Restless, he goes for a stroll and passes Det. Williams' place. They have a chat about the case, as far as is permissible and Geoffrey leaves with a even more aroused curiosity but asks for them to say hi to their daughter Sandy, known from high school. In an entrance for the ages the Sandy emerges from complete blackness under the trees of the footpath to reveal herself to be fashioned from living gold and silver. They catch up with some shared memories of school and he asks what she knows of the case. She takes him to the apartment building where one of the main figures in the case lives, a haggard urban block from the '40s. Both of them feel a little more of the thrill of it but part ways, going back to their homes.
He picks her up from school the next day in an open red car made of pure '50s rock 'n' roll, takes her to a soda joint and tells her his plan to get into that apartment. Weirded but intrigued she agrees. Geoffrey goes up dressed as a bug spray guy and gets through the door of Dorothy Vallens, a femme de film noire who is made of dark edible colour and porcelain. After a close call with a threatening interloper, Geoffrey escapes with a set of keys. The pair of scooby doobies go out that night and see Dorothy singing at her night club where she performs a melting breathy rendition of the title song. They hot foot it the apartment before she can get off stage and agree on a signal when the others get there. The dark rooms reveal more questions than answers and when Geoffrey misses the signal he is caught, hearing the key in the lock.
He springs to the closet as Dorothy enters, exhausted from the set. She takes a freaky sounding call which tells us through half a conversation that her husband and child are being held hostage. As she is preparing for a visit Geoffrey stumbles in his hiding place. Instead of screaming or running, Dorothy fetches a shark knife from her kitchen and drags Geoffrey out, nicking him when he tries to evade her questions. Then things turn stranger as she seems to seduce him at knifepoint. They go to the sofa but there is a knock on the door and Dorothy is transformed by pure terror. Geoffrey springs back to the closet and Frank walks in.
Frank who is made of vintage sports coats and knuckles enters like a supple bulldozer, barking commands at her. He sits at the couch and downs a whiskey and a gulp of something from a gas cannister and leaps on Dorothy in a ritual assault that crashes bizarre language and even stranger sexual moves, all the while bringing a pair of rasping scissors close to her body. After this, he stands over her and tells her to stay alive, to do it for Van Gough. And with his exit, the pretty but daggy town Geoffrey knew as a boy with its breezy, kitsch radio jingles and '50s billboards, has become one of the circles of Hell.
That's about ten times more plot than I usually supply in one of these articles but there's a reason for that. Blue Velvet is so very entrenched in living cinematic memory that we are often inclined to remember it by soundbite and extreme scene. That it is so strongly narrative and tightly constructed leaves our impressions until we see it again. If you have any inclination toward it as a film and have only distant memories of it I urge to to get in front of it again. By the way, the reason I'm not counting it as a 1986 release is that it didn't come out in Australia until 1987 and influenced the conversation of everyone who saw it for at least that year. A little time after its release a pair of friends gave me a large poster of the film as a birthday present. It's still on the wall of my living room, just above the fireplace.
Geoffrey's arc takes him from a confident young adult to someone whose revealed darkness and destructiveness leave him crying in his childhood bed. Unlike with the consistently awkward Dune, Kyle McLachlan found space to move in Geoffrey. He sheds his boyish curiosity early but trades it for the unknown within himself. By the time the monster Frank says to him, "you're like me," and gets punched for it the act seems at first like heroism but I've always taken it as guilty recognition. His personal task is to work himself into a new Geoffrey who can accommodate such things while still developing.
Speaking of developing the arc that's even more profound is that of Dorothy as played by Isabella Rosselini. We meet her living in a state of shock. Her family is imprisoned by the man who visits to violate her to humiliating damage whenever he wants. She is allowed to continue her career at the club but he turns up there, too. She is being kept in a state of emotional chaos and physical pain that she knows only that she can placate her tormentor with shows of pleasure. In his absence she implodes, responding to Geoffrey's increasingly motivated kindness with a kind of repeat bullying. Her moments of lucidity bring memories of trauma and a constant touch point of despair. Although her journey back is not as detailed as Geoffrey's when the film ends on her it is to show her in strength and at peace. It always makes me well up.
Dorothy's counterpart, Sandy, is young enough to believe in her dream of cosmic Robins bringing peace but she is by no means The Girlfriend role. She is as drawn by the mystery as Geoffrey but has the sense to keep herself from the darkness of its power. Laura Dern had already impressed in her role just before this (far from her first but among her first as a young adult) in Smooth Talk where she played her effortless allure against her recognition of the threat of the intruder, her uncertainty of caution vs impulse needed experience to resolve it. Geoffrey is no rock 'n' roll bad boy, for all his confidence - she frequently exposes the flaws in his thinking - but she has every reason to believe he will lose control of himself with only a little flick of circumstance. Later, when gutted by a confrontation with his "adventures" she restrains herself in front of him, showing him how that's done. It's a harder sell as an arc as it inolves the least trauma, but an arc it is.
The character without arc is the beast of the story. Frank is everything that everyone in Lumberton and all of the world beyond it fears, unbridled in his sexuality, sensuality, violence and will and always, always on. His first scene sets the tone of every subsequent appearance with the dread on ten. You only need to see he's there when he and Geoffrey meet to start wanting to watch through your fingers. Dennis Hopper was still crawling from his swamp of Hollywood exile when he took this role. From a notable return role in Coppola's Rumblefish and soon to impress again in Tim Hunter's River's Edge, he reinvented himself as a character actor with a jagged edge. Famously he called Lynch personally, after reading the Blue Velvet screenplay, saying: "I have to play Frank because I am Frank."
Frank Booth became one of the few characters who could be quoted and named in full by movie buffs or almost anyone after a night of drinking with the gang. His constantly swearing dialogue was attributed to undeclared Tourette syndrome which neither Lynch nor Hopper ever bothered denying or affirming, just another weird quirk for the bad guy. This will seem unremarkable to anyone young enough to have seen Tarantino and clones' efforts in the '90s first but he's the only character in Blue Velvet who does talk like that. It's the song of the force and the driving of his id and clears the table before him. Also, it means little without Hopper's injection of animation. When he yells "Let's Fuuuuck" as his gang are about to drive off again it's not because he meant to say "let's go" or even "let's rock". He means "let's fuck" but that has its own meaning which can only be communicated through his nerve shreddingly unpredictable actions. Frank is the thing that comes out of the night and takes everything he sees and turns it into himself or garbage. And yet, sing or even just mime an oldie by Roy Orbison and the intensity of it makes him explode. In the club his face screws up and he strokes a length of Blue Velvet manically while those very words are being sung by Dorothy. Even his tenderness is terrifying.
Back in the late '80s a version of Blue Velvet was prepared for prime time tv. I taped it to get some kind of copy of my own. Frank's dialogue had been substituted to the point where it sounded like dadaist prose: "Let's freak!" "I freak everything that moves." "I'll freak you, you freakin' freaker!" I could put that on as a kind of parallel universe version. I taped over it eventually and when it became available on DVD that was the end of that. Still wish I'd kept it, though.
Blue Velvet rests in the catalogue of David Lynch as the one that broke him through. Famously hated by Roger Ebert but championed back into the mainstream by Pauline Kael, it felt like a point of honour to its generation the same way that his debut Eraserhead had done to its own as a midnight movie. It succeeded in the cinema and enjoyed a growing reputation as a VHS essential in share houses and couples on the dinner party circuit along with the Nine and a Half Weeks, Fatal Attractions and Betty Blues of the time. But none of those others had a David Lynch who would give us a prologue that went from naively perfect neighbourhoods, to building tension with a tangled garden hose to a dive beneath the lawn to a world of warring insects within minutes to the sweetness of Bobby Vinton's version of the title song. And then when the violence first broke to show it as chaotic, only barely held together by a nervewracking kind of Stockholm syndrome. And then to make us tear up at the sight of a wind up bird with a bug in its beak. Lynch's team gave us colour pallettes out of dreams and soundscapes that blended low, uneasy hums with Bernard Hermann style orchestral scoring. And his cast gave us performances from nightmares as well as awkwardness from our own world and told a tale of deliverance impossible to forget.
This film marks the beginning of David Lynch's profile in mainstream culture and when the term Lynchian began to be used to refer to anything bizarre in cinema and even daily life. He had a brief run at this height with the hit tv series Twin Peaks but this resulted in a slide from mass favour with the lower quality second season of the show, the films Wild at Heart and Fire Walk With Me which garnered criticisms of weird for its own sake (however undeserved). His career found a more erratic path through the anomalous The Straight Story (a blind spot among his fans) and the fugue trilogy of Lost Highway, the celebrated Mulholland Dr., and the gingerly handled Inland Empire. Most recently, he returned to Twin Peaks and created a tour de force that slapped the wrists of fans expecting service and invited the adventurous to follow through to a heartrending conclusion. It might have seemed muted and obscure but still had the freshness and energy of the early work that got him into cinema to begin with. It was Lynch coming out of the ears and it was difficult but it had a real point.
Back in 1987 I had been waiting for the release of Blue Velvet since I saw Leonard Maltin review it on tv. I'd been a fan of Lynch for life from the twin punch of Eraserhead and The Elephant Man, providing worlds that only existed in one mind and then a version of history that lived there, too. I cringed at Dune, the more so since I'd presuaded my brother in law to join me at the cinema for it. Then again, its look and sound and some of its shocking violence gave me hope that Lynch hadn't just sold out to big-time town. Dune was too big for him. Eraserhead is set in Henry's head and John Merrick's life is told in close quarters getting horrifying when he is out in the open. Blue Velvet appeared to be progression but within a manageable pallette.
I had taken up with a fellow flatmate whose taste for the unusal and obscure were in good health. We went to see Blue Velvet together. It was on at Hoyts as Dune had been. I reasoned that even if it did go to difficult places its mainstream venue suggested they wouldn't be too hard. We settled in and rolled with it until Frank's entrance. My own shock at the assault was put in a vice of what my companion might be thinking. I couldn't look away from the screen however grating its violence. It felt like it was really happening in front of me. The cinema's air conditioning could not keep up with my sweating. We both watched to the end of the credits in silence and I wondered if she would even talk to me afterwards. We slowly made our way out through the foyeur, numb. In the light of the morning outside she whispered: "that was incredible."
I sighed. It felt like the first breath in or out for two hours.
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