The film drags the spectator inside the weird events described, and doesn’t put much effort in avoiding him to feel uncomfortable. But besides these similarities, there weren’t many other elements that you could use to correlate Lost Highway to the other psychological movies produced until that day. Both were films with a strong psychological load, playing with the unconscious, disturbing sensations that we all share, and both could be read at multiple levels of depth: the spectator sense that there are many elements in the movie that he didn’t understand entirely, but he still appreciates what he saw and he ends up loving the experience of watching (even when the pleasure remains under the conscious awareness). The similarities were mainly on the effects for the audience. When the movie was released, the critics used the only possible reference for such a shocking vision: Eraserhead, his first movie made twenty years earlier. The vision of the dark highway from the car was probably the trigger, and it will become later opening and closing scene of Lost Highway. Then, the night Lynch was heading back home from the last day of shooting, as if Lynch’s mind had the immediate need to focus on the next project, legend says that the whole first part of the film (until Fred’s imprisonment) magically appeared in his head, in all details. All that happened already before Fire Walk With Me. But you know, Lynch is a pretty demanding guy and in the end the writing process was a little internal war, where each one was refusing the other’s ideas. The title came from Night People by Barry Gifford (the author of Wild At Heart story), a book that pushed Lynch to ask for his collaboration in writing the movie. The story of the film wasn’t taken from a book (with David Lynch it’s quite unusual). Lost Highway probably grew in Lynch’s mind as a little, personal challenge: staying out of the sales pressure is always possible but movies which don’t sell can be a problem for anyone ( Dune was a nice example), the real challenge was creating films that can become commercial successes, and at the same time preserving the identity of the visionary filmmaker who expose complex, multi-layered ideas like no one else. The film arrived five years after Fire Walk with Me, which was a way to continue the success of Twin Peaks, but actually ended up as a flop at the box office. Lost Highway, for many the real David Lynch’s masterpiece, was released on February 21st, 1997.
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