this post was submitted on 12 Dec 2025
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I watched lost highways at movie night a couple of weeks ago. It was my first Lynch movie.
I despise it when the plot twist in a movie is that the guy imagined everything. And the movie was comically slow. I'm one who enjoys the process of cobbling together self referential details to get to the broader picture. And yet the disappointment of finding out it was all a delusion ruined the entire thing.
I didn't like it, wouldn't recommend. Sooner or later I'll watch another Lynch movie, maybe I'll change my mind.
I just wanted to vent
The only way to enjoy Lynch movies for me is to watch them like you look at a painting.
Enjoy the cinematography, costumes, lighting, music, atmosphere, etc.
Trying to follow the plot (especially on the first viewing) is frustrating and futile.
That's kinda the best approach to Lynch's films: he's a jazzman of cinema. Except the plot is also a part of his technique.
He was known to invent parts of his films on the spot: e.g. the cowboy character in ‘Mulholland Drive’.
We watched "Lost Highway" in school and I think I was the only one who raised his hand when the teacher asked afterwards who liked the movie. For everyone else it was a stupid mess. Me, I enjoyed the filmmaking aspects of it. One girl accused me of "only liking it because of the sex scenes" lol
Twin Peaks (the 1990 series) is a pretty approachable Lynch experience (and very good) but you do have to get used to the slow pacing. The story builds and doubles back and wrinkles, sometimes erratically, but the strange drama and excellent characters really are worth experiencing. If you hate it you probably aren't going to appreciate his really weird stuff either.
Or just jump straight into Eraserhead.
I might need a rewatch, but I don't think that was what happened in ‘Lost Highway’.
Check out ‘Inland Empire’ for hardcore Lynchean shenanigans.
How I understood it was: at the beginning of the movie the guy says that he likes to remember things his way, not how they actually happened, that suggests that his story is unreliable. He kills is wife because she was cheating and gets caught and sentenced to death. He then hallucinates a delusion where he actually is an entirely different guy (he turns into another person while in the cell and gets released) with some parallels with the true story. This guy is cooler, a prodigy mechanic, a womanizer, and his rival is an insane mobster. In his delusion he kills a pimp who worked for the mobster and that's how the police find him and chase after him. In the final scene he is running away driving in the night, but from his point of view we see the sparks from the electric chair, suggesting he never left the cell.
Apparently you aren't alone in this interpretation: some critics compared the film to the 'An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge' story. Lynch himself described it as a 'psychogenic fugue'.
However, I prefer a more literal, though not more realistic, interpretation: that the events happened approximately as they're shown. This is in large part because best surrealism, in my opinion, presents a world that lives by its own rules, which may or may not resemble our reality close enough. This is how things are with J.G. Ballard, David Cronenberg, Murakami, and Kobo Abe to some extent; and Piotr Kamler to a lesser extent but in the other direction. And I also consider the 'it was all a dream' trick rather cheap (even though it works occasionally).
With this approach, the Creepy Dude would be an outside intrusion, similar to the evil from the Black Lodge in original 'Twin Peaks'. He puts Lone Starr into the Möbius time loop and leads him to kill a guy, of whom Starr wouldn't even have heard otherwise.
Lynch, in his typical manner, didn't discount this hypothesis either:
It would also be somewhat supported by the behavior of policemen and the mechanic guy's parents, who are outside Lone Starr's immediate experience in the mechanic guy's timeline, but get to live through the events.
My first Lynch experience was Mulholland Drive. Partway through the film, the two lead women literally switch roles with no explanation. I was like what the fuck is this trash.
But then someone recommended I watch The Elephant Man, and I loved it so...
spoiler
One way to interpret 'Mulholland Drive' is that the first part is a dream of 'Betty'. The second part is the reality.