I think I have a few things to say about Lost Highway after all, but I don't know if I'll have time in the next few weeks. But I did make time to watch it last night and, gods, how I love that movie. I know I'm well in the minority on this, but this is a movie I've watched many, many times and I've never gotten sick of it.
The DVD image is the most beautifully clear I've seen this movie (which reminds me of the irony that it's only just now getting released on DVD as DVDs are on the precipice of being phased out by blu-ray)(yes, I've pre-emptively lower-cased "blue-ray". Suck it, corporations), but the sound could be better. The opening song, "I'm Deranged", by David Bowie, immediately sounded slightly muted to me, though maybe it's because I'm used to blasting it in my car. Anyway, one of the things I've loved slightly more than I've hated about the movie is its quiet, particularly at the beginning. This is not a movie to be watched while people are doing things in the next room, or while there's a clock ticking on your wall, and please, shut your fucking trap for two hours, because this is a silence you need to let settle on you like a cloud. Fred Madison's stiflingly poor communication skills that makes him imagine his wife's skipping out on him extravagantly, and also probably makes his wife skip out on him extravagantly (it hardly matters whether or not she did, though I suspect she did. I think she stayed with Fred out of pity). But it's the quiet that also means the loud bits are going to be really loud, and you know David Lynch did that on purpose. So resist the urge to grab the volume controls on the remote. Let the neighbours bark like Jack the dog.
Jack's the name of the dog who plays the neighbour dog that supposedly wakes Renee up early in the film. Yes, of the thousands of times I've watched the movie, I can't remember a time I didn't sit through the credits.
Anyway, yeah, maybe this weekend I'll have time to say all I want to say about this movie. Where is all the time going? I didn't even have time to drink last night--I believe this is the first time I watched the movie since I started drinking, so I was able to appreciate for the first time Fred gulping down those two, neat, double scotches. Wow, Fred, wow.
To-day, I read the new Sirenia Digest, which contains a sequel to H.P. Lovecraft's "Pickman's Model" called "Pickman's Other Model". Caitlin's work is rife with Lovecraft influence, so it's not a surprise, I suppose, that she can write an actual sequel to one of his stories like a duck takes to water. It's one of the fullest feeling single pieces the Digest has featured in a while. It has a beautiful layering of details, of reality conceptions. Aesthetically, paintings of ghouls, a silent movie vamp, and a bizarre cult murder go together well, and they serve the concept, familiar to readers of Kiernan, of certain truths or aspects of reality being too horrible to acknowledge, let alone discuss. I have to say, I sort of wish this had been a longer piece for which she'd had more time to flesh out. But, then, maybe it's better to see the piece as part of her larger mythology as well as Lovecraft's, both of which it is.
So, now I'd better go on to the next thing on my agenda, which I see is . . . dinner. Hey, that's not so bad . . .
Gods, has Jon Stewart aged, like, three hundred years, or what?
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