Some Drivel On...Blue Velvet

“Man, oh man,” says Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan) after waking up from a bad dream. It’s a funny line and an even funnier line reading, a little aw shucks, a little gee whiz, epitomizing “Blue Velvet’s” (1986) hazy dreamworld somewhere between 1950 and 1980, like if George McFly had been pulled from his peeping tom escapades into a psychosexual nightmare. That’s essentially what happens when Jeffrey returns to his idyllic hometown of Lumberton to see his ailing father (Tom Harvey), a wry red herring, as it’s not this familial strife that sets in motion a reckoning but Jeffrey discovering a severed ear in the grass. “It had to be an ear,” writer/director David Lynch would remark, “because it’s an opening.” I suppose that’s true but taken in context with Lynch’s opening images of swaths of black insects buzzing just beneath the finely manicured lawns of small-town paradise, I thought it more emblematic of how Jeffrey essentially puts his ear to the earth to hear the thrum of the underworld below.

Though Jeffrey takes the ear to a police detective (Dean Stockwell), he also blithely decides to open his own faux investigation into the severed organ with the detective’s daughter Sandy (Laura Dern) as his co-amateur sleuth, their clue leading them to nightclub singer Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rossellini) with whom Jeffrey becomes romantically entwined too. Indeed, “Blue Velvet” is a movie of contrasts and there are none more striking than Sandy’s pink costuming and Dorothy’s blue, the former like a wholesome prom queen, the latter a noirish femme fatale. MacLachlan furthers those contrasts by alternating his persona between a cocky college student back home when Jeffrey is with Sandy and a scared overgrown kid when he’s with Dorothy, no more a child yet not quite a man. In that way, “Blue Velvet’s” most famous sequence, the one in which Jeffrey hides in Dorothy’s closet while sadistic drug dealer Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper), who has kidnapped her husband and child, holding her in bondage, terrorizes and tortures her, becomes nothing less than Lynch’s version of the wardrobe in Narnia, a window into the bewildering, tantalizing, traumatizing world of adults.

The scene is also our introduction to Frank, a character virtually reduced to nothing but animal urges. “I’ll fuck anything that moves!” he screams at one point. And there is something about the way Hopper says this line, just as he memorably barks “Pabst Blue Ribbon” to indicate his beer of choice later. The words don’t come out at the right tempo, or something, bringing to life the character’s terrifying impulsiveness, the way Hopper makes him feel like he’s not acting out instructions in the script but following his own muse. He’s such a big presence, in fact, that his demise feels anti-climactic. He needed to be devoured by a black hole. The antidote to Frank is Sandy, played by Dern with an All-American innocence that is slowly compromised, though not quite shattered. Her unforgettable monologue about dreaming of a world in darkness only for robins representing love to effuse it with a bright light is elevated by Angelo Badalamenti’s score into the realm of a fairytale. And yet, as “Blue Velvet” ends, flowers bloom, robins arrive, spring has come, love has triumphed. Is it real? More than any time in my life, I came away wanting to believe it was.  

In Memoriam: David Lynch

My favorite David Lynch movie is “The Straight Story” (1999), maybe because it’s set in Iowa, or at least, because it starts in Iowa, which happens to be where I’m from. It begins with aerial images of a cornfield, a grain elevator, a main street, quintessential small town Iowa Chamber of Commerce stuff but quintessential small town Iowa chamber of commerce stuff with a purpose. Because it’s the next shot, craning down toward a house, and then in closer on a window, evoking how Lynch gets under that conventional surface to see what’s really under there. Lynch’s work was often classified as strange, or weird, and so much was made of “The Straight Story’s” G-rating, as if Lynch, once famously described by Mel Brooks as “Jimmy Stewart from Mars” was finally just being Jimmy Stewart from Earth. But you can imagine Lynch reading a news clipping of the real-life Alvin Straight journeying 240 miles from Iowa and Wisconsin aboard a riding lawn mower to see his ailing brother and thinking, hey, that’s kinda weird. Because small town Iowans, I can tell you from experience, are a little weird and I say that with all the love in my heart. Richard Farnsworth as Alvin Straight embodied Midwestern stoicism, but he also hinted at the mysteries and passions humming underneath, the kind many might reflexively assume small town Iowans lack. “The Straight Story” ends not with a long conversation between the two brothers but them looking up at the stars in the sky instead and it makes me think of going home and sitting on the deck with my dad and looking up at the stars in the sky and knowing that in sometimes saying nothing you are able to still say it all. 

That ending might have been closer to Lynch than we realize. In interviews he often derided unnecessary conversation and adamantly refused to explain his movies which in their surrealist sensations often screamed out for explanations. I loved this about him. Indeed, somewhere along the way I realized that if a movie had a director’s Q&A afterwards, I never wanted to stay for it lest their explanation ruin my interpretation. Lynch, bless his heart, left it up to each and every one of us. He apparently directed a pilot episode for “Star Trek: The Next Generation” all the way back in 1984 that never saw the light of day because it was too, well, Lynch. It’s not so much the existence of this unaired pilot that intrigues me as it is Lynch being associated with “Star Trek” at all. Because if I wanted to try to describe the experience of watching Lynch movies, I might say it was the closest any of us were ever going to get to being dematerialized into pure energy in those moments between being beamed from one place to another by Scotty. What’s the “I’ve Told Ev’ry Little Star” scene in “Mulholland Drive” if not all the b.s. of the movie business suddenly giving way to the moment when a movie emotionally teleports you to another planet? But look at me, interpreting. Lynch’s movies could baffle me, and his movies could mesmerize me, and his movies could do both at once, and a few of his movies I just plum did not like even if more often than not his movies left me with something I would never forget. Any time I sit down to watch a Hallmark Christmas movie, and I watch more of them than I should, Crispin Glover in “Wild at Heart” is not far from my mind. 

I had been working at the Cobblestone 9 movie theater for about five months when “Lost Highway” was released. It was too arty for a multiplex, frankly, and therefore relegated to theater one, like a room, to quote Elaine Benes, “where they bring in POWs to show them propaganda films.” Even so, a few of the other concessionists and I would time our breaks to go up to theater one and leave our bodies for a few minutes by watching the scene where Robert Blake goes up to Bill Pullman at the party and tells Pullman to call him at his home where, sure enough, Blake answers the phone despite being right there in front of Pullman, as evocative of Lynch’s delightful, demented interdimensionality as anything. That was the movie, that was the scene, that made me want to go and find out what David Lynch was all about. In fact, upon learning he died yesterday at the age of 78, I was surprised that when I got home, I didn’t get a phone call from Lynch saying hey from wherever or whatever is on the other side. He wouldn’t have told me what it was like, of course. I’d have to wait and figure that out for myself. 

Watch the scene from “Lost Highway” here

Friday's {New} Old Fashioned: The Straight Story (1999)

A little over ten years ago I got a call from my best friend in Brooklyn. I was living in Des Moines, Iowa at the time, and my best friend had a friend driving cross-country with two others to attend the fabled Burning Man Festival in California. These three needed a place to crash for the night so my best friend asked if I might provide shelter and without a moment’s hesitation I said sure. I told friends about this after the fact, how I let three people I’d never met and would never see again (and only one of whom my best friend could officially vouch for) into my home to have the run of my living room for an entire evening, and my friends often seemed weirded out and confused. I was confused by their confusion. Why wouldn’t I give these people a place to stay for the night? Am I not an Iowan? (Spoiler Alert: the bunkers were very nice and very gracious, and even folded up the blankets that I’d provided the next morning.)

“The Straight Story” (or: David Lynch’s G-rated Film) is a film from 1999 about a legally blind farmer from Laurens, Iowa who hops aboard a John Deere tractor and motors it all the way to Wisconsin to visit his ill brother (Harry Dean Stanton). It would seem a fable if it wasn’t true, and it is. The farmer, Alvin Straight (Richard Farnsworth), concocts a rudimentary bunk that he hitches up to the tractor and off he goes, off into the green loping hills and past the amber waves of grain that decorate the back country of my home state. There are setbacks, sure, and semi trucks laying on the horn and blowing up dust as they roar by, but the majority of hardships that Alvin encounters merely work to illuminate the kindness of strangers. And to eventually unearth Alvin’s own story at a pace akin to his journey.

You may recall that Farnsworth was nominated for an Oscar, and it is truly a marvelous performance, so perfectly effortless. You may also recall that it emerged post-picture that Farnsworth was in great pain for the duration of the shoot, suffering from bone cancer that would cause him to take his own life. Apparently, however, he kept this to himself on set. He didn’t want to trouble anyone and didn’t want anyone to make a fuss. It’s so true to his character, and so true to an undemonstrative spirit prevalent in the Midwest. Which is why his character’s gregarious reluctance to assistance on the open road, until he has no choice but to accept it, come across wholly authentic. That reminded me of the Grandfather on my Dad’s side – a Minnesotan, not an Iowan, but still a Midwesterner, and a man of immense individual resource who I often remember sticking to his stoic guns of self-reliance.

No matter how much toll the journey and his health and his emotional well-being may take, Farnsworth’s weathered face appears content. Oh, but that contentment masks a sadness, what with the mentally ill daughter he cares for back at home, his simmering memories of days in the trenches during WWII and, of course, the estranged relationship with his brother he is striking off to see. He reveals, bit by bit, the totality of his story to the various strangers he encounters, a wonderfully natural – the way that getting a clammed up Iowan to spill the beans of the past is like, as they say, pulling teeth, except that once the teeth have been pulled then we are more than willing to talk to whomever is willing to listen. But listen to the way he talks. It is simple recitation of facts, a person who mentally has already made peace with his lot in life. The script by John Roach and Mary Sweeney is not so numb-skulled as to have him say "Every day is a blessing", but this is the sentiment sublty conveyed by Farnsworth throughout.

This is why the final sequence and the inevitable confrontation with his brother, which turns out not to be a confrontation at all, astonishes in its genuine simplicity. These people and this place is not where you come for dramatic confrontations. Midwesterners are not about Big Scenes and Teary Monologues. That stays inside. Mere acknowledgment is all the moment requires, and a chance to sit together once more in silence and look at the stars.