[Lost Highway] gets pretty crazy with two themes churning, finding a way to separate and then coming back again. [ ... ] Certain things happen, ideas come along and they string themselves together and they form a whole and then a theme, or something becomes apparent — if you wanna look for it. But if you're true to these ideas you don't need to know. If you start off with a theme and say, "We're gonna amplify this theme," and do a story about teenage rape, that to me is completely backwards. Then you've gotta force things to fit. The other way, you don't know what it is. It just comes together and then later you find out. But meanwhile you're falling in love with it. You just know somewhere that it's right for you.
I have many rules of thumb concerning how to tell if a movie sucks, the most useful being that if you can watch the filmmakers' efforts while you watch what's supposedly the end product of those efforts, it sucks. If a sequence prompts me to envision the succession of scriptwriters' meetings that produced it, GAME OVER. I try not to Hollywood-bash, but it must be said that this sort of thing rises by sheer prominence to the prime failing of blockbusters or intended blockbusters. Dialogue emanates from the speakers, but I only hear stuff like this: "So when she loses the cat, we set up the false crisis that precedes the real crisis." "We're hitting the theme of youthful courage under pressure too hard. Let's spread it out over three football game montages, not one." "We showed the gun in act one; we're going to have to fire it in act three." (The only reasonable explanation is that these guys all came up on Mystery Science Theater 3000 and thus want to make dreck.)
This is not so promote the viewing mode of uncritical absorption, either. Everything I watch, read and listen to, I experience as a wrought object, and I've found that level of analysis by far the richest. (There's only so much advice one can shout to characters onscreen, after all.) Nor would I suggest that movies are only cool when their creators don't seem to be trying; I respect hard labor in creativity more than almost anything else. But when the hands pull the strings so deliberately and set up domino lines of contrivance so rigidly, paying no heed to the organic, the accidental and the ambiguous, the labor's lost.
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