OMG! Today I woke up at 2 in the afternoon and pretty much worked until 3 in the morning with a couple breaks to eat. When I wasn't eating I was working on one of three essays or letters I had to write. I've never worked for such a long period of time in my life. Here's the essay on Blue Velvet I wrote. I think I could've added lots of stuff to it, but I was limited by the guidelines set for the essay.
Well, here it is...
"So Hyperfamiliar It’s Scary"
Being different is nothing new to David Lynch, he makes a living out of doing it. What sets Lynch apart from most filmmakers is that in these explorations he’s unafraid to use images that might turn off mainstream crowds due to being excessively violent or confusing. His work will often involve exploring familiar territory in an unfamiliar way or from an unfamiliar angle. In his 1986 film Blue Velvet, Lynch explores the dark underbelly of suburban life in a way that no other film had yet done. Other films such as Sam Mendes’ American Beauty (1999) have since served as harsh indictments of the illusion of a happy suburban household, but few films have explored suburbia in as a bizarre and disturbingly effective manner as Lynch has. Later in his career, the director would go on to explore similar themes with his hit television series Twin Peaks (1990) which chronicled the investigation of a brutal murder within a tight knit community full of quirky characters who aren’t all what they appear to be.
In the 1997 documentary Pretty As a Picture: The Art of David Lynch, which loosely documents Lynch’s creative process while filming Lost Highway (1997), we’re exposed to Lynch’s other preferred form of art: painting. His love for painting and even designing furniture are all presented as extensions of his love for the visual aspect of filmmaking. From the backwards talking dwarf who inhabits the red room in Twin Peaks to the baby in Eraserhead (1977) and the moody atmosphere of The Elephant Man (1980), Lynch’s work relies heavily on its visual properties and their ability to unsettle the audience. With the help of Frederick Elms, who was also the cinematographer of Eraserhead, Blue Velvet is filled with imagery so rich that it sticks with you long after the credits have rolled.
Set in the eighties, but with a distinctly fifties feel to it, the story of Blue Velvet is set around Jeffrey Beaumont, a typical clean cut college boy. He’s returned to Lumberton to visit his ailing father and while on a walk through town he discovers a severed human ear. Although he turns the ear over to the authorities he’s overcome with curiosity and with the help of the police chief’s daughter, played by Laura Dern, he launches a “Hardy Boys” style investigation. During his investigation he meets a disturbed nightclub singer, wonderfully played by Isabella Rossellini, and is thrown head first into a mysterious dark underworld involving drugs, murder, and sexual perversion. The source of much of this perversion is the drug-addicted sadist, Frank. In a remarkable, energized performance by Dennis Hopper, Frank is the personification of society’s darker side, the polar opposite of everything represented by the wholesome image of Lumberton, a small idyllic logging town. Acting as Lynch’s alter ego with his trademark buttoned up shirt, Jeffrey bridges the gap between the two opposing worlds and investigates the relationship between them.
The most effective series of images in Blue Velvet appear right of the bat in the opening. Not only does it suck you into the carefully crafted world that Lynch is going to set his story in, but the sequence also serves as a visual metaphor for, as the director puts it in an October 1986 interview with GQ Magazine, “the sickness beneath the surface of what appears to be a very beautiful world.” The film begins with the credits over a blue velvet curtain as the sensual score by Angelo Badalamenti plays until the film dissolves into the baby blue sky of Lumberton. Badalamenti’s score is replaced by the song “Blue Velvet” and Lynch begins to present the viewer with an idyllic representation of suburban life. The images are a trip back to the fifties littered with bright patriotic colors and oozing with naïveté, it’s what Norman Rockwell might have shot had he been a filmmaker. From the blue sky, the camera shifts its attention to a bright white picket fence sitting in stark contrast to the blood-red roses growing in front of it. In the following shot a fireman aboard a bright red fire truck passes by waving to the camera with his trusty Dalmatian by his side. Another image of a white picket fence follows, this time accented by yellow tulips. Meanwhile, in another part of the town, children are shown safely crossing the street with the aid of a helpful crossing guard. The colors throughout the sequence are very heavily saturated, almost bleeding off of the screen and the images are so bright and sharp that the viewer could almost feel the crisp morning air in their lungs.
The introduction of the film could very easily have just been a tongue in cheek mockery of the idealized self image that the United States has of itself when thinking of the fifties, but Lynch takes it one step further. The montage of images continues beyond the children and roses and proceeds to a man watering his lawn. He notices that the hose is kinked and the camera focuses on him as he’s trying to untangle it. Lynch has pulled us out of the dream like series of images and has shifted our focus onto a moment of minor drama. As the man struggles with the hose everything about the world that Lynch has carefully crafted in front of us with some well selected images begins to collapse in on itself. Amidst his struggle the man suddenly clutches his neck and collapses onto the ground in agony, apparently the victim of a seizure. As he convulses on the ground with the hose still in hand, a dog leans on his chest and pecks at the hose trying to drink the water while a young boy eating a Popsicle approaches to watch the unfolding events. Upon the collapse of an idyllic world that Lynch had so efficiently setup, the director guides the camera into the depths of the nearby grass until the camera delves underground and is overrun by insects representing the darkness beneath the surface of this ideal world.
In the first two minutes of the film, Lynch sets up the kind of the community that the story will be taking place in and through the twist at the end of the sequence he establishes the theme of suburban disillusionment. His television show, Twin Peaks, was also very similar in the way it establishes a false sense of tranquility within a disturbed community right off the bat. The opening credits of the television show consisted of images of waterfalls, birds, and various other nature scenes set to yet another beautiful score written by Badalamenti. The opening credits of the show invite you into what seems like paradise until you watch the show and realize what’s lurking beneath the surface of the small town known as Twin Peaks, Washington. In both opening montages Lynch doesn’t waste a single shot, each one is essential in providing the viewer with a familiar context in which the story is going to unfold.
In Sigmund Freud’s essay, “The Uncanny,” the question of what it is that makes an image uncanny or disturbing is at the center of the work. He states that “the uncanny is that class of the frightening which leads us back to what is known of old and long familiar.” Freud makes the argument that for something to truly be uncanny it must deal with something the audience is familiar with and can relate to. If the images strike an emotional chord in the viewer and deal with something they might have experienced or seen it’s going to be especially effective when that image is distorted. This strategy has been the staple of Lynch’s work throughout his career, even in his most accessible film, The Straight Story (1999). In that film, the protagonist embarks on a cross country journey on his tractor to meet his sick brother, the concept is so uncanny that it makes for an especially poignant experience when coupled with Richard Farnsworth’s excellent performance.
It comes as no surprise that a film exploring the darkness amidst the pursuit of happiness would have been the creation of an American filmmaker. In Europe, the tortured artist figure is much romanticized, it’s understood that people have their good days and their bad days. Vincent Van Gogh is revered for his work and stories of him cutting off his ear over a floundering relationship are a favorite amongst art buffs and the general public alike. While Americans enjoy stories of such behavior and will gladly buy Van Gogh prints to hang on their walls, to actually live a life like his or to even condone one is out of the question. There’s a drive to always be happy that’s inherent in the culture of the United States and the fifties best exemplified that drive with its foolishly optimistic outlook on the world on the heels of the second world war and with the cold war looming overhead. In the following decades, much of the American public would be disillusioned by the Vietnam War and the revolutionary fervor that would build through the sixties and ultimately culminate both in the United States and overseas in 1968.
In the eighties, the “American dream” was once again making a comeback. Credit cards were the weapon of choice and Americans were in a frenzy buying their way to happiness. It was in 1986, the year Blue Velvet was released, that a Beirut magazine made waves by revealing that the United States had been supporting the Contras in Iran and had traded thousands of missiles to them in exchange for hostages. The Iran-Contra Affair had been made public and once again the general public was in a state of disillusionment. It was hard to believe that the Reagan administration, headed by a man who had charmed the public during his days as an actor and had won the public over as a politician, had taken part in illegal activities, leaving many Americans in its wake questioning their worldview.
It was on this sour note that Blue Velvet, a film dealing with disillusionment was unleashed upon the public. In an interview in the book Lynch on Lynch, edited by Chris Rodley, David Lynch is quoted as saying, “This is the way America is to me. There’s a very innocent, naïve quality to life, and there’s a horror and sickness as well. It’s everything. Blue Velvet is a very American movie.” As he states, Blue Velvet is a very American movie, moreover, both Lynch and Blue Velvet are uniquely American products, products of a society in which there is an unrelenting drive toward happiness. Lynch was lashing back at this ideal in a way that only someone raised in the country could have done. This was one film in a long line of responses presented by American filmmakers to the constant irrational struggle for unabated happiness. Films such as Douglas Sirk’s Imitation of Life (1959) explored the theme during the fifties, the era this film seems so preoccupied with and artists such as Todd Solondz, with his film Happiness (1998), would continue exploring this phenomenon well into the nineties.
Exploring the unfamiliar aspect of that which is very familiar is the root of what makes this film so unsettling for many and is what might have caused the film to open to less than enthusiastic reviews and public opinion. Images of Isabella Rossellini being subjected to what appears to be a sort of ritualistic rape were too much to handle for some and the box office numbers made it known. Pauline Kael might have had Freud’s theory in mind when she stated in her review for The New Yorker that the film was, “so hyperfamiliar it’s scary,” a sentiment that many seemed to share, but one which each person interpreted differently when it came to deciding whether that was good or bad thing. In general, it appeared that an exploration of the darker side of suburban America was something mainstream American audiences didn’t want to see, especially when done with the sort of uncanny imagery that Lynch is known for. Todd Solondz’s Happiness was cursed with the same fate. It’s only with a much more tame film such as American Beauty, although only more tame on the surface, that a film of this kind becomes easier for the public to swallow and laugh at. While the response from critics at the time of the films release was a bit cold in the states, the film was very well received overseas by an audience that was watching a film bashing a culture that wasn’t their own.
Lynch’s use of uncanny imagery and his way of distorting the familiar are what make Blue Velvet such a fantastic work of art. His work isn’t bizarre for the sake of being bizarre, the images are purposely setup to disturb the audience because what he’s representing is something that’s disturbing. When presenting the images that he does in this film he’s revealing truths about the society that it’s a product of and whether audiences want to accept that truth is entirely up to them. At the end of the film, Lynch chooses to reuse the images he had used at the beginning of the film, this time in a loosely reverse order. Seeing these images again in the context of all the events that preceded them, the images posses a much more sinister and pessimistic tone. In the introduction the images were refreshing up until the seizure, but after exploring the darker side of Lumberton with Jeffrey and David, the director commits his final act of perversion by completely altering the meaning of the images that physically remain untouched. Knowing what lies underneath we can no longer look at the surface in the same way.
Works Cited
American Beauty. Dir. Sam Mendes. Dream Works SKG. 1999.
Blue Velvet. Dir. David Lynch. MGM. 1986.
“Classic Scene: Blue Velvet.” 2002. < http://www.lynchnet.com/bv/bvpremiere.html>
Dirks, Tom. “Blue Velvet” 1996-2002. < http://www.filmsite.org/blue.html>
Elephant Man, The. Dir. David Lynch. Paramount Pictures. 1980.
Eraserhead. Dir. David Lynch. Columbia TriStar Home Video. 1977.
Forrest, Darlene, ed. Writing the Essay: Art & the World.
New York: McGraw Hill Primis 2002
Freud, Sigmund. “The ‘Uncanny’.” Forrest 228-261.
Happiness. Dir. Todd Solondz. Good Machine. 1998.
Kael, Pauline. For Keeps: 30 Years at the Movies. “Blue Velvet: Out There and In Here.
New York: Penguin Books USA. 1996.
Lost Highway. Dir. David Lynch. October Films. 1997.
Pretty as a Picture: The Art of David Lynch. Dir. Toby Keeler. Image Entertainment.
1997.
Rodley, Chris, ed. Lynch on Lynch. England: Faber and Faber, 1997.
Straight Story, The. Dir. David Lynch. Buena Vista Pictures. 1999.
Wow, if you actually read through this to the end, congratulations...
