'Velvet' Goldmine
After 20 years, David Lynch's masterpiece still glitters
By Andy Klein
The opening credits of David Lynch's Blue Velvet - playing this week at the Nuart in a fresh print - are superimposed over a widescreen curtain of - what else? - tatty velvet, bluer than blue, accompanied by Angelo Badalamenti's dark main theme. As the music gives way to the Bobby Vinton oldie from which the film takes its title, the image dissolves to one of the most memorable opening sequences in American cinema - a ghostly montage of banal small-town life with hints of sinister forces bubbling right beneath bushes of the world's reddest roses. Later, in the film's dense interweaving of images, this gaudy color will be associated with lipstick and with blood. Both the sadistic villain (Dennis Hopper) and the sensuous lady-in-distress (Isabella Rossellini) will smear the face of the hero (Kyle MacLachlan) with red. But, in Lynch's perverse world, the lipstick will come from Hopper's kiss and the blood from Rossellini's knife.
It's been just a tad under 20 years since Blue Velvet cemented David Lynch's reputation. Eraserhead (1977) had been one of the first great midnight-movie hits, but it could easily have been a one-shot wonder; The Elephant Man (1981) proved the cult director could function in a more Hollywood setting; but then the ill-fated Dune (1984) threatened to relegate him back to midnight movies.
And then along came Blue Velvet: Most critics spoke of it in awed, confounded tones; even those who hated it recognized it as a significant film that had to be dealt with. It wasn't much of a commercial success, but no one expected it to be. Dino de Laurentiis, who had funded it, had to start his own distribution company, because he knew - in that period before the heyday of big indies like Miramax - no one else would handle it. It did passably and snagged Lynch his second Oscar nomination for Best Director.
My opinion of the film hasn't changed after two decades, even if my reading of it and my experience viewing it have. This is partly because of the ways an artist's subsequent work can continually redefine how we see their earlier efforts. While a sequel to Blue Velvet would have been about as likely as Citizen Kane 2, Twin Peaks - an attenuated version of the same turf - was presumably conceived as (in spirit) Blue Velvet: The Series. During its first 15 or 16 episodes, the show provided a more leisurely tour of the fascinating, scary jungle of Lynch's subconscious. (While it's hard to say that Blue Velvet, for all its notoriety, was influential, Twin Peaks, its serial cousin, has been remarkably so, paving the way for The X Files, American Gothic, Carnivale, and others.)
Familiarity with the movie - together with 20 years of cultural evolution - may blunt its shock value, but not its effectiveness. That's because it works in ways that go beyond its scenes of sadism and sexual decay. Its repetition of images and distinctive visual style operate at a subconscious level to suggest meanings for us that are all the more powerful for being subconscious.
It's Lynch's lesser works that have really changed my view of Blue Velvet. On its initial release, I scoffed at those who said that Lynch's art was primarily intuitive, that he had simply spilled his subconscious out onto the screen. So intricate were the interlocking patterns of colors, roles, repeated lines of dialogue, and images that they had to be the result of a deliberate, intellectual construction. Lynch's unresponsive interviews had to be a coy game.
I was wrong. With the exception of Mulholland Dr. - whose transformation from TV pilot to feature did require that sort of cerebral construction - the director really does seem to work more instinctively than intellectually. He does just spill the stuff out: which is why sometimes it's messy but intriguing (Lost Highway), and sometimes it doesn't come together at all (Wild at Heart).
But, when the stars are right, it coalesces brilliantly ... and never more so than in Blue Velvet.
Published: 07/13/2006
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