9. David LynchLost Highway
No film maker terrifies me so deeply as David Lynch. There are half a dozen films of his that, no matter how often I see them, they still get me on an absolute visceral level. Not in terms of actual physical gruesomeness, but a sense of the utterly, dreadfully uncanny. When he gets onto supernatural dread, nobody comes remotely close. Things like the lurker behind the diner in Mulholland Drive, or the breakfast table scene in Fire Walk With Me, or the scene with the portrait on the wall, or that ghastly moment where Laura Palmer’s mouth turns into somebody else’s mouth for the duration of a shot. For me, the epitome of this, or the most intense case of it, is Lost Highway. The first time I saw it, was at a midnight show in Los Angeles. After about 20 minutes, I actually began to feel that if it went on like this for much longer, I’d have to get up and leave and come back and watch it another day, maybe in daylight. The intensity was such that I really was at the very edge of coping with the experience. I did sit there and take it, but every time I see it, that first half an hour or so, the whole first section up to the prison scene really, it has an intensity of terror that I don’t see anywhere else in the cinema, other than in other work by David Lynch. If I had to single out a moment in that film, it would be the moment that Bill Pullman tries to make love to Patricia Arquette in the first part of the film, and clearly fails. She says, almost inaudibly, it’s all right or words to that effect, and pats him on the shoulder in slow motion. Somehow, that image manages to convey to me, that he feels that it’s not her hand. Then there’s that ghastly moment where he talks about having woken and finding someone else, not her, next to him in the bed, and then wakes and the thing happens again.
