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 . . .
