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The Blackout vs. Lost Highway


There is apparently something to be said about Ferrara's "The Blackout" having some similarities with David Lynch's films and especially to "Lost Highway", which came out the same year (1997).

Let's see what similarities and parallels we can identify...


First the trivial ones:

- Dennis Hopper in both films, at times channelling his Frank Booth character from "Blue Velvet", especially in his final "Get out of my life! Get out of my memory!..." scene in The "Blackout"

- The recurring line "Where's Annie?" in "The Blackout", which recalls Cooper's repeated final line "How's Annie?" in last episode of "Twin Peaks".

- Use of blue strobe lights with no reasonable diegetic source (every Lynch film / when Matty awakes in his hotel room after his dream of having sex with Annie and choking her to death (two-thirds into "The Blackout") and after waking up in a car and fantasizing about Annie 2 (45 min into the film, before the "18 months later" cut)).



Now for Lost Highway, I think there's quite a lot of them, some of which very interesting:

- Two women, a brunette and a blond, with opposite personalities in both films (Renee/Alice in "Lost Highway", Annie/Susan in "The Blackout").
Also, in "Lost Highway", the same actress (Patricia Arquette) plays two women with different names (Renee/Alice), whereas in "The Blackout" two different actresses (Beatrice Dalle and Sarah Lassez) play two different women with the same name (Annie). In both films the two women's identities are confused by the protagonist at some point.

- Shots of a cigarette-lit face in the dark (first shot of Bill Pullman after the opening credits in "Lost Highway" / Matty in "The Blackout").

- Scene in red room inside a club (when Fred phones his wife from the red room at the Luna Lounge at the beginning of "Lost Highway" / When Matty smokes crack in the toilets of the club where they are shooting the film, 35 min. into the "The Blackout").

- Ominous man dressed in black, filming the protagonist with a video camera (Mystery Man in "Lost Highway" / Mickey Wayne (Dennis Hopper) in "The Blackout").

- Several cuts to screens filled with video noise in both films.

- Resurfacing of the repressed violent murder of their wives into the consciousness of both films' protagonists.

- Protagonist listening to his recorded voice without recognizing, or wanting to recognize it (Fred saying "Dick Laurent is dead" to himself through the intercom at the beginning of "Lost Highway" / Matty listening to the recording of him telling his wife to have an abortion at the beginning of "The Blackout").

- Bookending scenes expressing the inner mental state of a delusional protagonist escaping the real world (highway at night in "Lost Highway" / sea at night in "The Blackout").


If anyone spotted any other similarities and parallels, or has any interesting theory about why these two 1997 film share so much thematically and aesthetically...

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Quite insteresting. Hadn't really thought of that before. Personally, I like The Blackout more than Lost Highway. I think it's the sleazy neo-noir mood created by the music and the shots of Miami. And both Modine and Hopper are excellent in this.

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Great post. I can't imagine the parallels are intentional (both films were shot in 1996 at around the same time) but it's very intriguing nonetheless. Lost Highway seems to have influenced a large number of films in lots of ways. Mulholland Drive -- which is sort of a female LH -- is the more acclaimed film, but Lost Highway seems to me to have had a bigger immediate influence on other filmmakers, with its viscerally subjective portrait of insanity and its tantalizingly eerie videotapes-on-the-doorstep plot hook. The most obvious example of course is Haneke's Cache (2005) which borrows the latter element completely. Also, can't be intentional but in Fincher's The Game (1997), the scene where Michael Douglas discovers the hidden camera recording him, inside the clown doll's eyeball, has a Lost Highway feel to it.

The theme of surveillance and the experimentation with video and its textures continues and is even intensified in Ferrara's next film, 1998's New Rose Hotel -- his best film along with Bad Lieutenant, in my opinion. Except in New Rose Hotel, video is used not as an ominous device or a kind of "return of the repressed" but rather just an ubiquitous element of the film's dystopian surveillance society where everything, everyone, everywhere is always being watched.

You could say that the reason Blackout and Lost Highway are so similar is they are both exploring the psyches of a mentally imbalanced man who's in a sort of fugue state stuck between memory and fantasy and reality, constantly thinking about and analyzing and re-making the past over and over again in his mind. That they both happen to use the medium of video to dramatize this state could be simply seen as indicative of the format's burgeoning popularity in the late-90s; still, the similarities remain striking.

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Thanks.
Mulholland Dr. indeed feels like a "female Lost Highway", not only because the protagonist is a woman, but the tone of the film, the photography have... I don't know, more "feminine" qualities than in Lost Highway.
If films had genders MD would definitely be female and LH male (sexist clichés notwithstanding...): the former is suave, sensual and seductive, the latter is brutal, edgy and aggressive.

As for the thematic similarities between all the films you cited (surveillance, uncertain nature of "reality", etc.), I think they are indeed clearly a symptom of great auteurs getting a feel of the zeitgeist in the 90's : the emergence of the technology that will allow global scale surveillance of citizens -mostly by citizens themselves-, the lack of a powerful antagonist for the US in between the collapse of Soviet Union and the beginning of the War on Terror (meaning that, as in the 70's and contrary to the 80's, the enemy comes from within all over again), the constant questioning about the nature of reality...

Regarding this last aspect in particular (perception vs. reality), aside from the films you cited and films like "The Matrix", it's interesting to consider the number of films in the 90's that dealt with characters being unaware that they are dead and slowly coming to grips with that state of affair. Films like Jacob's Ladder (1990), Final Approach (1991), A Pure Formality (1994), The Sixth Sense (1999), Mulholland Dr. (2001, but mostly shot in 1999), etc.. It almost became a sub-genre.
And these are not films like Sunset Boulevard where the narrator being dead is only a storytelling device. In those films the protagonist is already dead (or dying) and is actually experiencing a collapse of reality within the diegetic space.

Man, I can't wait for 90's cinema to be properly analysed and subjected to thorough critical thinking. The time is ripe and I think the work's just begun!

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Oh definitely, there's a certain period from about 1997-2002 (with some before and after, but mainly concentrated around there) where there's just tons of films that are all about the uncertainty of reality, how "real" is reality, what IS reality, etc. And all the films about characters being uncertain of their status as alive or dead very much fit into that. (Similarly, there were so many films in the mid-late 2000s which no longer questioned reality but instead emanated a kind of weary acceptance of its darkness, post-9/11 under Bush).

And in addition to characters unaware of their own death, I'd say there were a lot of films about characters with a mental disorder of some sort which is either known to the audience and presented subjectively (perhaps Lost Highway qualifies even if it's not immediately apparent?), or unknown to the audience and presented as a twist (Fight Club et al). I'd put all these films under the same "questioning of reality" banner from around 97-02.

Other examples besides what we've already mentioned: Vanilla Sky, Eyes Wide Shut, Existenz, The Game, The Others, Donnie Darko, Pi, Demonlover, Fear X, The Truman Show, Cure, Femme Fatale, Memento, The Pledge, Swimming Pool, Waking Life, Pulse, Spider, Secret Window, etc.

Indeed, in terms of richness and sheer number of great films the cinema of the 1990s may in fact be only second to the 1950s and 1970s! A controversial claim, but there were so many directors at the top of their game in the 90s, so many different countries producing great cinema, and so many lesser filmmakers making thematically interesting films... it's definitely ripe for analysis.

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Blackout was just about OK but nothing too special and not among Ferrara's best but he has done some worse ones too. About a 5 or at most a 6.

Lost Highway is one of the 10 best movies of the 90s and one of Lynch's top 3 best works, 10/10.

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