influences how that person recollects that occurrence. Any two individuals can experience the same incident, and how they tell you about that event can totally differ since they are coming from two different perspectives.

“I like to remember things my own way… How I remember them, not necessarily the way they happened.”

Fred Madison perfectly exemplifies this mental phenomenon. he was a struggling musician living that white picket fence life with his suburban raven-haired wife, Renee. Albeit things were a bit shady, life was as perfectly mundane and predictable as it could be for them – until random VHS tapes, containing footage of them at home showed up on their doorstep.

After getting no value-adding help from the police, the couple are left in an even more unnerving place. What made things all the more confusing and mentally disturbing for Fred is that a certain Mystery Man keeps popping up in the most obscure places – his dream, through a phone call and even on his wife’s face. The phrase “Dick Laurent is dead” continues to haunt him alongside the creepy image. In one instance, the VHS shows him hovering over the dead body of Renee, and he is sent to the death row for allegedly murdering her. In the most complex and mind-boggling sequence of events, Fred “suddenly” transforms into Pete Dayton, a young scruffy auto-mechanic. “Pete” is then released and goes back to his everyday job. It’s at this point in the film where a viewer starts to ponder if it was a body-swapping situation, if Fred really magically turned into the younger stud, or if the film literally just abandoned the story of the Madisons and jumped into a completely different one.

Pete’s life starts off at his auto-mechanic shop where Mr. Eddy, a high-riding mobster, has him fix up his car. Impressed with his work, Mr. Eddy returns the same day, this time with his bombshell mistress Alice, whom Pete seems to have a “love”-at-first-sight moment with. Strikingly enough for anyone watching, Patricia Arquette also plays the role of Alice, as she has already portrayed Renee in Fred’s side of the story. Eventually, Pete and Alice do hit it off and begin an affair, as observed by two inquisitive detectives from Fred’s jail. In fear that Mr. Eddy would catch up to them, and he does, the pair decides to elope, with a plan to get all the money they need from Andy, who turns out to be a friend of both Alice and Renee (if those two are two different people, anyway). After murdering Andy and finding their way to a desolate cabin in the dessert, Pete – who has now transformed back to Fred – meets the Mystery Man he used to encounter. Visibly stunned, he drives away to the Lost Highway Inn. There he catches Mr. Eddy, post-coitus with Renee, no less, and kills him with the aid of the Mystery Man himself. Mr. Eddy turns out to be the Dick Laurent being talked about in the VHS tapes sent to him.

Concluding the film is a full circle moment, as Fred hops into his car and escapes the two detectives on his trail. He starts to shudder as he speeds through an empty and eerie highway; mimicking the opening scene of the film. At this point, I was curious thinking about how Fred would choose to remember all the events that transpired now, or if would even want to recall them at all.

Perhaps, that was what was happening in the entire duration of the film. The way I see it, all the haywire events such as Fred turning Pete was just Fred retelling the events that concerned him murdering Dick Laurent, and getting cheated on by his wife. When the police investigate Andy’s home after he was murdered, a photo which used to have both Renee and Alice in it, now only the former is seen. This begs the question if Alice was ever real or just a metaphor of some sort that Fred made use of. The film’s main point of view was Fred, and everyone was being narrated not the way they happened, but the way Fred remembered them to occur. Realizing that was a mindfuck moment for sure. Lost Highway was a movie I wasn’t meant to understand at first, and maybe watching it again after having pondered on it will help me appreciate it more. For now, I’m choosing to remember it as a movie that made me realize the power we have on our memories, and how malleable they are to us.

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.

Lost Highway

Lost Highway’s introduction seemed to have a classic peg but was erratic as well. Everything was dark and you could only see what the headlights allowed you to.

At the very beginning of the film there was a sense of distress and trouble. When someone said “Dick Laurent is dead,” I didn’t expect the film to be so blunt from the start, The main protagonist, Fred Madison, gave me the impression of someone who had this weird darkness about him, especially with his psychotic actions throughout the first few scenes.

When the scene cuts to his performance at the jazz disco(?), I remember thinking how intense it was. I play the saxophone, I know how emotional and into the music one could get. But this was the most intense I have ever seen someone play. It was as if his saxophone was an electric guitar at a rock concert. And the way one would play like that.. I mean, you would definitely lose some brain cells or pop a vain.

The way the movie portrayed Fred in terms of cinematography, lighting sound effects, positions, and shadows frame him as a murderer. A mentally unstable character, one you’d want to give the benefit of the doubt to, but sense his overall eeriness. At first, it looks as if he was a murderer r dark person but as the plot unveils it’s as if there was a dark being hovering over him or following him. This darkness, I later gathered was probably the personification of a psychotic mental illness. Especially when this ‘darkness’ suddenly had a face. This creepy pale faced old man, flashed during Fred’s love scene with his wife, and then shows up at the party claiming he was at Fred’s home.

Overall, this movie was creepy, eerie, but interesting, I believe it plays with the subjects on mental health and I enjoyed the film after seeing it more than while it was still playing. It gives you something, well lots of things, to think about and puts an interesting twist in mental health films. And to quote the person who made the most sense in the movie, there’s “some spooky shit,” happening here.

#162210 #LostHighway #SpookyShit