Mysteries
from The Blood Poets, Vol 2, by Jake Horsley
There are opportunities in life for gaining knowledge and experience; sometimes it’s necessary to take a risk
—Jeffrey
Beaumont, Blue Velvet
Blue
Velvet begins and ends with an ear.
These ears, one severed, the other attached, are like bookends around the
movie, or perhaps more accurately, like doors which respectively open and close
the dream—nightmare world of the film. The first ear is the ear that
Jeffrey (Kyle MacLachlan) finds in the grass, while rooting around for stones
with which to smash an old bottle, on his return from the hospital. At the
hospital, Jeffrey has been visiting his father, who has suffered from an
unidentified affliction in the opening montage of the film.[1]
As the ear is a severed ear, it signifies an opening, through which we
must pass—like Persephone descending into Hades—in order to gain
experience and reach the truth.[2] The camera tracks into the severed ear, as if drawn inexorably to
enter inside this world, and so it is that Jeffrey’s mystery rite of
passage (mythologically, his passage from boyhood to manhood) begins. When this
passage is finally completed, and Jeffrey returns “from Hell,”
carrying the trophies of his new awareness and understanding with him, the film
signifies this return—the completion of the journey—with a
mirror-shot of Jeffrey’s ear, in close-up, as the camera tracks back from it. The vision is now complete, the
“dream” is over, and can now be assimilated into reality.
Strictly
speaking, of course, Blue Velvet neither begins nor ends with these ear shots, and
the actual “bookends” are the more or less identical montages of
idyllic small-town “bliss” (or, in the second montage,
“ignorance”) of Lumberton. White picket fences, brightly colored
tulips, a smiling, waving fireman, lollipop lady, etc. In the first case (the
opening montage), these images are ironic, playful, slightly absurd, but also
reassuring, their familiarity meant as a comfort. In the second case (the
closing montage), these exact same images, after the journey we have undergone,
have become ominous, slightly obscene, and wholly disconcerting, their very
familiarity a kind of threat to us. And yet nothing has changed—save in us. Through our awareness and our experience of
what is beneath this “idyllic’ surface, we are forced accordingly
to alter our actual perception of the surface itself. We have, in the process
of two hours, become both older and wiser, and we have learnt the first, most
crucial and basic lesson of cinema (and, as it happens, life): appearances are deceiving, and nothing is what it seems. This is because the look is always subjective, and selective, so that
we see only what we want or expect to see, not what is actually there.
Blue
Velvet follows shockingly through on
this idea, its initial and most superficial theme/premise, with both flying
colors and creeping sounds: it shows us the things we would normally choose
(unconsciously) not
to see, and it compels us, through the hypnotic and seductive art of cinema
(which is the art of fascination), to look beneath the surface, only to discover
that what we thought was hidden was manifest all along.[3] Incredible as it seems, all this is conveyed
by Lynch in the first five minutes of the film: the idyllic montage, a shot of
Jeffrey’s father watering his lawn, succumbing to a seizure, or insect
bite, or whatever (it’s not relevant, only the mystery is important), a
small child (we never find out whose) watching curiously and uncomprehending
while a small terrier dog runs over and, resting its front paws on the
man’s body, snaps at the water spouting from the hose pipe. Already we
have the idea of misapprehended appearances, lack of understanding, incomplete
perceptions—to the dog the man’s seizure is nothing more than an opportunity
to frolic or satisfy its thirst; to the child, a mildy puzzling curiosity.
Lynch’s camera tracks away from this still curiously idyllic, but now
ominous, scene, into the underbush amidst a seething, black mass of beetles.
The noise of these scrambling, writhing bodies floods the soundtrack. Rather
more than merely hinting at the “dark underbelly” which we are
subsequently to be swallowed up in, Lynch shows it to us directly, without ado.[4] As Michael Atkinson writes: “Alan Splet, in the first of the
film’s many aural masterstrokes, scores this sequence with a cacophony of
machine noises and bassy mayhem, lending the insects awesome scale and menace.
We only see them for a few seconds... but the bugs stay with
us—they’re portents of horrors we’re awaiting from that moment
on.”
The
next scene, following Jeffrey’s finding of the ear (and the first one
with dialogue), consolidates the dis—ease we are already beginning to
feel—we have entered into an unfamiliar world (or, as Pauline Kael calls
it, a world “so hyperfamliar it’s scary”[5]) and the rules—if rules there
are—are still unknown to us (Lynch is clearly not about to be bound by
genre conventions here). When Jeffrey finds the ear, with perfectly plausible
but slightly unnerving nonchalence, he seeks out a brown paper bag and drops
the ear into it. He then takes it to the police station and shows it to
Detective Williams (George Dickerson) who says simply, “Let’s take
a look... Yes, that’s a human ear alright.” Neither his expression nor his tone of
voice betray the slightest surprise or distaste; in fact, this whole scene is
deliberately—though elusively—off. It doesn’t play the way we’re used to
such scenes playing in the movies. If asked why, we couldn’t quite say,
just that the dialogue seems too casual, too banal, slightly stilted, and we
expect our movies to be less like life than this. That’s what’s so
ingenious about what Lynch does here—he disconnects us, not by violating
the rules of reality (though he does that too), but by bending the conventions
of the cinema,
and so letting us know that something is not quite... right in Lumberton. But
he never lets on what
isn’t quite right, because of course what’s “not right”
is our own perception, our expectations, our stubborn adherance to the
conventions that, quite plainly, no longer apply.[6]
Lynch
fills out the world of Blue Velvet so lovingly, and with such care and imagination,
and attention to detail (and to the odd, essential quirks of life), that,
surreal as it is, this world seems wholly authentic to us. (As Kael writes,
Lynch “doesn’t do any interpreting for you: you simply watch and
listen, and what ensues rings so many bells in your head that you may get a
little woozy.”[7]) Because Lynch is not afraid to
“dream’ his movies, he fills his world with the kind of “abritrary’
touches that make up real life. And his mise en scene here, far from being merely the backdrop to
his “plot,” is actually central to it (and even takes precedence
over it). The one grows organically out of the other, in fact, for, as in all
true myths (and in dreams also), the two are inseparable. Because in life,
there is no plot,
obviously (save that written by God, or Chance), only an endless, infinite and
unimaginably intricate unfolding of scenes, acts, events, encounters, gestures,
words, sounds, smells. In a word—phenomena, endlessly spilling out and
colliding and spinning off and resounding with all the crazy random beauty of
pollen in the wind. There may be patterns in such chaos, but if so, they are
infinite, varied, and eternally
overlapping, interacting. And so the patterns
we choose to isolate are simply that: their meanings is merely the meaning we
have chosen to impose upon the chaos. For Lynch, the mystery of the world is
inseparable from the mystery of us—the mystery of perceiving, which is the greatest mystery of them all.
Something is out there, Lynch seems to be saying, because something is making us perceive. It’s up to us,
then, to seek it out, and even if we know we can never hope to understand it,
we can at least try. What else are we here for? The alternative is simply too
dull, too dispiriting, to entertain—that’s there’s nothing
out there, nothing hidden or inexplicable, and that what we think is all there is. (The insanity of solipcism is the only thing
that’s unthinkable in Lynch’s world.) To Lynch, the options are plain—either we know it all,
and the answers are just what we choose to invent, in which case there’s
no sense in asking questions at all. Or—we know nothing, and no answers are possible,
so all there is for us to do is ask the most exciting, enchanting, impossibly
impertinent questions we can dream up. To Lynch, the world is a strange world,
not because we do not understand it, but because that’s the way it is—it’s nothing but strangeness, that’s what makes it the
world (such stuff as dreams are made of). Since, for Lynch, there is nothing
stranger than “normality,” so, by the same token, the strange is
the only “normal” thing there is. And seeing as we have made the world thus, by perceiving it,
interpreting and assembling it, piece by piece, with our own thoughts and
senses, then we
must be mysteries, too.
With
Blue Velvet, Lynch
succeeds in perhaps the highest single accomplishment art can aspire to (at a human level, anyway): he shows us that, if reality
is a dream and dream reality, then we, as both the dreamers and the dream, are
the ultimate unfathomables: we are strangers to ourselves.
*
There’s always the
surface of something and something altogether different going on beneath the
surface. Just like electrons busily moving about, but we can’t see them.
That’s one of the things films do, is show you that conflict.
—David Lynch, Lynch on
Lynch
The
plot of Blue Velvet
unfolds lazily, at its own pace and rhythm, following a logic that is both
internal and occult—hidden—each event leading neatly and directly
to the next. Yet there is no apparent momentum to this “plot,”
other than that applied by the characters themselves, no deus ex machina, because everything that happens, that we
see, is a result of Jeffrey’s own motions, his investigations.[8] And as Jeffrey himself is motivated by (that
most pure and universal, but deadly, of motives) curiosity, the film itself
seem not so much to advance as to unfold, to reveal itself
gradually to the searching intensity of our (and Jeffrey’s) gaze.
Hence every scene in the film is absolutely essential and integral to the
whole; there is no superfluity here, and, in its organic consistency, the film
ap
proachs an almost “hologrammic” perfection: each image, each sound,
seems to suggest and contain all the others. There is no break between the
fragment and the whole, or, for that matter, the figment and the imagination.
As Atkinson writes:
a simple shot of a street sign
or a staircase or wind-blown trees is just enough, at that moment, to establish
moods and subconscious connections within the film we couldn’t hope to
account for. It’s a poetical logic, and it cannot be profitably
flow-charted or imitated. Moreover, the unbreakable beauty of the film resides
in the fact that nearly every scene is a diagram of the film as a
whole—you can extrapolate the film’s entirety from any individual
set—piece.[9]
An
indication of how this works is the superb manner in which Lynch creates and
conveys the “child’s eye view” of the film, an eye that
perceives everything as strange and wonderful, terrible and mysterious, as an
opportunity for knowledge and experience. As Atkinson writes: “every
frame of the film pulsates with appalled innocence, with the shock of a child
trying to come to grips with the adult cosmos.” (pg 21) Through such
intimacy, Blue Velvet
achieves an almost hallucinatory power: Lynch, a true artist, is, in the words
of Jesus, “making all things new,” as they are to a child. Jeffrey
is drawn at once into the mystery of the ear—not so much from specific
(or macabre) desire to get to the facts involved, but simply from a natural,
instinctive (and intuitive) impulse to seize this opportunity (presented by the
ear), and embark upon a voyage of discovery. As Atkinson says,
“he’s like a child longing to stick a fork into an electrical
socket, just to see what happens.” This voyage is consciously begun when Jeffrey leaves his mother’s
abode for a stroll (his aunt and mother are, as usual, watching a black and
white film noir on
TV), and Lynch dissolves from this “nightwalk” to a shot of the
ear, a “flashback” accompanied by the roaring sound of
“darkness” as the camera roves inside it, evoking once more the
seething of the bettles). He thereby designates Jeffrey’s “coming
out” as his first conscious step into the mystery, and into the night.
Jeffrey goes to see Detective
Williams to ask about the ear, and although he learns nothing new, he does run
into Sandy (Laura Dern), Det. William’s daughter, who will become,
literally, the girl of his dreams (just as Dorothy will be, for a while at
least, his Lady of the Night). It is Sandy herself, however, significantly
enough, who first appears emerging from the shadows: like the robins of her dream, she brings the
light. (Dorothy on the other hand is first glimpsed peering through the crack
of her door, like a prisoner of darkness.) Lynch establishes the affinity and
trust between Jeffrey and Sandy immediately, simply by his use of music and a
few quirky (throw-away) eccentricities on the part of Jeffrey, who is clearly
at ease with her. Sandy, whose first words identify Jeffrey as “the one
who found the ear,” gives him his first valuable
“tip”—the name Dorothy Vallens which she’s overheard
(from her room, above her father’s study) in relation to “the
case.” (“The case” as such is really of minor importance, as
the film subsequently makes clear. Lynch is concerned with the
personal/psychological and emotional/spiritual experiences of Jeffrey, not with
the nuts-and-bolts of the actual plot, which remains largely confused to the
end. As Anderson notes, “our role, like Jeffrey’s, is that of a
naive observer with no access to the whole, objective truth of what
happens.”)
Jeffrey
hatches a plot of his own, then, to get into Dorothy’s apartment (posing
as a pest-killer) and snoop around. Sandy reluctantly agrees and Jeffrey takes
his next decisive step, into the labyrinth proper. Deep River apartments (on
Lincoln St.) where Dorothy (Isabella Rossellini) lives, is an eerily sentient
building with an apparent life of its own—it hisses and groans and
rumbles and buzzes like some weird factory. (Kael writes, “the building
has a puffing, groaning sound. It could be an ancient furnace or foghorns or a
heavy old animal that’s winded.”[10]) Like everything else in Lynch’s world,
it seems imbued with a nightmarish organicness. Dorothy’s own apartment
consists of “musty rooms that look as if they’d sprouted their own
furniture. The gloomy walls—mauve gone brown—suggest the chic of an
earlier era, when perhaps the building was considered fashionable (and the
elevator worked).”[11] It’s as if Jeffrey is entering into the
belly of the whale, or, to be more
Freudian about it, returning to the womb.
Jeffrey
never gets a chance to snoop around, but he finds a key conveniently hanging
under the sink, and quickly takes it (hoping it’s the key to the
apartment). His brief meeting with Dorothy is inconsequential here[12]—it is Dorothy’s apartment, at
this time, which interests him, and which holds a child-like fascination (as
something forbidden) for him. It is not until the following scene, when Jeffrey
sees Dorothy sing (the title song, Bobby Vinton’s Blue Velvet) at the Slow Club (where he takes Sandy),
that he awakens to her mysterious, sensual allure, and begins to be driven by
an altogether less “infantile” brand of curiosity. He is transfixed
by her performance, which is indeed mesmerizing—Isabella Rossellini, with
her skin a bluish white and veiled by what looks like a black negligé,
seductively sighs and moans her way through the song,in a manner both
tantalizingly sensual and strangely melancholy. Jeffrey falls accordingly both
in lust and, at some deeper level, his compassion awoken, in love (Sandy looks
on with appropriate discomfort). He opts to “visit” Dorothy’s
apartment that night, to sneak in and look around while she’s away, at
which point Sandy comes up with the first in a series of unforgettable lines:
“I don’t know if you’re a detective or a pervert.” Jeffrey replies: “That’s
for me to know and you to find out”; but the irony implicit here (as we
shall see) is that it’s for Jeffrey to find out, for at this point he doesn’t
know, any more than she does, the real truth about himself. The fact remains,
however, that subconsciously (which is the level at which the film is really unfolding, after all)
Jeffrey does
“know” what he’s getting into, just as he “knows”
that Dorothy will return to “catch him out.” He is irresistably drawn into an illicit embrace with this dark
mystery lady, whose world is at once so strange, so threatening, and so
enticing to him. (If Sandy is the sun-child, Dorothy is the moon-goddess: she
signifies obsession—for Frank especially—madness—her
own—and passion, both in the sense of suffering and of desire, which are,
as Blue Velvet
makes fairly clear, ultimately synonymous.)
When
Jeffrey enters for a second time the apartment, he crosses the final threshold
and arrives at the heart of the labyrinth (what Atkinson calls “the
movie’s burial chamber, the centre of its pyramid”[13]), where what he has been subconsciously
seeking and dreading will at last be revealed to him: the first (and most
brutally persuasive) manifestation of “the mysteries of love.”
Dorothy
returns while Jeffrey (appropriately enough) is voiding his bladder, hence, as
he flushes the toilet he fails to hear Sandy’s warning honks from
outside. He is quick-witted and swift-footed enough to install himself in the
wardrobe before she enters the room, and from there he watches, through the
partitions in the door, as the mystery lady undresses. Lynch has finally got us
where he wants us (just as Jeffrey has finally made it where he needed to get), and the film has arrived at
its basic, central motif/meaning: the mysterious, deadly mix between fantasy
and voyeurism, in which the witness, at the terrifying point of realizing his
actual role as participant, is dragged inexorably out of his dream and into reality. From
innocence to experience. The actual set-up here is so basic, so simple, so archetypal, that
it’s funny, because it’s a straightforward literalization (and
liberation) of the male fantasy syndrome: to gaze, while simultaneously hidden
from sight, upon a desirable female in a state of undress. Subsequently,
following Jeffrey’s brief excursion into participation/reality—and
his ensuing return to the closet—he will then “enact’ an even
more primal (or Freudian) fantasy situation, when he gets to watch that most
forbidden act of all, the act of copulation. Only what he witnesses is a
perverse, terrifying caricature of the sex act, what Kael calls “a
sick-joke version of the primal scene, as this curious child watches his
parents do some very weird things. ...He has been pulled—with no kicking
or screaming—into the inferno of corrupt adult sexuality.”
First
of all, however, Jeffrey must meet his Lilith. When Dor
othy catches Jeffrey in
her closet, she weilds a kitchen knife and demands that he strip. He complies,
torn betwen fear and excitement; when he insists: “I only came to see
you,” he isn’t lying. She fondles him and berates him
alternatively, making sudden mad passes with the knife, keeping him in line
(when she goes down on him, with the knife still in hand, it’s a wickedly
kinky blend of horror and delight—we don’t know if she’s
going to fellate him or castrate him). She tells him, “Don’t look
at me!” (a line which we will discover to come from Frank’s: his
own obsessions having “contaminated” Dorothy). She directs Jeffrey
to the couch, and he complies willingly enough, apparently on the point of
finally undergoing his sexual intitiation. Lynch, however, has other plans.
The
appearance of Frank (Dennis Hopper) gives the film a horrific charge that takes
Blue Velvet into a new
orbit.[14] Frank represents here, in no uncertain terms,
the first, terrible surge of energy of Jeffrey’s newly awakened id,
namely: his libido. Now that Jeffrey has
entered into the labyrinth of his own sexuality, and his libido has
begun to stir, it has inevitably stirred up some “dark and troubling
things.”[15] It is of paramount significance that Frank
appears (having called Dorothy on the phone while Jeffrey was spying) at the
precise moment in which Jeffrey graduates from passive witness to active
player, when he enters into an embrace with his lady of the night, and allows
his lustful thoughts and desires to come to the surface. When Frank
arrives—at this crucial juncture—Dorothy hurries Jeffrey back into
the closet, thereby attempting to return him to his passive role as innocent onlooker.
Jeffrey of course seizes this opportunity, and, for a brief time at least,
enjoys again the luxury of detached observation. What he observes, however, is
of such appalling, searing perversity and intensity that it will forever banish
his ignorance, or “innocence,” of such dark, primal matters, such
“rituals,” both as a witness and as a participant. As Atkinson
comments, “Jeffrey, of course, never dreamed that sex—the essence,
truly, of what differentiates the adult and infantile worlds—would ever
be like this: terrifying, paralysing, chaotic beyond understanding, fuelled by
impulses so chthonic they seem unreal, paranormal, spiritually diseased.”
It
at this moment that, like a child spying on the incomprehensible fact of his
parents’ sexuality, Jeffrey beholds, in all its weird and grotesque
splendour, the workings of the tormented id. Frank Booth, as played by Dennis
Hopper, is the ultimate, supreme expression of this torment. As Phil Snyder
writes (in his unpublished opus, The Great American Psychopath):
Frank Booth’s obsession
with Dorothy is mysterious. We sense that each part of his twisted sexual
ritual has deep personal meaning for him, but we are left to wonder just what
that significance is. Something is eating away at Frank but we never see it. He
seems to be trying to reach something that he just can’t get at—his
sadistic ritual appears pointless, without any conventional climax. Frank has
somehow transcended natural sexuality but remains obsessed with sex, using it
to dominate and infect the minds of others.
Frank
is the runaway libido with a vengeance, our very worst nightmares of the (male)
sexual animal run amok. He is, in no uncertain terms, “the beast.”[16] As such, Frank has some of the animal purity,
despite (and even somehow relating to) his utter moral corruption, which
Scorsese so vainly attributes to his Jake La Motta in Raging Bull.[17] Frank, unlike La Motta, is a true soul in
torment—a sufferer of both mundane (all-too-human) and cosmic
proportions: he is Lucifer, Prometheus, the fallen angel condemned to suffer
the hell of his own
lost divinity. Frank is so excruciatingly aware of his own degeneracy that he
ca
n’t even bare to be looked at; all he can do is wallow in it. He wields
his madness and perversity as both a shield and a sword, to both attack and
defend himself with, in the battleground of his own hellish existence. Frank
knows nothing of pleasure—he is racked by pain, rage, contempt, sorrow,
and above all impotence.[18] Incapable of feeling anything but pain himself, he is accordingly compelled
(maybe even “condemned’ is really the word), to cause pain to all around him. He is the agent of
misery and destruction, and as such, he makes Jake LaMotta look like a sulky
boot-boy. Frank’s agony and despair is all metaphysical: he truly is at another level, but it’s a level below—one few people have the imagination, or
the courage, even to admit is there. Frank is there to remind us, and if he
represents Jeffrey’s (and our) demons, that is only because, as truly one
of the damned, he is driven by demons all his own.
*
Misery
made me a fiend. Make me happy and I shall be virtuous.
—Mary
Shelly, Frankenstein
Atkinson
writes: “The more we know about Frank’s ferocious hungers and
paraphiliac impulses, the less we can predict them, and though he certainly
stands as one of the most horrifying characters in film history, he is
nonetheless torturously, miserably human.... Everywhere Frank goes, someone is
trying to appease him through ritualised psychodrama, and it always fails. He
cannot sustain gratification—he is impotent, at odds not only with sexual
satisfaction, but with pleasure itself.”[19]
David
Lynch, who continues to insist that Blue Velvet is a love story, as much between Dorthy and
Frank as between Jeffrey and Sandy, describes his romantic psycho thus:
“Frank to me, is a guy Americans know very well. I’m sure most
everybody growing up has met someone like Frank. They might not have shook his
hand and gone out for a drink with him, but all you’ve got to do is
exchange eye contact with someone like that and you know that you’ve met him....
Frank is totally in love. He just doesn’t know how to show it. He may
have gotten into some strange things, but he’s still motivated by
positive things.”[20]
Frank
sees and feels and knows
things that most of us only ever dream of; that’s what makes him nightmarish, because
he’s a messenger from the same place our deepest fears arise from.
He’s the realization of Jeffrey’s awakening id—its first
manifestation—and Jeffrey is “responsible” for Frank just as
surely as if he had materialized him out of thin air with the force and
perveristy of his own will. (Of course—that’s exactly what Lynch did, with Hopper’s invaluable aid; and
Lynch is Jeffrey, at
the end of the day.) In the scene
in which we finally witness Frank—at play— he lights a candle and,
with the words of his trusty mantra “Now it’s dark,” enacts
his obscene, empassioned ritual upon (rather than with) Dorothy. What we see
comes about as close to the essence of “black magic”—true
depravity—as mainstream cinema has ever dared to show us. And Frank just
as assuredly conjurs his foul spirits, with this repulsive, awesome display and
release of satanic energy. He begins to look wildly about him and cries:
“Get away you fucks!”, responding, it would seem, “to unseen
demons”.[21] And no wonder Jeffrey stares on in utter open-mouthed
horror—he’s “coming of age” in a matter of seconds
here, the world having become suddenly a stranger and more terrifying place.
And even if he can’t see whatever Frank sees, he can most certainly see
the face of his own demon.
It’s
not until later that Jeffrey will—dimly but acutely—realize his
essential complicity, and affinity, with the demon Frank (who is after all
Jeffrey’s “familiar”). Not until, in fact, he has possessed
Dorothy completely and succumbed to her desperate, pathetic insistence that he
strike her, that he plays the role of “Daddy.” He does so out of
fear and exhasperation more than anger or desire, but as soon as he does strike her, he feels the surge of energy—the primal delight
and vicious power—that essentially joins him to Frank, and to every other
male beast who ever lived. They copulate then, and Jeffrey completes his
initiation into the mysteries, not merely of love, but of its twin horns of
power also—sex and violence. By awakening the monster within him, Jeffrey
at last becomes a man. The “monster,” however, is now at large, and wastes no time in coming to claim
Jeffrey as its rightful prey.
As
Jeffrey is leaving the apartment (and Dorothy is fondly telling him “I
still have you inside me”) he is horrified to find himself face to face
with Frank and his three cronies. They have arrived, as if from nowhere, like
Pluto with his Hounds of Hell, as if expressly to take Jeffrey back. (Cereberus of course is the three-headed
hound that guards Hades.)
That’s precisely where they do take him, anyway, back to their
“netherworld of sleazy interconnections,”[22] albeit stopping off first of all in
“Pussy Heaven.” Jeffrey like a helpless child follows mutely after
his unwanted guides, replying with mournful monosyllables to Frank’s barrage
of questions. Neither we nor Jeffrey know quite what Frank is really capable of
just yet (assuming there is a limit), but we have a pretty good idea. Frank calls Jeffrey
“neighbour” for the first time here, in ironic mockery of
Dorothy’s lame identification of Jeffrey as “from the
neighbourhood” (i.e., one of the adjacent circles of Hell?). But
it’s a fitting nomer, one which at once acknowledges Jeffrey’s closeness to Frank.[23]
The
profound sense of dread which Lynch creates from here on in, and for the
duration of the the following sequence, is I think unparalleled in modern
cinema. What’s most remarkable is that we’re not watching a horror
film (or, at least, we weren’t), and yet the level of horror which the film begins
to invoke in us here is beyond just about anything in the genre. (Texas
Chainsaw Massacre
is the only film I know of that approaches the nightmare intensity of these
scenes.) The sequence, which consitutues Jeffrey’s fully-fledged entry
(having officially abandoned all hopes) into Hell, from his first meeting with
Frank, to his brutal beating accompanied by Roy Orbison’s In Dreams, gets my vote (for what it’s worth) as
the single most outstanding piece of cinema in the (admittedly still brief)
history of film.[24] Lynch achieves here something geninely
uncanny: the sequence is hypnotic, chilling, hilarious, heart-breaking,
emotionally devastating and aesthetically gorgeous, all at the same time. It
has both a dreamlike poetry and a nightmarish reality, a matchless sense of
horror and ugliness that is somehow wed to an equal sense of sadness and
beauty. What Lynch does here is really sublime—he unites and consiles all
his myriad int
entions into a single, coherent, organic whole that seems, for
all its precisely measured brilliance, to have sprung, spontaneously and all at
once, not merely from Lynch’s but from our own unconscious. It’s a living dream.
Watching
these scenes for the first time (and even the subsequent half dozen times or
more since), I felt as if my psyche were being torn in two. (This clash, betwen
two opposing but connecting points of view, may be what Atkinson is thinking of
when he speaks of the “subterranean tension between id and superego...[25]“) On the one hand, we are wholly and
agonizingly trapped
inside the point of view of Jeffrey, and suffer the resultant horrors of being
in the hands of the demonic Frank. On the other hand, we are, if we are honest,
unable to detach ourselves entirely from the madness and depravity of Frank, so
palpable that it becomes overwhelming, and constitutes a kind of agony itself.
As Atkinson writes, “The film pulses with empathy for Frank’s
internal dilemma; nearly every scene is the by-product of his tortures...
Frank’s subconscious suffering is so strong that, for the moments
he’s on screen, Blue Velvet is his feverdream, not Jeffrey’s.”[26] And, in fact, in these scenes, Frank’s
nightmare and Jeffrey’s dream collide and become inseparable to us.
Jeffrey knows it; Frank knows it; and we know it—there’s one psyche here, split
into a two warring fragments.
The
sense of empathy for Jeffrey which Lynch creates here is so powerful, so
complete, that when the suave, smiling Ben (Dean Stockwell) punches Jeffrey in
the stomach, for the sheer, nasty hell of it, it may literally knock the wind
out of us. I know of no other parallel moment of movie violence that seems so
utterly, traumatically real as this one. Lynch has worked so masterfully at creating the dread
and awful, black misery of the scene, as seen through Jeffrey’s eyes,
that we feel that punch for what it is—final, sickening confirmation of
the hideous mess that he is has gotten himself into. Up until that point,
we’re not quite sure; Ben is a white-faced, otherworldly ghoul alright,
with his cigarette-holder hanging limply in his hand and that perpetual,
impenetrable smile on his face. (Frank clearly admires him and looks up to him:
as Synder writes, “Frank loves Ben. Perhaps Ben is Frank’s unseen
vision, his secret ideal of completion.”) But we don’t know what
Ben is actually like
until the moment he comes over to meet Jeffrey and, without warning, and still
smiling that dreamy smile, lets fly a fist into Jeffrey’s gut. At which
point we know—Jeffrey
is (maybe only figuratively, but then again maybe not) fucked. The punch, and the glib, vicious sadism with
which it is delivered (and the glee with which the others witness it), is but a
harbinger of things to come. Jeffrey is a rag-doll, a toy, in the hands of
these loonies: and there is not a damn thing he can do about it. The horror of
the scene is above all in our sense of his total impotence, in the face of
leering, insatiable evil.
What
does come next has to be seen to be
appreciated: words cannot do it justice. Ben mimes his kinky, demented version
of In Dreams
(Ben may just be
the candy-colored clown himself) until Frank can take it no more, and,
overwhelmed by emotion (just as he was while watching Dorothy sing Blue
Velvet), he howls his war—cry
to the night: “I’ll fuck anything that moves!!”, and, promptly—disappears, as if teleported away by sheer psychotic
ecstasy of it all! Cut to the open road speeding by. We, along with Frank, have
verily been “translated” to another dimension.[27]
The
scene which ensues is pure horror mixed with an awful, sickening pathos; but,
for all Frank’s gibbering, slavering depravity, the ultimate horror of
the scene (for me at least) is the sight of the chubby, painted whore, in her
pink miniskirt, dancing laguidly to Orbison’s song on the roo
f of the
car, while Jeffrey is beaten to a pulp down below. That whore might be the soul
of the world, a soul so weary and jaded that it doens’t even bother to
turn away, but merely looks on in total, final indifference. Having seen it all
a thousand times before, it now sees nothing at all. And, unspeakably awful as
the acts of barbarity which Frank commits upon Jeffrey may be, it is this utter
indifference to them, I think, which constitutes the true horror.
*
The natural, spiritual hunger,
if it is not fed by the sacred, is trapped in the demonic.
—Toni
Wolff
The
confrontation/violation[28] scene between Frank and Jeffrey is certainly
the weirdest ever male—bonding rite ever conceived for a movie, but there
is an element of
understanding—of empathy—between the two men, which forms the
subtext of the scene. This subtext becomes most especially apparent when Frank,
inhaling his nitrus oxide gas and leering, his eyes popping, at Jeffrey in the
back—seat, hisses: “You’re like me!” Subsequently, in a later scene, but
with the characters similarly situated (in the car), Frank is ruthlessly and
petulantly pinching at Dorothy’s breasts when Jeffrey, unable to contain
his disgust, shouts at Frank to leave her alone. Frank stares back
disbelievingly at this punk kid (this prodigy?) and, before Frank can even
respond, Jeffrey punches him in the face. Frank, so overwhelmed by rage he can
barely articulate, commands his cronies to stop the car, take Jeffrey out and
to “hold him tight.” He tells Raymond (Brad Dourif) to put
“Candy-Colored Clown” on the car radio, smears lipstick on his
mouth, and kisses Jeffrey brutally while reciting the words of the song to him.
(Frank makes his id—monster status official here, with the words:
“In dreams I walk with you, in dreams I talk with you, in dreams
you’re mine,
all of the time...” etc) He then proceeds to beat Jeffrey senseless, to
the accompaniment of Roy Orbison’s otherworldly crooning.
Frank
lets Jeffrey live, however, which is more than we had any right to expect, and
my feeling is that this is at least partially due to Jeffrey’s display of
courage and aggression, by punching Frank in the face. Frank, I think, feels a
grudging respect for Jeffrey for this act, by which, if nothing else, he proved
that he had the passion (one thing Frank can certainly relate to) to stand up
against him. Whatever the reason, though Jeffrey survives, it is just barely.
He awakes the next morning with everything but his soul intact and staggers
home, goes to his room, sits down on the bed, and begins to weep. The images
and sensations of his previous ordeal come flooding back to him, like the
licking flames of his unconscious, forever searing their signature on his mind.
Jeffrey is unable to communicate what he has been through to anyone, and,
what’s more, he doesn’t want to. It’s his own private journey, and
it’s the nature of true knowledge, after all, to be incommunicable.
Jeffrey returns to the arms of his sunshine girl Sandy and they dance closely
to The Mysteries of Love
(the angelic chorus written by Lynch with the film’s composer, Angelo
Badalamenti). Jeffrey has taken refuge in love—the pure, unsullied
(unexciting?) love that Sandy offers, having had his fill of the dark,
forbidden love which he got from Dorothy (and Frank?). (Jeffrey’s set up
in Blue Velvet,
is, all-too-briefly and before the “arousal” of Frank, Id monster,
a perfect school-boy fantasy of having one’s cake and eating it—he
gets to court the virgin and to be instructed by the “whore.”)
When
Dorothy appears naked and bruised (like a stray zombie from Night of the
Living Dead) on Jeffrey’s
lawn and embraces him, muttering sweet obscenities in his ear, it amounts to
another “ripple,” in Jeffrey’s hitherto placid reality, as
caused by the stirrings of his id. There’s no real logic to the event,
seeing as Dorothy could hardly know where Jeffrey lives, but poetically, it has
a perfect logic—it signifies the inevitabl
e, necessary encroachment of
Jeffrey’s secret life into his ordinary, regular world. When Dorothy
informs Sandy: “He put his disease in me”[29], she could hardly have chosen a more
horrendous turn of phrase for poor Sandy to have to assimilate. It is in this
scene that, crucially, Sandy realizes that “her’ Jeffrey is totally
unknown to her—a stranger.
Of
course, Blue Velvet
posits two worlds, as we’ve seen: the world of normality, order, light;
and the world of chaos, aberration, darkness. For these two worlds, the film
gives us two couples, two “families”—the world of darkness is
presided over by Frank and Dorothy (“mommy” and
“daddy”; in traditional mythology: Lucifer and Lilith); the world
of light by Jeffrey and Sandy (the children, Adam and Eve). But, in the liaison
between Jeffrey and Dorothy, the two worlds meet, and, once Frank gets wind of
it, positively (or catastrophically!) collide. And yet, even so, even as they come into violent and terrifying contact
with each other, they prove to be mysteriously compatible. (“You’re
like me!”) However
compatible Jeffrey and Dorothy may be (and to some extent Frank and Jeffrey,
and, although they never speak, Dorothy and Sandy), the mere idea of Frank and
Sandy meeting is so shocking, and completely unthinkable, as to effectively
demonstrate that there are parts of these worlds—areas of
experience—that can never meet, can never know each other. Thus Lynch
implicitly points out the deficiencies of both Frank and Sandy. As Lynch himself says: “One is
completely not able to deal with the other, and they’re poles apart. I
guess Jeffrey is the only bridge between the two.”[30] Sandy will never undertsand, or even imagine,
the depths of insanity, pain and desperation in which Frank exists. Frank, for
his part, will never (again, perhaps since his childhood) know the purity,
innocence and blissful, naive optomism that characterizes Sandy’s world.
Hence, though their circumferences overlap, these spheres are, essentially,
very much two different worlds. What does unite them, however, as represented by
Jeffrey’s (and our) point of view—is the act, the possiblity, of
perception. And this is what Blue Velvet is all about. We have two eyes, after all, two ears, and two sides of
our brain—one for each of these worlds. Hence, and so far as we—as perceivers, as
dreamers—can successfully straddle these worlds, they become as one, in us. Frank shows Jeffrey the
underworld, the place of the beast, which symbolizes Jeffrey’s own
primal, atavistic soul. Sandy shows him the light, the dream of the robins,
which represents his divine, poetic nature, or spirit. For the duration of the
film, Jeffrey is tugged and torn and thrown and twisted and battered between
the two. By the end—for the time being at least—he has brought them
into balance within himself, and so found a pocket of peace, within the
battleground of the world.
For
Dorothy too, some sort of redemption is possible. The final images of the film
are of her reunion with her child—the one “reason” (which she
had lost) to live, now returned to her, through the destruction of the
adversary (Frank, whom she also loved, but was enslaved to), and the
intervention of the hero. (Which is what Jeffrey is, in the deepest sense of
the word—a seeker of knowledge, who sets free the captives of darkness,
or ignorance.) Dorothy was a prisoner of (dark) love, freed when Jeffrey,
himself seeking such love, such darkness, unwittingly brought the light to
shine upon her. And the same light which, by dispelling the shadows, freed
Dorothy, also destroyed Frank, who was nothing but darkness. (In his own weird way, Frank was
also liberated, through death, as the only “way out” possible for
him.) Hence the optimism, the
naive, almost childlike “happy ending” of Blue Velvet—like Sandy’s dream and the Mysteries
of Love song, is not a case of ironic
kitsch or absurdist sentimentalism, but of the genuinely inspired (and
inspiring) intimation of a true redemption, a true deliverance, from the
trouble and pain and darkness. It heralds, or suggests, an awakening of the
unconscious, and a return to the original state of grace—the silence of
knowledge, and the knowledge of silence (the symbolism of the ear takes on
another dimension here). The bliss here intimated is not that of oblivion but
of freedom, unencumbered vision, beyond all the doors, locks and keys of
perception. Such a hope, or possibility, however slight, of regeneration and
purification (not apart from but through, and hence beyond, the corruption and
decay)—this Lynch symbolizes in the most brazenly ingenuous (some would
say trite) of images—the joy of a child. This child, however, is no
ordinary child, but a child, let us not forget, who, perhaps even more than Jeffrey,
has come through Hell, and found its way back to the light. If such innocence
can survive such an experience, there may
be hope for us all.[31]
The
only, minor reservation which I have about Blue Velvet is in the all—too tidy resolution of
the plot. The film is full of inconsistencies in the narrative (such as the ear
itself, for example: if it was meant as warning for Dorothy to “stay
alive” (“do it for Van Gogh”), what’s it doing lying in
a field?[32]); I don’t think these criticisms are
really relevant to Lynch’s concerns, however, which are to do not so much
with resolving the plot as the spinning of his dream. Even so, the way in which
everything “comes together” for the last scene is a mite too convenient—it smacks a little of the
obligatory climax. What happens it that Frank’s drug deals or
what-have-you fall apart, due to the invervention of the police (acting we
suppose on Jeffrey’s information.) These scenes are effectively rendered
as silent montage, accompanied by the pop song “Love Letters”;
following this, for reasons known best to himself, Frank returns (in his
“well-dressed man” disguise) to Dorothy’s apartment, where
Jeffrey just happens
to be also. Michael Atkinson’s rather wry comments are a propos: “If Jeffrey’s motivation for
returning to Dorothy’s is seriously unclear narratively speaking,
Frank’s is downright unfathomable; it’s as if they’re drones
drawn back to the nest. (Anyway, to argue for completely sensible behaviour
from these id—addled antagonists is to have not paid attention to the
rest of the film.)”
It
is at this point, anyway, that Jeffrey tricks Frank into thinking he’s
hiding in the back bedroom, then, arming himself with a gun from one of
Frank’s now dead (but still mysteriously standing) associates (“the
Yellow Man”), he hides back in the closet and waits for the predatorial
Frank to find him. Frank takes a last whiff of his laughing gas, opens the
closet and BOOM: all his miseries are ended.
I
can see why Lynch wanted—needed—to get Jeffrey back in the closet one more
time; there’s a certain, almost inevitable, poetic symmetry to it, no
matter how contrived it may be. I can also see why he had to have Frank killed
off in the end—there being really no other easy way to resolve the problem of evil—at least
within the generic limitations of a movie—save by annihilating it. But I
rather regret the fact that he had Jeffrey do it. It seems an unnecessary (as
well as unconvincing) ending to his coming-of-age initiation journey, that he
become a murderer on top of everything else. It would have been far more
consistent, I think, with the fairy-tale nature of the story, if Jeffrey had
somehow orchestrated—or
even merely witnessed—Frank’s destruction, without actually being directly responsible for it. The fact that this scene
(most especially the heart-stopping moment in which Jeffrey spots a disguised
Frank on the stairs) is one of the most terrifying in the film helps us
overlook its failings however; and although it remains about the only weak link
in an otherwise perfectly organic narrative (the only scene which seems
obligatory), Lynch handles it so gracefully that we hardly have the desire to
quibble.[33] It’s almost a relief, in any case, to
be able to find a flaw in an otherwise flawless dream—tapestry of a movie
such as this. As Pauline Kael remarked: “great movies are rarely perfect
movies.”[34]
*
We all have at least two sides.
One of the things I’ve heard is that our trip through life is to gain
divine mind through knowledge and experience of combined opposites. And
that’s our trip. The world we live in is a world of opposites. And to
reconcile those two opposing things is the trick... They’re just
opposites, you know, that’s all. And then that means there’s
something in the middle. And the middle isn’t a compromise, it’s,
like, the power of both.... I’ve always liked both sides and believe that
in order to appreciate one you have to know the other—the more darkness
you can gather up, the more light you can see too.
—David Lynch, Lynch on
Lynch
Blue
Velvet is remarkable in the entire
history of cinema for being sui generis—a genre unto itself. Of course, the same
might be said of Eraserhead, and countless other weird or cult movies; but the remarkable thing
about Blue Velvet
is that it is simultaneously all genres and none—it moves gracefully and
seamlessly from one to the next, without ever losing its own organic
consistency. Blue Velvet
is, variously and at any given moment, a comedy, a love story, a sci-fi
mystery, a crime thriller, a film noir, a horror movie, a psychodrama and a supernatural
(or Surrealist) fantasy (about the only genres which it doesn’t partake
of is the Western and the war movie; it’s even a kind of musical, as Kael
notes (“a musical on themes from our pop unconscious.”)[35] Above all, Blue Velvet is a fairy tale, a modern myth with all the
ingredients, the versatility, insight, depth, meaning, wit, poignancy and
universal resonance (or relevance) of the very best of myths. The definition of
myth, as a dream shared by a race (or, at least, a segment of a race), is: what
is “realer than fact.” Hence myth and Surrealism are naturally
drawn to each other.[36]
But
Lynch’s film does more than simply to inititate us into mystery and usher
us into the nether realms, because the new awareness it offers us does not
simply alter
our perception of things, but transforms the things themselves. For now that we have
perceived the essential mystery of the world—its strangeness—and we
have recognized its hostility, we have come a step closer to consiling
ourselves to it, and thereby overcoming it. By amending out interpretations, we
expand our perceptions, and, finally, potentially, redeem our reality. Hence, at the end of the film,
not only are things no longer what they seem (which after all, they never
were), but they are not as they once were, either. (Dorothy is reunited with her son, Jeffrey
is united with Sandy, all three are wiser, and Frank, the marauding demon of
Jeffrey’s id, is dead, or at least temporarily placated.) Sandy’s robins may not really be here, as yet, but they are at least a step
closer than they were before.
Audiences
have been known to take a glib, hipper-than-thou attitude to Blue Velvet, and to embrace it as a kind of ultra-cyncial
absurdist comedy, confined I guess to the sense of the grotesqueness of their
own lives. Go to a “cult’ midnight showing of the film and you will
see what I mean: you may find the audience laughing all the way through the
film with a quite maddeningly “knowing” and complacent smugness.
Admittedly, Blue Velvet is, at least sporadically, a comedy, but it is a particular kind of
comedy, and the kind of laughter one hears at a midnight showing of the film
tends to be that harsh, excessivly roudy laughter that seems to me to be
entirely devoid of true mirth. It is not so much canned as forced laughter. Of course, audiences also are known
to laugh uproariously through The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and though the laughter is of a different
(less “sophisticated”) sort, the reasons I think are basically the
same. Both films stir up emotions—fears and doubts—that most people
prefer not to have to deal with. They effectively undermine, if not shatter
outright, the complacency upon which—for most of us—our sanity
rests, and replace it with a new level of uncertainty. They leave us, in a
word, exposed, by the precariousness of our own perceptions, our own
understanding, to the fury and mystery of the world. Is it any wonder people
prefer to feign superiority to such “truths,” to pretend these
films are just particularly vicious, intense comedies that they can laugh along
with, in their smug, superior
“knowledge”? But, in fact, what’s so grating and enfuriating
about these “fans” of Blue Velvet is that they are laughing not with but at the film (at what they perceive to be its
mock sentimentality, for example), in order to laugh the film away. Of course, laughter, however phony, and
however briefly and ineffectively, may serve to keep the true horror at bay;
it’s a way off fending off the blows which the film administers.[37]
But
David Lynch intended
the film to deliver such “shocks to the sytem”, and certain scenes
in his film—such as Sandy’s dream—as a kind of relief, or balm, after the blows. Certainly he didn’t
mean them as “mock sentimentality’ but as wholly genuine, however
“goofy,” evocations of innocence, and expressions or flights of
poetic fantasy. He may have meant them to be incomplete, somehow out of whack
with other scenes in the film, but not as kitsch to be ridiculed. (In any case, in my
experience such “hip” audiences tend to laugh just as uproariously—probably
more so—during the scenes of Frank’s violations of Dorothy and
Jeffrey.[38])
Much
has been made of the final image—or rather one of the final images, but I think the key
one—of the robin with the beetle in its beak, and, specifically, the fact
that the robin is all-too-apparently mechanical, i.e., fake. Audiences have
lept upon this as “proof” of the “fakery” of
Lynch’s optimism, especially of Sandy’s dream of the robins, which
they are all too eager to dismiss as silly sentimentalism. There is something
to the observation that such a dream is rather unconvincing, after all we have seen, but if
so, that’s not because it’s ingenuine (and certainly not fake), but only because it is ingenuous, naive,
uninformed, slightly inadequate, and most of all, premature.
I
think perhaps audiences have a particularly hard time accepting this unabashed,
childlike romanticism from the same man who is, at the same time, giving them
such a bleak, relentless and sordid depiction of corrupt adult reality. It may
be beyond most viewers’ capacity to accept that Lynch identifies as
freely and completey with Sandy as he does with Frank, that in Lynch, as in
Jeffrey, the two worlds of light and darkness collide and are consiled.
It’s especially ironic, or tragic, that viewers feel the need to
undermine Lynch’s (or Sandy’s) romanticism, because, by being
unable or unwilling to embrace the totality of the film’s vision, they
are rejecting the whole point of it.
Sandy
is a dreamer, and like most of
us, she prefers to take cover from reality in the sweet security of her dreams.
The final image of the robin and the beetle suggests several things. First of
all, taken at face value, that the darkness has temporarily been “overcome” by the light, but
only temporarily, and only overcome in so far as it has been—just as
the
beetle is devoured by the robin—assimilated by the light. The image is a
profound and yet simple (truly childlike) symbol for Lynch’s vision of
the Universe, a Universe in which the light depends upon the darkness, cannot exist without it,
even as the robin depends upon the beetle for its livelihood. Without beetles,
there would be
no robins; but, without robins, the beetles would doubtless overrun the planet,
they would be Legion. Hence, the robins are like the guardians, the protectors
or keepers of the light, which signifies (in the person of Sandy) innocence,
purity, bliss (but also, when uninformed by darkness, ignorance, oblivion). By making the
robin appear somewhat unreal, Lynch is once again challenging our perceptions.
If he’s mocking anything, it’s not the naivety of Sandy’s
dream, it’s our own tendency—through excess wishful-thinking and
over-expectation—to see what we want to see, to assume, in a word, that
every robin makes for springtime. But a fake robin makes for a fake spring,
obviously. (Atkinson puts it perfectly, I think, when he writes that the robin
“doesn’t embody Sandy’s dream so much a some creepy,
dangerous, earthbound manifestation of it.”)
Lynch
is saying you can’t trust too much to the signs, if you can’t trust
your own ability to read them. He’s saying, look closely, and don’t
make assumptions about what the signs are saying. Everything is ambiguous, most
of all the signs, which are in any case always coded, and can be read any
number of ways. Of course, the robin—though it carries the “red
badge of courage” on its chest (signifying love)—is actually bringing not light but
darkness, in the form of the beetle in its mouth. But it is the darkness redeemed, at least potentially. Anderson writes:
“The ideal remains imbued with savagery; the formally traumatised and
disordered universe between Jeffrey’s ears is now superseded by the
ambiguous, non-split outside world of the robin and the beetle, locked in
predatory congress.”
If
we can look at the darkness and understand it for what it is (a necessary
source of knowledge and strength, ie: sustenance), then we will accept it as
what makes us whole. One of the most affecting moments in the film for me is
when Jeffrey’s Aunt Barbara sees the robin and pulls a face of
(squeamish, “middle-class”) horror and disgust, and says “I
could never eat a bug!”
It’s a moment which invariably slays me, because it has such an ironic
kick to it, after all we’ve seen; it’s funny but it’s also
somehow tragic, heart-breaking. Because Aunt Barbara is more lost than Frank
ever was, so utterly sheltered by her own ignorance and fear and squeamishness
that life, even in the relatively innocuous form of a bird devouring a bug, is
simply too much for her. The moment reminds us that—for all the depths we
have traversed, and the knowledge we have acquired on our journey to the heart
of darkness, and into the suburbia of corruption—ours was a privileged journey, and there are and will always be those who can never take such a journey, or claim such knowledge
as their own. Those for whom the light, as much as the darkness, is more than
they can stand to look upon, who, when faced with the mysteries of life, prefer
to turn away, and for whom Truth will always remain—something that they
prefer not to know.
[1].
Michael Atkinson (in Blue Velvet, the BFI Modern Classics
study of the film) describes it as “what could either be an internal
trauma like a stroke or an aneurysm, or, given the ambiguous grasp at the back
of his neck, an insect bite of some unspecified sort,” pg. 19.