SPOILERS

A dry run for Muholland Drive and nowhere near as rich. It has the same plot --a murderer creates a doppelganger to get over guilt-- but the three leads are dry cyphers. Watched on a movie night with Eraserhead, which was inspiring to revisit (--in the sense of the filmmaking, not mutant cow baby nightmares).

Things I liked about Lost Highway regardless:

- the wonderful sense of having to stay quiet around a coarse, uncouth and powerful person, exemplified in the drive Getty takes with Robert Loggia. It ends in the silly scene where Loggia pistolwhips someone while explaining the dangers of tailgating. This establishes for the plot that Loggia is dangerous, and later when Pullman returns he kills Loggia to return the sense of manliness he lost when he couldn't perform in bed early in the film. It reminds me of a particular boss I had, who just like Loggia likes Getty, liked me. I didn't see him as a metaphorical challenge to my manhood, but I did resent how he brought me down to his level and I was required to follow, and wasn't able to express disagreement as part of the job.

Loggia offers him his porn tapes, shows off his car, and beats someone to a pulp, all to show off (or as prospective employee training), and for once in the film Getty's character being the silent type works really well as awkward nervousness

- Getty cannot imagine Arquette's character as anything other than electric sex in the window, so when he sees her in a porn film and when she has no reaction to a (dead) body, in typical femme fatale fashion, he's devastated. He can barely move. I thought the film played this well. His exaltation of her as a blonde hottie handicaps him

- Patricia Arquette, like Pullman and Getty, must tamp down her personality in service of playing a type and not a character. As in other Lynch films he/the camera is obsessed with her, but unusual for him it just produces the regular catalog of an actress' body any Skinemax movie would create.

But the super closeup shot near the end just before the plate glass death, where she delivers a singsong list of instructions about where to go and who to hit over the head is great, and how the whole movie should have been. Lynch knows how to employ her like Scott/Tarantino did in True Romance. She's much more compelling as a breezy character than a quiet one

- Robert Blake is quite chilling and effective

- allowed to be funny and idiosyncratic, Jack Nance and Richard Pryor do more in a few lines than everybody else on a leash

I'd love to see a shorter edit that turns up the humanity of the characters a bit by taking less time between Blake and face swapping