Starting this month, we're proud to launch a monthly excerpt partnership with the stellar internet magazine "Bright Wall/Dark Room." The image above is credited to Brianna Ashby and this month's issue centers on Americana through coverage of "Blue Velvet," "The Last Picture Show," "Far from Heaven," "Friday Night Lights," "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington," "Lost in America," and "Boyhood." You can buy the magazine on your iPhone and iPad here or sign up for the web-based online version here.
"American Idols" by Kara
VanderBijl
I am five years old. Crisp white paper crinkles underneath me as I
shift on the table. It is very cold and bright in the room, but I am sweaty. My
palms stick together. I look at my mom and at the big jar of red, yellow, and
green lollipops. Then I look at the nurse, who is holding a syringe up to the
light. Clear drops of fluid spritz off its sharp end.
"Now," she advises, pointing the needle at the meat of my upper
arm. "Look away."
But I can't. The needle moves closer and closer.
Some
images are too powerful to forget. Wherever and whenever they appear, they poke
at dark things that lie just beyond the reach of our consciousness. They sear
our brains. Whether we seek them out or stumble upon them, they reel through
our minds like a refrain, unbridling fear and obsession.
David
Lynch's "Blue Velvet" is full of such images. I was fourteen when I saw it
for the first time, on a class trip, and I was not ready for it. I walked out
of the theatre that day, its violent, sexually charged scenes filling my mind,
cues for brand new nightmares.
In the
film's iconic opening sequence, the peace of a quiet neighborhood in Lumberton,
North Carolina is shattered when a man collapses on his lawn. Inside the house,
his wife watches a mystery program. A dog drinks from the man's hose, which he
still holds in a viselike grip. Nearby, children laugh as they cross the street
and flowers in deeply saturated colors play against a bright blue sky. Roy
Orbison croons "Blue Velvet" in the background.
This
could be Anywhere, America. But the man's stroke has taken away its anonymity.
Violence is particular: it peels open what's expected, to reveal what's curious
underneath. Below this man's immaculate lawn, thousands of bugs gnash at the
soil and at one another, eroding the idyllic afternoon with each bite.
My mother is watering flowers in the backyard. When she steps away
from a pot full of bright purple petunias, my brother and I see that a
rust-colored rattlesnake is coiled next to it, almost the same color as the
planter.
It flicks its tongue. We scream and pound on the window.
The man's
son, Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan) returns home to Lumberton from college
to visit his father in the hospital. While cutting through a vacant lot on the
way home, he finds a severed ear. It buzzes like a radio between stations, as
if Jeffrey must turn it to the right frequency to understand its hidden
message. Jeffrey bags and pockets it like a key, opening the door to an
enigmatic, frightening world that's been lying just under the surface of his
sleepy hometown.
With his
open face, sensitive eyes, and strong jaw, MacLachlan is a Romantic hero, a
physical embodiment of trustworthiness and virtue. Lynch once said of him,
"Kyle plays innocents who are interested in the mysteries of life. He's the
person you trust enough to go into a strange world with." This is especially
true for Sandy Williams (Laura Dern), the local detective's daughter, who
catches wind of Jeffrey's discovery and other details of the case by
eavesdropping on her father's telephone conversations. In a local diner,
Jeffrey and Sandy make plans to find the connection between the ear and the
police's current person of interest—a club singer named Dorothy Vallens—by
breaking into her apartment.
My father cracks open the lid of the electric breaker on the back
wall of the house. Inside, a huge spider stretches across the switches. Her
spindly legs gather together as the sun hits her. She hisses.
My father slams the breaker shut.
It's
within Dorothy's flat that Lynch's noir undertones take full flesh. We'd heard
echoes of it in Angelo Badalamenti's score, an orchestral track calling to mind
deeply-dipped fedoras, slinky cocktail dresses, and smoking guns. Now, in a
setting worthy of Hitchcock, Lynch's femme fatale, played by the inimitable
Isabella Rossellini, catches Jeffrey red-handed as he rifles through her
apartment looking for clues. She holds a butcher knife up to his throat. She
demands that he remove his clothes.
You can't
look away from Dorothy. Dark-haired and pale, she drapes a blue velvet robe
around her shoulders and examines herself in the mirror. She leans against
walls, folds in despair to the floor, and looks up through half-lidded eyes.
With her bright red lips and bruise-blue eye shadow, she's the picture of open,
violent passion, the antidote to Sandy's pink-and-white bloom. She is the
smoking gun. She is the afternoon mystery program that the women of Lumberton
turn on to forget the suds in their sinks. She is so alluring that a man named
Frank kidnapped her husband and young son in order to make her his sexual
slave.
Frank
(Dennis Hopper) lives up to his name: he is a straightforward brand of evil.
Jeffrey, Sandy and Dorothy, their names ending in y, decorate the action
of the film like adverbs decorate a verb. But Frank is pure action. He
interrupts Dorothy and Jeffrey's brief interlude by pounding on the door. By
the time Dorothy whisks Jeffrey into the closet, he has entered the apartment,
his movements brusque, every word punctuated by obscenities. He has come to
take what is his. As Jeffrey watches from the closet, Frank subjects Dorothy to
a series of humiliating and violent sexual acts. He presses a mask to his mouth
and gasps at an unidentified substance. His eyes bug out. But neither his
person nor his crimes are as disturbing as Dorothy's obvious enjoyment of them.
At the tail end of a punch, her lips curl into a smile.
I shift uncomfortably in my red velvet theatre seat as Frank
finishes dry-humping Dorothy and leaves. She folds her legs up to her chest, a
patch of her blue velvet robe missing where Frank cut it. Naked, Jeffrey
emerges from the closet. He folds Dorothy into his arms. "Are you okay?" he
asks her.
"Hit me," she whispers.
I am not ready to see this, but I cannot look away.
With "Blue
Velvet," Lynch satirizes an antiseptic small-town America and creates its
antithesis, a terrifying villain—but it is through Dorothy that he makes his
most important point. She may love her husband and child, but when they were
taken away, she discovered that she loved pain, and humiliation, and
degradation, too.
We are
almost never ready for the things that end up shaping us the most. Innocence
kidnapped, flesh bared, we wait for whatever lurks in the darkness. As viewers,
we take Jeffrey's place in the closet and wonder at Dorothy's world, where blue
velvet symbolizes the complex dichotomy of human desire, at turns soft and
rough, dark and light. We are Little Red Riding Hood who, in the original tale,
was so fascinated by the wolf that he was able to gobble her whole. We are
voyeurs of violent fantasies, rubbing at the hurt until our fear and desire
explode.
As
Jeffrey deepens his relationship with Sandy, he gets caught up in Dorothy's
world. One moment he shares a tender kiss with Sandy in the local diner, the
picture of 1950s high-school innocence, the next he punches Dorothy during sex.
Like Dorothy, he has a relationship with two very different people, but he
separates his encounters by night and day, location and type, whereas Dorothy
links her savior and her captor by desiring violence from both of them.
Fear is
brawny. It beats the pulp out of our other feelings until it has left scars on
all of them. We turn to it like a bad habit, and no wonder; it's been with us
the longest, longer sometimes than comfort has. It takes us further into the
future than love. It carries us to the outer reaches of our character: how fast
we can run and how much we can stand. Sometimes it takes us far enough to bring
us to what we thought we'd never do.
A young boy and his brother are playing outdoors after dark. From
where they play, they can see the rose bushes in their front yard, the bright
friendly white of their picket fence.
Suddenly, they hear a thin wail. Walking down the street towards
them is a naked woman, arms across her chest, dazed and crying. The young boy's
eyes fill with tears. He is not ready to see this. He cannot look away.
Dorothy's
appearance, naked and battered, in the idyll of Jeffrey and Sandy's
neighborhood, is what marked me the most when I first saw "Blue Velvet."
Her bruises made sense to me (she had just escaped from Frank, after a
particularly horrific event), but the erotic satisfaction with which she
spreads her body open did not. How could a woman already so harmed desire to
degrade herself further?
The
nakedness was an obvious choice. It did not surprise me to learn later on
that the scene is actually based on Lynch's childhood experience. Had the
troubled woman in his past also laid herself bare? Doubtless she had been pried
further and further open as the image echoed in his mind like a refrain, until,
like a symbol, she had no shame, only meaning.
Like
humor, violence often occurs in the space between what's expected and what
actually happens. In a society where the two so often remain separated,
humor—or violence—becomes a natural reaction. Both are particularly-shaped
puzzle pieces that cement the often ill-fitting parts of human desire. If you
despise a man, you can laugh at him or kill him. Satire is punishment on a
grand scale; violence is punishment on a particular scale. Lynch manages to do
both in "Blue Velvet."
If you
were to separate the two worlds in the film, you'd find that both have the
power of a gut-punch: each one alone is enough to sear you. They dredge up fear
and obsession; they demand laughter or horror. But together, they elicit a
curious blend of both.
"What kind of movie is this?" my classmate whispers. I am peeking
around my fingers as Frank searches Dorothy's apartment for Jeffrey, gun in his
hand. He throws open the closet doors, where Jeffrey has been hiding. Jeffrey
puts a bullet in Frank's brain.
I laugh. My classmates laugh, hysterically.
We are laughing to save our lives.
