By David Chute in the September-October 1986 Issue
“Blue Velvet is not a movie for everybody. Some people are going to really dig it, but we’ve experienced some extremely negative reactions, too. We had a sneak preview in the Valley that was a disaster. People thought it was disgusting and sick. And of course it is, but it has two sides. If you don’t have the contrasts, then maybe. But you can push the limits out much wider than Blue Velvet. I believe that films should have power, the power of good and the power of darkness, so you can get some thrills and shake things up. And if you back off from that stuff, you’re shooting right down into lukewarm junk."
“I don’t know if you’re a detective or a pervert,” remarks Sandy (Laura Derm) to Jeffrey (Kyle MacLachlan) at a crucial juncture in the harrowing new David Lynch picture, Blue Velvet. We never are told which term really applies, although writer-director Lynch (who created Jeffrey as a look-alike alter ego) would surely insist that he is both at once. The puppyish curiosity of the eager-beaver boy investigator, who gets into a sicker brand of trouble than an American small town is supposed to be able to encompass, may not be entirely blameless in his wide-eyed naivete. He is so amorally awestruck by crime and horror that he could be accused of fraternizing with the forces of human soul-rot.
The movie is a nightmarish coming-of-age story, a Hardy Boys thriller with running sores and pustules. It was made by, and about, a compulsive lifter of rocks who secretly adores the slimy creepy-crawlies he uncovers. But the picture also toys with the notion that happiness is a matter of confining yourself stubbornly to the sunny surface of things, of not probing too deeply into their wormy innards. And who can deny that he has a point?
“This is all the way America is to me. There’s a very innocent, naive quality to my life, and there’s a horror and a sickness as well. It’s everything.”
“Blue Velvet is a very American movie. The look of it was inspired by my childhood in Spokane, Washington. Lumberton is a real name; there are many Lumbertons in America. I picked it because we could get police insignias and stuff, because it was an actual town. But then it took off in my mind and we started getting lumber trucks going through the frame and that jingle on the radio-‘At the sound of the falling tree…’—that all came about because of the name.”
“There is an autobiographical level to the movie. Kyle is dressed like me. My father was a research scientist for the Department of Agriculture in Washington. We were in the woods all the time. I’d sorta had enough of the woods by the time I left, but still, lumber and lumberjacks, all this kinda thing, that’s America to me—like the picket fences and the roses in the opening shot. It’s so burned in, that image, and it makes me feel so happy. That was in a lot of our childhoods.”
A brainy, small-town kid, MacLachlan’s Jeffrey finds a grisly clue in a field one day and dutifully hands it over to the straight-arrow local constable. Later on, partly to impress the cop’s daughter, Dern’s Sandy, a raw-boned teen angel, with his own boldness, Jeffrey follows his few skimpy clues straight into the dark heart of a violent sexual mystery. It’s as if the living room wall in a Frank Capra movie opened up to reveal an assaultive ritual choreographed by De Sade unfolding on the other side—a ritual in which purity is sacrificed (for love) to monstrosity and is irrevocably tainted by it.
Isabella Rosselini’s porcelain-skinned Dorothy, bruised and defiled by the seething, wheezing, vile Frank (Dennis Hopper in full froth), standing naked in Jeffrey’s living room, in front of Sandy and Jeffrey’s mother, screaming,“He put his disease in me!” is not a spectacle anybody will enjoy. (The nudity is meticulously de-eroticized.) And poor Jeffrey doesn’t know how to react; he isn’t sure which of the implications of this outburst he has to accept like a man and which he can still righteously fend off.
Because he is implicated. He imagines that he’s falling in love with Dorothy (even though the center of the story is Sandy’s radiant sanity), and when they’re in bed and she reflexively says,“Hit me.” He recoils, but complies.
“Blue Velvet is a trip beneath the surface of a small American town, but it’s also a probe into the subconscious or a place where you face things that you don’t normally face. One of the sound mixers said it’s like Norman Rockwell meets Hieronymus Bosch. It’s a trip into that, as close as you can get, and then a trip out. Theres an innermost point, and from then on it pulls back.”
“Jeffery has seen enough and gotten in there enough so that the opportunity is there and the desire is there. But it‘s something he doesn’t like about himself at all. It comes back at him pretty quick. And that’s something about life, you know. At times, you push the limits out as far as where you think you can live with yourself. Even though Jeffrey could understand it and get there, it’s not his scene. That’s his, I dunno, his conscience. You can’t keep doing things that you can’t live with. You’re going to get sick, or you’re going to go crazy, or you’re going to get arrested, or something’s going to happen.”
For David Lynch, gazing in rapt fascination at diseased bodies (or souls), in Eraserhead, The Elephant Man, Dune, and Blue Velvet, the spectacle may be no more gross disgusting than wriggling bacteria glimpsed through a microscope. His curiosity is not tainted by irony, malice, perversity, or condescension. His studious outlook has an almost scientific purity. He doesn’t smirk, he doesn’t wink, he doesn’t judge. The wisps of classical religious music on the Blue Velvet soundtrack are no ironic jape. David Lynch could be putting his most profound religious feelings into this picture, quasi though they be. This is probably the most nakedly exposed he’s been in a movie, and no artist as sophisticated as Lynch would take such flagrant risks unless he felt driven to it, unless he felt he’d hate himself if he turned tail.
It will be observed that Blue Velvet has story problems. It probably could have benefited from the services of a freelance “thriller doctor” like, say, Ross Thomas. The generic mystery story elements are skimpy. On the level of bare craftsmanship, Blue Velvet sometimes feels down-right klutzy. It stumbles over the basics of setting up characters, of leading us along step by step so that we’ll always know just how to interpret everything. It “bungles” all those neat, businesslike devices for eliminating ambiguity. But it revels in the kind of demented, go-for-broke amateurishness that cuts through to perceptions, that ordinary professionalism, valuing correctness beyond everything, can’t touch.
“I’ve met John Waters, liked him, and feel a definite kinship with his stuff. But there are a lot of differences. His way is making so much fun of those banal, absurd, polyester things. I want to come at them sideways in a drier way, for that certain kind of humor. And also so that you can slip into fear. See, Ronnie Rocket, the film I’ve been trying to make for five years, is very absurd but also can turn slightly and become very frightening. You can’t just be so camp or so blatant. Walters is very up front, sorta like a loud saxophone, and I want to back off into something a little different.”
The billowing blue velvet draperies under the opening credits have an Italianate lushness, a rotting romanticism that recalls Luchino Visconti. But they also look like something that’s alive and throbbing: an engorged membrane. In this movie, Lynch’s trademark thumping noises make us feel trapped inside an organism, wedged into an intestine or a pulsating ventricle.
All the organic elements in Blue Velvet exhibit a similar hectic vigor. The flowers look swollen with color, the greenery mysteriously overnourished, like the thick blades of grass over a cemetery. In the calendar-art first image of a glowing-white picket fence and top-heavy blood-red roses, the colors are psychedelically heightened, like the blossoms on the plants in H. P. Lovecraft’s The Color Out of Space that were raised on unearthly fertilizer.
The underlying horror of Blue Velvet, of course, is that there’s nothing unearthly or inhuman about any of this stuff. It’s the rampaging, devouring vitality of the most noisome critters that so unsettles. The rot in a human monster like Dennis Hopper’s Frank is, in this scheme of things, a moral abscess, and Hopper’s performance (as wacked-out as it is) has a lot of pain behind it: the anguish of a spiritual gangrene case wracked by uncanny jolts of energy. You feel he could crush brains with his bare hands in the throes of some feverish spasm.
“Laura Dern’s Sandy has to balance out a lot of darkness. Laura looks like Sandy should look, and she understood what she had to do, and she had everything that it took to do it. Sandy is the counterweight but she is also the person who got Jeffrey into this. He would probably have walked home that first night, after talking to her father, and forgotten all about it.”
The implications of Blue Velvet could slightingly be reduced to a fistful of platitudes—it’s a yin and yang, ego-id, can’t-have-the-light-without-the-dark view of life. But Lynch clings to such a tough-minded version of this basic attitude, without a trace of romantic nature worship, that it doesn’t feel like a reduction. He’s willing to construct a working model of the scheme of things that incorporates the vile, the revolting, and the monstrous—and he calls them by their right names.
Death and decay also feed a teeming undermass of scavenging beetles and bacteria, and Lynch always seems subliminally aware of the odorous organic processes that are gnawing at the very roots they fertilize. His camera keeps trying to burrow into that wriggling, black, bug-infested subsoil—literally, at first, when Jeffrey’s father suffers a stroke while watering the front lawn and a chasm opens up and we can hear the clattering hum of thousands of leathery black mandibles. And, like a painter schooled in anatomy, his sense of what’s beneath the surface affects the way he photographs it.
“The one artist that I feel could be my brother—and I almost don’t like saying it because the reaction is always,“Yes, you and everybody else”—is Franz Kafka. I really dig him a lot. Some of his things are the most thrilling combos of words I have ever, ever, ever read. If Kafka wrote a crime picture, I’d be there. I’d like to direct that, for sure. I’d like to direct a movie of The Trial. Henry, the hero of Eraserhead, gets into Kafka’s world a bit.”
“Henry is very sure that something is happening, bt he doesn’t understand it at all. He watches things very, very carefully, because he’s trying to figure them out. He might study the comer of that pie container; right there by your head, just because it’s in his line of sight, and he might wonder why he sat where he did to have that be there like that? Everything is new. It might not be frightening to him, but it could be a key to something. Everything should be looked at. There could be clues in it.”
Some moviegoers will react to the brutalization of Isabella Rossellini in Blue Velvet with unalloyed disgust. Those sequences could invalidate the film for them. It is a peculiarity of the visceral way we respond to movies that we don’t necessarily assume that the disgust has been evoked intentionally or that the director shares this feeling. The person who staged the action, who dreamed it up, often becomes the object of the negative reactions it provokes.
And, in a sense, this is perfectly proper. A novelist, for instance, doesn’t have to draw anybody else into a depiction of depravity. He doesn’t have to force anyone to walk through it. The act of moviemaking draws close to the acts it depicts or explores, because the acts have to be staged before they can be photographed. You can even assume that if a director found any human activity too disturbing even to simulate, he wouldn’t be able to make a film about it.
“Some people may have this stuff in them, but they live through television or movies or someone else to satisfy the urge. So it’s one step removed and it’s cleaner. They don’t get their hands dirty, but they’re still there. The people watching the soap operas are digging this sick stuff so much, and they understand it—and if they had the chance, they would do the same sick stuff.
“Sex is such a fascinating thing. Its sorta like you can listen to one pop song just so many times, whereas jazz has so many variations. Sex should be like jazz. It can be the same tune, but there are many variations on it. And then when you start getting out there, it can be shocking to learn that something like that could be sexual. It would be kind of, you know, strange. But it’s a real fact of life just the same. There’s no real explaining in Blue Velvet because it’s such an abstract thing inside a person.”
A character in John Updike’s novel The Witches of Eastwick (an enjoyable book that presents magic as a vestigial nature-religion) delivers a guest sermon at a local church. It’s a pretty weird sermon, too, all about the emotions of the roundworm nestled in your small intestine, “when a big gobbety mess of half-digested steak or moo goo gai pan comes sloshing down to him. He’s as real a creature as you and me. He’s as noble a creature, designwise-really lovingly designed.”
David Lynch shares the fascination of this amateur biologist (and amateur minister) with the complex shapes and ingenious functions that even the groddiest natural processes can assume. And it’s somehow even more diverting when the phenomena are poisonous or stomach-churningly ugly.
“The ‘disease’ Dorothy talks about is an abstract sort of thing. It doesn’t mean AIDS, or anything like that. There was, in the script, even more on that theme. Dorothy’s had that done to her before and she understands that thing, that sickness. People mention William Burroughs to me a lot, but I’ve never read any Burroughs. I know I should, but….”
As it happens, Lynch’s dreamily evocative visual gifts are a perfectly adequate substitute for intellectualism and analysis. He is such a wizard at infecting us with his creepoid perceptions that he really doesn’t need to work through the intermediate steps of figuring out what it all means. As if entranced, he translates his intimations of toxic mortality directly into imagery.
“In a way, this is still a fantasy film. It’s like a dream of strange desires wrapped inside a mystery story. It’s what could happen if you ran out of fantasy.”
The in-and-out structure of Blue Velvet mirrors the “journey into hell” format of such recent American political epics as Missing, Under Fire, and especially Salvador. The new myth of discovery in these stories is a journey into a dark place where very few of the (legal or natural) laws we take for granted seem to apply any longer. Everything is leveled by the feral, surreal savagery that bubbles up from within people when they’re liberated from the social tether. The last fillip of horror comes with the recognition that this chaos is somehow a direct consequence of those beliefs and of our attempts to enforce them on other people. We peer into the abyss of political decay and see our own faces staring back at us, slack jaws dappled with innocent blood.
In the face of the lobotomized, yuppie-careerist, expedient optimism that ate Hollywood, the most acidulous pessimism can be a sign of life-an act of independent judgment.
“I really believe it’s like the Beach Boys said: ‘Be true to your school.’ You gotta be true to the ideas that you have, because they’re even bigger than you first think they are. And if you’re not true to them, they’ll only work part way. They’re almost like gifts, and even if you don’t understand them 100 percent, if you’re true to them, they’ll ring true at different levels and have a truth at different levels. But if you alter them too much then they won’t even ring. They’ll just sorta clank.
“No matter how weird a story is, as soon as you step one foot forward into that story you realize that this world has rules, and you have to follow them or the audience will sense that you’re doing something dishonest. That’s part of being true to your ideas. Some films operate so much on the surface it doesn’t feel like there are any kind of real rules. Maybe in those cases you can actually go further; here and there.
“Anytime there’s a little bit of power; somebody might think it was sick or disgusting. A lot of the time when you go out to an extreme, you can make a fool of yourself or a fool of the film. You have to believe things so much that you make them honest. I’m really just trying to be true to those ideas, not to manipulate an audience; to get in there and let the material talk to me, to work inside a dream. If you just experience it, ideas will pop and you’ll be in that world, and then you’re OK. If it’s real, and if you believe it, you can say almost anything.”
(Paragraphs in italics are excerpts from an interview with David Lynch by David Chute, conducted at the Bob’s Big Boy, corner of Wilshire and Highland in Los Angeles on Saturday, June 21,1986.)