Lost Highway (1996)

It's been too long since I watched this, or any Lynch film.  Seeing this again I realise just how different it is from the rest of his work.  I mean it still has that distinct visual style, that seductive use of lighting and colour to make his dreamscapes and nightmare corridors that I always found alluring, but it feels more modern than anything else he's done, whereas most of his other work has one foot in the 80s/90s/00s and one foot in the the 50s.  I never really connected with Lost Highway emotionally like I did Mulholland Drive, Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks and most of his work, so it was never my favourite of his work, but looking at it now, even though it still doesn't really hypnotise, it's still a really entertaining, interesting film and totally unique.

Essentially it's about lust, jealousy, identity and redemption, the tale of a weak-willed, impotent, awkward man named Fred Madison who enters into some nightmare, possibly in his sleep after making weird, whispery, clearly unfulfilling love to his wife Renee, in which he's forced to finally take control, assert himself and make his devil serve him through a series of temptations, confrontations and nasty situations.  In the opening he's told by an anonymous voice that "Dick Laurent is dead," and then he received several tapes through his door that show the inside of his house.  I think the anonymously video-taped house represents his mistrust and second-guessing paranoia about his wife's fidelity and well, things in general.  He knows there's an intruder in his house, but who is it?.  One night he looks at his wife and sees a ghoulish face projected onto it.  His devil is no longer on his leash and is being projected all around him, until in his nightmare he murders his wife and is imprisoned in a small cell, in which he is driven mad and tortured by his demons until he falls into their hell to confront them as Pete Dayton, an angsty, confused young man who represents both Fred's lost youthful drive and his childish emotional weakness.  Pete is a shy, meek young man who works as a car mechanic.  He is the go-to man for Dick Laurent, an ultraviolent gangster who hates tailgaters and beats one of them in front of him on Mulholland Drive.  This is a demonstration and provocation, and the site of Dick Laurent beating a weaker man pokes at Pete's own inadequacy, prompting him to try and assert his own masculinity by banging his hot wife and his own girlfriend on the side and trying to look tough.  His wife (Patricia Arquette, who also plays Renee, Fred's wife, they're all the same person anyway), manipulates him and leads him on into a series of encounters that test and resolve his weaknesses.  In one scene he questions her as she covers her face, showing off her green fingernails (colour symbolism everywhere in this film), over her past sexual encounters, her promiscuity and her line of work, which he perceives as a transgression.  She doesn't actually do anything except lead him to do increasingly stupid and violent things of his own accord, and when he says "we killed him" after throwing a man headlong into the corner of a glass table in a really funny death scene, she corrects him.

Eventually he comes full circle and morphs back into Fred again, who is confronted by the devil (mystery man) with the camcorder who asks him "who the fuck are you?" forcing him to finally decide who he is and get in his red hot car and own himself.  When he does this the devil becomes his servant and kills Dick Laurent for him, allowing him to go home and tell Fred through the speaker that "Dick Laurent is dead," and crucify his demons once and for all in a frenzy of speed and red and blue police lights.  Fred Madison is redeemed.