By Roger Ebert
If you want to understand David Lynch, maybe the place to start is
with his paintings. He paints in a style he describes as "bad primitive
art," and says that one of his paintings works if you feel the desire
to sink your teeth into it.
Although Lynch is a serious painter, he is much better known as a
movie director, and with his latest movie, "Blue Velvet" (now playing
at the Fine Arts), he finds himself at the center of a national
critical firestorm. The movie is so strong, so shocking and yet so
audacious that people walk out shaking their heads; they don't know
quite what to make of it.
I am not one of the film's admirers. Or perhaps I should say, I
admire its craftsmanship but am not one of its defenders. I believe
Lynch is a talented director, and that in "Blue Velvet" he has used his
talent in an unworthy way. The movie is powerful, challenging and made
with great skill, and yet it made me feel pity for the actors who
worked in it and anger at the director for taking liberties with them.
Then I interviewed Lynch in New York, and I found, not a monster, but a
pleasant, sincere man who was disarmingly frank about his film.
If you have not seen "Blue Velvet," perhaps a brief description is
in order. The movie is a head-on collision between two popular genres
from the 1940s: the insipid small-town comedy and the film noir. In the
first genre, a character not unlike Dagwood Bumstead fumbles his way
through life while dogs bark at him, kids play jokes at his expense and
his wife nags him a lot. Yet all is essentially sunny in his world,
which is made up of picket fences, green awnings, shade trees, genial
neighbors, friendly policemen and postmen who know his name. Dagwood,
or whatever you want to call him, acts as if he is unaware that many
males actually do have sex lives.
In the film noir, a more serious and brooding genre, ordinary
people find out that evil lurks just beneath the surfaces of their
lives, and that they themselves are capable of committing unspeakable
acts. A proper film noir is not usually a gangster or crime film, but
the story of how evil enters everyday lives. The genre is profoundly
pessimistic; it does not show bad people doing bad things, but average
people doing bad things. The implication is that we are all capable of
evil.
"Blue Velvet" has two kinds of scenes: (1) The everyday small-town
scenes, in which people go out on dates to the soda fountain and drive
around town in shiny cars, and (2) the subterranean scenes in which the
most unspeakable acts take place behind closed doors. Lynch has cast as
his heroes two clean-cut young performers, the square-jawed Kyle
MacLachlan and the blond, perky Laura Dern. They're both about 18 or 19
years old. One day they stumble across a mystery involving a severed
human ear, and their investigation leads to one of the most shocking
scenes in recent movies.
The scene: MacLachlan hides in the apartment of a local nightclub
singer (Isabella Rossellini), who he suspects knows something about the
ear. He watches as a perverted madman (Dennis Hopper) screams
obscenities at the woman, beats her, inhales narcotic gas from a
cylinder at his belt, and then rapes her. He leaves. Rossellini finds
MacLachlan in the closet, pulls a knife on him, forces him to disrobe
and orally arouses him. Later, she asks him to "be a bad boy" and hit
her. She is a masochist. Although Hopper apparently holds her husband
and son as kidnap victims to force her to submit to him, we realize
with a shock that she has discovered that she likes to be brutalized.
In the course of the film, Rossellini is put through a more severe
emotional ordeal than any movie performer since Marlon Brando and Maria
Schneider in "Last Tango in Paris." In one scene, she lies naked on the
lawn of the local police chief, while strangers form a crowd. I found
that her scenes had an unexpected effect. I responded to their raw
power, yes, but the more I thought about them, the angrier I got,
because Lynch surrounds them with what is essentially a satire on
small-town comedies. He generates this immense and painful power, and
then uses it merely as counterpoint to an immature satire.
The more painfully a director violates the sensibilities of his
audience and his performers, the more serious his intention should be.
Bernardo Bertolucci earns every moment of pain in "Last Tango in Paris"
because he tells us things about the human spirit that we can respond
to and learn from. Ingmar Bergman's "Cries and Whispers," the most
painful film I have ever seen, requires three actresses to portray
moments of incredible pain, debasement and self-revelation. It is a
noble film. Lynch shows us Rossellini naked and humiliated, and then
cuts to jokes about the slogans on the local radio station.
The movie has received some rave reviews, but many of them seem to
tap-dance around the central emotional challenge to the viewer. In the
New Yorker, Pauline Kael says she loves the movie, but her review is an
extended plot summary, a detailed description of the movie that seems
to imply that a precis is enough - she doesn't choose to discuss the
issues it raises. Dave Kehr, in the Chicago Tribune, hardly seems to
have noticed the scenes I just described and devotes most of his
attention to explaining the cleverness of
Lynch's ironic style. Gene Siskel says the director is "playing the
audience like a piano," first shocking us, then making us laugh, as if
merely causing sensation to the audience - any sensation - were by
definition an admirable thing.
Is that all a movie is, style? Some critics think so. They argue
that a movie isn't about anything except itself. They approach "Blue
Velvet" like some kind of clever intellectual puzzle in which the
challenge is to find all of Lynch's filmic references and neat little
in-jokes. But wait a minute. There's a woman standing naked on the lawn
here. Has this movie earned the right to show her that way?
Having talked to Lynch about his film, I am inclined to believe that
he takes it more seriously than many of his defenders do. It is an
intensely personal film, and here's the catch: It is personal for
reasons that Lynch has not put in the film. Therefore, it means more to
him than it ever can to us.
He told me, for example, that the scene of Rossellini naked in the
night was inspired by his childhood: "When I was little, my brother and
I were outdoors late one night, and we saw a naked woman come walking
down the street toward us in a dazed state, crying. I have never
forgotten that moment." What about the scenes in which a woman finds
she loves sadomasochistic abuse more than her own family?
"She is a willing captive. I feel that people can fall into these
things, like steps," Lynch
said. "In real life, it doesn't happen so fast. I'm not saying it
couldn't. I feel like people get into it by degrees. The boy in the
film does what she asks him to do, and finds in himself the ability to
do a lot of the things he never thought he could do."
Lynch said he grew up in Montana, in a town a lot like Lumberton,
the town in his movie. He spent a lot of time in the woods. His father
was a research scientist for the Department of Agriculture. They lived
on a street with picket fences and rose bushes, just like in the
opening of the movie. The family moved around the Pacific Northwest -
Missoula, Mont.; Spokane, Wash.; Boise, Idaho - and then moved east to
Alexandria, Va. Eventually, he found himself enrolled in art school in
Philadelphia, and it was in that city that unspecified bad things
happened to him, and he realized that life was more complicated than he
thought.
He always wanted to be a painter. He got into filmmaking
indirectly, doing some film school projects. His first feature,
"Eraserhead," established him as a brilliant young stylist. Then came
"The Elephant Man" and "Dune." When "Dune" was released, I was struck
by how ugly it was, how deliberately ugly he made its planets and their
life forms. It had none of the awe, wonderment and beauty of many
science-fiction films. I gather that was deliberate. Lynch described
his feelings about painting to me: "You go by most paintings, and they
don't stop you. You can walk by so much because it's merely beautiful.
I like to feel that you could bite my paintings. Not to eat them, to
hurt them. I like to feel like I'm painting with my teeth. I call my
painting `bad' because bad painting has its own beauty. It's not a
designer tapestry or a commercial hype. It makes you react to it."
All right. I have reacted to "Blue Velvet," too. As an experienced
and clever film critic, I even know how to write fashionable praise
ose bushes, just like in the
opening of the movie. The family moved around the Pacific Northwest -
Missoula, Mont.; Spokane, Wash.; Boise, Idaho - and then moved east to
Alexandria, Va. Eventually, he found himself enrolled in art school in
Philadelphia, and it was in that city that unspecified bad things
happened to him, and he realized that life was more complicated than he
thought.
He always wanted to be a painter. He got into filmmaking
indirectly, doing some film school projects. His first feature,
"Eraserhead," established him as a brilliant young stylist. Then came
"The Elephant Man" and "Dune." When "Dune" was released, I was struck
by how ugly it was, how deliberately ugly he made its planets and their
life forms. It had none of the awe, wonderment and beauty of many
science-fiction films. I gather that was deliberate. Lynch described
his feelings about painting to me: "You go by most paintings, and they
don't stop you. You can walk by so much because it's merely beautiful.
I like to feel that you could bite my paintings. Not to eat them, to
hurt them. I like to feel like I'm painting with my teeth. I call my
painting `bad' because bad painting has its own beauty. It's not a
designer tapestry or a commercial hype. It makes you react to it."
All right. I have reacted to "Blue Velvet," too. As an experienced
and clever film critic, I even know how to write fashionable praise
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