The Pleasures of Weirdness: "Lost Highway"
I hope it’s not too clever to begin by noting that "weird" is a weird word. In common usage here in America, it has come to be synonymous with words like "bizarre" or "unknowable," and often has a connotation of something slightly distasteful. When someone says "That's so weird," with a sort of confused grimace on their face, we often understand that the word is accompanied by an internal shiver of annoyance.
But remember that the older meanings of the word have far more interesting resonances. It’s connected to the supernatural, the uncanny. Shakespeare named the three witches in Macbeth the Weird Sisters, and gave them the power to cast a spell with their famous chant:
Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn and caldron bubble.
Fillet of a fenny snake,
In the caldron boil and bake;
Eye of newt and toe of frog,
Wool of bat and tongue of dog,
Adder's fork and blind-worm's sting,
Lizard's leg and howlet's wing,
For a charm of powerful trouble,
Like a hell-broth boil and bubble.
This takes us to an older meaning of the word, which has to do with something like the attempt to control fate. Its roots are in the Old English "wyrd," meaning "fate," "chance," "fortune," or "destiny," or more literally "that which comes." It's also connected to the Proto-Indo-European root "wer," which means to turn or bend.
So the word weird does not simply mean "Like, that's so strange, dude!" It's also tied to ides of magic, the cosmic role of the dice, and the attempt to turn these things to our use, or control them.
There is a lot of weird art in the world. When I was young, I was put off by this art. It made me uncomfortable, and, although I would have neither understood nor admitted this, it intimidated me. Weird art is often not easy art, and I found this annoying. In part, this is because I thought the whole purpose of someone else's creative output was to entertain me. But it was also, at least in part, because I tended to want explanations for things, and things that couldn’t be easily explained made me uneasy. Anything inexplicable, anything I couldn't pin down, anything that resisted bland, straightforward explication, seemed to me to be weird (in the "Dude, that is so, like, strange!" sense) and thus I was happy to put it to the side.
Then I grew older, and learned more, and art that tended towards the weird began to strike me as glorious. In my own small ways, I even began to dabble in it in myself. This week, I thought I'd try to explain a small part of why I think that kind of art is valuable.
Lost Highway, made by David Lynch and released in 1997, is based on the familiar elements of American noir movies, with several hallucinatory twists.
It opens with the story of Fred Madison (Bill Pullman), a jazz saxophonist in Los Angeles. One morning, someone buzzes Fred's intercom, and tells him that "Dick Laurent is dead." Fred cannot see who it is. From this beginning, the film spins out a short, strange, tale. Fred suspects that his wife Renee (Patricia Arquette) may be sleeping with a friend of hers, a shady character named Andy (Michael Massee); this paranoia is linked to, in some kind of subterranean way, the fact that Fred and Renee find a series of video tapes on their doorstep, which seem to show that someone has been entering their house at night with a camera.
The couple then goes to a party at Andy's house, at which Fred meets a nameless man with pastry-white skin (Robert Blake). This man tells Fred that they have met before, and then tells Fred that he – the nameless man – is actually in Fred's house right now. To prove it, he hands Fred a cell phone and tells Fred to call his home phone; the voice that answers belongs to the nameless man. Understandably upset, Fred drags Renee out of the party to go home and check what the hell is going on. The next morning, Fred receives a final video tape: it shows him kneeling over the Renee's bloody body.
Fred claims he did not kill his wife – we suspect maybe the nameless man had something to do with it – but question of his guilt is never really answered. Despite this, Fred is convicted of murder and sentenced to death. But, and this is where for many viewers the film goes from just being "weird" to being "really, really weird," in his cell on death row Fred seems to transform into someone else. The confused prison authorities find a young man named Pete Dayton (Balthazar Getty) in the cell, and have no choice but to release him to the care of his parents.
Thus begins a second part of the plot, or maybe a continuation of the first. Pete is a mechanic who does work on the cars of a gangster and pornographic film producer named Mr. Eddy (Robert Loggia). One day, Mr. Eddy comes by the shop with his moll in his car, a woman named Alice, who looks identical to Renee (and is also played by Arquette). Alice and Pete start an affair, and when Mr. Eddy begins to suspect what they're up to, Alice convinces Pete to help her rob a man she knows, so that they can use the money to run away together.
The man turns out to be Andy – Renee's friend from the opening – and in the course of the robbery, Pete accidentally kills him. He also finds out that Andy and Mr. Eddy were involved in making pornographic films, that Alice (or perhaps Renee?) had been in some of those films, and that Mr. Eddy's real name is Dick Laurent, which was the name whispered to Fred through his intercom in the beginning.
Pete and Alice drive out to a shack in the desert. After they have sex, Alice tells Pete that he will never really get to have her in the way he wants to, after which Pete turns back into Fred. The nameless man appears again, this time filming Fred with a video camera; Fred drives away in the car and finds a motel, where Mr. Eddy/Dick Laurent is having sex with Renee. He kidnaps Mr. Eddy and drives him back out to the desert, where the nameless man appears again. The nameless man shoots Mr. Eddy, but in the next camera shot, it's Fred who's holding the gun. Fred then drives back into L.A. and rings the doorbell of his own house, announces that "Dick Laurent is dead" into the intercom, and then flees town, chased by the police.
Lurking behind all of this is a question – it's nearly always the wrong question, and it's one that Lynch has had a lot of fun with over the years – that attends weird art in a lot of people's minds: what is the correct interpretation of it? Or is there even a correct interpretation? My suspicion is that this question arises nearly as much from bad arts education as it does from a certain American cultural lack of imagination in these areas.
Most people learn in high school – usually in English classes – about things like symbol and metaphor and motif and irony and all the rest of the words that attend talking about narrative art. Frequently, these words take on an almost totemic significance in the classroom: they are supposed to MEAN something ABSOLUTE. This then gets boiled-down into a terribly misused jargon later in life; the source of this problem is that the way people were taught to think about these words was wrong from the get-go.
It is not the case, as so many of us were taught, that there is a single, "real" interpretation of what a poem or story or movie "means." Nor is it the case, to take a more fundamental example, that a literary symbol carries a one-to-one correspondence to something out here in the real world. The river, in some poem or movie, does not "symbolize" sadness, nor does the knife or some other phallic object (say the drill in Body Double) "symbolize" the penis, or masculinity, or anything else.
This is not to say that those words or images – the river, or the knife or drill – do not bear some kind of relationship to the ideas of sadness or to male virility (or lack thereof). But this is an incredibly complicated and nuanced relationship, and one that is dependent on things like the various other elements of the artwork, the author's and viewer's conceptions of the world, not to mention social and artistic circumstances. High Noon, for example, might work well as an allegory for communist witch hunts for viewers of its day; for viewers of our day, it might be more interestingly read as a exploring the kinds of human responses that we see in our own fights over global warming or being vaccinated against COVID.
Is either reading of High Noon somehow "right" or "wrong"? Not at all. It's just that the relationship between the work of art and the world comes into being through things like trial and error, repeated viewings, thoughtful analysis, and discussion, and it is never stable. Meaning, that is to say, is what can be convincingly argued about a movie, rather than some kind of treasure hiding inside the movie, ready to be discovered by someone who learns the sanctified, immutable codes of film criticism.
And it's precisely in this area – meaning – that what I've been calling weird art adds so much to our understanding, and, vitally, enjoyment, of art itself.
One aspect, maybe the primary one, of its weirdness is that it makes the viewer do work of their own if they want to come to an understanding of what's happening. Instead of spoon-feeing meaning to us, weird art engages us in a sometimes playful, sometimes serious dance. It suggests and confounds, it experiments and ventures into paradox and double-meaning and nonsense and whimsy. It delights in these things, and uses them to express what might not otherwise be easily expressed. And sometimes it just does things for the hell of it.
To return to Lost Highway, there are coherent and fascinating readings of the film available. Fred, at the opening, is in the classic position of the film noir character. He finds himself involved in mysterious circumstances (the message that Dick Laurent is dead, the videotapes); he's in a relationship with a beautiful woman who he fears may be unfaithful to him, and who perhaps has been corrupted by the man named Andy.
And these things are somehow connected to urges and inabilities in himself: his saxophone playing when he performs is so frenetic as to suggest some kind of otherwise unexpressed anxiety, and when he has sex with his wife there are suggestions that he is experiencing difficulty or feelings of inadequacy in that area.
The appearance of the nameless man injects a supernatural quality into the story: this man at first appears to be some kind of avatar of evil, although at the end it's hinted that maybe he's the bringer of the justice that eventually befalls Mr. Eddy the pornographer. This supernatural element is strengthened when Fred turns into – or is replaced by – Pete. The second part of the story serves as a kind of counterpoint to – or extension of – the first part.
Pete's story is also a classic noir setup. It's about a man who meets a dangerous woman with whom he has a passionate affair. Soon, it turns out that she’s under the thumb of unsavory types – Andy and Mr. Eddy/Dick Laurent – and is using Pete to get herself out from under their control. Both Andy and Mr. Eddy end up dead, and by their deaths, the woman is avenged.
So one might offer readings of the film based on the idea that the second story in some way completes the first. One might argue, for example that the story is about a character – the saxophonist Fred – who falls into an inescapable situation in which his wife is killed and he takes the blame, and who is then rescued from that situation by supernatural forces. To remedy what is happening, these forces somehow inject Fred into another person – Pete – so that he can learn the source of the mysteries that plague him, and so that the woman can enact her revenge on the men around her, in particular the pornographers who ruined her when she was younger.
Or one might offer more psychological readings, and cast the film as one about the nature of identity itself, as a series of metaphorical enactments of the ways that things like sexual desire, jealousy, male dominance, and discomfort with them can almost split us into two different people. The person in us who wants revenge, for example, may be a very different person than the one in us who is capable of taking revenge. One can imagine all kinds of high-falutin essays along these lines, explaining how the film continues Lynch's obsessions with the thematics of the difference between people's internal and external lives, or the boundaries between the world of adulthood and the world of steamy youth, etc. etc.
All of which is fine and good and interesting. But here's the more important thing about the movie, for my purposes today: it gets under your skin. You feel it exploring and suggesting, hinting at other, darker worlds that lie just beyond our daylight comprehension. It feels – because Lynch is a very good filmmaker – like a coherent, fully finished whole; it's clear that something has been brought full-circle at the end, a complete story has been told.
But exactly what that story is remains elusive. It resists being tied down, squirms away every time you try to dominate or simplify it by reducing it to a concrete meaning. In this way, Lost Highway – as are a vast number of other examples of what I've been calling weird art – is very much like life itself, truly understood.
What are our stories, exactly? What do they mean? There are plenty of comforting answers out there, plenty of movies that set out to convince us that we're all heroes in are own way, that it's all going to turn out okay in the end, and that everything happens for a reason. Which reassurances are in some sense vital to our well-being, not to mention our sanity.
But remember that weird is a word with connotations of the supernatural, with chance itself, with fate. It is a word that entails the sense of being confronted with something larger than ourselves, something mysterious, that feeling we get sometimes that there damn well have to be three crazy old witches out there, hunched over a pot cooking up some brew that might be disastrous for us, or might bring us fame and fortune…and who the hell can possibly know which until they try it?
Our own stories, in other words, feel many times like they are determined by something beyond our ken. Why did the fire burn my house and not my neighbor's? Why did I happen to be in the right place at the right time to land that dream job? Why does one person get cancer at age sixteen and die the next year, and another person smoke cigarettes until they're eighty-eight years old and then die peacefully in their sleep?
It's all weird. It truly is. And what a joy to have movies that let us dance with that a little bit, up there on the screen. What a joy to be led through a maze that resembles the weirdest, most uncontrollable aspects of life, by someone as good as setting up that maze and doing the leading as David Lynch. Because in doing that up there maybe we learn to do it a little better down here, in the real world.
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