The Lynch Meditations -19

Lost Highway on pan-and-scan VHS in the late 1990s . . . it almost felt like an elaborate, deeply sick prank on the home viewing audience. The widescreen compositions totally obliterated. The already dark cinematography downgraded into absolute murk. Whispered dialogue overpowered by a burst of violently blaring buddy-cop flick saxophone. A circular structure that renders the movie either utterly pointless or filled to overflowing with metaphysical significance-you decide! I honestly couldn't decide at the time if this movie was incomprehensible garbage, or if it was brilliant big-screen art ruined by a shitass VHS release. In fact, watching this movie on tape pretty much turned me against the VHS format. VHS tapes within the plot of this film seem to be symbols of evil, sinister distortions of reality, and murderous madness. Anyone who professes a hipsterish affinity for the rightly bygone format should be made to watch the pan-and-scan Lost Highway on tape-that'll straighten their pretentious ass out!

So motherfuck VHS into a molten puddle of plastic with a thousand blowtorches.

Some years after I first watched the movie, I bought the soundtrack on used CD, and Lost Highway became one of those movies-like Conan the Barbarian and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly-where I listened to the soundtrack many more times than I actually watched the movie. It was the kind of CD I could just put on and listen to straight through without having to skip any boring or grating tracks. The soundtrack became a kind of condensation of a version of the original movie that somewhat existed in my memory-a highlights reel of the parts that made the strongest impression: Robert Blake's bug-eyed vampire mystery man; Robert Loggia's comically macho gangster; a man impaled through the forehead on the corner of a coffee table; David Bowie's sepulchral voice singing over a first person camera POV racing down the road in the middle of the night; the usually bland and non-threatening Bill Pullman transforming through flashing lights and Jacob's Ladder-style head vibrations into . . . Balthazar Getty of all things.

Lost Highway never worked on my mind as a complete movie. It hit me as a kind of fragmented, postmodern multimedia experience. Here's some images, here's some bursts of spoken word performance, there's the curated soundtrack, it's all kind of connected, but not so much for me. Overall, Lost Highway seemed like it was either much smarter than me as an audience, or that an hour of footage had been left out that might have made it work better as a narrative. I always assumed-wrongly-that there was a more expansive director's cut lurking within some unauthorized dub no doubt recorded in Extended Play Mode-maybe it would turn up in a Luminous Film Works catalog someday . . .

So what will I make of Lost Highway now that I'm older, wiser, more experienced?
Yes, this is the question that must be answered . . .

Once the post-desire economy picked up, my sibling was able to afford to move into a new body.

Preliminary design for the dust jacket art . . .

. . . for Endless Hunger: The Myth of the Post-Desire Era by Douglas Macross.

The New Lost Generation

The Last Stander 3: The Last Stander in Heaven 2

New Era, New Appetites

DLC Canon Ending: Desire is Dancin'!

I got the Light of Victory between two fingers . . .

Preliminary design for the dust jacket art . . .

. . . for H.H. Brill's The Collectors: Rise of the Tchotchke Traders in the Post-Desire Era.

The New Scavengers of the Post-Desire Economy

When the post-war economy collapsed, my sibling and I had to move back into the same body again for our scavenging business. 

The Last Stander 2: The Last Stander in Heaven

Linked by Shadowspeak . . .

Toys of Empire (blister pack of three)

Let your comrade be your weapon . . .

The Last Stander

The Post-Desire Era/The Long Road Home

Stash Guardian

Emergency landing in the commercial wasteland . . .

Shit, I actually had to leave the house . . .

Peak Desire/The Product Becomes the Master

Indigestion

Employee of the Month: The Guardian of Desire's Birthplace

Abandoned defense labyrinth leftover from the Age of Desire . . .

As my mind unspooled, I felt my bitterness leave me . . .

The Lynch Meditations 18: Premonitions Following An Evil Deed (1995)

This one's like a rogue transmission from an unauthorized future. Made me think of the eerie future dreams from John Carpenter's Prince of Darkness just a little bit. Seems to be riffing on the paranoia induced by the presence of uniformed police assets, deadly secrets concealed by cheery home facades, and grotesque alien abduction scenarios. It's so short that it's easy to watch over and over again and pick it apart, but I almost think it should be seen once, and then never watched again, except within one's memory where it will be inevitably distorted, expanded, and transformed into some other wholly unauthorized thing. Kinda like how the creator of the Super Nintendo game Earthbound supposedly saw a scary scene from an obscure old film as a child and then spent a lifetime haunted by a memory of that scene which he had wholly concocted within his imagination.

Say . . . is it copyright infringement if I intentionally choose to distort someone's film within my imagination, and put together my own fan-edit/remix of a film inside my brain studio? I sure hope not.

But if it is . . . think about how exciting it would be to live in such a dystopian future where copyright lawyers become ultra-tech brain-vivisectionists to cut out and destroy unauthorized "Brain Cuts" of films.

Holy shit . . . I want to be on the run in such a hellish future. I could have elaborate martial arts battles with all the copyright lawyer brain-vivisectionists. A dystopian hellscape fugitive routine is also good cardio.

But, um, as for Premonitions Following An Evil Deed . . . it's a sharp little nightmare of stylish black-and-white micro-cinema. Dig on it to the max!

NEXT: 6/1/18: Lost Highway (1997)

The Lynch Meditations -18

Premonitions Following An Evil Deed . . . 1995 . . . never seen it.

Not sure I've ever even heard of it.

Maybe, when I watch it, I'll remember it, but I don't think so.

I'm just about certain I've never seen this one before.

But maybe, just maybe, I can convince myself that I've seen it, and then reconstruct a fake version of the memory of my having seen it . . . and maybe, by some serendipity, it will be a perfect recollection of a movie I've never even seen.

Maybe . . . if I can get fifty million other people on this planet who've never actually seen this movie to try "remembering" it, then out of those millions of make-believe memories we'll somehow get it right-that whole fifty million monkeys with fifty million typewriters spontaneously coming up with Shakespeare type of deal.

Hmm . . . or I could just watch the fucking thing, blog about the thing itself.

Some god-hump fills the world with desire . . . just making trouble for regular folk down the road . . .

A memory from the age of abundance . . .

FOMO-Spasm: Invite Tunnel Insurgency

My new bedtime mask . . .

A Jealous Face

Beware the man with a decent pair of walking shoes!