Endless Highway Continued (Naturally)

Oh, you didn't think I was finished talking about Lost Highway with yesterday's entry, did you? I feel like I could talk about it forever.

I wonder if many people have considered the possibility that Lynch looked at Mr. Eddie (Robert Loggia) as a heroic character. For all his bluster, the only person we actually know he killed was Marilyn Manson, who may have been a demon. There's the tailgating scene and certainly he's excessively violent there. But I remember an interview with Michael Anderson on the first Twin Peaks season one DVD in which he talked about riding with Lynch and witnessing someone tailgating him. Lynch shrugged it off but Anderson commented that the tailgater was such an asshole that he would have been furious had he been in Lynch's shoes. Then, years later, Anderson saw that scene in Lost Highway and figured Lynch got his revenge. After Lynch and Michael Anderson, who was the dwarf on Twin Peaks, had a falling out, Lynch made a scene in the third season of Twin Peaks in which Agent Cooper nearly rips off a dwarf's hand, egged on by a talking cgi tree that took the place of Anderson in the role. So Lynch was not above indulging in cathartic violence vicariously through his characters.

Loggia believed he got the role as Mr. Eddie because he gave a memorably violent audition for Frank Booth, the role that Dennis Hopper eventually played in Blue Velvet. But Frank is utterly amoral while Mr. Eddie clearly has a kind of moral code. Mr. Eddie was a gangster but consider how the Mitchum brothers, the two gangsters on the third season of Twin Peaks, turned out to be heroic characters. So I think it's possible that Lynch considered Mr. Eddie a better man than Fred Madison. After all, Renee certainly seems to be happier with Mr. Eddie.

Following on from what I said yesterday about Lost Highway and surveillance culture, I remember when I watched the movie with my grandfather he mentioned that the prison you see Fred in, in which guards on a catwalk above could look down on the prisoners in cells without ceilings, was an actual prison design implemented in France.

I suppose I would be kind of remiss for not mentioning the panopticon, the prison designed so that prisoners would never know whether or not they're being watched at any given time. Michel Foucault famously used the panopticon has a point in discussion about modern discipline and it was used in the 1984 film version of Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Of all the songs on Lost Highway's famous soundtrack, it's The Smashing Pumpkins' "Eye" that best connects with this idea.

I think my favourite track is Nine Inch Nails' "Perfect Drug", though, even though it's barely in the movie. Mark Romanek's music video for it is still amazing.