In 1997 David Lynch used a Lou Reed song in his movie “Lost Highway.”
I was 18 years old in the summer of 1997 and just out of high school. David Lynch and Lou Reed were two of the most important people in my life. The moment when Lou’s cover of “This Magic Moment” kicked in on the “Lost Highway” soundtrack felt like a culmination of my artistic needs at that point in my life.
I first saw “Lost Highway” with a group of friends at the Rivoli in La Crosse, Wisconsin. We’d dedicated much of our summer to watching “Twin Peaks” and were suitably obsessed with it. To my recollection, we all liked the new movie too, but we also felt like it lacked something when held up against the horrible beauty of David Lynch’s TV masterpiece. “Lost Highway” was pitch-dark, ponderous, and grounded in the 1990s in a way that Lynch’s other work seldom felt moored to its era.
But man, it had Lou Reed covering “This Magic Moment.” The song plays when Balthazar Getty’s traumatized young mechanic first lays eyes on Patricia Arquette, playing the second of two mysterious women who might actually be one woman, or no women. (It’s a David Lynch movie, remember.) In that context, it can easily be interpreted as Getty’s character recognizing the magic moment when his dream woman entered his life. That’s certainly part of it, but it doesn’t get at the overall significance of the song, or of Lou Reed being the one to sing it.
“This Magic Moment” was co-written by prolific songwriter Doc Pomus, a legendary figure in the 1950s and ‘60s pop music scene and a close personal friend of Lou Reed’s. Pomus’s death from lung cancer in 1991 hit Lou hard. It was one of the titular losses that inspired his 1992 album “Magic and Loss,” which I hold as one of the greatest meditations on death in the history of music. In 1995 Lou was asked to contribute a song to a Doc Pomus covers album called “Till the Night Is Gone,” alongside such esteemed Pomus acolytes as Bob Dylan, Brian Wilson, Ben E. King, and Dr. John. That’s where the version of “This Magic Moment” used in “Lost Highway” comes from.
In that context, I read Lou’s version a little differently. “Magic and Loss” is full of imagery involving people changing and becoming new selves over the course of their lives, and their deaths. I hear Lou’s take on “This Magic Moment” as a song of longing for a lost friend, a wish to trap certain pieces of his friendship with Doc Pomus in amber and preserve their perfection. To make those magic moments last forever, forever ‘til the end of time.
That reading ties directly into the themes of “Lost Highway,” an intentionally hazy story of one woman’s effort to free herself from the men who would constrain her in various ways, even if it means destroying herself – or at least one of her selves. Every major character in the film cycles through multiple identities, often without them or us understanding why or how or to whom it’s all happening. Getty and Pullman seem to swap existences. Arquette changes her appearance depending on who’s in her company. Robert Blake can be in two places at once. Robert Loggia conducts evil business under two personae, one of whom might be dead.
Time and self are mutable concepts in this world, but magic moments mean everything. Lynch draws a clear divide between remembering and preserving these moments. We’re told early on that Bill Pullman’s character hates video cameras because he wants his memories to be “how I remembered them; not necessarily the way they happened.” Photographs, films, and VHS tapes play big roles in the narrative, locking people into not-so-magic moments that they desperately want to remember differently. Eventually we see that even those supposedly unchanging artifacts aren’t set in stone, but by then they’ve wreaked havoc (often well-earned) on the lives of all involved.
All of this was on my mind when I rewatched “Lost Highway” at the Grandview Theater last night. It was the first time I’d seen it on the big screen since 1997, although there have been a couple of video viewings in between. On this viewing I recognize it as a masterpiece, one of several in the David Lynch catalog. My local movie theaters have been rolling out a steady stream of David Lynch tribute screenings since his death earlier this year. I’ve made a point of seeing each one, both because David Lynch was one of the most important artists of my formative years and because it’s a form of therapy as I process a loss of my own.
I lost a friend last year. Not “lost” as in “they died,” but rather that deep-rooted differences between us finally became too irreconcilable to ignore and too grievous to forgive. It had been a long time coming. I think both of us knew it, but we let it slide for longer than we should have because we still valued the friendship enough that we weren’t willing to stop grabbing onto the past. I put off the necessary conversation for ages, not because I was waiting for the right moment, but because I didn’t want that potentially ugly moment to negate the magic moments we had yet to experience.
That’s another reason I’ve been so doggedly revisiting the David Lynch catalog since his passing. A shared love of David Lynch films figured heavily into my relationship with my former friend. Not long ago, we likely would have seen all of these movies sitting side by side just like we did “Lost Highway” back in 1997. Watching Lynch’s films these past few months has drawn pangs of sadness for the conversations they might have inspired, but it’s also been invaluable for viewing the situation in a larger context.
Nearly every Lynch film explores themes of duality and time. People, relationships, and realities change suddenly in these stories, in ways perplexing to both the characters and the audience. Just as often, things that appear benign are revealed to have been diseased and disgusting all along. People in Lynch’s movies try to ignore or resist these revelations, often by clinging to magic moments from the past. But the march of time makes it impossible to preserve those moments. The cold, hard facts of images, videos, documents, and words make it just as impossible for the Bill Pullmans of the world to keep on living in their own embellished or wholly fabricated moments.
There is a world of difference in viewing David Lynch’s body of work with the eyes of a rapidly withering urban hipster rather than those of a spunky, pretentious rural teenager. His films are layered with levels of sadness, obsession, and desperation that I simply wasn’t equipped to identify in my youth. That isn’t to say that I misunderstood these movies as a teen. I simply understood them the only way I could at the time. I understand them differently now, and I’ll understand them another way when I watch them all again in a couple of decades.
That’s true of all art to an extent, but even more so for a canon so deeply interested in the mutability of identity. Through Lynch’s lens, I’m more able to recognize that the crisp, green lawn of my former friendship rested on a festering foundation of rot and dirt and scavenging insects. I’m also able to recognize that the magic moments that made it work are neither diminished nor erased by its inevitable dissolution. As Bill Pullman's character learns, trying to make the past conform to your memory only works until someone forces you to face the facts of the matter. Clinging to the reality you want only makes it harder to stare down the reality that is.
Like Lou Reed said, “there’s a bit of magic in everything, and then some loss to even things out.” It isn’t 1997 anymore. It isn’t 2008 or 2019 or even yesterday. It’s today. It’s right now. Lou Reed is dead. David Lynch is dead. My friendship is dead. So it goes. And gosh, it sure does go.
By definition, every moment we experience is both impermanent and unalterable. Lynch and Lou both understood that that doesn’t make those moments not magic. In fact, it’s exactly why they are.
