It also amplifies the horror Laura feels when she sees her friend Donna, so movingly played by Moira Kelly, attempting to follow her lead.
Yes, it’s all a part of Lynch’s art and I think that’s sometimes really hard for an American audience to embrace.
To me, Lynch’s “Wild at Heart” could be interpreted as a fever dream had by Christian Slater’s Elvis-obsessed character in “True Romance.”
That had always been one of my bucket list questions for Patricia Arquette, and I was glad that I got to ask her about the connections between those two films. She agreed with me that those connections are there, and in doing a bit of writing about “Pulp Fiction” and other Tarantino films, I actually see a lot of similarities between Lynch and Tarantino, which is interesting since Tarantino has said some snotty things about Lynch. But I think he likes Lynch because you’ll often see him do things that Lynch had already done first.
What makeup artist Debbie Zoller achieved in “Lost Highway” was incredible, leading up to Fred’s implied electrocution at the end. I love your comparisons in the book of Pullman looking at the skylight in his house and then the light in his cell, suggesting that he has always been in prison throughout the film, which echoes the interpretation that Agent Cooper never leaves the Red Room in “Twin Peaks: The Return.”
Debbie Zoller’s work on Alice and Renee is so detailed. She is just incredibly smart and great at her job. I love that interview, and she was very motivating to me. I got sort of emotional during our conversation because she told me about how she really took control of her life and her career by believing that she could do more. She got her start on “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” and she said, “I could still be working on ‘Star Trek’ today, and that could’ve just been my career.” She could’ve spent thirty years working on “Star Trek,” and there’s nothing wrong with that career, but she’s gotten to do so many other things because she believed she could do more than put on Vulcan ears. When you look at all that she has done, it just makes you think that whatever you want to do, nothing should hold you back from going out and doing it.
I had to quote you in my obituary for Angelo Badalamenti because I loved how you analyzed his music in your previous book. You do an equally wonderful deep dive into the “Lost Highway” soundtrack here, which you dub the film’s “reliable narrator,” an observation that could likely be made about all of Lynch’s work. Have you gradually come to that realization through your analysis of the music?
Yeah, definitely. I really learned that from “Fire Walk With Me” years and years before I was ever covering Lynch. I started to notice how he’d put the sound of the electricity in whenever certain things would happen, which made me begin to pay close attention to the sound. So much of the feeling and mood in “Eraserhead” is created by the sound. All that being said, I knew very little about the soundtrack for “Lost Highway,” so that chapter on it became my favorite in the whole book because I actually had to do research on the songs. Whereas I knew every song frontwards and backwards from “Fire Walk With Me,” I really had to research where the songs in “Lost Highway” came from and what they meant. I learned a ton about them, and they helped to sort of explain the movie. That is not true of most movie soundtracks. I don’t know if studying the “Clueless” soundtrack is really going to bring something more to that movie, but with “Lost Highway,” it truly does.
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