Lost Highway

One of our favorite movie experiences (and probably one of our favorite anything experiences) was heading out to see Mulholland Drive back in 2002. See, we'd checked us out some David Lynch during our high school days and each time found ourselves horribly disappointed. Our Clearasil-addled minds were dead set on thinkin' that if something was s'posed ta be "nightmarish" then that'd mean it'd be all gory and Cronenberg-y. You can imagine our surprise when we discovered "nightmarish" really meant "weird and slow." Guess it's no wonder we didn't like Blue Velvet. But we grew up in the next two years and once we were filling up on some good ol' university style tweed sportcoat mumbo-jumbo we thought to ourselves, "Yessir, we think we're finally ready to give that other Big Dave another try. Which way's the theatre, dude with the Peta shirt and At the Drive-In 12"?"

Armed with lotsa Foucault learnings and auteur philosophies, we sat in that cineplex and hung on every image and every word the Drive threw at us. We scratched our chins and let out a "hmmmmm" or two, and when we walked out of there we felt pretty good 'bout having seen a real-deal smart guy flick. And that feeling only got better as we headed down the block to share our pontifications 'bout Mulholland's deep meanings, character inversions, dream imagery, and sweet sweet boobies over a couple of frosty brews.

And now here we are. It's a few of years later, we've abandoned our hairy armpit constructivist affinities, and we've finally sat ourselves down for some Lost Highway. The experience was similar, yes, but this time around there emerged a difference so great that we're not sure we will ever recover. No, it wasn't that we stopped paying attention. It wasn't that we hit the sack without our gray matter a-analyzing. It wasn't that we decided against working on a Highway magnum opus. Our Achilles heel turned out to be something so simple we'd failed to consider it in the first place. It was...

The Internet.

Yup. It was a simple Google search for "Lost Highway." Before we knew it we were ankle-deep in a host of ancient frames-enabled webpages, each one more chock full o' Lynchian theorizing than the last. We never thought it'd be a big deal. Normally we love the imdb trivia and the Ebert review. We want nothing more than checking out the superhighway's infinite peanut gallery. But this time, as we sat in our chairs scrolling through David Lynch tribute pages, we felt like we were committin' adultery against our brains. Here we were, armchair Sarrises who'd put some real time and energy into putting together an amateur tract 'bout meanin' and interpretation and then what do we do? We go and ruin the whole thing with a few simple mouse clicks. We threw away the fruit of our cranial churnin' and bubblin' all 'cause we wanted to read some pretentious nerd's sub-thesis. Sure, maybe it was more thought-out than what we were comin' up with, but goshdammit it wasn't ours, and we walked away feeling a little bit sad and a whole lot dirty.

So sometime in the not so near future when we actually decide to sit down for Inland Empire we're making the commitment right now to get us a trial version of NetNanny and put "David Lynch" into the banned searches list. It may interfere with our Transcendental Meditation research, but you can bet the Empire post will be pure Cinema.