Retro Movie Pass Adventures: Lost Highway (1997)

What if Vertigo but David Lynch?

Patricia Arquette and Balthazar Getty in Lost Highway
Robert Blake as Mystery Man in Lost Highway

Somehow, David Lynch’s Lost Highway is both more and less realistic than Hitchcock’s Vertigo. Body doubles, body switches, a Mystery Man who appears in multiple places at once, and a linear story told in non-linear time, but it’s still not as weird as a guy dressing up a woman to look like the woman who thought she was possessed by her ancestor and killed herself but then two or three other layers of unlikely weirdness happen.

Also: it was fun to see Robert Loggia beat up a guy on the closed road I use to ride my bike to Griffith Observatory.

Today’s poster was such an clear choice that I almost avoided it for being too obvious. Fun fact: The original poster featured an early example of computer graphics. Vertigo was actually the first movie to use computer graphics; Saul Bass used them in the title sequence and on the original version of this poster. They probably took days to render. I made my low resolution substitute in about five minutes with an online programming language for kids called Scratch. The part that took the longest was all the hand drawn lettering. There are Saul Bass homage fonts out there, but I wanted all the letters to be unique.

A poster for Lost Highway in the style of the poster for Vertigo.

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