David Lynch’s deepest, darkest excursion into film noir. Lynch, and co-writer Barry Gifford, must have gone down a list of every trope of the genre and made sure to use them all.
The setting is a shadow world Los Angeles where everyone smokes, the women are vipers and the men are losers. There’s a jazz club, a jailhouse and a desert road. Sexual tension and simmering violence are constants. Both are prone to erupt out of the blue. Even when the film’s plot breaks down into a final act puzzle box (which Lynch doesn’t care to solve), it isn’t a far leap from the winding narratives of noir, where confusion sometimes rules. You don’t need to follow every twist. You’ll always know what’s going on as long as you can recognize the pattern of a downward spiral. For the most part, the words spoken here don’t matter much anyway. Lynch’s painter’s eye tends to tell us everything we need to know at a glance. For example, at the beginning of the movie, we instantly know that Bill Pullman and Patricia Arquette’s marriage is on the rocks before they’ve said a thing. Their opulent home has too many shadows and not enough windows. The walls are a strange, fleshy, muted pink. Their furniture looks uncomfortable. It’s a house of secrets. Nobody could love anybody in that place.
The story: It looks like Lynch and Gifford couldn’t decide which classic noir archetype to deal with here, the ticking-time-bomb spurned husband or the lowlife in the midst of a doomed plot to run off with a gangster’s girl. So, they wrote a movie about BOTH OF ‘EM. One guy (Bill Pullman) literally transforms into the other one (Balthazar Getty) after an uneasy night’s sleep and with no explanation. Different man, different problems, same bed, same bleak future. Hello, Kafka (in a way, Lost Highway is the Metamorphosis adaptation, tilted sideways a few inches, that Lynch has expressed interest in making in the past). And just so you can’t easily dismiss one half of the story as being a fantasy or fever dream, Lynch takes care to show us that the other characters are also flummoxed by this. This is not an illusion. This is a thing that happened. If you can go with that, you’re exactly the audience that Lynch wants.
Balthazar Getty isn’t the only character here who appears in a place where he doesn’t seem to belong. It’s a major theme in the movie. The obvious example is Robert Blake’s Mystery Man, a powder-white faced ventriloquist dummy of a person with shaved eyebrows who shows up at an EL Lay pretty people party for seemingly no purpose other than to scare the living fuck out of Bill Pullman. A slightly more subtle example is when Patricia Arquette (in what appears to be her second role here, a completely different character from Bill Pullman’s cheating wife, as fatcat gangster Robert Loggia’s trophy woman) steps out of a taxi cab alone at the car repair garage where Balthazar Getty works and, dressed to the nines, walks up to him, as he’s stained with grease and engine oil, and makes a play for his dick like a woman such as her would never need to actually do.
Robert Blake is to Bill Pullman what Patricia Arquette is to Balthazar Getty. Far-fetched encounters that barely seem to be real, but that lead these doomed men into their next world of trouble.
That’s how noir works. It’s all about fate. And if no one ever did anything stupid, well, we wouldn’t have any crime at all, now would we?