SOURCE: Rhodes, Eric Bryant. Review of Lost Highway, by David Lynch. Film Quarterly 51, no. 3 (spring 1998): 57-61.

In the following review, Rhodes asserts that Lost Highway's narrative is based on a theme-and-variation structure in which recurrent visual and thematic motifs take precedence over conventional narrative coherence.

The ever quotable pop artist and underground filmmaker Andy Warhol reportedly stated that films are “better talked about than seen.” With his latest film adventure, Lost Highway, David Lynch has given audiences a complex and perplexing story to ponder and some astonishingly brilliant images to enjoy. Yet the majority of critical responses to Lynch's new horror noir have denounced the film's narrative as being interesting but impenetrably chaotic at best, and some have even gone as far as to call the film unwatchable. Even the cinephiles who have recognized the significant aesthetic achievements of Lynch's film have announced that he is unconcerned...