As a longtime David Lynch fan, I have decided to rewatch both Lost Highway and Mulholland Dr. in advance of seeing Inland Empire next month. I’ve previously seen the former twice (once at the cinema and once on DVD); that was my third viewing.

I find Lynch movies to be terrifying. Most of the most Lynchian ones among them — i.e., not The Straight Story, The Elephant Man, and Dune — are, to me, more horrific than most horror movies. Indeed, I think of Lynch as the creator and one true exponent of what I term the “urban horror movie”, a genre that takes the most grotesque elements of our everyday lives and tosses them all into the pot, making us hope we never have to venture out into the world again.

Third instance around, I found LH to be less scary than the previous times, but that is nearly certainly considering I was already aware of the gist of the movie, and additionally considering I was watching with a view to seeing things I hadn’t noticed before.

On the surface, LH is a murder mystery. There are touches of noir and Hitchcock in there, too: the doppelganger; the platinum blonde; the wrong man. But beyond that, don’t ask me to say what’s going on. And there’s a lot of humour, as always in Lynchland: who among us can forget the “I hate tailgaters” scene with Mr Eddie (expertly played by the great Robert Loggia)? Less funny, of course, is the glass-table scene.

The acting — going back to a comment-box conversation I recently had with Red and Candy — was something I paid specific attention to that moment. And I found it more convincing than I have before. It’s so terrible and so stilted, and the dialogue so … banal …, that it is absolutely the way society are in real life.

I loved Lost Highway. But soon after I never understood why the critics hated it anyway. And now I’m itching to see Mulholland Dr. again too.

Scores
Acting: 15
Story: 16
Direction: 18
Enjoyment: 17
Involvement: 18
Total: 84

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