"Lost Highway", the David Lynch film (and probably my favourite of all Lynchs films, if you'd press me), has a fantastic soundtrack in my opinion. It's really over the top but mostly works with the loopy, drastic, violent storylines of the film. If I remember it correctly Trent Reznor was in charge and NIN submitted "The Perfect Drug" which I believe is quite highly regarded by NIN fans, plus lots of moody/goth/industrial stuff, notably a couple of outrageously dumb and full on Rammstein songs which were quite dramatically placed within the film and probably helped their somewhat baffling soon-forthcoming rise to the goth/industrial superleague. At the time, in the context of the film, they sounded so alien and different, the way these curiously sung German words were placed over the film, they had no direct connection to it but it worked. Apparently the whole film crew loved them. I don't know. You could say the soundtrack has somewhat aged but again I think it works well still, even as a period piece, there is a nice early 90s/80s hangover vibe underlying a lot of LH, and that's at least in part due to the soundtrack. I've seen it so many times (probably about twenty times, maybe a bit less, maybe, um, more) I don't have much critical distance to it anymore and just submit to the ride, usually, it is a fun ride, but it's safe to say the music and visual style make it the most overtly "goth" of Lynch films. At least that's one aspect of the film, and maybe one that doesn't necessarily work for everyone. It was slated by the critics early on, though I must say I liked it straight away, it was so punchy and genuinely shocking on that first viewing. If I remember correctly it was one of those films (the other probably being Twin Peaks - Fire Walk With Me, which I also love) when a lot of people genuinely gave up on Lynch, too weird, too overtly violent, too random, just make it stop :-). Again, I don't know. The film has held up strong for me with repeated viewings. It's not that difficult to follow, the different strands do hang together, it kinda does make sense etc. You just have to submit to it and its dreamlike world, suspend disbelief, otherwise it probably doesn't really work. I don't know what that says about me...
I had heard the Austrian writer Elfriede Jelinek and the Austrian composer Olga Neuwirth had staged an opera production of it in Germany a couple of years ago and was super excited just to hear about that. Are there any other stage adaptatins of Lynch films? It just seemed very interesting to have THAT film staged. And now the ENO had a London production in the smallish, in-the-round modern space of the Young Vic I just had to go....
In short, I think it's worth seeing, it brings the film to life and even adds things to it. Visually it's mainly successful in transferring the warped extreme visual language of the film onto a stage (with all its limitations), with a glass house hanging over the highway, surrounded by giant screens projecting the videos used in the film and other images. The glass house is both the LA house, the prison cell and the car in the last scene. The plot is somewhat shortened and it's now just 90 minutes long but otherwise it's very faithful and presents it in a more trimmed down form. The score is amazing, and that's why I mentioned the original soundtrack. I faintly heard a Lou Reed track that was also in the film played as a tape for a split second but it's mostly eerie, quite abstract, pulsating noisescapes played by an orchestra. Um, contemporary classical music, modern opera, are these the correct terms? First I didn't even notice it so much as I was focussing on seeing one of my favourite films transferred to the stage but as it progressed and built up the score became more noticeable and insistent. There is no opera singing to start with, the first few scenes are all spoken, but slowly it creeps in and it is so weird hearing lines from the film that already have a distinct hyper real quality (and that I know by heart, well some of them) sung in a weird, slightly hysterical, operatic way, as if played on a warped tape. And it's used quite sparsely but to dramatic effect, it adds to the disconcerting dreamlike atmosphere. It's really unusual to have a film like Lost Highway staged faithfully but as an opera, there are a lot of vaguely disturbing scenes that feature the same casual absurd violence and retain the overall tone of the film. Mostly worked. Go and see (well, it *is* expensive and only on til Thursday)!
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