by Dijana Knežević
The grotesque implementation of Marquis de Sade's novel "120 Days of Sodom" (O Le 120 Giorante Di Sodoma) is a film about which for almost forty years there has been a strong debate. The reason for this is the brave genius of the director in his attempt to show us the atmosphere from the darkest depths of human nature.
One of the most powerful of Pazolini's "tools" here is the context and time of the film itself: the 1944th and the arrangement of Mussolini's, fascist Italy (as the film itself says "We Fascists are the only real anarchists") and the blasphemy and misery of distorted minds in the free space .
The main actors, four representatives of the authorities (Duke - Paolo Bonacelli, Giorgio Cataldi, President Aldo Valletti and Umberto Paolo Quintavalle), with the help of fascist units, capture the group Young people and imprison them in a luxurious villa. They become former prostitutes in their old age (prostitutes Castelli - Caterina Boratto, Prostitute Vaccaari - Helena Surgere and Magi Maggi - Elsa De Giorgi) which tell young prisoners stories from their own experience, and, based on these stories, the film itself is structured, divided into three parts:
Antechamber of Hell
Circle of Obssesions Circle of Shit Circle of Blood
The inspiration for such a structure, Pazolini found in the "Divine Comedy" (La Divina Commedia) by Dante Alighieri (Dante Alighieri).
Although in the original Marquis de Sad has placed his novel a couple of centuries earlier, Pazolini's ingenious idea of transferring the film's work to the time of the most monstrous in the history of mankind has absolutely brought forth the fruit.
Visually and emotionally, this Pazolini film might resemble the worst-ever ever-fictitious thing, but its artistic and aesthetic value is more than noticeable.
For a deeper understanding of this story, it is important, even partially, to know the work of Marquis de Sade, whose story is directed and directed. Namely, in each of his novels, the "role" is more or less the same: the very top of the social scale that impairs those listed below. The distortion of the Sadow's mind found the most incredible ways to explain this, but the very essence would lie in (De Sade to say) the fact that there is no God, but only nature, and nature, besides beauty, creates destruction. How life is governed by the laws of nature, claims that it is clear that the law of the stronger must be respected. Man's destructive impulses are also part of nature and must be distributed. In his novels, this usually happens in the form of the most horrible (mostly sexual) tortures and revulsions. What is emphasized in his novels, and what is in the film, it would be said, "propelled" to be transmitted (in De Sade's always emphasized) the importance of human unbridledness, in some way (and again, first of all, sexual).
The movie "Salo" is considered one of the most controversial films of the twentieth century. It's not by chance, because rape scenes, fecal eating, cutting off language, homosexuality, etc. Leave the viewer, and not only the one with a weak stomach, maximally disgusted. Nevertheless, this Pazin's directing achievement should in no way be viewed outside the context in which it is located. Whether we do this, apart from directing and photographic genius, we will remain purely grotesque, devoid of aesthetic values. Pasolines in this film represent the world, a cold, hopeless, apocalyptic era in which evil wins, but also implicitly suggests that such a regime can not survive (which is why the action is located in the area of the Hall). He deliberately rejects the subtle approach and choices explicit (to him and, in all likelihood, irritating), portraying fascism as a transformation that, at the same time, refuses and attracts.
Here, at the same time (as is often the case in De Sad's novels), it could also be said of a nature that is long overdue, most often imposed, imposed social norms, and becomes distorted and in constant search for the ways in which their interference could channel. In this case, this results in total sexual harassment, revenge on innocent victims, etc.
While prostitutes, in their enthralling costumes, tell the worst stories of their sexual and business life, the victims (most often) are seduced, humiliated, on the floor, until some of the main actors, encouraged by the "hot" story, take it and do not use it for The "revival" of what has just been listened to.
The epilogue of the film is also the most stressful and almost resembles culmination, rather than the epilogue:
The four commanders choose young men and girls who were not absolutely obedient, and the guards take them to a nearby yard and kill them in the worst ways. The commanders, almost indifferently, are looking at the binoculars, from the remote room, that scene. An aggravated pianist, who played and worked for them, spotted a scene and committed suicide by dropping from the window. The sound of "Carmina Burana" by Karl Orff (Carl Orff) is radiating from all the time. After all, two young guards change the station on the radio, play the happy song and cheerfully, and still indifferently, dance. One asks another for his girlfriend's name. "Margarita," he replied.
Curtain.
These final scenes, accompanied only by calming music, deepen the damages that the scenes themselves bring.
Whatever, even today, criticized and forbidden was, this Pazolini film is absolutely a huge artistic achievement (at the same time, the last ones that the author worked, because it was just before the premiere of the film and he was killed). Only the "revival" of the novel, and even of the Garden, reflects a great knowledge of the director's work, but also of the aesthetically fascinating experience and appreciation of reality. Imminently, the filthy picture of Italy and, in general, the humanity, which Pazolini sent to the world with this film, is also a jewel in the sea of cinema, which gives us a chance to see the reality through absolutely black, and with its grotesque glorious, glasses.
Translated from Serbian by Dejan Stojkovski
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by Greg Olson
Lynch has said that Blue Velvet is “a trip into darkness, as close as you can get, and then a trip out. There’s an innermost point, and from then on it pulls back.”93 Jeffrey makes his journey to the center of night in the hour after he struck Dorothy in bed. As he says goodnight to her, she makes plain her raw need for him and calls him “my special friend” (the next time MacLachlan works with Lynch, he’ll be a special agent). While the youth and Dorothy talk, Lynch disconcerts us with an out-of-context shot looking down the apartment’s staircase. Sixteen years earlier, in The Grandmother, the director surprised us with a shot looking up a staircase in the midst of a narrative about a parentally abused boy. The lad eventually discovered that the stairs led up to the nurturing world of his grandmother, while Blue Velvet’s harbinger steps will take Jeffrey down into purgatory. When he steps across Dorothy’s threshold into the hallway, there are Frank and three of his depraved, cackling pals coming up. Previously, Jeffrey has only seen Frank from the relative safety of Dorothy’s closet, and now he’s faceto-face with the monster. Frank mixes a “Howdy, neighbor” mock joviality with his deep rage as he suggests a “joyride” to the trembling youth, who, with good manners, declines the invitation. But social niceties and personal boundaries are like dry fall leaves to the flaming furnace blast of Frank’s will to power. He already holds Dorothy’s family hostage, and now he spirits off her and Jeffrey in his roaring Dodge Charger, whose grille and headlights Lynch frames so that they look like a fierce animal’s jaws and eyes devouring the night.
Along with Frank’s three loony cohorts, they go to Ben’s Pussy Heaven where, as did Eraserhead’s Henry, Jeffrey must endure a bizarre and punishing social evening. Pussy Heaven is a low-rent-district bordello stocked with fat women who sit silently aligned against a living room wall as though trapped in the numbing stasis of a Diane Arbus photograph. This blasphemous Heaven is presided over by the marvelously effete Ben (Dennis Hopper’s pal Dean Stockwell) who, with his lip rouge and ruffled-front shirt, is, as Frank proclaims with deadpan Lynchian humor, “One suave fucker.” Ben and his scarlet women hold Dorothy’s little boy, Donny, behind a locked door. And when we hear her visiting him, it sounds like she’s been accused of being an absentee parent, for she says, “No, no, Donny, Mommy still loves you!” Perhaps this moment is a guilty projection of Lynch’s own sense of being, to some degree, an unavailable father to his children.
After Frank and Ben use Jeffrey as a punching bag and reveal their majorplayer role in Lumberton’s clandestine drug-dealing network, Ben does a special performance at Frank’s request, lip-synching to Frank’s audiotape of Roy Orbison singing “In Dreams.” This song and “Blue Velvet” are Frank’s anthems; both speak of men weeping over lost loves. When Ben does his unforgettable pantomime, holding a construction-site electric lamp under his chin like a microphone so that the glaring light makes his pasty face glow, Frank is transported. He seems lulled as Orbison-Ben sings “Go to sleep, everything is all right,” but his face stiffens with apprehension as the singer falls asleep “To dream my dreams of you,” and he winces with pain when the narrator walks and talks with his now-vanished love. Many commentators simply characterize Frank as the Anti-Christ, an incarnation of abstract evil. He is certainly loathsome and terrifying, but Lynch as writerdirector and Hopper as actor invest him with a wrenching pathos. We sense that Frank has grown monstrous because of some wounding loss or horrible abuse visited upon him. Frank and Dorothy, a sadist and his masochist partner, are ultimately both victims. Frank is possessed by some eros-perverting past trauma, as Twin Peaks’ daughter-molesting Leland Palmer is possessed by the evil force of BOB. Both Lynch and Hopper say that Frank truly loves Dorothy, and when he watches her sing at the Slow Club, he weeps tortured tears, simultaneously grieving for her and himself.
Lynch understands the nuanced shadings of those who express themselves with malevolent behavior, just as he allows his upholders of righteousness to manifest a full human complexity. And once, years before Blue Velvet, he was surprised to learn that his daughter, Jennifer, was dwelling seriously on such matters. As she remembers, “I was very young, and I was fearless when it came to the grotesque. My father got upset with me when he found me reading my dog-eared copy of Vincent Bugliosi’s Helter Skelter, which detailed Charles Manson’s horrible crimes and how he was apprehended and brought to justice.”94 Just as Lynch, in his art, presents two characters with their heads almost touching when things get intense, “He leaned his head next to mine and said, ‘This is beyond darkness, it is not the opposite of light, this is evil.’”95 As though anticipating Blue Velvet’s “areyou-a-detective-or-a-pervert” dialectic, Jennifer replied, “But Dad, I’m not fascinated with Manson—what I like is the guy who caught him, the guy who figures everything out and captures him.”96 Still, Jennifer responded with humane empathy toward Manson: “Here’s a soul tortured throughout his life, shunted from home to home, beaten, turned wrong by hatred and fear,”97 just as her father sees Frank Booth as both a monster and “a man who’s deeply in love but can’t express it in a normal way.”Jennifer feels Frank “is a poignant character: I have a sadness and a pity for Frank. When he does his baby voice and his whimpering it’s so revealing, the way he’s violent to get what he needs.”99 She agrees with my thought that Frank was the victim of incestuous sexual abuse: “Yeah, all the Mommy/Daddy/Baby roles are fucked up in his head. My father puts such interesting details of humanity in Blue Velvet, it seems so absolutely real to me psychologically.”100 So the bestial Frank has a human side, the humane Jeffrey harbors animal impulses, and Roy Orbison will bring them face to face.
When Frank, Dorothy, Jeffrey, Frank’s hoodlum trio, and one of Ben’s fat whores drive off into the night, Jeffrey does something no one else in the film has had the courage to do: He defiantly glares into Frank’s eyes after being ordered, “Don’t look at me, fuck.” Frank fires back a damning truth at the youth: “You’re like me.” And Jeffrey, as if to both acknowledge and defy Frank’s insight, lashes out and punches him in the face. Jeffrey’s shocking aggression inspires Frank the warped artist to pile out of the car and stage a perverse ritual comparable to his sadistic sexual theatrics with Dorothy.
While Frank’s gang holds a knife to Jeffrey’s throat, the fiend exhibits some of the homosexual leanings of Lynchian villains in The Elephant Man, Dune, and Twin Peaks. When Frank was ready to leave Ben’s place he showed that his animalistic appetite encompassed all sexes (and perhaps species) as he declared,” I’ll fuck anything that moves!” (Frank’s form then suddenly vanished from Ben’s living room and was next seen driving down a highway. This split-second jump from one point in space to another could be Lynch’s conscious or subconscious reference to The Wizard of Oz’s Dorothy’s observation that in Oz, “People come and go so quickly here” [regarding the Witches’ magical transports]. Blue Velvet’s Lumberton is far from the land of Oz, but near Twin Peaks on the map of Lynch‘s imagination, and the supernatural aura of Frank’s uncanny mobility in this one instance prefigures BOB’s [another evil force with a hunger for men and women] otherworldly coming and going every time he travels.) Frank calls Jeffrey “our pussy” and “pretty-pretty,” and, after forcing the youth to feel his biceps, says, “You like that, huh.” The villain then grabs Dorothy’s lipstick, paints his mouth, and kisses Jeffrey repeatedly, smearing his face with red: a visual signifier of the dark erotic linkage between Jeffrey and his two netherworld guides, Dorothy and Frank, that makes all their mouths taste the same. Now Frank, his face harshly lit by a handheld electric light as Ben’s was, does his own rendition of Roy Orbison’s “In Dreams.”
As the song plays, Frank exhibits a deranged intermingling of love and hate, sex and violence. First, he growls at Jeffrey that if the youth gets out of line, “I’ll send you a love letter. Do you know what a love letter is? It’s a bullet from a fuckin’ gun, fucker. You receive a love letter from me, you’re fucked forever.” This passionately delivered physical threat is terrifying, but Frank’s next mood swing is even more disturbing. Lynch stages arguably the most intense of his two-heads-in-confrontation clinch scenes, as Frank breathes into Jeffrey’s face with the erotic ardor and cold malevolence that a predator holds for the victim he controls. In stunning close-up, his eyes burning cool blue, Frank intones with Roy Orbison, “In dreams, I walk with you. In dreams, I talk with you. In dreams, you’re mine, all the time.” Throughout the film, Dennis Hopper has given Frank expressive gestures: He always points with two aggressive fingers, like a child forming his hand into a revolver. As Frank says, “You’re mine,” he bunches his extended fingers together and holds them next to Jeffrey’s head, as though he could reach in and own the young man’s psyche. Because of the dark, mirrorimage symbiotic bond between the two men, Jeffrey knows that Frank is capable of stealing his soul. Indeed, the youth may already have precious little of it left.
In Lynch’s script, Jeffrey was to wake up lying on the ground after being beaten unconscious by Frank. His pants were to be pulled down and a lipstick “FUCK YOU” scribbled on his leg in the aftermath of a homosexual rape. Kyle MacLachlan pleaded with Lynch to delete the sexual violation details, and after giving the matter some thought, the director agreed. Lynch will sometimes acquiesce to his actors’ strongly held opinions, as when he let Anthony Hopkins keep his beloved beard in The Elephant Man and, in Twin Peaks, he abandoned a certain romantic storyline for Agent Cooper that MacLachlan just didn’t think was right.
Jeffrey has reached the heart of Blue Velvet’s darkness and seen it as the murky shading of his own psyche, and now it’s time to start to pull back and journey toward the light. Lynch is interested in the full range of human emotions, and has said, “If you’re a man, you can cry.”101 Jeffrey reaches his turning point sobbing in his room alone. But banishing Lumberton’s darkness (and his own) isn’t as easy as switching on a light. When he sits down to breakfast with Mom and Aunt Barbara, and Barbara starts to chatter about his beaten-up appearance, Jeffrey’s answer sounds like Frank Booth: “I love you, but you’re gonna get it.”
The youth nurtures and strengthens his capacity for goodness by staying away from Dorothy, telling Detective Williams all he’s learned about Frank’s law-breaking activities (without mentioning Sandy’s investigative help), and telling Sandy he loves her. She returns his feelings, and they dance and kiss to the music that accompanied her dream-of-the-robins narrative, the chorale-like melody which now has lyrics by Lynch sung by Julee Cruise: “Sometimes a wind blows / and the mysteries of love / come clear.”
Jeffrey is going straight and staying clean, but his choice to indulge his dark side has repercussions, as it always does in Lynch’s world. The shadowy force that beetle-churned beneath the Beaumonts’ lawn has spread all over town, and now it pops up in Jeffrey’s living room. When Lynch and his brother were boys in a small Northwest town, they looked out their bedroom window one night and saw an unclothed woman walking in the street. Now, in the director’s fiction, after Jeffrey and Sandy’s dance, the achingly vulnerable, bruised, and naked Dorothy Vallens steps into those bastions of domestic propriety, the Beaumonts’ front porch and the Williamses’ living room. Once again, Lynch displays his gift for staging excruciating embarrassments and violating social niceties. As Jeffrey consoles the dazed Dorothy, hugging her exposed body against him, in front of Sandy and her mother, the clandestine sexual relationship that he’s hidden from his golden angel comes gushing out. Dorothy calls him “my secret lover” and, looking directly at Mrs. Williams and Sandy, tells them, “He put his disease in me.” Sandy and Jeffrey have not yet made love, but this grotesque revelation of his emotional unfaithfulness and untruthfulness causes her to break out in deep sobs, with the corners of her mouth curved down like the traditional Greek mask of tragedy. As with Sandy’s narration of her robins-and-love dream, some viewers snicker at the extreme gestures of her weeping and think that Lynch is making fun of her. But, as Laura Dern has said more than once over the years, “that’s how I cry.” True, her manner of weeping in other films resembles her Blue Velvet behavior, but her sadness seems most gut-wrenching under Lynch’s direction.
Sandy and Jeffrey speak words to try to repair their rift, but the youth’s actions are needed on the dark side of town, for Dorothy has called from a phone booth to say that they’ve hurt her husband, and entreated Jeffrey to “help him.” Jeffrey first entered Dorothy’s apartment to see what the police couldn’t, and now he will be the one to precede the law and strike the decisive blow against the powers of night. As he approaches Dorothy’s door, he knows he is in the realm of insect energy, for there’s a buzzing from inside. A TV has been kicked in and a lamp is ready to short out. Like Jeffrey’s father’s hose caught on that bush, the natural pathways of electrical flow in this room have been kinked and disturbed. What Jeffrey next sees in the room defies the laws of gravity and mortality.
Earlier in the film, the youth discovered that the man in the yellow blazer who came to Dorothy’s door is Detective Williams’s partner, and also a partner to Frank’s dope-dealing cabal. Now the Yellow Man, his head a travesty of oozing red, a police radio crackling in his pocket, stands frozen like a statue, not lying flat like a proper corpse should. Aside from Frank Booth’s bizarre behavior, Lynch has exhibited plenty of evidence in Blue Velvet that would make Jeffrey declare “It’s a strange world.” One of the director’s subtly disturbing motifs is to put people in places and postures that are a few degrees removed from normal. While Frank sang and punched “In Dreams” to Jeffrey, one of Ben’s fat whores incongruously danced on the roof of Frank’s car, and at Ben’s, one of Frank’s goons had stood on the arm of a sofa while Ben sang. Lynch once said, after viewing a music video of animated store-window mannequins, “Anything that looks human, but isn’t, is frightening,” and he creates this haunting quality in Blue Velvet by showing people who don’t move. In an early establishing shot of the town, there’s a large, immobile man positioned by a store for no explained reason. And when Jeffrey begins his first night walk to Detective Williams’s house, there’s an eerily inert man standing under the trees with a little dog on a leash. We’re clearly not in Mr. Rogers’ neighborhood.
Back in Dorothy’s apartment, the seemingly dead standing Yellow Man scares Jeffrey and us when his hand twitches out and knocks over a lamp: Throughout his work, Lynch makes the boundary line between life and death ambiguous, a road that travels in twin directions. There’s no question, however, that Dorothy’s husband, Don, is dead. He sits bound in a chair, displaying the hole where his ear used to be, and in true Lynchian maximally disturbing fashion, littering his wife’s kitchen countertop with the contents of his head. And where there is death, there is Frank’s touch, for a length of blue velvet fabric spews out of Don’s mouth like a frozen scream, recalling the attenuated animated scream line that flowed from The Grandmother’s Boy’s mouth. Lynch is adept at making pain palpably visible.
Jeffrey goes to leave this house of carnage, but he sees Frank coming up the stairs and Frank sees him. The youth must manfully face the responsibility of his decision to walk on the wild side of town, for there’s no place to go but back into Dorothy’s apartment. The first time Jeffrey laid eyes on Frank, the youth was invisible, hiding within Dorothy’s closet. Following Lynch’s characteristic scheme of balances and parallels, Jeffrey again takes refuge in the dark little room within a room. And if the hearing function got Jeffrey in trouble before (his toilet flush made him miss Sandy’s warning car honks and get caught by Dorothy) it now benefits him. He calls Detective Williams for help on the Yellow Man’s radio, and when he realizes that Frank can hear him on his radio, misleads the villain by telling Williams that he’ll be hiding in Dorothy’s bedroom. Jeffrey then grabs Yellow Man’s pistol and dives into the closet just ahead of Frank’s entrance. Now all of Dorothy’s men are in attendance.
Lynch underscores his homosexual-villain subtext by having Frank call out, “I know where your cute little butt’s hiding.” Jeffrey’s radio may be making noise in the bedroom, but the youth’s not there. Frank yells “prettypretty,” makes some animalistic grunts, and fires bullets into the empty room. Enraged and calling out, “Where are you?” like some wicked hideand-go-seek player, Frank comes back to the living room. He is the maker of final deaths and when, in frustration, he pumps a bullet into Yellow Man, the standing canary figure must at last fall over and prostrate himself before the Lord of the Flies.
Through the slats in the closet door, Jeffrey has watched Frank commit brutal acts of sex and violence, and the youth has stepped through those doors to act out the parts of himself that are like Frank. Jeffrey is now fully aware of his capacity for good and evil, and that he can consciously choose which path to follow. In the next second or two he must use violence to save his own life, as well as to smite the predatory-animal powers that seethe in darkness a mighty blow. Frank throws open the closet door, and Jeffrey fires a single shot into his forehead. As the monster loses the back of his head, Lynch mixes the scream of a beast with the gunshot blast. If Dorothy and Frank have been Jeffrey’s benighted parent figures, nurturing him in the ways of the netherworld, then the young man has now closed the Oedipal circle, having slept with his mother and killed the father who wanted her all for himself.
On this night, the police have closed in on Lumberton’s web of criminals, and as Jeffrey and Sandy kiss in the apartment hallway, their true love is irradiated with white light, and outside we see light-flashing police cars descend on the building like robins pouncing on beetles.
Jeffrey has entered a severed ear and probed deep beneath the surface of his own and his town’s consciousness, and now Lynch pulls out of a ruddy canal that is Jeffrey’s sunlit ear, as he snoozes in the Beaumonts’ backyard. When he opens his eyes, the first thing he sees is a plump red robin on a branch. As if to codify his status as the hero who has mastered darkness and light, Jeffrey wears black pants and a white shirt. Having destroyed his bad father, Frank, the young man’s good father has been restored to him. In Lynch’s favorite movie, The Wizard of Oz, far-traveling Dorothy concludes that “There’s no place like home,” and now Jeffrey enjoys the most wonderful of homecomings. For the first time in the film, the Beaumont and Williams families are conjoined, as if to bless Sandy and Jeffrey’s union. Tom Beaumont is “feeling fine,” and Detective Williams tends to the barbecue in the backyard. Sandy and Aunt Barbara are fixing lunch, and Jeffrey’s and Sandy’s moms can’t wait to eat. Sandy’s original involving of Jeffrey in the ear mystery, which she’s regretted all along, has resulted in the vanquishment of evil. For there on the windowsill is her dream come true: that fat robin, a squirming black beetle in its powerful beak. Sandy looks at Jeffrey, recalling all the terrible and wonderful things they’ve shared, and there’s only one way she can put it into words: “It’s a strange world, isn’t it.”
The warm, sweet music of “Mysteries of Love” carries us to another homecoming. For the first time in the film, we see Dorothy Vallens in daylight, sitting on a park bench in the sun. Her little boy, Donny, now free as the wind, is enfolded in her smiling embrace. If any character in Blue Velvet has been as torturously entrapped as The Grandmother’s Boy, Eraserhead’s Henry, and The Elephant Man’s John Merrick, it is Dorothy. She evinces a shift in Lynch’s sensibility toward a growing concern for the victimization of women. Each of the director’s earlier characters escaped their bondage through the transcendent grace of love, and Dorothy also seems to have thrown off her web of darkness.
But Lynch knows how complex the world really is and he remains haunted by Dorothy’s suffering. Her smile fades, and there’s a tormented look in her eyes as we hear her voice sing the words that symbolize her unholy union with Frank: “And I still can see blue velvet through my tears.” As Lynch pans up from her and Donny to a beautiful blue sky, we remember that Don and Frank, Dorothy’s good and evil husbands, are both dead, and Jeffrey has chosen to stay on the side of the angels. But maybe some night the young man will again take a walk on the shadow side of town and Dorothy will find him in her closet. There are countless more hidden insects in the world than there are robins. The last thing we see in the film isn’t the wide-open sky; it’s a curtain of blue velvet that’s being rhythmically moved, as though the darkness behind it would never stop breathing.
Lynch says he is able to visualize thoughts and behavior more horrific than anything he has put before our eyes. In an earlier conception of Blue Velvet, the director let Frank Booth’s death-dealing perversity lunge out, violating the boundary of his own physical demise, and touch Dorothy one last time, making her, at this point in Lynch’s career, the director’s ultimate female victim. In a script-dialogue line not in the film, Lynch has Jeffrey say that Frank “had to have Dorothy cause her whole life was blue.”105 As the film ends now she’s still the Blue Lady, but being reunited with her loving little Donny and the exultant atmosphere of a sunny afternoon have let some light into her life and dispelled some of her soul’s gloom. Yet just as Lynch had initially planned for Eraserhead’s Henry to perish without the saving grace and love of his radiant Lady in the Radiator, Dorothy was originally to be swallowed by the ravenous black insects of darkness.
We would have seen the bloody body of little Donny, killed by Frank, found under Dorothy’s bed, as though birthed into death by the twisted, violent sex his mother was at first forced to practice, then loved to practice, in this room. Then, looking up the towering facade of Dorothy’s apartment building at night, we’d see a single red shoe fall toward us. Unlike Judy Garland in The Wizard of Oz, this poor Dorothy has no hope of finding Oz or getting back to Kansas, so she throws her unmagical ruby slipper into the abyss of night. Then her naked body, which we’ve previously seen stripped of protective clothes for sex and bruising, leaps from the rooftop toward us and past, into a final embrace with death, making literal her panicky words from earlier in the film that had summed up her plummeting spiritual state: “I’m falling!” Then her blue velvet robe drops toward us—can Lynch be providing a glimmer of redemption even in this darkest of endings?
The ruby slipper may not have gotten Dorothy where she wanted to go, but by throwing off the blue velvet robe that symbolizes her oppressive bondage to Frank, she has leapt into a transcendent freedom. (In Sunset Boulevard, which Lynch dearly loves, William Holden’s character removes the expensive cuff links that symbolize Norma Desmond’s oppressive hold on him before meeting his death.) As Lynch has said to me, he likes to “get people trapped in a hellhole”106 and then he often shows us, or implies, that there is an escape route. For Eraserhead’s Henry Spencer and The Elephant Man’s John Merrick, the process of achieving a final release involves their own death, as it will for Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me’s Laura Palmer and Mulholland Drive’s Diane Selwyn. Perhaps, as death enabled John Merrick to merge with the spirit of his truest love, his dear mother, so Dorothy will unite with her husband and child who have passed on before her.
After Dorothy leaps to her death, her blue robe would have fallen into our faces and frozen there, filling the screen as Bobby Vinton’s words “and I still can see blue velvet through my tears” hang in the air. Dorothy would be gone to some other place. We the living would be the ones still seeing blue velvet, still haunted.
David Lynch had found himself. He was home again, back from the dream-convolutions of Eraserhead’s mind, The Elephant Man’s nineteenthcentury England, and Dune’s interplanetary future, to the small-town streets where America lives. Blue Velvet was just as he wanted it to be, for it sprang from his innermost feelings about a young man becoming sexually and psychically mature, the terrors and exhilarations of acquiring knowledge, and the sustaining potency of love and family. In Isabella Rossellini, Lynch had a passionate and devoted love of his own, and he would face the eruptive response to his film, both the veneration and vilification, with a renewed personal confidence. The lucid, reality-based style of Blue Velvet seemed to heighten the director’s ability to convey resonant ideas, dreamlike poetic associations, and complex states of being. Just like Jeffrey, Lynch was growing, learning, and maturing, but some things would always remain the same. There would be a beautiful cherry tree in a boy’s backyard, and red ants swarming on it. Robins and bugs, blue skies and blue velvet, a curious young man and a severed ear, an FBI detective and a dead high school girl. Born amid Mount Sentinel and Mount Jumbo in Missoula, Montana, David Lynch would forever reside between twin peaks.
excerpt from the book: David Lynch:Beautiful Dark / Greg Olson
by Greg Olson
Reflecting the time-honored American myth that equates urban precincts with evil, Sandy and Jeffrey’s night walk takes on an ominous air as they leave her tree-lined, homey street for the wide concrete boulevard downtown. He protectively takes her arm as a slinky black 1950s car cruises by and men leer from the windows, “Hey babe, hey.” This is the seedy Lincoln neighborhood, the zone that Jeffrey’s parents have warned him to stay away from all his life. Sandy points out the singer’s forlorn, old brick apartment building and turns to go. “Come on,” she admonishes, but Jeffrey stands transfixed, staring at the building for many moments as Lynch holds a traffic light on red in front of the dilapidated structure, a motif warning of infernal danger that he will memorably repeat in Twin Peaks. Sandy is intrigued by mysteries up to a point, but she knows when to pull back, her sense of self-preservation is strong. Jeffrey, on the other hand, is obsessed; like so many of Lynch’s characters, he will risk his body and soul in order to learn the secrets that the night holds.
Back on home turf, heading toward the Williamses’, Jeffrey lightens up, spouting a bit of Lynchian grotesquerie as he recalls “a kid I used to know who had the biggest tongue in the world.” Sandy, who’s in perfect synchrony with Jeffrey’s moods, laughs. Then she turns solemn with him as he laments, “All my friends are gone,” and we remember that this boy’s father lies near death. Lynch has talked about a giddy feeling he’s had while “saying goofy, corny things” to a woman he’s fond of late at night. Jeffrey suddenly asks, “Do you know the Chicken Walk?” and parades up and down the sidewalk with his knees bent low and his torso and head held unnaturally stiff. Sandy breaks up in laughter and Jeffrey touches her shoulder for a second in affection. Lynch ends his masterful night-walk sequence with a moody image worthy of an Edward Hopper painting. From far away we see the small forms of the boy dressed in black and white and the girl in pink strolling slowly under the canopy of dark trees, we hear their faint laughter on the wind, the spark of their shared joy clouded by the mournful low moan of a far-off foghorn.
Even in broad daylight, filling in for his father at their bright and clean family hardware store, Jeffrey finds mysteries. Working with him at the store are two older African American gentlemen who’ve been there forever. They radiate affection for Jeffrey and he just calls them Double Ed, since they always walk and stand together. One of the men is blind but he can tell you which shelf the overalls are on and correctly ring up cash register sales. When Jeffrey holds up four fingers and asks, “How many?,” the blind man instantly answers, “Four.” With an awestruck grin, the youth replies, “I still don’t know how you do that!” In Lynch’s script, there was just one Ed, who could see just fine. Aside from showing the director’s love of twinning and doubling, the film’s Double Ed scene projects his and Jeffrey’s need for some mysteries to remain unsolved so that they retain their preternatural power. Like Lynch, Jeffrey wants to remain a little naive about some things; he seems to be willing himself not to guess Double Ed’s secret. Even though we in the audience see the two men facing us from Jeffrey’s point of view, it’s pretty easy to realize that all sighted Ed (Leonard Watkins) has to do is tap blind Ed (Moses Gibson) four times on the back.
Jeffrey can cruise on past Double Ed’s puzzle but he’s compelled to burrow deeper into the ear. He plans to put on those store overalls, grab an insect-exterminating sprayer, tell the woman singer he’s from pest control, jimmy a window in her place while he’s spraying, and sneak back in at night to search for clues. On the surface, he seems to be an idealistic Hardy Boys–style junior crimefighter, but he isn’t playing detective primarily to help Williams or impress Sandy: Subconsciously he’s on a profoundly personal quest, an involved process that will make him a fully integrated human being.
Sandy is part of Jeffrey’s plan, and he verbally pulls her away from her high school girlfriends and takes her to the local diner, Arline’s (as she leaves with him, she tells her friends not to mention this trip to her boyfriend, Mike). Symmetrically left and right of Arline’s front door are red drapes drawn back like theatrical curtains. These draped fabrics, which Lynch also features in The Grandmother, Eraserhead, The Elephant Man, and Twin Peaks, frame narrative details and concentrate the audience’s focus. They also alert us to intermixtures of reality and illusion. Lynch echoes the entranceway’s symmetry by placing Sandy on the left and Jeffrey on the right in a booth, each sipping a Coke. The stage is set for Jeffrey to convince Sandy to help him, and his words recall Dune’s Duke Leto’s words to his son, Paul, which Lynch had screenwritten from Frank Herbert’s novel. Lynch had Leto say, “But a person needs new experiences. They jar something deep inside: the longing to grow. Without change, something sleeps inside us, and seldom awakens. The sleeper must awaken.” Lynch pares this down for Jeffrey: “There are opportunities in life for gaining knowledge and experience. Sometimes it’s necessary to take a risk.” Jeffrey is gathering steam to take some major chances, and through them Lynch can live out hazardous fantasies through his art, as can we, the viewers, gaining some measure of Jeffrey’s self-knowledge.
Lynch then has Jeffrey speak the director’s own adolescent fantasy virtually verbatim. “I could learn a lot by getting into that woman’s apartment. You know, sneak in, hide, and observe.” Sandy shows how much she cares about Jeffrey by speaking right up when his notion violates her empathetic sense of his safety: “Are you crazy? This is too dangerous, she could be involved with murder!” But like an artist pursuing an alluring, dark muse, Jeffrey won’t be deterred by mundane, cautionary worries. Lynch wants us to share Sandy’s rational, common-sense concerns, but he, and we, are most interested in pursuing Jeffrey’s imaginative scheme. Like Dune’s Bene Gesserit Reverend Mother Mohiam, Sandy’s attempts to curb male initiative and enterprise will be overridden. The prevailing males in both films are played by Lynch’s screen alter ego, Kyle MacLachlan, and there’s the sense that we’re witnessing some of the artist’s uncensored psychodrama, his own obsessive pursuit of creative endeavors despite the curtailing entreaties of wives, friends, and business advisors. Perhaps Sandy is a version of Lynch’s ideal woman, expressing her heartfelt feelings with spirit, then going along with his plan. Jeffrey wins Sandy over by saying, “No one will suspect us because no one would think two people like us would be crazy enough to do something like this.” This awareness of their square, straight-arrow image in the community bespeaks Lynch’s own understanding of the persona that the media have created for him: a friendly, grinning, Jimmy Stewart and Eagle Scout type who’s secretly a crazed, far-out artist. Lynch is attuned to the multivalenced nature of things, the interplay between what is and what appears to be. We recall that Jeffrey told Detective Williams that he found the ear “behind Vista,” referring to a street or neighborhood. The ear is the youth’s mysterious ticket-to-ride, a portion of the secret world hidden behind the vista of Lumberton’s wholesome facade, and Jeffrey wants to see the whole show.
Lynch, in his opening montage, symbolized the town’s hidden world with the seething black insects and their ravenous, endless cycle of carnage and copulation. Jeffrey, dressed in his exterminating gear, enters the Deep River Apartments (deep waters being an ancient symbol for the human subconscious mind). Upon crossing the threshold, he hears the insectoid buzzing and humming of a “no vacancy” sign that’s shorting out: This is indeed the entrance to the netherworld. The low-rent building’s elevator is out of order, so he climbs seven flights of exterior stairs, as Lynch gives us the feeling that Jeffrey is beginning the exertions of an arduous quest.
Up the stairs, down the gloomy dark-gray hallway, Jeffrey travels deeper into the ear. The youth gets no response when he knocks on Dorothy’s door, so that Lynch can build to her dramatic entrance into the film. The door suddenly cracks open the width of a safety chain, a vertical shaft of light falling on the ripe, red lips of the director’s original Blue Velvet vision, and the anxious eyes of a woman teetering on the edge of fear. She spits out a foreign-accented challenge: “Yes, what do you want?,” but Jeffrey’s roleplaying gets him past her defenses.
The exotic strangeness of Dorothy’s accent is matched by the look of her living room, which is unlike anything Jeffrey has ever seen. It’s as though his penetration of the ear canal has brought him deep inside a human body, or mind, where the walls and floor are dark red and the curve of an armless couch seems to have grown out of the wall like a fleshy organ. And, in contrast to the normal-looking plants that grow in the Beaumonts’ garden, there are two green erections of frond foliage shooting up from unnaturally tiny pots against the red walls. These phallic plants reflect the surrealistically part-plant, part-animal growths that sprouted in Lynch’s early animated film passages (The Alphabet, The Grandmother).
As the ants crawling on the newfound ear and the bug-like buzzing lobby sign indicate, Jeffrey’s pursuit of the ear’s mystery will lead him into the zone of raw animal impulses, a fearsome region that will both surround and inhabit him. As he sprays Dorothy’s kitchen, he bends over at the waist, a creeping-animal posture that Lynch will assign to the feral BOB of Twin Peaks. There’s a knock at the door, which Jeffrey expects to be Sandy posing as a Jehovah’s Witness to divert Dorothy’s attention. But instead there’s a big man in a canary-yellow sports coat, who takes a good, hard look at the youth. To explain Jeffrey’s presence, Dorothy says, “It’s only the bug man.” This line wasn’t in Lynch’s original script, so the director must have decided during filming to add this phrase that describes Jeffrey’s pretend occupation, his low-bending posture and dark, beetle-like jumpsuit that covers him from feet to Adam’s apple, and his psychological metamorphosis into a darker self.
While Dorothy bids goodbye to the Yellow Man, Jeffrey spies her house key and pockets it. Back outside, Sandy apologizes to him for not coming to the door because she figured the Yellow Man did her diversionary job for her. That night, she lies to her boyfriend and father in order to be with Jeffrey as he plans his next step. At the Slow Club, Jeffrey, in true Lynchian food-and-beverage-appreciation style, rhapsodizes about the Heineken beer he’s drinking. He and Sandy watch Dorothy Vallens sing two numbers, the stage set in what will be the standard for Lynch’s performance scenes: red curtain backdrop with blue spotlighting. Indeed, the vertical folds in the Slow Club’s curtains, and the white light behind them emphasizing the fabric’s ruddy membranes, anticipate Twin Peaks’ iconic Red Room. Starting out in what seemed to be the 1950s, the film has mixed in 1970s cars, 1980s computers, and now Dorothy sings into a 1930s art deco microphone. In Blue Velvet, Lynch is pioneering a subtle stylistic motif that other filmmakers will try to copy; he’s giving us an evocative dream time, an ambiguous mix of various decade signifiers in which we float around, subtly disconnected from the waking realities of our own time-bound lives.
As Dorothy sings “Blue Velvet” on stage, we notice an incongruous talisman of bestial energies at her feet: the wicked six-foot-wide horns of a longhorn steer. Dorothy is not herself essentially animalistic, but she is a body in which bestial men deposit their impulses, debasing her emotions into a desperate sadness that’s like an unsatisfied hunger. Sometimes Lynch’s character’s names are literal descriptions (The Man in the Planet, The Lady in the Radiator, The Blue-Haired Lady), but Dorothy’s name at the Slow Club, The Blue Lady, refers more to her hidden bruised soul and midnightstained grief than to her blue eyeshadow makeup and the light that bathes her on stage. She sings her last number, whose lyrics are Lynch’s: “Shadows fall so blue; as lonely as a blue, blue star.” The director then accomplishes another of his elegant, expressive scene transitions by taking the last musical note of Dorothy’s lament and flowing into a progression of descending musical chords, which dissolve from the singer in shadow on stage to Sandy and Jeffrey driving into their nocturnal mission of mystery. The falling chords not only give a sinister gravity to the evening and Sandy’s worried look, but the music’s linkage to Dorothy is a prelude to her wish to end her miserable life by plunging from a great height. In his script, Lynch alludes to the possibility of Dorothy leaping from her apartment roof, but in the film he condenses her feeling of a panicky plunge into the abyss to a scream at street level: “I’m falling!”
In Lynch’s aesthetic, the two primal modes of moving through space are floating and falling. Floating is the positive pole. The artist has spoken of how he “fishes”80 for ideas and intuitions that “float” by, and how he tries to transfix and float the viewer into his films and paintings and musical/song compositions. Floating figures are found in Eraserhead, The Elephant Man, Dune, Wild at Heart, Industrial Symphony No. 1, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, various paintings, drawings, photographs, and song lyrics (“You and I float in love and kiss forever,” “We’re floating as one”. Falling is the negative pole. The Grandmother’s Boy falls over after his granny dies; Industrial Symphony No. 1’s bereft heroine, who floats singing 60 feet above the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s stage, suddenly falls; figures plunge in drawings; the doomed Laura Palmer of Fire Walk With Me speaks of “falling forever until you burst into flame”; and song lyrics bemoan “Falling through this night alone.”84 Floating and falling are the physical equivalents of those heightened states of being and emotion that fascinate Lynch: times when our feet aren’t firmly on the ground.
Sandy can feel the darkness pulling at Jeffrey, and she worries that he’s going to fall. Parked in front of Dorothy’s apartment, she regrets having told him the police-case details that got them to this moment, but she will help him by honking the car horn four times when Dorothy arrives, so Jeffrey will know she’ll soon enter her flat. Just as Jeffrey’s declaration, “It’s a strange world,” crystallizes the viewpoint of both Blue Velvet and the man who wrote and directed it, what Sandy now says to Jeffrey applies to both him and David Lynch. “I don’t know if you’re a detective or a pervert,” she wonders, as Jeffrey heads up to hide in a strange woman’s room.
Lynch’s films delve deeply into disturbing realms of human emotion and behavior. The director is a detective scanning the psyche’s netherworld for clues to the big mysteries of existence and death, but the fierce persistence of his fascination with the darkest veins of fear and desire seem sick and perverse to some viewers and critics. What really gets under our skin about Lynch’s work, and causes some to demonize him, is the realization, if only subconsciously, that we ourselves might be capable of the thoughts and actions the director depicts so intensely. Even if we can’t admit this, we like to watch.
We who view movies are voyeurs, we sit in the dark gazing at the often intimate behaviors of (albeit) fictional people who don’t know we’re looking at them. Of course, we’re actually watching actors playing characters, but the aesthetic contract enforces the feeling that we’re indulging the privilege of spying on other people’s lives. While voyeurism is the subtext of the movieviewing experience, some films consciously acknowledge the concept in notable scenes (Psycho) or extended thematic treatments (Rear Window, Peeping Tom). The watchers in these films are looking at sex and death, the twin aspects of human experience most guarded by societal taboos: Once again, the movies fulfill our secret desires, our urge to see all that human beings can do. Jeffrey wants to gather clues in Dorothy’s apartment and help solve a crime, but, we’re sure, he (and we) also want to see her naked. Perversion denotes abnormality, and the wish to see another’s bared flesh is not unusual. It’s the context of Jeffrey’s viewing that will be transgressive: He’s an uninvited, hidden spectator whose gaze will have power over the one that he’s looking at.
To Sandy’s “detective or pervert” musing, Jeffrey replies, “That’s for me to know and you to find out.” In Lynch’s original script, we would already know of the youth’s lascivious leanings by now. There was to be a scene early on in the film before Jeffrey was called home from college. Hiding in the shadows, the youth watched a male student “trying to rape his girlfriend. She is crying and telling him to stop but the boy keeps forcing her down toward the ground. . . . The boy is now hurting the girl.”85 Only when Jeffrey hears his off-camera friends calling for him does he (still concealed by the darkness) yell at the rapist: “Hey, shithead. Leave her alone. . . . Don’t force girls!,”86 at which point the boy releases the girl. Watching this scene, we would have noted that Jeffrey’s fascination with what he was viewing allowed the crime to progress, and it was a reminder of outside social sanctions (his calling friends) that prompted his intervention. Without interruption, how long would he have watched? Though this is clearly a strong scene, Lynch chose to leave it out. So when we meet Jeffrey in the film, he’s absolutely identified with the benign and wholesome small-town universe, against which his gradual descent into the ear’s mystery and his own sexual and spiritual darkness will provide a more dramatically potent contrast.
Beginning with the wildly feeding beetles in Blue Velvet’s opening montage, Lynch has linked rampant animal appetites with primal evil, and as Jeffrey began to penetrate Lumberton’s netherworld, he was called “the bug man” by one of this sinister realm’s denizens, Dorothy, who ought to know one when she sees one. Now, as the youth breaks the law to enter her apartment, his appetites, and his penis, immediately get him in trouble. Because of all the Heineken beer he consumed at the Slow Club, Jeffrey is loudly peeing into Dorothy’s toilet and flushing it when Sandy gives her warning beeps that the singer has entered the building. Jeffrey’s cut off from Sandy’s lifeline in this place; he doesn’t hear her warning. The youth, in detective fashion, is starting to carefully examine Dorothy’s dressing table for clues when she starts to open her front door. He dives for her living room closet where, hidden inside and peering out through its louvered doors, he looks more the pervert, recalling the image in Psycho where Anthony Perkins peeped through the wall hole at the undressing Janet Leigh. Lynch has realized his adolescent fantasy on film: His cinematic alter ego is secretly watching a woman in her room at night. Jeffrey provides a textbook example of the nefarious “male gaze” that feminist critics deplore. A man has written his visual sexual reverie into a film, shot by a male cinematographer, in which a man looks at an unpersonalized woman as a sexual object, and then a higher percentage of males than females watch the film. These are the facts in the case, but Lynch’s truth is more complex and balanced than his detractors care to admit, or notice.
Lynch may be visualizing his teenage fantasy, but he presents Jeffrey’s view of Dorothy stripping to her bra and panties and doffing her performance wig without a hint of erotic spark. She arouses no prurient interest as she has a desperate phone conversation with someone named Frank and, burdened with spiritual malaise, retreats to the bathroom where, far away from the camera, she quickly strips in rear view while standing straight up. Not only is the leering male viewpoint absent from this scene, but Lynch turns the traditional male power position topsy-turvy. For Dorothy hears (ears again) a rustle in her closet and, wearing her blue velvet robe, rousts out the frightened Jeffrey at the point of a butcher knife. Her surprisingly commanding voice is harsh and ragged: “Get on your knees. Do it!” Concealing his detective persona, Jeffrey takes refuge in a pervert’s defense, saying he’s the bug-spray man who “just wanted to see you.” In a stunning reversal of Jeffrey’s expectations for his spying session, Dorothy spits back, “Get undressed, I want to see you.” The narrative surprise of this moment parallels the sudden revelation of the beetles churning beneath the Beaumonts’ lawn, and it won’t be the last rude shock that Jeffrey will endure as he ventures deeper into Lumberton’s underworld. He’s dealing with powerful, scary forces that he can’t control. But like young David Lynch going down into that menacing New York subway tunnel, he can learn something about himself if he keeps riding into the darkness.
Lynch believes that both the malevolent and the benign aspects of life can teach us a thing or two, and Jeffrey’s guides into the dark realms he doesn’t yet know about will be Dorothy and Frank. The curriculum will let him experience the roles of both victim and sadistic perpetrator, the teaching tools will be sex and violence, and there will be minor electives in pain, weeping, degradation, and corruption. Homework will be inescapable; sleep-learning will consist of nightmares. Like the girl in The Alphabet, Jeffrey will be absorbing the horrors of learning. Lynch, aside from having Dorothy and Frank give Jeffrey life lessons in depravity, will use the pair as benighted, underground reflections of the youth’s warm and loving aboveground parents. And the director won’t shy away from pushing Oedipal logic to the nth degree. Dorothy makes Jeffrey take down his underpants, which are, naturally, all-American red plaid boxers. Kneeling in front of him, she invitingly asks, “What do you want?” He says, “I don’t know,” and she does what he wants, but won’t speak, taking his penis into her mouth at an angle the camera can’t quite see. Jeffrey gets a teasing few seconds of pleasure, but Dorothy is in control, holding her big knife a breath away from his genitals, and barking orders: “Don’t move; don’t look at me; don’t touch me or I’ll kill you.” Dorothy is playing a sadistic game, but Jeffrey is no masochist, and tells her he doesn’t like that threatening talk. They move to the fleshy couch that seems like an organic outgrowth of the wall, and enact one of the film’s iconic tableaux of melded six and violence: Dorothy in her blue velvet robe straddling Jeffrey’s pelvis and bending forward to kiss him, her ready blade glinting against the ruddy wall. She makes a potent dominatrix, but a sudden, thunderous pounding on her door announces the arrival of this underworld’s alpha male predator, the power of Lumberton’s darkness.
The Frank Booth that Lynch wrote and Dennis Hopper acts out is a phenomenal creation. If Jeffrey is trying on the role of bug man, Frank is the real thing. Wearing a stiff black leather coat like a beetle’s carapace, sucking in nitrous oxide gas from a plastic inhaling mask that covers his nose and mouth and gives him a gleaming bug-like jawline, his eye popping, Frank is an insect ready to feed on flesh. And he’s got a bug in his noggin: a buzzing sexual obsession with Dorothy, the Blue Velvet Lady. Like a demented artist of the libido, Frank has devised a theater-of-cruelty ritual that he enacts with Dorothy. As Jeffrey watches aghast and fascinated from his closet, he encounters a new mystery: Why does she put up with it?
Dorothy douses the electric lamp, lights a squat, white candle (like the ones at Laura Palmer’s Twin Peaks murder site), and Frank intones the archetypal Lynchian incantation: “Now it’s dark” (which isn’t in the script). Repeating an established pattern, Dorothy brings over a small chair and sits on it, and gives Frank a glass of bourbon. As in some perversion of a 1950s sitcom, Frank casts himself in the role of Daddy coming home, but Dorothy slips and calls him “Baby.” An understandable mistake, for there’s a maelstrom of Oedipal confusion in Frank’s psyche. He next calls her “Mommy,” and in a plaintive, childlike voice, declares, “Baby wants to fuck” and “Baby loves blue velvet.” Then, as Lynch’s script specifies, he gives commands to himself, which degrade into vocal self-abuse, “Get ready to fuck! You fuckers, fucker, you fucker.” And when he throws Dorothy to the floor, jumps on top of her and, with all his clothes on, bounces up and down frantically for a few seconds before ejaculating, Frank is “Daddy” again, and keeps assuring us that “Daddy’s coming home.” (Many critics’ theories about Frank being mad at the world because he’s impotent—based on his staying zipped-up during his frenzy of sexual thrusting—are vaporized by a line in Lynch’s script: “faster and faster, then he has a climax in his pants.”)
Whether Frank is seeing Dorothy as herself or his mother, he heaps abuse on her. His harrowing expression of sexuality is an act of rage against the world, women, and himself. Fueling his assaultive acting-out with hits of nitrous oxide gas, Frank attempts to hide his vile self-image by repeatedly yelling, “Don’t you fucking look at me!” and striking Dorothy if she seems to disobey. To see himself in her eyes is more than he can bear. If Frank loathes himself, he also abhors Dorothy’s femaleness. Before climbing on top of her, he roughly jams his fingers into her vagina, and after climaxing he looks at the hand that touched her, as if it wasn’t part of him, and makes a splayed-finger throwing gesture like he’s trying to rid himself of slime or the hand itself. No wonder Daddy chooses to come home in his pants.
Lynch stresses the brutal animalism of Frank’s behavior by having Hopper growl and slaver vocalizations that aren’t words. Frank’s snarling sounds as he hovers over his victim recall The Grandmother’s Father barking and looming over his hapless Boy, and prefigures similar configurations of characters that will show up in the director’s future works.
After Frank is finished with Dorothy, he stands above her supine form and cryptically says, “Stay alive, baby. Do it for Van Gogh.” This data convinces the watching Jeffrey that Dorothy is suicidal, and adds to the youth’s sense that Frank has kidnapped her little boy and husband, and has cut off her spouse’s ear (“Van Gogh”). Frank then uses his control over Dorothy’s loved ones to manipulate her any way he wants.
It now becomes clear that Dorothy’s sadistic sexual bossing of Jeffrey is a pale reflection of the way Frank treats her, a way of coping with her hellish situation by taking on some characteristics of the man who has power over her (she commands Jeffrey using Frank’s words, “Don’t look at me”). Given Lynch’s penchant for casting parents and parent-surrogates as potential and actual sexual abusers of young people (The Grandmother, Eraserhead, Twin Peaks, Wild at Heart, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me), it’s reasonable to surmise from the “Mommy loves you” and “Baby wants to fuck” of Frank’s perverse sex ritual that the man has been traumatized by a past, perhaps incestuous, sexual experience. (Freud believed that a boy witnessing the primal scene of his father and mother having intercourse would develop a sadistic sexuality fixated on the power of the strong male dominating the weaker female. He also surmised that the last object a boy sees before he first glimpses his mother’s genitals becomes fetishized: It wouldn’t surprise us if little Frank Booth’s mother wore a blue velvet robe.) Frank’s victimization has compelled him to visit sexual violence upon Dorothy, who continues to cycle with Jeffrey. Foisting rough sex on Jeffrey may help Dorothy cope, but she’s most deeply conditioned to express her erotic nature through victimhood. When Frank has left and she and Jeffrey are alone again, the youth gently comforts her and they both get aroused, and she implores him, “Hit me, hit me.” He won’t, so their first evening is over.
Or so Jeffrey may think as he’s putting on his clothes. But walking away from Dorothy’s building in the darkness, his black-clad form starts to glow with phosphorescence; then we see Jeffrey’s father struggling in vain to speak, the guttering flame of Frank’s white candle, Dorothy’s face begging “Hit me,” and a Dorothy’s-eye-view of a grimacing Frank mashing his fist into our face to the sound of her scream. Then Jeffrey is in bed in the morning, his head reeling from a nightmare (“Man oh man”). Lynch has not only toyed with our sense of reality by slyly immersing us in what we now realize was a montage of Jeffrey’s dream, but he’s emphasized how profoundly the youth’s consciousness has become immersed in the ear-mystery, and how dangerous his quest is. He’s awake, his bad dream is over, he’s in his own comforting bed. But on the wall above him is an animalistic rubber Halloween mask that’s all devouring mouth and hungry teeth—a reminder of the metaphysical evil of the dark beetles gnawing beneath sunny lawns, Frank’s brutal appetites, and the unsettling fact that the mask fits Jeffrey’s face. As artist Vito Acconci says of Lynch’s oeuvre, Lynch shows us that we are both “scared and scary”: We are threatened by shadows from outside and inside.
Twenty-four hours after Jeffrey’s dark introduction to Lumberton’s underworld with Dorothy and Frank, the sober and sad young man sits in the Williamses’ car with Sandy. Whenever Jeffrey drives, they go to the wrong side of the tracks. But when Sandy’s at the wheel, they stop in front of a stone church with stained glass windows, in which we can hear an organist practicing a beautiful melody. Sandy, the agent of angelic goodness, would naturally guide them to this site. (We note that Jeffrey drives a convertible, signifying his dual nature as wholesome, upright youth and dabbler in darkness; Twin Peaks’ Leland Palmer, Laura’s demon-possessed father, also drives a convertible.) Gazing at Sandy’s blonde loveliness, Jeffrey gathers himself to speak of the raven-haired Dorothy’s inferno. He first said, “It’s a strange world” to Sandy on their initial night stroll, when an amorphously defined forming mystery could be contemplated with innocent enthusiasm. Now, having gained some experience of the mystery’s shape and lived some of the life its main characters lead, he says, “It’s a strange world” with a melancholy whisper. Jeffrey has discovered a secret realm hidden within the world he thought he knew by heart, and it’s tainted him. His account to Sandy keeps secrets from her: He makes no mention of the sexual activity of he and his two netherworld guides. Wanting to believe that people can be either all good or all bad, Jeffrey condenses the evil of the ear mystery into the form of Frank Booth, and passionately asks Sandy, “Why are there men like Frank? Why is there so much trouble in the world?” Sandy doesn’t know the answer to this major mystery, but, given Lynch’s love of opposing forces in contrast, she offers an antidote to the world’s evil.
Sitting at the steering wheel, the church and its uplifting melody softfocus in the background, Sandy says with sweet exultation, “I had a dream,” words that are a Lynchian declaration of principles. “The world was dark because there weren’t any robins, and the robins represented love. And for the longest time there was just this darkness. And all of a sudden, thousands of robins were set free. And they flew down and brought this blinding light of love, and it seemed like that love would be the only thing that would make any difference. And it did. So, I guess it means there is trouble ’till the robins come.”
If Frank’s sexual abuse of Dorothy is Blue Velvet’s most searing statement of malevolence, then Sandy and Jeffrey’s car talk is its antithesis. And, as evidence that the powers of shadow and radiance are equally valuable to Lynch’s sensibility, each scene runs about the same length of time. As Laura Dern has said, “David believes in the robins as much as in Frank Booth.”89 Some viewers, whose sense of wonder is dimmed by an overdeveloped need to find everything ironic, are convinced that Sandy’s dewy-eyed dream description is a put-on, a way for Lynch to mock her corny credulity. But this artist who calls himself naive, who meditates on Eastern concepts of spiritual transcendence, values dream states, and in previous films has portrayed the ability of higher powers to deliver benighted souls, most certainly has his ears pricked for those robins’ song.
Other than his creepy human animals, the critters that appear most in Lynch’s work are insects and dogs, though there are a few other birds outside the precincts of Blue Velvet. The graceful, feathered creatures that can defy gravity have a positive connotation for the artist. There’s the cheery robin on a fir branch in the Twin Peaks credits. The joyful feeling in Lynch’s song “I Remember” that’s “So happy, so warm / That sent seven little red birds up my spine / Singing.”90 The way the director compares a well-made film to the “perfect composition” of a mallard duck’s anatomy, the bird’s eye having been positioned “in exactly the right spot.” And there are Lynch’s angel figures, one of whom, in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, has white-feathered wings.
Sandy’s dream has the resonance of a prophecy but, unlike in Dune, where it’s telegraphed ahead of time that Paul’s visions will come true, Blue Velvet trades in true moment-to-moment existential mystery and revelation. (Every frame of this film shows how much more at home Lynch is here than in the imperial throne rooms of far-flung galaxies.) Sandy had her dream the night she met Jeffrey, so maybe he’s the one who can make the robins come, though he seems more interested in debauchery than birds. Lynch cuts directly from Sandy and Jeffrey’s sanctified scene in front of the church to Jeffrey on the prowl in night town, anxious for Dorothy to open her door, and more, to him.
There’s something murky in him that responds to the dusky pull of her blood, and Jeffrey thrusts himself into Dorothy’s desperate body. He can see that she’s half crazy, looking for Jeffrey in her closet every night, scared of Frank and soul-sick over what he may do to her entrapped husband and little son. She’s sunken so low in abuse that she keeps entreating Jeffrey, “I want you to hurt me.” One night, when the youth says he’ll tell the police of her predicament, she gets furious with him and literally starts to kick him out of bed. Up to this moment Jeffrey has maintained, “I want to help you, not hurt you” but, with relief, he yields to the darkness within him, and whacks her hard in the face with the back of his hand. (Following Freud’s logic, Jeffrey, having psychically processed and absorbed the primal scene of his netherworld surrogate father and mother Frank and Dorothy having punishing sex, is now able to model Frank’s sadistic erotic power-plays.) Like a visual reverberation of the blow, Lynch shows us a huge close-up of Dorothy’s chipped front tooth, which dissolves in a gust of flames that becomes Jeffrey pouncing onto her in a sexual slow-motion embrace, over which we hear distorted animal roars and the sharp-end punctuation of a woman’s scream. The scene goes to black and Dorothy says, “I have your disease in me now.”
The question of the exact nature of this disease generated much discussion after Blue Velvet came out. In the mid-1980s, America and the world were still trying to comprehend and cope with the concept of AIDS, a horrendous, fatal plague spread from person to person primarily through sexual contact. A number of commentators thought that Dorothy’s “disease” was AIDS and that Lynch was making a sociopolitical point about the Reagan administration’s avoidance of this crisis-magnitude public health issue. Indeed, many hip viewers were sure that Lynch, by exposing the moral rot behind the sugar-sweet facade of smalltown USA, was subverting Reagan’s Up With America ethos. Of course, these cognoscenti were shocked to learn that their radical-director hero was a supporter of the Gipper. Lynch wants his art to mean different things to different people, to speak to the individual viewer’s needs and imagination: The connection between artwork and public is what matters, not the communication of a neatly formulated and circumscribed message from the author.
The “disease” in Blue Velvet is one of the director’s beloved abstractions, which he wants us to interpret as we will, but his original script gives us some clues about his take on the concept. On the page, Dorothy ruminates, “You put your disease in me—your semen. It’s hot and full of disease. Men are crazy. They put their craziness into me, then it makes me crazy—then they aren’t so crazy for awhile. Then they put it in me again. . . . [Starts Crying] It’s burning me!”92 This from the supposedly male chauvinist director who lives to abuse women onscreen: These script words could have been written by Valerie Solanas, the woman who shot artist Andy Warhol and founded the Society for Cutting Up Men (SCUM). For Lynch, the disease is the evil that men do, which can invade another’s personality and bring out their worst. Bad, twisted thoughts and actions can be contagious, and the director will further explore the question of whether evil is a possessing or an intrinsic force in Twin Peaks.
excerpt from the book: David Lynch:Beautiful Dark / Greg Olson
When People Cannot Differentiate Between Internal and External Worlds And Then Take One For Another
Behind the credits of the “Hour of the Wolf” we hear noises of a set being made ready for the shot – a black frame… a black screen in fact, an image (if one can so describe it) of total darkness before the first real, luminous images… All this – night passing into day, darkness into an image – to anchor the narrative in a kind of primordial night… Liv Ullmann is revealed… confiding the story… This second narration (the first is the introductory darkness) is soon “illustrated” – a third narrative, this time peopled with “characters” follows on from her confession. This narrative proceeds up to the point when Liv Ullmann discovers her husband’s diary… So, there is a fourth narrative superimposed onto the first three… Her reading is in turn illustrated: a fifth narrative is grafted on to its predecessors. Phantasms of extreme violence are unleashed by this new proliferation of the unfolding narrative. Up to the moment when Liv confesses to her husband that she has read his diary. Now begins a long night, in which the couple’s phantasms… begin to develop in common… After the night in the castle, the climax of this eruption of dreams, the house of cards begins piece by piece to collapse. The characters evaporate, melt into the night… Liv resumes her confession at the point where we left her in the start, in the same close-up.
Cahiers du Cinema 1960 – 1968, Harvard Univ. Press, p. 313, 315
The worst are the ‘hours of the wolf’… between three and five. That is when the demons come: mortification, loathing, fear and rage. There is no point in trying to suppress them, for that makes it worse.
Ingmar Bergman, “The Magic Lantern”, Penguin, 1988, p. 226
Of course, works of art create themselves, and dream of killing both father and mother. Of course, they exist before the artist discovers them. But it’s always “Orpheus”, always “Oedipus”. I thought that by changing castle I’d change ghosts and that here a flower could make them flee.
Jean Cocteau, “The Testament of Orpheus”
Bergman’s film is about a psychological phenomenon that is quite widespread in our time – when a person’s impulses, intentions and desires go out of the control of his/her psychological wholeness – of his personality and holistic identity. In US in the 21st century we observe more and more people with the inability not only to control their impulses, but to rationally take into consideration the consequences of their actions. Even people’s everyday actions and decisions become impregnated with their instinctive impulsivity, impatience and expectation of quick results. More, this is true not only about regular people – even the decision-makers are like this – immature and not capable of self-reflection, whose calculations are not thought through and made angrily, often belligerently and with electronic speed. “Thinking” for these people means to justify the decisions they already instinctively have made. It expresses itself in all the areas of life – in personal relations, in politics (Bush Jr. type of bravado decision-making, the neo-conservative politicians’ adolescently blind and wide-sweeping passions, today’s policemen’s panicky shooting unarmed people, erroneous profitmaking of the financial entrepreneurs, with disastrous consequences for global populations because of their inability to resist the imaginary profits, arm-chair killing of civilians by sitting in air-conditioned offices drone operators, in general thinking about life as moneymaking and fight for more power, the inability to keep the sexual impulses and private addictions under control, impersonalized and depersonalized consumerism, etc.)
The socio-psychological phenomenon of pluralism of social life which was always a point of pride for democratic systems, is perceived in the 21st century as an adversary factor – for people ruling democracies today the international versatility is not only a burden but an obstacle and a menace. They encourage in masses suspicion for otherness and paranoid reactions. Bergman’s film shows the process of pluralization of reality through multiplication of narrations, characters and situations which the main characters cannot assimilate and tolerate without extremely defensive reactions and frustrations. Collapse of the artist’s psychological wholeness and transformation of peoples into (shattered) phantoms and ghosts – shadowy creatures without identities – here is Bergman‘s comment about the future of human societies which becomes a reality for us today. In this sense Bergman’s “Hour of the Wolf” is a dystopia not without a political connotation. When individuals are no longer able to think without fear deforming their thinking, when philosophers become just specialists in philosophers of the past, when artists become entertainers, then the regular people are transformed into phantoms without identity and humanity (contaminated with aggressive, dangerous unconscious energies).
Bergman masterfully personifies this situation as a problem of the artistic self’s failure in the talented painter Johan Borg, whose partial creative impulses as a result of his psychological fragmentation are going out of control – when his imaginary constructions (his phantoms, his aesthetic interpretation of various people, his figurative imagination) started to rebel against his artistic will. But let’s be sure that in Bergman’s film these imaginary personages which are the inner images of the artistic unconscious/conscious are also real human beings who are like appendixes to their obsessions and suffer from existential depravity – the ontological incompleteness producing a basic “inferiority complex” fixating people on external achievements as a result of their internal emptiness. Psychological fragmentation tends to flatten the human psyche, reduce it to partial interests, which are always impulsive and unable to provide human being with a solid ontological rootedness and existential perspective. That’s how people today hunt after jobs and consumer items, after images ripped away from the context, after ideological sound-bites and crumbs of bliss provided by rock concerts and mass events, alcohol and drugs. So, Bergman in “Hour of the Wolf” simultaneously analyses the situation of a talented artist who is losing creative control over his figurative images – his phantoms (his internal objects), and the psychological condition of regular people who pursuit false (absurd) goals (like the inhabitants of Baron von Merkens’ castle) because they are ontologically deprived and unconsciously feel that they are “inferior” and for this reason are restless and over-agitated to achieve and be rewarded with social status and power.
As a result of his sensitivity and talent the artist repeats in his sub-conscious the condition of people he comes across in social settings and through his imagination reinvents them for the purpose of his art. By the logic of artistic creativity Johan Borg shares his social phantoms’ ontological deprivation to the horror of his wife Alma. The artist (Johan Borg) registers the condition of people as that of his inner objects which “represents” inside his psyche the truth about the psychological condition of people in the real world.
But the artist (Borg) personifies not only his own inner objects and not only the psychologically regular people (the members of Merkens family and their entourage), but also the condition of human culture in the times of cultural fragmentation (much like this period we live in today in the Western societies when culture cannot democratically control (humanize) the psychological state of its people who dramatically regress from the more rational way of psychological organization into chaotic and impulsive feelings and behavior). Bergman’s film is a diagnosis of today’s planetary culture (symbolized by Johan Borg’s psyche which reaches the point of anomie).
A big part of the film is dedicated to the depiction of the artist’s relationships with figures of authority, stylistically enigmatized and demonized by his imagination, while also reflecting truth of these personages with their self-confident manners, the imperative verbalizations, rather of mature age, materially very prosperous and socially influential. Amongst them there are modifications of parental figures (paternal and maternal) – Baron von Merkens (spider-man) and Corinne von Merkens (his wife), of grand-maternal (Countess von Merkens, Baron’s mother), of grand-grand-maternal (The Lady with a hat) who not only takes away her hat, but also her face (in order to hear better the music of an imaginary composer). There is also an uncle-like Ernst von Merkens. Besides that Bergman introduces us to the personifications of two aspects of an intellectual art-criticism – the performative aspect (archivist Lindhorst, the bird-man) and the “public relation” aspect (curator Heerbrand) in two incarnations – as a “homosexual” attracted to the artist’s exhibitionism, and the development of the theme of “schoolmaster with the pointer in his trousers” – a despotic (self-imposing and intrusive educator).
Johan Borg in the film represents rather a modernist painter with the ability to perceive other people critically – the ability which contributes to the artist’s conflict with society (that contradicts the traditional “romantic” concept of art as a beautiful alternative to the reality). Archetypal figures of the Western psyche whom Bergman represents as Borg’s neighbors, want to be idealized, worshiped and adored, and they strike back for a lack of reverie towards them on the part of the artist. Johan Borg becomes the hero of modernist (critical and democratic) art, fighting with the despotic images and social structures from the past and falling in this battle while trying to deconstruct and to debunk the traditional authoritarian values. Before his psychological collapse, Johan Borg was existentially oriented and didn’t want the images of art to be grandiose, superhuman, eternal, over-beautiful as they are supposed to be in the traditionally understood “great art”.
Another extensive topic Bergman touches on in this film is the antagonistic relation between the artist’s personal life on the one hand and his fixation on the archetypal images of his imagination on the other. “The art of living together is Bergman’s central concern.” (P. Livingston, “Ingmar Bergman and the Ritual of Art”, Cornell Univ. Press, 1982, p. 244). Johan’s inability to stay with his wife Alma (who personifies the human wholeness), incompatibility between his more and more shattered psyche and her holistic personality refers to a tragedy not only for art, but for human culture when both losing wholeness and becoming an appendix to the drive for material success (art-makers) and immediate satisfaction (the audience). Traditional forms of despotism are activated in democratic societies under new masks, and purity of the soul (Alma) is unable to withstand growing irrational fears armed with animosity. The intellectual artist must fight alone and is doomed. Johan feels farther and farther from Alma’s love. She is a metonymy of existential genuineness, of ontological presence. Three Alma’s gazes are registered by Sven Nykvist’s camera – one at Johan when he is going through his sleepless night hours, the other – at the puppet representation of Mozart’s opera, and third – at Johan’s portrait of Veronica Vogler – represent the abyss between life and art in a condition of disintegration. In these three gazes Liv Ullmann expresses a mixture of curiosity and disgust, a combination of disappointment and compassion, of disbelief and contempt for the miserable human condition of being obsessed with pleasures of darkness, with self-aggrandizement inside a cave (with the same expression Alma could look at the TV or movie screen showing commercial TV programs or entertaining Hollywood films). The artist cannot reach personal happiness – he is too divided between his concentration on the images of ontological inferiority and the reality of human wholeness.
Johan Borg is involved in two relationships – with an existential woman (Alma) and with the object of his “romantic” obsession – Veronica Vogler. The coexistence of these two types of love refers to a clash between an elevated seductive love – a greedy-consumerist one, and a pure but artless and wingless, even, somehow a prosaic love of “real life”. Then the scene of the film where Johan Borg is searching for Veronica Vogler in the castle of voyeurs and vampires is Bergman’s surrealistic parody not only on “Magic Flute” – on Mozart’s idea of ordeal which the beloveds have to go through on their way to happiness, but on the very tradition of romantic love and conventional idea of love between man and woman. Johan is successfully passes through the five ordeals, all of which violate and go against his morality and integrity.
But the real comedy of horrors starts when Johan Borg approaches his beloved who, according to the code of behavior suggested by the endless tales of Western culture, is lying as if dead while waiting for his resurrecting gaze-and-touch (her nakedness is covered by a white sheet like in morgue). Parody on traditional concept of heterosexual love here has an impressive intensity. Woman is supposed to pretend that she is completely sexually inert so as not to shock man and by this inactiveness to arouse him. Then he will be able to feel his vigor and assert himself with her with his magic touch/kiss which will bring her to life from her natural state of passivity. Under Borg’s desiring palm Veronica not only resurrects but becomes feverishly, maniacally excited and starts to hysterically kiss him with an uncontrollable urge. This is a caricature version of how a woman ought to react on a man’s touch, according to traditional cultural expectation. Not less symptomatic is the fact that when our great lovers Johan and Veronica are on the way to sexual culmination, the phantoms who with voyeuristic voluptuousness watch the scandalous love affair, started to jeeringly laugh at the romantic pair. With this humiliating laughter announcing to the oblivious couple their presence, the phantoms express to the lovers their jealous revenge. Borg’s vampires here behave like majority of American public in the situation of Clinton-Lewinski affair – they watched this affair while holding their breath and with secret pleasure, but unanimously scolded the president for immorality.
Today, the psychological situation of American public is even worse. With the intensification of neocon austerity agenda the suspiciousness and paranoid emotional predisposition in political and world views and personal relations become intensified, like relations between Johan Borg and the inhabitants of the castle – his neighbors, and eventually, between him and his wife. Psychological tolerance of others and ritualistic politeness (civility) are in a process of being transformed into despair armed with crimes and hysterical violence (like in road rage). If in a situation of Bergman’s Johan Borg his figurative images become mutually repulsive, in a situation of regular people the very perception of others become more prejudicial and impregnated with suspicion and hate – in terms of Bergman’s film people start to see others as demonic figures. A wave of hateful suspicion struck Russia and Germany in the 30s and US during the presidency of George Bush Jr. in the very beginning of 21st century. Today, the American civil population is under the most extensive surveillance in human history. American culture today is losing its humanistic and democratic orientation. The young need education and guidance and not police brutality. Non-commercial art and humanistic education (liberal arts) are losing support, and more and more students have to turn to technical and applied professions to be able to work for corporate Tyrannosauruses.
By showing the collapse of Johan Borg’s internal world Bergman points at the weakening of positivity in human relationships inside and between countries, a growing hate between people in parallel with diminishing rationality and kindness towards others. The film analyses the brutalization of the emotional environment between people. Johan Borg was an intellectual artist who became mentally sick and lost his creative ability. In the “Hour of the Wolf” Bergman warns our culture about the decline of our psychological health through losing our existential taste for humanism (this situation is visually expressed in the film by the loss of mediation between light and darkness – stepping into a world of extreme contrasts).
In Johan Borg’s disturbing psychological portrait we not only see the predicament of today’s humanistic intellectuals but the situation of ordinary people who have lost control over their inner and external environment.
“Flower is made from your blood (said Cegestius in Jean Cocteau’s “The Testament of Orpheus” to the artist) and has adopted the same rhythms as your destiny.” Bergman’s Johan Borg was “devoured” by his figurative images/psychological objects (and people incarnated them) because he lost his “phoenixological” ability to restore “flowers” to life in and through his art.
posted on 11, 11 2015 – “Hour Of The Wolf” (1968) By Ingmar Bergman by Acting-Out Politics
by Greg Olson
A rebel for the cause of unbridled free expression, Hopper stormed through life wolfing down booze and drugs, and romancing every starlet he could get his hands on. Hopper’s compulsion to maintain a militantly antiestablishment stance kept hurting his career: He couldn’t resist alienating the very people who could help him. He wrote, “Jimmy Dean once pulled a switchblade and threatened to murder his director. I follow his style in art and life.” Hopper’s former wife, Brooke Hayward, recalls, “We’d go to these parties where you’d have the crème de la crème of Hollywood, and he’d tell them that when he ran things heads were going to roll, they’d be in chains.”
Lynch calls the 1960s “the decade of change,” an era in which America was divided against itself: young against old, those who hated the Vietnam War against those who supported it, the counterculture against the establishment. While Lynch was painting in his studio, Dennis Hopper was walking with the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. in the Alabama Freedom March for African American civil rights and being spat on by southern bigots who called him “a nigger-loving Communist.”
Though Hopper’s mind was engulfed in drugs, rage, and paranoia, the excess and chaos of his life spawned the landmark American film Easy Rider, which he directed, co-starred in, and co-wrote. Made for only $350,000, the movie tapped into the archetypal American myth of the promise of the open road, which had been sung by everyone from the first explorers and pioneers to Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, John Steinbeck, and Jack Kerouac. (In 1990, Lynch would join the freedom-loving road chorus with Wild at Heart.) Unlike Lynch’s artwork, Easy Rider was consciously, overtly political, and it expressed the mindset of many baby boomer–generation youth who celebrated peace and free love and railed against the corporate warmongers who were napalming babies in the jungles of Vietnam. The film asks a wrenching question that haunts us today: How can each of us be free and make American the way we want it to be without hurting each other and trampling on each other’s freedom?
Easy Rider made the brooding Hollywood outsider Dennis Hopper wealthy, famous, and instantly reclassified as “a creative genius.” His film changed the face of the movie business. Graying studio executives began catering to the “youth market” by hiring twenty-year-old “do-your-ownthing” filmmakers, and soon even the top-level-management ranks surged with younger blood. Hopper was given free reign to make his magnum opus, The Last Movie, a heavy-handed treatise against Hollywood/American imperialism presented in a boldly deconstructed narrative that turned off critics and audiences in droves. Hopper was once again exiled from Hollywood, and his professional and personal life spiraled down into drug addiction and psychotic hallucinations.
Hopper was absolutely out of control, and his friends stepped in and got him into a detoxification program. Actor Dean Stockwell, whose career had been revitalized after he played the traitorous Dr. Yueh in Lynch’s Dune, was instrumental in helping his comrade stay clean and sober, one day at a time.
Lynch had put Hopper on his first list of possible actors to play Frank Booth, but the director figured that if even half the stories about the legendary rebel and crazy man were true, he’d best leave him alone. Still, he’d heard that Hopper had cleaned up his act in recent months, that his searing talent was no longer compromised by scrambled brain chemistry. One day, the director’s phone rang, and Hopper’s intense voice declared, “I’ve got to play this part, David, because I am Frank.”37 Impressed and shaken by the actor’s unorthodox audition, Lynch said to the assembled cast and crew, “My God, he just told me that he is Frank. I don’t know what he meant by that. Maybe he’s right for the part, but how are we going to have lunch with him?” They decided to risk it.
Once the world saw Blue Velvet and experienced the blast-furnace power, frightening, sadistic perversity, and commanding authenticity of Hopper’s Frank Booth, word got around about the actor having said “I am Frank,” and once again he had some explaining to do. “I understand Frank very well. I was known to abuse people when drunk or high, but not exactly in this way. I’ve also played a lot of sex games, but I’m more a masochist than a sadist.” For Brooke Hayward, Frank Booth’s behavior was a portrait of “the way you would have seen Dennis behaving” in the 1960s.
Whatever the origin and history of the ferocity that Hopper brought to Frank Booth, Lynch was thrilled to have captured it with his camera. And Hopper was excited to be playing “perhaps the most vicious person who has ever been on the screen.” The actor credited Lynch with helping him reach his peak of frenzy: “David kept me up really high, pushing all the time. He insisted I keep playing it at a high level. I love what I do in the film, and I love what David did with me.” Hopper admitted that just a few months earlier that he “would have taken cocaine” to achieve his riveting acting effects, but now he was deeply gratified to be enjoying the sober life and drawing upon the pure, unadulterated streams of his talent. Lynch and company learned that having lunch with Dennis was no strain at all.
Hopper’s old pal Dean Stockwell rounded out Blue Velvet’s cast as the flamingly suave drug dealer Ben, and Lynch completed his technical crew by bringing in his longtime friend and sound-design maestro Alan Splet. Isabella Rossellini’s Dorothy would have to sing a couple of nightclub numbers, so the director hired composer Angelo Badalamenti to coach her vocal performances. Lynch had such a positive rapport with the genial, rotund music man that he engaged Badalamenti to score the entire film, thus beginning a creative “marriage” that has included the director’s every movie, TV, and stage production through Mulholland Drive. Badalamenti wrote a beautiful melody to accompany Jeffrey and Sandy’s falling-in-love scene and Lynch was inspired to pen lyrics for it, thus opening up another avenue of self-expression that the director would pursue in the future. The resulting song, “Mysteries of Love,” needed just the right person to sing it, and the ethereal-voiced Julee Cruise was given the job, initiating still another of Lynch’s longtime artistic partnerships.
After Dune’s ultimately frustrating and dispiriting three-and-a-half years of inflated gigantism, making Blue Velvet felt like an intimate homecoming to Lynch. As with Eraserhead, the director was working with a smallish budget and an extended family of friends and collaborators, and he knew that the vision that reached the screen would be his alone. He was regaining his creative confidence after the Dune debacle, as Kyle MacLachlan recalls, “David was able to say, ‘this Blue Velvet material comes from me; I’m going to trust that it’s right.’” Lynch’s Blue Velvet dream was unique, but, as with Dennis Hopper’s road-tripping Easy Rider, it tapped into a primal, potent American myth.
For the country’s early, colonizing settlers, America was the frontier, a world of limitless space in which they could move about, build, worship as they pleased, and reap the bounty of their new land. Ordinary, common folks could chart their own course in this rural paradise, but as wave after wave of immigrants washed ashore and industrialized cities began to sprout, the frontier of wide-open promise and possibility kept elusively advancing westward. In 1890, newspapers from coat to coast delivered a traumatic shock to the American psyche: According to the latest census, the frontier was officially and forever closed. As more people jammed into cities, the urban areas expanded their boundaries and crowded out the wild, unsettled land. Cities pulsed to the oppressive beat of machines, and lived on a schedule of mechanized time, rather than the cycles of nature. An alfresco, neighbor-to-neighbor democracy was replaced by institutionalized government, blue skies became sooty gray, and the crime statistics worsened every year.
But there remained enclaves of rural hope and freedom, places that struck a perfect balance between the secure comforts of civilization and the spirited call of the wilderness. Small towns preserved the agrarian pursuits and free-ranging roots of the American experience. Sure, we’ve got cars and newfangled tractors and telephones, but in our hearts we know that the frontier starts right out where Maple Drive ends. The town grown-ups and kids all know each other, we leave our doors unlocked, and solve little problems in the front-porch twilight and tackle big ones at the town meetings. We jump right in to help in a crisis, but otherwise we let each other be. We’re a tight community of ruggedly individualistic souls, not a cheek by-jowl lonely crowd of strangers rat-racing after the almighty dollar in some skyscraper metropolis. Smelling fresh-cut wheat on the wind is more valuable than all the Mercedes-Benz exhaust fumes in the world.
In the American mind, there is a sun-dappled line of continuity that stretches from the earliest settlers’ idealized New England image of a village in the seventeenth-century wilderness; to Sarah Orne Jewett’s romanticized Tales of New England (1879); to Booth Tarkington’s The Gentleman from Indiana (1899), whose town is “one, big, jolly family”; to Thornton Wilder’s Our Town (1938); to the Andy Hardy movies of the 1930s and 1940s; to William Saroyan’s The Human Comedy (1943); to Norman Rockwell’s Saturday Evening Post cover illustrations of the 1950s and 1960s; and to the wholesome TV and movie small-town fun of The Andy Griffith Show, The Waltons, Happy Days, American Graffiti, and Back to the Future of recent decades. The national imagination warms to the idea of small towns as repositories of tranquility, virtue, and bedrock democracy. However, for centuries, our psyches have also conjured dank and shivery forces of fear and evil waiting to seize us in shady, bucolic lanes.
The early Puritan settlers felt that they had found God’s country in America, but they brought their Old World Devil with them. The sect had broken away from England’s Anglican Church, an institution that, the Puritans believed, was woefully blind to the essentially corrupt nature of human beings and the Christ-ordained biblical manner in which fallen souls should properly worship. The benighted sinners could only attain the bliss of divine grace by strictly following God’s written laws. The Puritans were masters at projecting their own dark psychic shadows onto convenient scapegoats. In 1692, Betty Parris, the daughter of sin-and-Satan-obsessed clergyman Samuel Parris, began to position her body in strange postures and speak words that no one could understand. Soon, five of Betty’s girlfriends were suffering feverish fits in which it felt like insects were crawling beneath their skin, and seeing visions of wild animals with manlike faces (it seems Lynch’s intuitive urge to portray insects and animalistic humans as agents of evil taps into an ancient archetype). The parson’s daughter singled out Tituba, a black West Indian slave woman, as their tormentor. Tituba confessed to having made a pact with the Devil, whom she said was a tall man dressed in black who rode through the air on a stick. Witch-hunt hysteria gripped Salem, and the town locked up 150 bedeviled suspects, twenty of whom were put to death before the town’s malignant mass-delusion passed.
It wasn’t just the newly arrived European Americans who were seeing fearsome apparitions in the deep woods. The indigenous Native Americans, who the newcomers would tragically slaughter and displace from the lands that were the center of their universe, believed that mischievous and maligned spirits dwelled beyond the comforting glow of their cooking fires. In all cultures and eras, the ancient part of our psyches that fears being eaten by something bigger than us, that trembles at the seasonal death of the sun and the sudden, unaccountable deaths of our crops and our tribe-mates, stimulates our imaginations to produce images and scenarios of natural and supernatural predatory dangers. As a serpent slithered into Adam and Eve’s garden, agents of darkness crept into even the most idyllic small settlements where human beings dwelled.
Some early European American settlers felt the Native Americans were void of humanity, and conjured up the image of the evil Indian, which the nineteenth-century’s James Fenimore Cooper applied so forcefully in The Last of the Mohicans (and which he balanced against a host of beneficent and admirable Native Americans).
Caucasians were more than capable of haunting their own wilderness settlements, of course, and the souring of the pastoral dream began in earnest. Mark Twain detailed the emptiness of Mississippi village life in Huckleberry Finn (1885) and Edgar Lee Masters’ Spoon River Anthology (1915) reveals people thwarted and wasted by the repressiveness and hypocrisy of their small-town home. Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio (1919) examines the lives of misfits whose dreams and gifts are bigger than their narrow-minded little town. In Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street, the town seems founded on the principle of “dullness made God”46 and is a place lacking in “beauty and strangeness,”47 qualities that Lynch sees everywhere. A town in the book (1940) and film (1942) King’s Row was “a good place to raise your children,”48 as well as for delving into insanity, murder, suicide, incest, euthanasia, unnecessary amputation, and embezzlement. In Alfred Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt (1943), chaos comes to sunny Santa Rosa, California, in the form of big-city Uncle Charlie, a killer of women, whose train pulls into the station spewing a monstrous black cloud of smoke as though, Hitchcock says, “the devil is coming to town.”49 So forces of darkness can come from the outside and invade a town, as also happens with the outer space–spawned seed pods of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956)—or the roots of malevolence can have been here forever, ancient as the roots of grass.
Blue Velvet’s sense of lurking darkness is very close to that of Ray Bradbury’s 1946 story The Night, in which a small-town boy approaches a dreaded ravine. “Here and now, down there in that pit of jungled blackness is suddenly all the evil you will ever know. Evil you will never understand. All of the nameless things are there. Later, when you have grown you’ll be given names to label them. Meaningless syllables to describe the waiting nothingness. Down there in the huddled shadow, among thick trees and trailed vines, lives the odor of decay. Here, at this spot, civilization ceases, reason ends, and a universal evil takes over.” Bradbury continues,
There are a million small towns like this all over the world. Each as dark, as lonely, each as removed, as full of shuddering and wonder. The reedy playing of minor-key violins is the small town’s music, with no lights but many shadows. Oh the vast swelling loneliness of them. The secret damp ravines of them. Life is a horror lived in them at night, when at all sides sanity, marriage, children, happiness, are threatened by an ogre called Death.
We hear Bradbury’s “reedy . . . minor-key violins” in the sinuous Badalamenti music that accompanies Jeffrey’s mystery-seeking night walks around Lumberton. Lynch’s devouring insects hidden beneath a perfect lawn are “all the evil you will ever know,” churning beneath giant grass blades as in “that pit of jungled blackness.” The nameless “disease” with which men poison Dorothy’s psyche and make her want to die is the “meaningless syllables to describe the waiting nothingness.”And Jeffrey’s town, like all the other towns, is full of “shuddering and wonder,” so much fear and awe that his only response can be to exclaim, “It’s a strange world.”
In Ray Bradbury’s 1920s Waukegan, Illinois, childhood, there was an actual spooky ravine. Visiting it as an adult with grown daughters, he found that this shadow zone was as deep, dark, and mysterious as ever. As Bradbury grew up, his indelible boyhood image of the ravine became the serpent in the small-town garden of his writing. David Lynch also carried with him a childhood image of paradise poisoned. The artist’s childhood in the town of Spokane, Washington was
“Good Times On Our Street.” It was beautiful old houses, tree-lined streets, the milkman, building forts, lots and lots of friends. It was a dream world, those droning airplanes, blue skies, picket fences, green grass, cherry trees. Middle America the way it was supposed to be. But then on this cherry tree would be this pitch oozing out, some of it black, some of it yellow, and there were millions and millions of red ants racing all over the sticky pitch, all over the tree. So you see, there’s this beautiful world and you just look a little bit closer and it’s all red ants.
The wounded tree has a special resonance for Lynch since his father was a research scientist who probed beneath tree bark seeking pockets of invasive disease to study. As the director once said of his daughter, Jennifer, who was launching her fledgling foray into surrealistic filmmaking: “The apple doesn’t fall too far from the tree.” And like his father, Lynch digs beneath the surface of external appearances to explore deeper realities, the hidden life within all things. The diseased tree convinced young Lynch that “there is a goodness like those blue skies and flowers and stuff, but there is always a force, a sort of wild pain and decay, accompanying everything.” These childhood recollections show that the director’s consciousness was working on Blue Velvet a long, long time before it became a typed script. The bleeding tree is Lynch’s Bradbury ravine: that oozing bark, those ants.
The years in which young David Lynch so carefully observed those ants swarming on his small-town-backyard cherry tree were part of a golden decade. America had saved the free world from the Nazi and Japanese hordes, and the economy was booming. Young families with a single wage-earner could afford a house with all the newest appliances, a car, and vacations. The divorce rate barely registered on a graph, women were pregnant, and people felt no guilt about smoking cigarettes, eating cheese and charbroiled beef, and stomping on the gas pedals of their low-gas-mileage, highhorsepower, V8-powered cars, those big beautiful Detroit vehicles with voluptuous curves to rival Marilyn Monroe’s. She and Elvis Presley were the iconic Queen and King of an era that gave birth to rock and roll music, drive-in movies, sleek modern houses, and a playful, future-imagining, optimistic sense of design and color. We weren’t involved in any wars that were our fault, schoolkids respectfully minded their teachers, marijuana, cocaine, and heroin were the stuff of pulp fiction, not streetcorner business deals, and we learned our family values from Dr. Spock and TV’s The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, Leave It To Beaver, and Father Knows Best. The possibility of realizing the age-old, land of plenty American Dream quickened hearts from coast to coast.
For the baby boomers, the largest generation in United States history, the golden dream of the 1950s was soured by the harsh realities of becoming adults in the 1960s. With a burgeoning sense of social conscience, young Americans saw their beloved President Kennedy gunned down and our military involvement in what seemed to be an immoral, genocidal war against Southeast Asians in Vietnam escalate. Carefree playtime was over: You could get drafted and die. Many young men didn’t want to fight in a war they didn’t believe in, a euphemized “conflict” that their father’s generation of 1950s military-industrial, corporate empire-builders had blundered into and were perpetuating and lying about. The cadre of young folk was so big that it spawned its own youth culture, whose folkways were shaped as a reaction against the older generation’s traditionalist establishment: To hell with those bland old 1950s, when the civil rights of African Americans and homosexuals were grievously ignored, when witch-hunting Senator Joe McCarthy imagined a Communist hiding under every bed, and people liked blond-wood furniture and pink and turquoise, for God’s sake. We’re going to stand Ozzie and Harriet on their ears. We’re gonna grow our hair long and sleep in the park and ditch school and pop pills and live life instead of punching a time clock like those squares in suits. We’re gonna fuck who we want when we want, we’re gonna trash the dean’s office until the university gives us the curriculum we want, we’re gonna march until we stop the war, we’re never gonna trust anybody over thirty.
In the 1970s, as the ignoble, soul-killing war finally ground to a halt, the counterculture and their semi-rebellious sympathizers gradually quieted down and were subsumed into mainstream life. The rift between generations narrowed and it became all right to relax and love America again, to embrace Mom and apple pie and hang up that Norman Rockwell print, though it was damnably hard to warmly welcome home the boys who had fought in the jungles. Having faced numerous national traumas in their early adulthoods, the grown-up baby boomers competed fiercely for jobs, realized that their standard of living was never going to even equal that of their parents, became walking definitions of the phrase “stressed out,” and began to look back at the 1950s as though that time was a lost secret garden.
From the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s, filmmakers began to portray the 1950s and pre-Kennedy-assassination 1960s with a yearning, misty-eyed reverence: American Graffiti (1973), Grease (1978), Back to the Future (1985), Peggy Sue Got Married (1986). Rock musicians, who had stuck it to the establishment throughout the 1960s, now declared that “It’s Hip to be Square.”65 Young Americans were being monogamous and having families again, buying cookbooks full of 1950s favorites like Pepsi-Cola cake, and plunking down big money for thirty-year-old blond coffee tables shaped like boomerangs.
Lynch’s approach to the 1950s in Blue Velvet is very subtle; there are no artifacts in evidence, no wall-to-wall greatest hits soundtrack. He’s not climbing aboard some retro-chic bandwagon, nor is he viewing earlier decades from a distanced, ironic, hipper-than-then stance, putting postmodernist quotation marks around the past. The flood of sweet imagery that flows in the film’s opening seconds comes straight from Lynch’s heart. The artist never repudiated the 1950s over the intervening decades; those weren’t protest-song lyrics he was penning on Bob’s Big Boy napkins, they were sketches of atomic-age furniture. The loyal Lynch lived by Beach Boy Brian Wilson’s words, “Be true to your school,”66 and he never stopped loving the decade that enveloped his idyllic Spokane, Washington, childhood. The director’s earliest days are on his mind as he opens the film with his personal red tulip–white fence–blue sky American flag.
The director has said of his boyhood home life, “Yeah, it was like in the fifties.” And his experiences were so glowing that he recalls them in idealized images. “There were a lot of advertisements in magazines where you see a well-dressed woman bringing a pie out of an oven, and a certain smile on her face, or a couple smiling, walking together up to their house, with a picket fence. Those smiles were pretty much all I saw.”
In Blue Velvet, Lynch accomplishes the feat of suggesting the decade with his characters’ attitudes and behavior, the sense of a kindly, mannerly social contract that binds neighbor to neighbor in a network of peace and safety. The director follows his flowers-fence-sky image with two more that show we’re in a safe place for children: an old-fashioned fire truck, charming because it’s small and coasts down a residential street, with the fireman smiling and waving in slow motion and a white-and-black Dalmatian sitting on the outside running board; and, in slow motion, a gray-haired woman stands in the street at a school crossing, a red stop sign in one hand and gesturing with the other for the parade of little ones to keep progressing across the intersection. Drifting by slowly and joined by gentle dissolves, these images are like dreamy memories of the director’s, and our own, American past. Both shots are comforting, for they show us agents who strive to keep destructive forces from harming people, and we’re painfully aware that menacing powers are at work in our and Lynch’s world: a fire truck would really come in handy in Wild at Heart and Twin Peaks. There’s even the sense that Blue Velvet’s toylike fire truck is protecting our childhood innocence and love of playful fun, for the Dalmatian on the running board subliminally reminds us of good ol’ Uncle Walt Disney’s 101 Dalmatians. And, speaking of family, Lynch next shows us Mom sipping coffee and watching TV in the living room, and Dad wearing his sunglasses out on the lawn watering the garden with a hose. Everything is in its proper place and all is right with the world.
Looking at Lynch’s Blue Velvet script, the tone he’s attempting is evident in the words on page 1: “clean, sweet, clean, clean happy, safely, gorgeous, happy, sparkling, light.” Then things change: “SUDDENLY, dark, GETTING DARKER, ominous, black, LOUD HISSING.” The archetypal Lynchian struggle between light and darkness has begun. In his script, the director shows his gift for creating fraught imagery as he writes in a shot in which the lawn-watering man’s neighborhood and its sheltering dome of blue sky are reflected in a close-up of his dark glasses, thus tainting the good and cherished world we’ve seen so far with shadow. However, this image isn’t in the director’s film: it was probably too technically difficult to get the effect of a whole neighborhood reflected in the dark glasses. Instead, Lynch begins his shift to a darker tone with the two-shot scene in which Mom is watching TV (the television set is one of those 1950s-style big, dark wooden boxes on four legs that stands in the middle of the living room). He cuts from Mom, relaxing on the sofa and lifting her coffee cup to her lips, to a shot of the TV, on which we see a black-and-white close-up of a hand holding a pistol and advancing from right to left (toward Mom) in the TV set frame. Lynch chooses and films the images in this opening montage with such care and precision that we pay rapt attention to the details that our eyes are drinking in. The pistol looms as a major signifier: danger is advancing on Mom; evil has entered the house of Blue Velvet. And the garden. Dad’s enjoying his watering routine, but his green hose gets caught on a bush, putting a disruptive kink in the water flow. The soundtrack thus far has consisted of Bobby Vinton singing the favorite “Blue Velvet,” in which the lead voice speaks of his intense love for a woman in blue velvet, and how their love blossomed, yet she left suddenly, leaving the man with his warm, melancholy memories and a vision of blue velvet seen through the veil of his tears. With the introduction of Dad, Lynch, with sound maestro Alan Splet, lightly mixes in the hissing of the watering hose and, when the kink is added, stresses an unsettling rumbling. Wayward water sprays from the unsound connection between hose and tap, and the rumbling intensifies as the kinked watering system is put under near-bursting pressure. Then, at the moment Bobby Vinton sings “like a flame burning brightly,” referring to him and his Blue Lady’s lost love, Dad slaps the back of his neck as though he’s been bitten by an insect, and falls to the ground, making choking sounds as he’s wracked by a massive seizure. Here’s “a flame burning brightly” that the fire truck and its smiling fireman could never put out.
In this opening montage, Lynch does an almost subliminal manipulation of sound to further disquiet us. Beginning with the first shot of the tulips and fence, the director cuts to the next shot right on the beat of Bobby Vinton stressing a word or starting the next verse of his song. This harmonious pattern remains unbroken for eight shots/song passages, until the pressured throbbing of Dad’s hose shatters the visual-aural rhythm that our senses, without our being consciously aware of it, have grown accustomed to. Once Dad is stricken, Lynch doesn’t return to that regular rhythm that’s been linked to the preceding happy times in this sequence.
Following Lynch’s poetics, the TV gun pointing at Mom is Dad’s imminent seizure, the throbbing water in the kinked hose is the blood beginning to burst the vessels in his head. A family and, metaphorically, a town, have been stricken with chaos. A few wooden stakes linked with string, which form the layout for some garden project, define a precisely right-angled, 90-degree-cornered grid pattern on Dad’s lawn. Now the lawn’s presumptive master lies writhing uncontrollably within the neat, schematic design he tried to impose upon nature.
The next shot in Blue Velvet’s opening sequence is one of the most amazing images in Lynch’s entire body of work. Dad lies shuddering and gurgling on the ground, his hand rigidly gripping the hose and holding its nozzle near his groin, so it looks like he’s peeing or ejaculating into the air. A small orange-and-white dog is standing with its front paws on Dad’s thigh, growling and snapping at the water that spurts from the nozzle. With the horizontal man, hose, and dog large in the shot’s foreground, a little toddler comes wobbling straight forward toward the incredible spectacle in front of him. With the groin shooting fluid, Lynch foreshadows the wildly unbounded sexual energies that will course through his film. The playfulominous dog is the classic Lynchian nemesis, the embodiment of unleashed animalistic impulses. The child is, perhaps, the one who was looking up at those beautiful red tulips next to the white fence. Or maybe it’s Lynch’s memory of himself as a young watcher, taking in the phenomenon of the pained human being trembling on the ground, the beautiful spraying water, the frolicking dog, and learning that, as Jeffrey says later in the film, “It’s a strange world.”
The opening sequence ends with the famous camera’s point-of-view shots of Dad’s formerly aimed, now random, water spray falling onto the huge, close-up grass blades; diving through and beneath this jungle, and plunging into a glossy black pool of seething forms, beetles chattering and devouring until the end of time. In a passage of bravura filmmaking, Lynch has taken us from the innocent red tulips of small-town serenity to the hungry, gaping mouth of hell, in two minutes of screen time. And, true to his love of contrasting, balanced dualities, the trip has been exactly one minute light, one minute dark. Jeffrey Beaumont is the young man who will bridge the worlds of sunshine and shadow, and discover that both realms compose the elemental core of his being. Whereas Dune’s Paul Atreides was pursuing a preordained path to self-knowledge which the viewer could surmise before Paul did, Jeffrey and the audience are on equal footing in a world of living mystery. Our minds and senses become as abuzz with alertness as Jeffrey’s are. If external and internal Mystery is one of Blue Velvet’s key themes, then Family is the other. Lynch’s opening montage has introduced us to another of his households with big problems.
Tom Beaumont (Jack Harvey), the lawn-watering man gravely stricken, is Jeffrey’s father, and his hospitalization forces his son to leave his college studies and come home to run the small family hardware store. Jeffrey is now the man of the house that he shares with his mother (Priscilla Pointer) and chatty Aunt Barbara (Frances Bay). It’s a lot of new responsibility for a youth not that many years past boyhood. And, walking through a vacant lot grass field to see his father after Tom’s seizure, Jeffrey does a boyish thing, stopping to throw a rock at a distant shack and some debris. It’s a warm spring day but Jeffrey wears what a grown-up male (and David Lynch) would wear, a black suit with an unbuttoned beige-gray shirt (which Lynch would button): his rock-tossing and attire emphasize his boy-man status. Before he heaves his rock, Jeffrey stands for a second with his back to us as he regards the tawny grassland, assuming a pose that Lynch’s heroes have exhibited in The Grandmother, The Elephant Man, and Dune. The energy the watcher puts into his looking compels us to tip forward in our seats, as though the scene had a hidden message to tell us. This repeated image is the way Lynch the artist sees himself: a figure in black contemplating a murmuring world. Jeffrey’s surroundings will have to speak to him, for his father cannot. At the hospital, Tom Beaumont lies in bed, his head immobilized within a torturous framework of metal rods. Pushing a button device at his throat, he tries to talk, but like many Lynchian characters (and, sometimes, the director himself), he can’t get the words out. Father and son can only touch hands and shudder together on the verge of tears. Like all young children, Lynch had troubling thoughts of his parents getting gravely sick or dying, and Blue Velvet’s stricken-father theme may reflect an experience Lynch had when he was eight. Walking through his idyllic smalltown Idaho neighborhood, Lynch “saw a boy my age sitting in the bushes crying. I didn’t know this boy, but I asked him what was wrong, and he said his father died. It just killed me. I didn’t know what to say, so I just sat with him for a while.”
Lynch continues his doubling ways and has Jeffrey pass by that grass field again. Needing to blow off his sadness, he stops and throws more rocks this time. Jeffrey’s first field scene was accompanied by Angelo Badalamenti’s low-key jazz music, but now Lynch subtly stresses the human hearing function by filling the soundtrack with the chirping and buzzing of birds and insects (the film’s totemic symbols of, respectively, good and evil, innocence and experience). His ears absorbing the sounds of both light and dark forces, Jeffrey makes a discovery that tips his world toward shadowed realms. A human ear lies in the golden grass, as though it is an entryway leading down underground, where dark insect appetites pounce and devour. Lynch now fills our ears with a high insectoid singing as his camera studies this object that he has created with painterly care and detail. The pale ear, roughly severed from a living person, is smudged with a little dirt and some gray-green splotches of decay, a few blackhairs sprout from its top curve, and small brown ants crawl and feed near the central black hearing canal opening. The artist has spoken of the abstract beauty that he sees in objects that consensus reality deems to be repulsive, the way our preconceived associations about an object color our perception of it. “Take an old used Band-Aid in the street. It’s got some dirt around the edges and the rubber part has formed some little black balls, and you see the stain of a little blood and some yellow on it, a little ointment. It’s in the gutter next to some dirt and a rock and a little twig. If you were to see a photograph of that not knowing what it was, it would be unbelievably beautiful.”
Lynch himself no doubt finds the ear aesthetically pleasing, just as he loves rusty, old, moldering factories in real life but, as with the negative, threatening way he portrays heavy industry on the screen, he knows that most viewers will be shocked and frightened by the severed skin and he uses it for that effect. Jeffrey is fascinated by his find; he only winces slightly as he picks up the ear with his fingers and slips it into a paper bag. This is a bold meeting of live and dead flesh that eclipses Jeffrey’s more self-protective approach in the script, where he uses a twig to push the ear into his sack. The young man has a need to touch the quick of death as well as life, and his journey has begun.
Lynch the artist knows that our alert senses can transport us into experiences of profound discovery. “If Jeffrey hadn’t found the ear, he would have walked on home, and that would’ve been the end of it. But the ear is like an opening, a little egress into another place, a ticket to another world that he finds.” The director gives many of his heroes such tickets. The Grandmother’s Boy finds the bag of seeds that will grow his loving Granny, Eraserhead’s Henry enters his apartment’s radiator and embraces Heavenly Love. When Dr. Treves meets The Elephant Man’s John Merrick, both of their lives change, and when Merrick rests his head on his pillow, he merges with his lost mother for eternity. For Dune’s Paul Atreides, a spaceship to the desert planet is the first step to becoming Master of the Known Universe. When Sailor and Lula blast off in Wild at Heart’s Thunderbird convertible, they begin a high-octane trip through Hell and Heaven. And Laura Palmer’s plastic-wrapped corpse leads Twin Peaks into deep earthly and cosmic mysteries. Lynch adds that, in Blue Velvet, the ear “draws Jeffrey into something he needs to discover and work through.” The youth needs to become a man, to experience the hot, wet rawness of sex and violence and evil that’s hidden within his chaste little town, to be fully conscious that he has the capacity for both light and darkness within his own soul, and to then resolutely choose the righteous path. By day, the ear is a naturalistic object that Jeffrey dutifully takes to Detective Williams (George Dickerson) at the Lumberton Police Department, a clue that launches a careful combing of the grass field where Jeffrey found it. There, investigators lay out a gridwork of string lines like the one in the Beaumonts’ garden where Jeffrey’s father collapsed: human design again trying to put a frame around chaos. But by night, as Jeffrey walks dark neighborhood streets with rustling trees arching overhead, Lynch makes the ear a passageway into the youth’s primal psychosexual adventures. With his shirt now buttoned to the top like Lynch’s, Jeffrey’s form dissolves into a shot of the ear, which the camera approaches ever closer, dissolving through the archway of the hearing canal into the curving inner passageway of the organ as the soundtrack roars with a pressurized hissing. Lynch then dissolves this interior penetration into Jeffrey arriving at the arched doorway of Detective Williams’ house, where he’s welcomed in by Mrs. Williams (Hope Lange). The first thing we see inside the house is the arching, golden oval frame in which rests the cherished smiling photograph of the Williamses’ golden daughter, Sandy. These five shots, subliminally joined by the echoing arched forms, are a hypnotic example of the way Lynch wants to “float” us into the experience of his films, to carry us on a flow of imagery that feels like our own dream.
Like Lynch’s father, Donald, Detective Williams has a homey innersanctum office, and he ushers Jeffrey in. Jeffrey may have gained access to Williams’ private domain, but the policeman says he can’t say anything more about the case until it’s “sewed up.” The youth literally twitches with curiosity and, carried away by his romantic view of crime fighting, says it must be “great” to be a defective, but the seasoned cop, who’s actually seen the worst the world has to offer, somberly adds, “And horrible, too.” The message to Jeffrey, courteously delivered: Leave this dirty business to the big boys.
Jeffrey, mannerly as any well-brought-up kid in a 1950s TV show, says goodnight to the Williamses and asks them to say “hi” to Sandy.
Once again, as in the grass field, Lynch puts Jeffrey in the position of “if he hadn’t found the ear, he would have walked on home, and that would’ve been the end of it,”76 but the severed flesh keeps echoing. As the youth leaves the Williamses’ door and heads up the sidewalk, he hears the night speak to him in a disembodied female voice: “Are you the one who found the ear?” The voice is behind Jeffrey, and he turns toward it with the same motion that Henry in Eraserhead turned to find his love, the Lady in the Radiator, in a transcendent flood of light. Jeffrey sees only blackness and the hint of a weeping willow branch stirring upper left. Then, in one of Lynch’s most gorgeous images, a faint, pale form materializes out of the dark, getting larger and taking on color as it approaches and becomes the teen angel, Sandy, golden hair falling down her long neck, bared collarbone framed by a pink dress, an unsmiling wisdom on her slightly parted lips. Lynch frames Sandy’s approach from the waist up so that we don’t see her walking; she truly does float into Jeffrey’s life. The director has spoken of his admiration for the great American painter Edward Hopper (1882–1967), and the way that Lynch and his cinematographer Frederick Elmes make Sandy positively glow against the night reflects Hopper’s technique of frontlighting objects and people that are standing before a looming darkness. Elmes’s color photography for Lynch’s films has occasionally been criticized by prosaic viewers for inconsistency: Some passages are super bright, others almost indiscernibly murky. The reason, of course, is that these shifting tonal moods create the atmosphere that the director is after. As Elmes once put it, “David and I spend a lot of time figuring out how dark is dark.”
Jeffrey answers Sandy’s “Did you find the ear?” with a question of his own: “How did you know?” She continues to float in his mind as an agent of mystery as she replies, “I just know, that’s all,” and steps ahead on the sidewalk. Jeffrey, of course, follows her lead. They both acknowledge that her father said not to talk about the case, but the allure of the unknown makes them circumvent the rules. Lynch builds on the deadpan severed-ear humor that Detective Williams unconsciously expressed (“when the case is sewed up”) by having Sandy say about the case, “I don’t know much but bits and pieces; I hear things.” Sandy, like lead characters in The Grandmother, Eraserhead, The Elephant Man, and Twin Peaks, has an upstairs bedroom. For most of these people, the house’s upper regions, which symbolically correspond to the mind’s higher consciousness, are places of deliverance from earthly trials, though Twin Peaks’ Laura Palmer endures abusive terrors up under the eaves. Sandy’s room gives her knowledge; it’s situated above her father’s office, so police-business details filter up through the floor. In Lynch’s world, sometimes two people in a room can’t make out each other’s words, but on occasion the invisible can speak.
The communication between Sandy and Jeffrey is certainly flowing freely; there’s an immediate bond of sympathy and trust between these two solitary nightwalkers who have found each other. She tells him that she keeps hearing her father mention a woman singer who lives in an apartment near Jeffrey’s house and the field where he found the ear. To this moment, Jeffrey’s equation of mystery had been simple and inert, with no place to go: It was just him and the ear. Suddenly, the beautiful woman at his side has given the equation a thrilling triangulation that vivifies it with open possibility; now it’s Jeffrey, the ear, and this nameless singer. He is moved to sigh with the night wind, “It’s a strange world, isn’t it,” and Sandy, his perfect complement, answers, “Yeah.” As with a couple who’s been together a long time, she anticipates his next thought: “You want to see the building where she lives, don’t you?”
excerpt from the book: David Lynch: Beautiful Dark / Greg Olson
by Greg Olson
(Blue Velvet)
David Lynch was lost. He fastened the top button of his white shirt every morning, but tendrils of panic and confusion snaked their way into his chest. How could his second attempt at sustaining a marriage be slowly withering? How could Dune turn out so bad? He couldn’t understand how his thoughts and feelings, which he seemed to know so well, could be so at odds with each other, so scrambled. He experienced the way “you can play tricks on your mind, or your mind can play tricks on you, and it keeps you from seeing what’s really happening. I don’t know.”
Lynch continued to reside with Mary and Austin, but his soul needed to find a home. In The Grandmother, Eraserhead, and The Elephant Man, the director provided the flagging, downtrodden spirits of his heroes with a locus of solace and creative growth. Even Paul Atreides, who had to exchange his lush home world for a barren desert, found on Dune a place and people that nurtured and expanded his being. The director needed to go where, as Robert Frost said, “When you go there, they have to take you in.” A place where the voices of criticism and failure would fade into the silence of his inner peace. Where he could rediscover the ideas and reveries and sudden insights that had guided him to so much good work in the past, and know that he was following the true and only path of his art.
Lynch once said, “If you cut my father’s leash, he’d run straight into the woods,” where he had spent so much time communing with nature and studying the diseases that blighted healthy plants. Well, now the director was free of the leash that, if Dune had been successful, would have bound him to the task of making two mega-epic sequels. In his imagination, Lynch joined his father and headed for the trees. His mind dwelt in the Northwest lumbertown realm of his Spokane, Washington, and Sandpoint, Idaho, childhood, in the comforting innocence and security of the 1950s. Lynch didn’t want to get on a jet and fly across the country to the actual towns of his youth, for if he saw the real locations “too clearly it would destroy the imaginary picture” that had formed so evocatively in his head. And it would be Dino De Laurentiis, of all people, who would help him go home again.
The mogul had established his De Laurentiis Entertainment Group operation 200 miles south of Lynch, Mary, and Austin’s Virginia home, in Wilmington, North Carolina. How perfect that the production family and the director of the calamitous Dune would shake hands on another deal in the treacherous hurricane country near Cape Fear. Lynch wasn’t afraid to work with Dino again since he had comprehended the lesson of his threeand-a-half-year Dune ordeal: “The right of final cut is crucial.” Lynch would be getting a much-reduced director’s fee and a production budget one-tenth the size of Dune’s. But for the first time since Eraserhead, he would be filming a story that sprang totally from his own subconscious; he would pick his own crew and actors and locations, and, as when he stood in front of one of his paintings, only he would know when the film was complete, and there it would end.
Lynch’s Dune producer, Raffaella De Laurentiis (looking back from 2003), realized that due to the monstrous size of the production, the pressures of time and meeting budgets, “David had to give up his creative freedom.” (Lynch also had a problem with the way Raffaella, while working on Dune, was simultaneously producing Richard Fleischer’s Conan the Destroyer on nearby Mexican soundstages. Once, when she left Lynch to visit Fleischer, David’s face went white with anger.) She remembers that after Dune Lynch “said he’d never do another big movie, and he never has. He’s been really happy doing smaller films: he’s found his niche, the thing he loves doing.” Blue Velvet would begin (or reinstitute, á la Eraserhead) Lynch’s felicitous outpouring of human-scale, deeply personal cinema.
Like Eraserhead, Blue Velvet would be synthesized from the substance of Lynch’s life. The director’s first feature film was built upon his experience of Philadelphia as an urban hell; his queasiness about procreation and fear of fatherhood and the freedom-restricting responsibilities of family life; his dealing with the fact of his own daughter, Jennifer, being born with clubfeet; and his belief in the powers of spirit and imagination to deliver us from earthly turmoil. Blue Velvet would portray the artist’s base and lofty obsessions.
Having suffered the dilution and disintegration of his personal vision while toiling on Dune, Lynch sighed with relief as he returned to his primal first principles in Blue Velvet. The famous, iconic opening image of the film, in which the low-positioned camera looks up at red tulips bobbing against a white picket fence with blue sky beyond is, for former Spokane tyke Lynch, specifically “a child’s view”8 of an archetypal red-white-and-blue American tableau. Not only would Lynch’s small-town roots be displayed in his new film, but this very private man would expose, and own up to, one of his own transgressive daydreams. “I always had this fantasy of sneaking into a girl’s room, hiding, and observing her through the night.”
There have been secrets in the director’s films from the earliest days: The Grandmother’s Granny hidden up in the attic, where she and the Boy share a clandestine life removed from his abusive parents; Eraserhead Henry’s intimate bond with the Lady in the Radiator, a private treasure he keeps from his wife; The Elephant Man’s sweet and cultured soul, which is masked by the brutish monstrosity of his deformed flesh; and the concealed cosmic truth that Dune’s Paul Atreides is the prophesied messiah. Secrets aplenty, but, beginning with Blue Velvet, Lynch will forcefully make secrets and mysteries the declared subject of his work, something that his characters both live out and talk about. The elusive director, with unconscious selfrevelatory humor, acknowledged his fascination with hidden verities in the year of Blue Velvet. When asked if he was secretive, the director responded, “That’s a possibility, yeah.”
Lynch had carried around his fantasy of spying on a girl in her room at night since the early-1970s time of Eraserhead. Like a magnet, this story element attracted bits of the director’s imagination over the years. Jeffrey, the young man who was the girl-watcher, would see a puzzle piece from a murder mystery in her room. In a field, he would find a severed ear that would take him to the police. He would become involved with the policeman’s pure-hearted daughter, then also the darkness-tainted woman he had spied on. He would make a fearsome night journey from innocence to experience, discover that his tranquil town has a noxious underside, battle the forces of evil, and wonder if that evil stirs within his own heart.
Since the creation of Blue Velvet’s scenario was a gradual process, Lynch had plenty of time to talk about the project with his cinematographer friend, Fred Elmes. The two had met in 1971 when they attended classes at the American Film Institute’s Center for Advanced Film Studies in Beverly Hills, and it was Elmes who had realized on film the evocatively dark-charcoal-andebony Eraserhead imagery that brooded within Lynch’s mind. Lynch and Elmes’s hours of Blue Velvet talk proceeded from the general to the specific. What would the town look like? What do people do in this town? What’s the feeling in Dorothy’s strange apartment? What color makes it strange?
While determining the final shape of his story and its setting, Lynch set about casting Blue Velvet’s principal roles. Who better to portray Jeffrey Beaumont, an adventurous youth on the verge of manhood, than Paul Atreides himself: Kyle MacLachlan. Dune remained an emblem of negativity in Lynch’s mind but the director greatly admired his lead actor’s abilities. He felt MacLachlan possessed abundant mental and physical prowess, and projected both spiritual depth and innocence. He also knew that Blue Velvet, unlike Dune’s ponderous, magisterial narrative, had passages in which MacLachlan’s boyish zeal and quirky playfulness could shine through.
The young actor wasn’t feeling very frisky after Dune came out. The film’s failure dissolved his six-picture contract with De Laurentiis, and he fell into a dark depression in which he questioned everything he was doing. Aside from sharing Lynch’s post-Dune blues, MacLachlan agreed with his friend and director’s post-mortem of the Dune problem: Given half a chance, studio bosses will fold, spindle, and mutilate your artistic vision. Oliver Stone offered MacLachlan a leading role in the much-anticipated production of Platoon, but the actor stayed on Lynch’s wavelength and waited for Blue Velvet to gear up at its own proper time. The Platoon role turned out to be Charlie Sheen’s breakout part, but MacLachlan felt that Blue Velvet’s Jeffrey made a far more fascinating journey than the comparatively undeveloped lead character of Platoon.
Sharing Jeffrey’s journey is the immaculate Sandy, police detective’s daughter and, for Lynch, “the most beautiful, popular girl in high school." The director rhapsodizes in his inimitable way, “If you wanted to buy a bottle of innocence as a shampoo, you’d buy Sandy.” Sweet smelling and pure of heart, Sandy is nonetheless the one who facilitates Jeffrey’s Walpurgis Night trip into a lethal small-town netherworld.
MacLachlan’s film career was still in its fledgling stage, and he wanted his parents to be involved in the process he was going through, so he gave each of them a copy of Lynch’s Blue Velvet script. “I wasn’t too worried about my dad, but my mom was going through chemotherapy for ovarian cancer. She was very sensitive, very protective, and felt like her baby was getting into something that she was very concerned about. But I trusted David, and I finally said to her, ‘You’re going to have to be okay with this.’ It was about being able to say to her, ‘This is really important to me,’ and her being okay with that. She died before the film came out, ironically.”13 So for both Jeffrey Beaumont and Kyle MacLachlan, Blue Velvet was a maturing, coming-of-age experience of independence from loving parents.
Lynch had talked to just about every young actress in Hollywood and still hadn’t found his high school sweetheart. He was growing impatient and frustrated when in walked Laura Dern. Or rather, Dern was sitting on the hallway floor outside the director’s office when Lynch dropped an earthy greeting as he hurriedly strode past her, “Hey, I gotta go pee. I’ll be right back.” As Dern recalls, Lynch’s job interview technique was casual as usual. “We talked about everything, from meditation to movies to clothing designers to lumber,”and the director simply “decided he wanted me to be in the movie.”16 Lynch needed his new leading lady and leading man to get to know each other, so he initiated Dern and MacLachlan into one of his favorite rituals of creativity: lunch at Bob’s Big Boy.
Sitting in his favorite restaurant, eating the burgers and fries and milkshakes he had loved as a kid in the 1950s, and dreaming about a film that would have the feel of that cherished era, Lynch felt his post-Dune malaise start to lift. For years, the artist had sat in this clean, well-lighted place, sketching images and jotting words onto paper napkins, doodlings that became paintings that hung in galleries and collectors’ homes, and films that people throughout the world respected. As a boy, Lynch had loved “building forts”17 with “lots and lots of friends.”18 Now, after being crushed underfoot by the relatively impersonal behemoth that was Dune, the artist would, as he did with Eraserhead, be building a deeply felt film with a human-scale circle of friends. The burger griddle was hot that day at Bob’s, and Dern and MacLachlan sparked some warmth of their own, for their meeting generated a romance as well as one of the most notorious films of the 1980s.
So Lynch had found his Sandy, blonde angel of love and light, but where was Dorothy, the dark lady of pain and sorrow? In a serendipitous way, Dino DeLaurentiis would provide her. One night in New York, Lynch and a male friend were having dinner in Dino’s restaurant, Allo Allo (the words the producer uses to answer the phone). Humphrey Bogart was not the nightspot’s host, nor was Dooley Wilson playing “As Time Goes By” on the piano, but Casablanca was on Lynch’s mind as he regarded an uncommonly beautiful woman across the room, who was dining with Dino’s wife. “Would you look at her, she could be Ingrid Bergman’s daughter,” the awestruck director said to his friend. “You idiot, she is Ingrid Bergman’s daughter”20 was not only the reply, but also the answer to what Lynch needed—both as an artist and as a man.
Thirty-three-year-old Isabella Rossellini was indeed the daughter of actress Ingrid Bergman (1915–1982) and Italian film director Roberto Rossellini (1906–1977), whose union had caused one of Hollywood’s most notorious scandals. In 1949, Bergman, at the height of her Hollywood success and near sanctification by adoring moviegoers, left America, and her husband and child, to make films with Rossellini in Italy. She divorced her spouse, married Rossellini after becoming pregnant by him, had three children with him (including Isabella), was vilified by the American media, and condemned in the halls of Congress. In the late 1950s, after divorcing Rossellini, Bergman was finally welcomed back by the American public and Hollywood moviemakers.
Isabella Rossellini—who, with her twin sister, Ingrid, was born in 1952—was insulated from the harsh winds of vilification that swirled around her mother. She enjoyed a happy childhood near Rome with lots of friends and pets and games. When it was time for the afternoon siesta she could never fall asleep, so she lay there quietly, daydreaming—sounds like a simpatico playmate for a younger David Lynch. Blessed with her mother’s moon-faced beauty (she’s been called one of the most lovely women in the history of the world), Isabella began modeling as a teenager, and she let loose her playful spirit performing on the Saturday Night Live–like Italian TV comedy The Other Sunday, for which she also filmed offbeat reports on notables such as Muhammad Ali and director Martin Scorsese. She was married to Scorsese for three years (1979–1982), acted in A Matter of Time (1976), Il Prato (1979), and White Nights (1985), and became the exclusive spokeswoman and representative image for Lancôme cosmetics. She had another short marriage, to filmmaker Jonathan Wiedemann, with whom she had a daughter, Elettra-Ingrid, in 1983.
Even before meeting Lynch, Rossellini had been swept away by his Blue Velvet screenplay. The script opened up “a world of deeper truths,” and courageously portrayed “the reality of abused women, the many layers, the horrible twists, the unclear emotions.” The character of Dorothy was an actress’s dream: a “beautiful broken doll,” a tarnished-glamour façade that masked “shadings of desperation, helplessness, madness.”
Rossellini felt a kinship with the world of Lynch’s art, and the director’s intuition was quick to recognize her as Blue Velvet’s perfect Dorothy. She seemed to embody the very words of his script: the ripe, thirty-something sexuality of a woman who has borne a child, the “beautiful full figure, dark eyes, black thick wavy hair, full red lips.” The blooming, ruddy lips that had whispered Blue Velvet into being in Lynch’s mind were now breathing and speaking before his eyes; Rossellini understood him so well. She saw Lynch as both “serene, happy, well-adjusted,” and obsessed with “the dark side, the inexplicable, the mystery.” She marveled at his intuitive ability to tap into the “strange thoughts that we all have” and blast them onto the screen with a “raw, emotional” power.
Isabella would be Dorothy on screen. And, as the director acknowledges, Kyle MacLachlan would, to some degree, be Lynch’s surrogate in the film. So while Dorothy leads the innocent Jeffrey into a realm of dark sensual experience, Lynch will find in Rossellini a kindred spirit and a lover who will crystallize his need to move beyond his second marriage.
Now who would Lynch choose to portray Frank Booth? Many Hollywood males, including Robert Loggia (Prizzi’s Honor) and singer Bobby Vinton (whose “Blue Velvet” song helped inspire Lynch’s film), dearly coveted the role. Just as children love to dress up as witches and monsters and devils on Halloween night, actors relish playing villains. Agents of the night, of tears, violence, and death, villains allow actors to express some of their own malevolent impulses, to unburden their souls in a safe, make-believe setting. In turn, members of the audience, in experiencing the actor’s and dramatist’s art, can recognize their own darkness in the villain’s devilishness and then redemptively feel it vanquished and purged by the triumphant hero’s killing stroke. Alfred Hitchcock often said that “the stronger, the more colorful the villain, the better the picture.”30 Blue Velvet would be powered by the hellish energy and twisted psyche of Frank Booth, a scary and fascinating monster who would stand alongside Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) of Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) as one of the cinema’s most unforgettable villains.
But there was a possible Frank Booth who Lynch was curious about, and more than a little afraid of. Dennis Hopper was celebrated as a gifted actor, painter, photographer, and director (Easy Rider, 1969), but he was also a notorious holy terror. Hopper had starred and became friends with James Dean in the archetypal teenage-angst film Rebel Without a Cause (1955), and he seemed born to live out the moody, sensitive, explosive persona that Dean acted for the cameras. Hopper tangled with director Henry Hathaway while shooting From Hell to Texas (1958), forcing Hathaway to shoot eighty-six takes of Hopper saying a few simple lines of dialogue. After fifteen ego-clashing hours, Hathaway yelled at Hopper, “You’ll never work in this town again! I guarantee it!”
excerpt from the book: David Lynch:Beautiful Dark / Greg Olson
by Carlo Antonicelli
No Country for Old Men, a film of ruthless pessimism that graciously chiseled work by Cohen brothers, has succeeded almost perfectly to overcome the poetic sign and the content of the same book of Cormac McCarthy. A work, that of the Texan author, capable of metabolizing and representing the Zeitgeist of the time in transit, and in particular the dialect of Western civilization.
Carlo Antonicelli: I would like to start with the figure of the sculptor Bell, an elderly man who wakes up from the incarnation of the wise figure of a wise man, finds himself in front of the wondrous wickedness and violence that he does not seem to understand or want to understand. To me, it is pertinent, but anchestrating, that the one who ought to be the lover of the "healthy" values of the nation refrains from applying them as if it were overwhelmed by a louder necessity than him.
Gabriele Guerra: It does not seem to me that the position of the scribe is described as "agnostic" around the problem of the other: in the contrary, the Sheriff Bell seems to me an "ascetic" figure of radical rejection of evil. Like all ascetic figures - it suffers, like all the "saints": but the definition would lead us to an overly religious context - the sheriff knows good the evil of the world, he obviously fought him, but now has intervened a form of rethinking his own action, Which leads him to change his behavior (bottom Askesis in Greek means first and foremost "practice", and therefore there is no movement of a practical philosophy, that is, ethical), that it ceases to withdraw from any "action", but not necessarily approaching "contemplation" (which is the "Antithesis around which, as is well-known, Christian-Western ascetic practice is built).
C.A.: The same Sheriff -Bell in Western dramaturge is absolutely heterogeneous. It is not courageous, but it would be unclear. It's bipolar, "he says even unfortunate bad guys in the book, and McCarthy does not care to protect him. In the movie, but still, in the book, Bell regrets the times gone by, a mixed attitude of cynicism disenchanted toward this world. But this talk about lost tradition has not originated very early, already in the first Aristotle? How come back to common sense and the plot of this work?
G.G.: True, Bell incarnates everything in Western movies we're used to considering the "hero". But we need to look at the figure. The key to understanding his attitude is instead the "dream" telling his wife how to spin the end of the movie: his father riding overboard him, handing himself a burning torch, traveling on a road to cook a new bonfire to give way to something like a new beginning. The dialectical light/darkness on which the interpretable is built (that is, that asymptotic process that leads us to approach the "truth", which is in the depths of the story of telling), obviously articulates a problem (religious but not only) Specifically modern: the jammed with the tradition. In this regard, I do not know how to deal here with the first Aristotle, as you say; With this dialectic I meant rather a very conceptual - not archetypal - device that maybe, if anything, we find ourselves in Plato (but I prefer to refer to the testament contest, particularly to the Gospel of John). The fact is that the world is irreparably shaded in a partially illuminated and (still) obscure implies not only a dialectical, but also a moral so to speak: on the one hand, there are some who are still dominated by darkness, who do not mind and continue to this to do evil. On the other hand, those who, illuminated by the light of salvation (from the Messiah's truth), are able to see the world in the connexions (and disconnections) - an elective dialect of choice and not. But let's go back to the relationship with tradition: while the "natural" transmission chain of salvific knowledge (the lighthouse illuminating the path) involves the passage of father son, the gnostic period in which the action of the film lives, or the perception of a world impregnated with evil, causes it to become overwhelmed; and if the task of tradition had always been to repeat the same gestures, so that to make and maintain an orderly cosmos (Eliade), now it only becomes the one to interpret the message itself that in those gestures was contained. After that, it will only sit to remember the message itself and then perpetuate that message without understanding it, and so on, in a process of inexorable subtraction. In the end, the problem of the atradition is the problem of memory, as Benjamin it has condensed in the famous formula: "Death is the sanction of everything that the narrator can tell."
C.A.: Throughout the long history, Bell lives immersed in the history of his own family, relatives who like him grow older. Leaving his employability is a breakthrough in tradition, as dictated by me, but in the dream it seems that the very idea of advancing progress, the father passing by his son to light a flame of hope. More in the book Bell invokes the coming of Christ as the sole author of the present state of things. So a Palingenese, an ancient but also popular idea of rejection of the status quo, but in the dream the idea of progress towards the future, and of tempting, seems to me to be subverted in a more radical way.
G.G.:"The father who passes in front of his son" - did not think of Bell's ultimate parable of this interpretation, but gave me a progressive reading, whether it was a breakthrough, sick, in crisis - but still progress; But it seems to me that the frequent recall of the Bell of the Romance to the Christ of salvation confirms my interpretation: in the end, the "new time" inaugurated by the Advent of Christ is a time destined to subvert the pagan continuum - in this sense then the father he does not surpass his son, but simply precedes it, is literally a precursor, representing a "typological" conception of history: all those who intend to make a light of disreputability in the world must adapt to the figure of Christ, becoming his type.
C.A.: Does Bell need to present a weak dietary version? He says she is not a contemplative man, and he seems to be above the events, indeed he is always late on what is happening, is always a step backwards with respect to the violent emergencies. But Bell knows good only as a memory of good, he can not put it into practice. Is this a post-modern character in this sense? Or is it more like an amethyst tragic background?
G.G.: I will reply to you with a parable, what Gershom Scholem tells us in closing his book The Great Currents of Jewish Meditation: "When Baal-Shem [the founder of the ultimate throne of Jewish mysticism] had to fulfill some difficult task, he went to a place in the woods, he ignored and said prayers, absorbed in meditation, and everything was done according to his purpose. When, a generation later, Magogd of Meseritz found himself in front of the same task, he went to that place in the woods and said: 'We can no longer fire, but we can say prayers' - and everything went according to his wish. Another generation later, Rabbi Moshe Leib of Sassow had to perform the same task. He also went astray, saying, 'We can no longer ignite the fire, and we no longer know the secret meditations that enliven the prayer'. But we know the place in the wood where all this happened, and that's enough. And that was enough. But when again, another generation later, Rabbi Ysra'el of Rischin had to face the same task, sat in a golden seat in his castle, and said,: "We can no longer fire, we can not say prayers, and we no longer know the illusion in the woods, but of all this we can tell the story. And his story alone had the same deeds as the other three. " It also seems to me to be a good allegory of Bell's dream: tradition is subject to strong corrosion, a progressive reality, what remains is just the possibility of dealing with it-more importantly having lost the "strong" interpretative keys; This is, if you like, a weak, typically post-modern ethic (although I think I do not have to indulge in the Eco as an infinite semiotic game, but to think about it in the tragic nature of its "post-" . Every amletic character is a "post-character").
C.A.: We come to the character Chigurh. It is possible to understand a figure of the character, but by listening to choosing his own jokes, he parallels his action to a sort of inexhaustible dinecession. As he pulls the coin for air to end the fate of the victims. Chigurh says, "I've got a lot of money and we've come up with it." It seems to have eradicated the freedom to decide. And this is totally inhuman. Chigurh is a Knight of Revelation?
G.G.: Certainly, Chigurh is an enigmatic character. But, like the Oedipus Sphinx, it is only if he questions himself as a "character" in its entirety, while it seems to me a "function" that has only one side, or rather is dominated ('possessed') by its being function - that is to do it, like that of the Sphinx is to question Oedipus, or to put it in crisis. It is then to be asked what type of function incarnations. And in this sense it seems to me to be a very high definition of Chigurh as someone "uprooted by the freedom to decide." The question then becomes: Does Chigurh incarnate the Greek tyche, or if he prefers the inscrutable fate (the thread of the Fates), or is it rather a function necessary for the "salvation economy" evoked by Bell, or 'antipathy' of Christ, in a word Satan? It is not here, of course, to decide on the conceptual fundament - pagan or Christian - but to settle it into a philosophy of history. More concretely, Chigurh is the "diabolic" side of a fairy tale that is its "sim-bolic" moment in Bell. I mean, that while Bell intends to "hold together" the different moments of existence, grouping them in their highest ethical moment - as sanctioned by the "jump" in the symbol - Chigurh seems to me to be represented by a divisional instance, "dia-bolica" just, intending to separate the different plans of existence once and for all. As he wrote what I consider a great Italian philosopher, Vincenzo Vitiello, in his latest book: "Without the world it would hurt evil, without the multiple would not be bad. But it's bad more than negativity. Evil is the manifold not related to one, which is self-evident, nothing separate from the possible".(Reflecting Christianity, De Europa, p.244).
C. A.: Socrates said: "If you really needed what you were doing, you would not hurt; You do it because you do not know what you are doing." But even in the Gospel there is a trait that says this unknowingness approaching, which identifies the malecoline of not knowing what we are doing: "Lord, forgive them because they do not know what they are doing." Llewelyn seems to know how to make the right choices for his destiny and to justify his "small" misdeed. The evil perpetrated by Chigurh, however, is irrational, but at the same time accompanied by a rigorous ethics that leads him to kill Llewelyn's wife in the word he had given to the latter. How do you break this tragic paradox?
G.G.: It seems very important to me this aspect. To resume what I said above: Chigurh's would not call it "a strong", but rather "a rigid ethos ", that is, demonic in the sense I have illustrated; It seemed like allowed, it is the same as Terminator of all the other machines "programmed to kill". There is no paradox in this regard, but only resistance to evil by the people, like Llewelyn's wife, does not accept this logic. It is unfortunate that, unlike what is happening in the novel, his brutal assassination by Chigurh is not shown, I do not want to be explained precisely with reference to his "diabolical" ethos: a behavior that even the eye would give me refuses to see.
G.A.: Throughout this incredible story and in a sense of violence does not seem strange to let the affair come from the good action of Llewelyn that goes to bring the Mexican water to the desert? Is it just a narrative pretext?
C. G.: It does not, however, seem to be a fundamental engine of the philosophical course that we witness in the film's work: the modern world is structured around an acronymatic and methodological heterogeneous of the ends, which transforms finishing into good and vice versa. Llewelyn's good action is, in other words, a direct, conscientious way as "Socrates said", which is lurking under our eyes; the subject of the process is the conquest of power - money, success, etc., but above all: power of life and death.
G.A.: From the dramatic point of view, McCarthy has decomposed Western classic slabs, and the Cohen have borrowed the way to proceed with the book, succeeding in coinciding with the form and content of the film. The two outlaws, Llewelyne and Chigurh, never clash either with them or with the sheriff, the law is not restored, and the villain is not killed. He thinks that this destructiveness is necessary for the contemporary co-location of this work, and what is its news?
C. G.: No Country for Old Men is a great movie, because as Walter Benjamin wrote "a significant work, fonds the genre or flows; in the perfect works, the two things merge." It seems to me that all McCarthy's work witnesses to the intrinsic difficulty in this sphere, the relationship of a literary work to a certain genre - in this case the western, as you rightly recall; a difficulty that McCarthy resolves to make it explode, using the background pattern (which is the Mezzogiorno di Fuoco , as you rightly sums up) just to show the inadequacy of the present time only to show its inadequacy at the present time (if you want, it's also a great representation of the impossibility of making an epic today.). But I do not know so much about the American novelist that I may be able to produce in a disagreeable judgment on his work. Cohen brothers make a great film because they can blend the foundation and the final moment of the genre. Regarding the message it addresses to our present: I do not know how to express it - there is certainly a message inside the "specific film", as was once said, which I must first emphasize: the violence contained in this film is a sign spectacularly opposed to that of Tarantino's films; while in these the violence becomes calligraphy, distracting exercise end in itself (and thus becomes autonomous, producing an aesthetic that does not succeed in defining "fascist" - if for fascistas the aesthetic worship of violence becomes purpose to itself)), then there is continually Bell's gaze that he judges - and condemns - such an explosion of violence. Violence without Tarantino's morality is thus replaced by a morality without violence. And this seems to me to be a short message.
Gabriele Guerra was born in 1968, after graduating in Germanica at the University of Rome "La Sapienza" with a thesis on Walter Benjamin, and having pursued a research doctorate at the Freie Universität in Berlin on political syathology in some Jewish-German thinkers of the first half of the twentieth century, became a professor of German literature at the University of Rome "La Sapienza".
He has written the following volumes: Das Judentumzwischen Anarchie und Theokratie. Eine religionspolitische Diskussion am Beispiel der Begegnung zwischen Walter Benjamin und Gershom Scholem, Bielefeld 2007; La forza della forma. Ernst Jünger from 1918 to 1945, Civita vecchia-Roma, 2007. He does not deal with cinema professionally, but he's just a curiosity, especially as far as his philosophical implications are concerned.
https://www.academia.edu/930925/_No_Country_for_Old_Men_._Dialogo_cinefilosofico_con_Gabriele_Guerra
Translated by Dejan Stojkovski
A 1980s science fiction script reaffirms human feelings within the networks of virtual sociality.
"There will soon be nothing more than self-communicating zombies, whose lone umbilical relay will be their own feedback image – electronic avatars of dead shadows perpetually retelling their own story.”
- Jean Baudrillard in Telemorphosis
Around 1979 the American filmmaker Robert Kramer and the French schizo-analyst Félix Guattari started working together on a film about two Italian fugitives from the Italian Autonomia Movement, Latitante. The film, which was to star Pier Paolo Pasolini's regular actress Laura Betti, was meant to be a sort of first person collective reflection on the finitude and fragility of the body, “opposing the enormous weight of things-as-they-are, systematically defined by vast power.” A film about the intimacy of resistance. Somewhere along the way the film morphed into a significantly different creature, the science fiction flick A Love of UIQ, a formal shift (sub)consciously informed by the wider political changes taking place off screen: from the grand ideological narratives of the 60s and 70s, to the videodrome mutations that would characterize countercultural developments in the 80s.
Guattari's narrative somehow bridges these two currents, borrowing the resolve from the former and the conceptual tools from the latter. The headless body of workerism with its absence of political organs prefigured some of the most politicized forms of cyberpunk and its anti-authoritarianism. Hamburg's early incarnation of the Chaos Computer Club, underground zines like Hackerfür Moskau or the British Vague, the militant sci-fi of Italy's editorial collective Un' Ambigua Utopia or the galactrotskyist novels of Mack Reynolds, YIPL or the soviet cyber-fantasy flick Kin-dza-dza (1986) and other undetected influences all seep through Guattari's unfilmed script. At the time of the first draft (1980-81), Kramer was to direct the film and Guattari himself wanted it to be produced in Hollywood. He had in fact sent a copy to Michael Philips, the producer of Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Taxi Driver, who took it to be “too political” for US audiences. A second draft, still co-written with Kramer, dates back to 1983 while the final version that has just been published in English for the first time was completed by Guattari alone around 1986. Kramer himself will flirt with science-fictional tropes in his 1985 Diesel, his first and last foray into commercial filmmaking, a film that might have been aesthetically influenced by his work with Guattari, but bears none of its narrative characteristics.
A Love of UIQ reverses the spatial coordinates of science fiction from outer to inner space, from the vast stretches of faraway galaxies and star warmongering to the infinitely small interstices of molecular resistance. Guattari's unfilmed script envisions the discovery of a formless intelligence by a fugitive biologist who finds refuge with the help of an American journalist in a hi-tech squat in Frankfurt. There, along with a group of cypher-punks and techno-squatters, connection is established with this post-structural intra-terrestrial, a sort cognitive interference able to disrupt and hijack official signals (enough to seriously worry the President of the Investigation Commission into Hertzian Disturbances) as well as questioning the linear phenomenology of things. It's the infinitesimally small Universe of the Infra-Quark (UIQ). Initially shaped in pixels, via a screen, as sort of hypothetical Max Headroom from an Autonomist pirate radio, UIQ's immanent manifestations can take multiple forms. “It can take whatever form it wants, one minute it's in the sky, the next in the crowd, but it's the same thing. It can appear in a freak weather front, in radio interference, in anything...” It is the very concept of subjective identity that baffles the mysterious entity: “yours, mine, ours. You, me, you, me. You...yes I understand you. But me...Me, I'll never get it. This face on the screen is only for you. I can change it,” observes UIQ during a conversation with the person it will fall in love. It's precisely that quintessential device of narrative cinema, (heterosexual) love, that will debase UIQ's protean and boundless essence to the self-interested pettiness of jealousy and detonate a “new type of cosmic catastrophe.”
Set in the post-industrial immateriality of data among the embryos of the cognitariat, A Love of UIQ belongs to the science-fiction sub-genre of (political) contamination, somewhere between the bio-tech dystopia of Warning Sign (1985) and the semiotic horror of Pontypool (2009). Culturally and aesthetically though, the script is clearly indebted to Muscha's Decoder (1984) and F.J. Ossang's L'affaire des divisions Morituri (1985) and their politically charged atmospheres and allusions, as Silvia Maglioni and Graeme Thomson, who translated the script from French, point out in their insightful introduction. Containing no descriptions of camera movements, set or light design, the script reads remarkably agile to be written by a philosopher known for his ornate, neologistic prose. Significantly, for someone who had reclaimed the militant role of desire and confuted Freudian repression in his Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, A Love of UIQ is haunted by a post-human pessimism tinged with a residual confidence in the possibility of technological innovations. A distinctive touch of Parisian snobbery, if not outright classism, is evinced in the characterization of the only two working class members of the cast—“who left their provincial hometown in search of the American Dream”—to which Guattari accords, in fact, the most thankless roles. That aside, A Love of UIQ still reads as a legitimate and compelling enough attempt to explore “the rise of computerized forms of imagination and decision-making,” as well as “the digitalization of a growing number of material and mental operations” and how difficult it would have been for all this to be reconciled “with the existential territories that mark our finitude and desire to exist.” Read today, when the science fiction prophesy of Kornbluth's and Pohl's Space Merchants seems to have come true in the digital totalitarianism of Silicon Valley, Guattari's script is both outdated and timely. Outdated because the technological utopia of the early hackers generation has been co-opted and monopolized by corporate interests, but also timely because it reaffirms the centrality of human feelings within the networks of virtual sociality. Cyberpunk after all was the culmination of the progressive nearing of two previously distinct realms, the technological and the humanistic.
As fascinating as the script and the idea of a film by Félix Guattari are, one cannot help imagining how it could have actually ended up looking and feeling, especially since, by Guattari's own admission, “certain thematic elements, though essential, can only be crudely sketched” and “taking form will require a particular stylistic visual and spatial treatment that will not become apparent until shooting.” A Love for UIQ's script is in fact traversed by a palpable tension reaching towards a cinema not only able to critically elaborate the present and its realities, but to radically transfigure them.
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