Lost Highway (David Lynch, 1997)

 

There is a slang expression in America that I dig very much and I think that it's extremely successful, graphic and explanatory. That expression is "artsy fartsy". In Greece and in Europe in general we have a lot of artsy fartsy examples. I know people who are particularly successful to what they are doing and yet the thing that they are doing is pathetically phony, pretentiously sophisticated and immensely unappealing. There is even a fantastic, underrated film about that issue called The Kill Room with Uma Thurman and Samuel L. Jackson. Artsy Fartsy is an epidemic of our times. And I'm not trying to say that back in the days weren't phony artists, but as time passes that phenomenon gets bigger and bigger and for the fucking life of me I don't know where it will stop or lead. The most dreadful thing of all about that kind of phoniness is that the "artists" who fall in that category are usually tremendously egotistical and think that they are manufacturing some higher form of art than the others, the "square" artists. And as much as I hate the average American moron who watches some shitty horror movie and shouts "this film rules, man!" with his mouth full of popcorn, I can easily say that he is my dearest friend and an authentic character when compared with the artsy fartsy people. 

Artsy fartsy people don't even have a taste of their own. They like what other artsy fartsy people like and they are particularly nasty and snobbish to things that don't fall on their suffocating category. There is a movie that is called Lost Highway by the major David Lynch that is appreciated and loved by many artsy fartsy people around the globe. David Lynch in general is praised by that kind of people. I'm telling you for sure that not even one of them knows why he digs Lost Highway. He digs it because it's inside his obligatory code to like it. Because Lost Highway is ethereal, incomprehensive, surrealistic and nightmarish. And of course that is the true reason also why Lost Highway is such an impeccable movie and a movie that has no duplicate. But for the artsy fartsy people the explanation that I just gave to you is a foreign language. For those people Lost Highway... RULES! because it has to rule, regardless the fact that most of those people didn't get anything from film. Not even its wild and untamable emotion.