There was an Everyday Music near my high school that friends and I used to pursue for cheap DVDs. It’s where I acquired a lot of my staples as a burgeoning cinephile—Starship Troopers, The White Ribbon, a few of those old Criterion editions with the line running across the top of the case—but my most important find was Lost Highway. I’d loved Twin Peaks, didn’t know what to make of the movie, and was wrestling with what I felt about Blue Velvet. Lost Highway, the first of Lynch’s L.A. films (followed by Mulholland Dr. and Inland Empire), became an obsession after I watched it, because of its more outright rock ‘n’ roll sensibilities (or perhaps I should say “industrial”—I’ll admit to Rammstein when I was 16) and for how strangely the film was constructed. Not just its diptych, where Bill Pullman’s character either disappears or morphs into Balthazar Getty’s at the midpoint, but how differently the two sections move. The Getty sequences are snappy, youthful, bursting with sex and seediness, whereas Pullman’s parts are languidly oneiric, flowing more like a hangover than a party.
Lost Highway received a mixed-to-negative reception, and upon rewatch I think part of the reason why is a pulling-apart of the tendencies of Lynch and his most prolific editor, Mary Sweeney. Sweeney began cutting for him during Twin Peaks run, and then hot off that did both hers and Lynch’s best work in Fire Walk With Me—a devastating push-pull. Unlike Lost Highway, however, the anti-Peaks front half with Chris Isaak and Kiefer Sutherland bumbling around the northwest still has a snappiness popping through its languishes. When contrasting it with the Lynch-edited Missing Pieces, which was constructed from scenes cut or removed from Fire Walk With Me, there’s a sense of prolonged observation (even to the point of absurdity), which harkens back to Eraserhead’s time-based portraiture rather than the rhythm guitars of Sweeney.
The first half of Lost Highway, with its long fades to black and surveillance camera mise-en-scene, feels like Lynch tugging against Sweeney, rather than letting her create a jazz solo out of his melodies. It’d be hard to say that it doesn’t work, as its off-putting, psychologically fraught sequencing creates a specific (and unique) tone that gets ripped apart by the metal music and raw horsepower of the back half. Lost Highway doesn’t since in the same way that Sweeney’s masterpieces, Fire Walk With Me and Mulholland Dr. do, nor is it as close to the painterly pace of pure Lynch, like his work with Noriko Miyakawa on Inland Empire and Blue Velvet Lost Footage or the way Duwayne Dunham was able to add neat Hollywood threading to Blue Velvet, the Twin Peaks pilot, and The Return.
Dunham, however, wasn’t always the perfect fit for Lynch—Wild At Heart, while having everything contained in its walls to be one of Lynch’s best films, just doesn’t hit its marks the way it needs to in the edit. It’s the opposite of Lost Highway in that sense: where that film (arguably) was moving too slow for Sweeney’s taste, Wild At Heart was too high-key for Dunham, overwhelming his slow-building style. While I’m not sure that I’d change a beat to Lost Highway—in part because of sentimentality, and also I think in a really strange, basically ineffable way it works—but I have to wonder if the Palme D’Or winning Wild At Heart could’ve been even better had it been in the hands of someone who knew how to hear its heartbeat.