The taste of watching Lost Highway goes beyond the usual experience of watching a movie. The lost highway takes you into mysterious and chaotic thoughts and brings you strange and rare experiences. Stay with this article to get to know more about this amazing work of David Lynch.
Dick Laurent is dead!
The movie “Lost Highway” begins with a captivating, mysterious and of course famous sequence. The main character of the story “Fred” is seen in a subjective view and space, which is drowned in his thoughts. The doorbell rings. Someone behind the iPhone says: “Dick Laurent is dead”. Fred moves to the window, but sees no one. From the beginning, all their scenes and moments are so mysterious. In fact, David Lynch brings his audience into the fluid world of his character’s mind and the temptations of his disturbed psyche. But where did this mysterious world come from?
The ethereal woman and the terrifying world of the blind owl
Most of us have definitely experienced anxious, brooding and distracted thoughts during times of stress and pressure. Fortunately, the border of these thoughts with the events of the outside world is clear to us. But in a sick mind, the circle of these fantasies is wider and my fantasies are intertwined with everyday events. It is known that David Lynch has created the speculative mind and the illusory world of his character with the inspiration of the novel Buf Cor by Sadegh Hedayat. If you have read this novel, you will understand that this claim cannot be far from the truth. With this description, let us first enter the terrifying and eerie world of the Blind Owl novel.
The highway that passes through the ruins of Rey
A man tells his story alone in an old house, in a distant time, among the imaginary ruins of an old city. He says of his melancholic imaginations that their border with reality is no longer clear. A crouching man sees a monster through a hole in the wall sitting in front of a seductive woman with Turkmen eyes. He calls the beauty of Fatan an ethereal woman. The woman comes and enters the man’s house, and the man embraces her in the midst of desire and desire. But soon he finds out that the woman is dead. He cuts the woman into pieces and, with the help of the old man, digs a hole somewhere far away.
Then he tells about his Indian mother “Bogamdasi” and his father and twin brother. A father and an uncle who once competed for his mother’s head. One of them was killed by a cobra in the dungeon and the other came out unharmed. Interestingly, both men are a dumb image of the same old man who helped her in burying the woman earlier. Then the narrator tells about his childhood friend and adult lover and wife. A woman who is related to all men except the lonely narrator. An ethereal woman with Turkmen eyes, whose image is painted on several thousand-year-old jars and old pencil cases. The old man of Khanzerpanzeri and the butcher are the place of his wife’s prostitutes, and they both have an eerie and mysterious image of the same old man.
Borders of illusion and reality
In fact, women reflect an illusion of that ethereal woman and men reflect melancholy illusions of that old man, and this is where the boundary of space and time, illusion and reality breaks. Did the evil and sick man kill his wife due to pessimism and pathological temptations? At the end of the story, the man sees himself in front of the mirror in the form of the same old man with a pig. Have they all been him?
The beginning of the story of the lost highway
In Lost Highway, Fred is also pessimistic about his wife Renee. At a party, Fred meets a man who seems to have had relations with his wife in the past. This, and the presence of a short and strange man and the claims he makes, cause Fred to take Renee’s hand and take her home. In the next scene, Fred has slaughtered his wife like the character of Buff Cor. When the police take Fred to prison, a strange thing happens. At this point in the story, the boundaries of the surreal world collapse and this time, like Kafka’s Metamorphosis novel, Fred is replaced by another young man named “Pete”.
pit story
From here on, we enter Pete’s story and his work relationship with Dick Laurent. In the continuation of the story of Dick Laurent’s lover, “Alice” is also found and we see a romantic relationship between Alice and Pete.
Blind knots and difficult puzzles
But why is Alice’s face the same as Rene’s? What does the creator mean by this work? To answer this question, we must again refer to the blind owl. Isn’t it because in the blind owl, the woman on the jar and the hero’s wife had the same face? In the film, the image of the thousand-year-old urn is replaced by a photo frame in which Rene and Alice are standing next to each other.
So, why does Sadegh Hedayat surprise his audience with the characters who sit in each other’s place in the blind owl? In fact, he intends to match the perspective and perception of the audience with the pathological understanding of his character.
Here too, in fact, from the point of view of the character of the story, we see everything as he sees it, not as it is. What is the reason for this claim? Farid himself explains the reason for not paying attention to CCTV cameras as follows: “I like to remember everything in my own way, not necessarily as it happened”.
Art by David Lynch
So, facing the lost highway, we descend into the fluid vortex of the character’s mind and perceive the melancholic, black and ghostly world of the character as he imagines, and this is exactly David Lynch’s art. There is not supposed to be an answer for all the mysteries of the film, and there is no opening for its knots. The world of the Lost Highway movie is a fluid of the mind and you just have to immerse yourself in it and taste it.
The power of form
Drawing such a mysterious and different world is definitely the work of David Lynch. The art of “production design” including stage design is also important. The design of spaces such as the dark corridors of the house, the wooden hut, the long corridor of the hotel has been done correctly and along with the expert lighting, it has created an eerie and mysterious atmosphere.
In order to create the right feeling and convey the feeling through the image, in addition to directing and designing the production, another person’s skill is needed; And that is none other than the director of filming. The art of the cinematographer in choosing the location of the camera and the composition of the frames, among other qualities expected from Lynch, gives the film style and turns it into a tall and magnificent work. The audience tastes the pleasure of watching the mesmerizing frames with a touch of dread and sinks into an illusory and imaginary trance that is a little cold and scary. The film presents a pure visual experience to the audience so that they can record and remember each shot of the film deep inside.
For example, there is a view that shows a room on the left and a dark corridor on the right of the frame. Fred slowly sinks into the darkness and emerges a moment later. It is as if he is stepping into the dark troubled world inside him. The collection of these moments and events, in addition to conveying a feeling to the audience, leads him to an original and attractive experience.
content
It is not easy to talk about the content of the movie The Lost Highway, and basically to analyze the meaning and theme that surreal movies convey to their audience. But the black atmosphere of the film, the inspiration of Buff Kor and the heavy metal music used in it, which includes pieces from Rammstein, help to understand the world of the film. Also, Marilyn Manson’s presence among the drug gang of Dick Laurent (an actor in immoral films), many of whose songs were influenced by the school of Leviticus Satanism, and who is considered one of the priests of this sect, may have played a role in drawing the antagonist of the story.
In fact, there is no positive force in the dark world of the film, and there is nothing but evil and ugliness and blackness. The film presents a dark and disappointing picture of man and human society.
