Title: Blue Velvet
Rating: 5 Stars
Let me remove the mystery of the post title right away. Apparently there are people (a diminishing number I’m guessing, since the film is over 35 years old) for whom your opinion / relationship to the film Blue Velvet reveals something important about yourself to them. Some 30 years ago or so, a young woman that I was interested in getting to know better asked me if I saw Blue Velvet, and when I said that I did, she asked me that very question. Now I have no recollection of what I said, but whatever I said must not have been tremendously impressive because I never really did get to know her all that much better.
Last week, for some reason, What Did Jack Do popped up in my Netflix recommendation list. For those that have never heard of it, I think that you should stop reading this immediately, go over to Netflix, and watch it. It is maybe twenty minutes long. The entire plot, if you want to call it that, is David Lynch playing a homicide detective interrogating a capuchin monkey in a train station. Yes, you read that right. The monkey answers Lynch’s questions using, shall we say, pretty basic CGI. As with all Lynch films, I’m not sure how I’m supposed to feel about it, but in this case I found it quite amusing. Anyway, seeing a Lynch short film inspired me to re-watch his now classic Blue Velvet.
For a Lynch film, the plot is actually quite straightforward. Jeffrey (Kyle MacLachlan) is a young man home from college helping to run the family’s hardware store during his father’s illness. In a field, he stumbles across a human ear (and yes, there are ants crawling around in it). From this beginning, Jeffrey stumbles into the dark side of Lumberton, his apparently bucolic home town. And dark side, it is. He encounters a distressed woman (Dorothy, played by Isabella Rossellini) with an apparently kidnapped husband and child and she seems to enjoy being beaten. There is the evil drug dealer (Frank, played by Dennis Hopper) who happily beats Dorothy as he inhales nitrous oxide. There is Frank’s underworld gang members, including Dean Stockwell as Ben, Brad Dourif as Raymond, and Jack Nance (he of Eraserhead fame) as Paul. Jeffrey discovers all of this as he tries to solve the mystery behind the ear and as he falls in love with the daughter (Laura Dern as Sandy) of the local police detective. This sets up a final showdown between Jeffrey and Frank.
So, what do I think? Well, it’s in the category of neo-noir, which as a rule I enjoy. The film is visually quite dark. I watched it on my laptop and there were a few scenes in which I was squinting. I believe that Lynch did this to contrast the brightness of the idealized small town with the darkness of its underbelly. The scenes with Sandy are all bright, cheery, and neat while the scenes with Dorothy are darker, dismal, and just a bit creepy.
There seem to be a number of themes here that seem to cross Lynch films. As I’ve already said, there’s the contrast between the nostalgic seemingly innocent surface of the town with the vicious sexuality and brutality of Frank’s world. This contrast also exists within Jeffrey. Jeffrey is the college boy that comes home just to take care of things for his ailing father. On the one hand, Jeffrey is clearly attracted to Sandy (even as he’s stealing her away from her football playing boyfriend), ensnares her in his investigative schemes, and confesses his love to her as they dance and softly kiss. Sandy has a virginal purity to her that Jeffrey respects. On the other hand, Jeffrey voyeuristically watches Dorothy be abused by Frank while hidden in her closet. Once Dorothy discovers Jeffrey hiding, they almost immediately fall into a passionate sexual relationship. Although initially hesitant, at her imploring Jeffrey ultimately does strike her while the two have sex. After, tortured by his guilt as well as by his pleasure, he weeps.
A theme that also recurs in Lynch films is dual identities. The yellow man that is Frank’s partner turns out to be Sandy’s detective father’s partner. Even more so, there’s a mysterious well dressed man that seems to be running things. At the conclusion of the film (fine, spoiler alert), the well dressed man turns out to be Frank in disguise. By the time Lynch makes Lost Highway, he’s having two completely different actors playing the same character with absolutely no explanation for the change. He seems quite interested in discovering the layers that lie beneath our social constructs.
Also as I was watching this, maybe because I just re-watched Eraserhead sometime this year, I noticed a mechanical feel to the town’s underbelly. Frank meets the yellow man in some apparently abandoned factory building. Frank brutally beats Jeffrey (after first smearing lipstick all over his face and then kissing Jeffrey) in front of what appear to be oil derricks. At various times in the film, you distinctly hear mechanical noises. Again there is the contrast. In the idealized part of the small town, all is quiet and peaceful while the hard, dirty work of industry is performed in its underbelly. Eraserhead seems to be completely set in this industrial environment. Either it’s set in a dystopian time/place where there is no idealized adjacent small town or it’s so far removed from the ideal that it’s not reachable from it.
So, although it’s extremely unlikely to ever happen again, if someone asks me what does it mean that ants are crawling around in the severed ear, at least now I have a better answer (I think). Either the ants are a metaphor for the inevitable decay that is omnipresent in any human condition or it is simply a Lynchian image designed to provoke feelings of disgust or disquiet.
dorkenstein 