Lost Highway (1997); Written and directed by David Lynch; October Films; MPAA Rating: R; Panavision; 9.0/10

Here we go again, David Lynch explores the limits of reality and its cancellation, with a weird vision (in the tradition of Eraser Head, Wild at Heart, Twin Peaks, and Blue Velvet.)

This time, a physically attractive married male musician with the Theta Property (Bill Pullman, and I'll leave the reader to figure out what I mean with the "tp") is living in relative psychological isolation despite his marriage (Patricia Arquette is the wife) in this very dark, orange-and-black Halloweenish Beverly Hills mansion. One day a video tape shows up on their front door, depicting their sexual activity. Their investigations lead to a party in which an omnipresent millstone armed by cell-phone threatens to watch then always and warns, like a Shakespearean soothsayer, of disaster. His wife gets murdered and Pullman is accused, convicted, and imprisoned in near-isolation (no Pee-Dee North Carolina administrative segregation, though).

One night, he transmutes into somebody else, an auto mechanic (Bethezar Getty) and gets released, and goes on to lead the mechanic's life (and meets up with a reincarnated Arquette) until, after some particularly gratuitious violence, he comes full circle and gets himself back.

Some good reality-testing questions. If you become somebody else, do you remember yourself? Can you be two people at once? Is this what reincarnation is all about? Does the premise really make sense? With David Lynch, the vision is so compelling that it doesn't matter.

 David Lynch aficionados will want to check out the 2001 film Mulholland Drive (not to be confused with the Cold War drama Mulholland Falls of 1996). There is the usual array of fascinating character “instances” and a good deal of identity swapping. I like the monster from skid row. There is some pretty explicit lesbian affection as the actress and her mystery protégé get to know one another near the end.   But they didn’t put it on the lesbian-gay film festivals.

There is a documentary about David Lynch from Image: Pretty as a Picture: The Art of David Lynch (95 min). It lets you relive a bit of Twin Peaks and Lost Highway. There is one scene where a producer says he prefers to hire a director who is not married.

Blue Velvet (1986, United Artists/de Laurentis, dir. David Lynch, 120 min, R) is one of the famous Lynch films that just draws you in to it’s looking-at-your-navel fantasy. A young man Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan) is walking home through a field when he finds a severed ear. Pretty soon he is exploring a dark apartment with the police detective’s daughter Sandy (Laura Dern). Outside the radio commentators tell us this is Lumberton, NC, where woodchucks chuck. Inside the characters play a Hitchcockian hide and seek. Eventually they are led to the asshole drug dealer (Dennis Hopper). The film also has a famous title song.

Wild at Heart (1990, United Artists/Polygram, dir. David Lynch, 124 min, R) is a weird road movie with Nicolas Cage and Laura Dern, starting at Pee Dee prison in Lynch’s North Carolina (Tree Hill, anyone?) and taking us through cockroaches and vomit, and apparitions flying through the air. We are wild at heart.

Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992, New Line, dir. David Lynch, 135 min, R) was the post-prequel to the famous television series, that went on through delicious scenes with “warm milk” to its climax involving wood spirits. In the prequel, the last week of Laura Palmer’s life is told as an FBI agent disappears. The film has bizarre dialogue, as when a dwarf says, “I am the arm.”

Mulholland Drive (2001, Focus, dir. David Lynch, R, 147 min) is an absorbing mystery named after one of Hollywood’s famous perches. Here two women, one nearly killed in a crash and another with amnesia, are drawn together, toward the magic of a little blue box and a dance of the homeless gnomes, who scare you out of the woodwork.

Eraserhead (1977, Columbia TriStar, dir. David Lynch, 89 min, R) is a wonderful black-and-white horror nightmare classic where Henry Spence (Jack Nance) lives a simple life next to a Bessemer converter (so it looks) and deals with mutant babies dropped by a girl friend (the fetus looks like a live roast chicken) and a spirit that sings weird rhymes in a bar.  The “Lady in the Radiator” scene is quite famous, as she (her face getting distorted) sings “In heaven everything is fine” to weird music played on an organ.  You can look for this on YouTube (Lynch tends to guard his copyrights pretty strictly).

The Elephant Man (1980, Paramount, dir. David Lynch, 124 min, PG) is a biography of 19^th Century architect John Merrick (John Hurt), who was afflicted with neurofibromatosis, where tumors grow all over his body and leave him grossly disfigured. The tagline was “I am not an animal; I am a man; I am .. a human being!”  Anthony Hopkins plays Dr. Frederick Trevers. Toward the end, Merrick builds a model of an Elizabethean theater. The film is shot in handsome black-and-white Cinemascope.

Inland Empire (2006, Absurda / Studio Canal, dir. David Lynch, 180 min, France / Poland, R). First, the title of the movie sounds like the geographical area comprising the California interior valley, or the Great Basin, all the way up to Spokane. Actually, in the movie it’s in Poland. No matter, the movie takes the theme of “art creates life” and runs with it. Actress Nikki (Laura Dern) has an affair with co-star (Justin Theroux) as they try to remake a movie about a Polish hit that was shelved. Gradually they learn that the movie had been shelved because two of the cast members had been murdered, and that their off-screen lives had meshed with the plot. So it is happening again. The movie builds up in layers, including a stage play with donkey heads. The basic setup seems to recall Alban Berg’s opera Lulu, as does some of the background music, which is often atonal (the composer seems to be Steinholz), in addition to the usual background brooding menace of Lynch’s scores. The characters gravitate toward a catastrophe, and it is not clear if their lives stop in some kind of suspended dance why the universe around them self-destructs. There is a fascinating scene early on where Laura receives a house guest who warns her in the manner of a Shakespeare soothsayer. (That’s like the joker-in-two-places in “Lost Highway”). 1.85:1 this time, in English, French and Polish with French subtitles. Lynch’s thesis is fascinating, yet one does not feel like joining the characters’ journey as much as in some of his earlier films (“Blue Velvet”). I love some of the black-and-white scenes of the Polish embedded movie, like the record being worn out by a heavy tracking arm.