Was Lynch inspired by Pulp Fiction when making Lost Highway? The film visually and tonally seems to have a similar feel and the mob/gangster storyline. Also there is the whole multiple interconnected stories told out of sequence aspect. Patricia Arquette’s characters also are similar to Uma Thurman in Pulp Fiction. It’s almost as if this film is Lynch’s answer to Pulp Fiction.
shareIt could be possible, yes. Some also noticed the heavy use of rock soundtrack during this film's violent scenes.
shareYep Lynch was clearly influenced by the ‘cool criminals’ fad of the 90’s courtesy of Tarantino, plus heavy use of great songs, which we don’t see much of these days.
He infused these things into his own Lynchian obsessions and the results were marvellous.
I’d love Netflix to bankroll a few more Lynch films before he logs off.
I thought you were sarcastic at first but there are people who actually believe Lynch would copy Tarantino or jump on bandwagons? Lol. Crazy.
shareI don’t think he did either of those things, I think he was inspired by Tarantino and included those elements in LH.
Lynch’s characters often live in dream worlds, and their fantasies take the form of existing movie genres.
Personally, I always thought it was the other way around. I can see Lynch's influence on Tarantino, potentially (I mean, who really knows?), as Blue Velvet definitely crept into the collective subconscious of several Hollywood film makers since its release.
There was either a film poster or a DVD cover with a pose of Laura Palmer laying on a bed for the film Fire Walk With Me and it was suggested that that position was aped by the cover of Pulp Fiction (they did look remarkably similar). So this kind of endless comparison goes on for whatever reason.
But back to Lost Highway. David Foster Wallace wrote an essay "David Lynch Keeps His Head" on the set of that film and here's an excerpt:
"In 1995, PBS ran a lavish ten-part documentary called American Cinema whose final episode was devoted to "The Edge of Hollywood" and the increasing influence of young independent filmmakers - the Coens, Jim Jarmusch, Carl Franklin, Q. Tarantino et al. It was not just unfair but bizarre that David Lynch's name was never once mentioned in the episode, because his influence is all over these directors. The Band-Aid on the neck of Pulp Fiction's Marcellus Wallace - unexplained, visually incongruous, and featured prominently in three separate set-ups - is textbook Lynch. So are the long, self-consciously mundane dialogues on pork, foot massages, TV pilots, etc. that punctuate Pulp Fiction's violence, a violence whose creepy/comic stylization is also resoundingly Lynchian. The peculiar narrative tone of Tarantino's films - the thing that makes them seem at once strident and obscure, not-quite-clear in a haunting way - is Lynch's tone; Lynch invented this tone. It seems to me fair to say that the commercial Hollywood phenomenon that is Mr. Quentin Tarantino would not exist without David Lynch as a touchstone, a set of allusive codes and contexts in the viewer's deep-brain core."
I remember reading that article, it’s excellent. I’m tempted to read one of David Foster Wallace’s books, probably Infinite Jest but it’s crazy long.
I wouldn’t be surprised if there was some cross pollination. I believe Kubrick was influenced by Lynch when he make The Shining, and that film subsequently inspired Lynch.
Lynch borrows a lot from famous paintings (https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/tv/news/a56137/david-lynch-scenes-paintings-video/), and thematically borrows from the writings of Kafka.
" . . . . and thematically borrows from the writings of Kafka."
I suppose Lynches acknowledgement, or homage, of Kafka comes in the form of a portrait hanging on the office wall of Agent Cole in Twin Peaks: The Return.
More like Tarantino was inspired by earlier Lynch (Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks, Wild at Heart).
shareVery possible when one considers Tarantino offered that "he loved David Lynch" (as he simultaneously trashed Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me back when it was originally released).
shareEverybody trashed Fire Walk with Me when it was new. I don't think anyone (myself included) understood what Lynch was doing. I watched it twenty years later and couldn't believe just how wrong I was in my initial judgment of the movie.
shareI don't know if I can personally claim to know what Lynch was doing with FWWM, but I loved it from the beginning and am happy that so many appreciate it now more than ever.
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