If there is someone capable of leaving us reflecting for hours after the end of a film, that is David Lynch. If viewers have already been thinking over and over the cryptic endings of ‘Inland Empire’, ‘Mulholland Drive’ or the third season of ‘Twin Peaks’, imagine the actors who have gone through them. Patricia Arquette, the protagonist of ‘Lost Highway’, shared his interpretation of one of Lynch’s most mysterious films.
Down the dark side of the road
‘Lost Highway’ was released in 1997 and is about a musician who begins to receive strange videotapes in which he and his wife appear at his home. The film is divided into two halves and at no time is the relationship between the two explicitly stated.
Within the possible interpretations of the film, we have the correct explanation that the actress gave Patricia Arquette, co-star of the film with Bill Pullmanwho explained in a podcast how he approached his character.
From now on, SPOILERS from the end of ‘Lost Highway’
Reading the script, Arquette asked Lynch if she was two different characters or the same, if one was a dream or a ghost, if it was a hallucination… but the director did not want to give him any indication on that subject and left it to your own interpretation.
So the actress decided to take as reference the case of OJ Simpson, which obsessed Lynch at the time and in which he found many points in common with ‘Lost Highway’: a man whom all the evidence points to as the murderer of his wife but who insists that he did not do it. Is it possible that at some point he began to believe his own lie?
Arquette explains that he approached the film as “an analysis of women through the eyes of a misogynist” and this is how he built his character:
Renee, my character, is married to Bill. But he touches the hood of her car when she gets home to check if he’s warm, if she’s out of it. There is something weird between them. She doesn’t feel safe with him but she is kind trying to bore him into leaving him.
He kills her but has no recollection of doing so. She sees it as something alien to him. He then reinvents himself as that young boy and meets her again. Now she really wants him! But, even in that fantasy reality she dreams of, she’s a lying bitch, she always will be. And she will never love him enough, nor will she ever be safe to love.
Of course, an interesting interpretation that is quite close to some of the theories raised about the film, and even to what the director himself has commented on occasion.