Orpheus and Eurydice Go to the Movies
Kissed, Lost highway,and Crash
J. A. Hanson
July 1, 1997
Kissed, directed by Lynne Stopkewich (Orion Pictures, 1996), 80 mins.
Lost Highway, directed by David Lynch (October Films, 1996), 135 mins.
Crash, directed by David Croneberg (Fine Line, 1996), 100 mins.
Sex and death have gone to the movies, and the end-product is really not that original. Consciously or not, three recent features—Kissed, Lost Highway, and Crash—all link eros and thanatos much as the ancient Greeks did in the original sex-and-death myth of Orpheus and Eurydice.
Recall that Orpheus, a musician of such power that he could charm nature itself, loses his wife, Eurydice, to a lethal snake bite. Stricken with grief, he enters the underworld by means of the power of his lyre. Moved by Orpheus's situation, Hades and Persephone—the overseers of the underworld—permit Orpheus to lead Eurydice back to the living world on one condition: Orpheus must never look back to confirm that Eurydice is following him; he must simply trust as much. But Orpheus does look back, and Eurydice vanishes back into the grip of Hades. A miserable Orpheus then wanders the earth. When a group of frenzied Maenads wish him to celebrate the Bacchic orgy with them, he refuses, and is killed. Zeus then places Orpheus's lyre in the heavens as a memorial, and Orpheus fulfills his only true desire, to rejoin Eurydice, albeit in the underworld.
The fact that characters from an ancient Greek myth are today haunting your local video store is indicative of two things: first, that the fundamental questions about the nature of human existence have not changed that much in the last few millennia, and second, as we shall soon see, that apart from the context of a story that attempts to answer these questions, whether a Greek myth or the ...
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