Lost Highway (2002) from Johnny Web (Uncle Scoopy; Greg Wroblewski)

I think Lost Highway is kind of a cool movie, maintaining a level of creepiness high enough to require multiple showers if you are watching at home. Having said that, I must add that I don't have any idea what is going on.

Bill Pullman plays a hepcat sax player whose wife is a low-down cheatin' tramp. He can't seem to interest her in anything about himself.

They start to receive mysterious video tapes which demonstrate that someone is watching them in their house.

Pullman goes home, and before the night is over, he finds that his wife has been cut in half, ala the Black Dahlia, and that there is another  mysterious videotape, this one showing Pullman standing over the body, drenched in blood. So Pullman ends up on death row, not able to understand how a videotape could show something that never happened. One morning, the jailers go to his cell and find a completely different guy in there. Nobody knows how that could be, but the new guy is a garage mechanic with a genuine life history, and he hasn't committed any crimes, so the police let him go, but decide to keep an eye on him.

The garage mechanic then goes through some adventures with another woman who looks exactly like Pullman's wife (same actress, different wig), and these events seem to parallel Pullman's life in the distorted way of a funhouse mirror.

There are some bizarre comic interludes. The garage mechanic's girlfriend is also the girlfriend of a mobster (Robert Loggia). The mechanic also tunes the mobster's car. At one point, the mobster beats a motorist nearly to death for tailgating. He gets especially upset when the other driver can't tell him how many feet it takes to stop a car going 65 MPH. Loggia lets the poor sap live only after the bloody, weeping man agrees to read the drivers' manual and memorize the safety rules.

Then it starts to get really weird!

Get the picture?

Does it mean anything? Doubtful. David Lynch's filmmaking is pretty much all style, no substance.

It is an oft-repeated axiom that the line between genius and insanity is a fine one. In reality, there is no line. Some geniuses are mad. It is their very madness which makes them interesting.

Both "genius" and "insanity" are ambiguous and imprecise words, but I think what we mean in this case is that a genius is someone with a tremendous talent for something, a talent so great that we normal people could not achieve the same results with any amount of hard work and  perseverance. No matter how hard I tried and how much I studied, I could never think like David Lynch. But insanity can be pretty much the same thing, can't it?

We say a person is insane if they simply cannot recognize the obvious differences between fantasy and reality that are apparent to "normal" people, or if they cannot understand the simple logic of cause and effect, or if they spend too much time focused on a detail that seems meaningless to the rest of us - an insane guy can spend all day watching a bee. In other words, like geniuses, they live in a world that the rest of us can never enter.

Does that mean all surrealists are insane? Hell, no. Salvador Dali was as sane as any of us. He was a calculating genius with a soaring imagination. But some people who are considered geniuses are also genuine nutcases. Antonioni comes to mind. His movies make no sense, and when he spoke, his words were just as incomprehensible as his films, complete babble, exactly what you'd expect from a guy in the local loony bin. I suppose David Lynch is in the same category, but his nuttiest concepts often seem to draw us in.

Sure most of his Lynch's work is pointless - but it is captivating nonetheless. His unique talent is that he can actually get one involved in something that doesn't make any sense. How many other people have that talent?

I can't name even one. He's unique. That's genius.

He is a genius, and he probably is insane, and he has somehow found a way to make both characteristics profitable.