I re-read the chapter on Blue Velvet in Jameson’s Postmodernism book and have additional Lynch thoughts, like everybody on this website it seems. It got way too long and is hastily written and repetitive, so skip it by all means. But I figured I may as well post it since I wrote it.

I love the idea of film/TV as a writer’s medium, including extreme cases where the actors are engaging with the writing as if on stage and the cinematographers are The Help (like BBC Shakespeare or the miniserieses of Tinker, Taylor, Soldier Spy, or even Paths to Freedom and the Pallisers). Obviously it is possible and much better to have a hyper-literary script that becomes real cinema, like with Rohmer, but I’m a bit surprised that no-budget films with cardboard sets haven’t made a comeback. Anyway Lynch, who was a painter after all, approaches film from the opposite direction. Lynch was very pop, but what director working at the same time was more convincingly adventurous with film as a medium? For my money Hans-Jürgen Syberberg, I guess Goddard, Herzog during his 70s hot streak. Jacques Rivette was one of the only people in 1992 to realize Fire Walk With Me was a masterpiece. Envelope-pushing isn’t everything, I probably prefer more formally conservative filmmakers, but Lynch’s ability to to be more adventurous than Rivette in what was almost the direct-to-video prequel to an canceled 90s network TV show is unique.

There are unforgettable lines in Lynch movies, but often they are lines like “now it’s dark” and “you don’t belong here.” They are part of a dream logic that gives the words a power they would lack on the printed page. The over-the-top obscenities of Frank from Blue Velvet are completely different from Tarantino dialogue. The Suave Man says to him “here’s to your health” and Frank responds “no, here’s to your fuck.” He repeats the offending word in almost every sentence he speaks. This isn’t gangster dialogue, it is near-nonsense, as if imagined by an 11 year old who knows you shouldn’t say the f-word but is at once frightened and fascinated by it. Frank is hardly even a character. He is a nightmare, forcing you to hear and see things you don’t want to think about. The spectacle of Isabella Rossellini’s Dorthy taking pleasure from being raped (or whatever horrible thing it is that Frank is doing to her) retains all of its power and hasn’t, as we now say, “aged poorly,” because what’s being represented is an intrusive fantasy. It is partly Dorthy’s own fantasy, mostly Jeffrey’s. (The Lacanians are right to like Lynch, because he presents dreams that detach themselves from the subject that is dreaming them. When Lynch’s dream figures act like “regular characters,” they mostly become walking cliches out of a sitcom or cop show, or rather versions of this kind of cliche with something visibly off. The acting can give the cliches weight and intensity, and there are exceptions, in particular Sheryl Lee and Ray Wise in Fire Walk With Me.) An early 80s “erotic thriller” featuring a woman enjoying her own rape (by her child’s kidnapper!) in a kinky BDSM-adjacent way is easy to imagine and would really be intolerable. Evidently this is what Roger Ebert thought Blue Velvet was. But Frank is too far removed from either realism or genre conventions for this perspective to capture him. At one point, after Dean Stockwell’s uncanny lip-synch of “Sandman,” Frank puts on lipstick, sloppily kisses Jeffrey, and says “I'm gonna send you a love letter. Straight from my heart, fucker. You know what a  love letter is? It's a bullet. Straight from my gun, fucker. Once you get a love letter from me, you're fucked forever!” [I initially transcribed this from memory and I didn’t put in enough “fucks.”] This reminds a bit of Hannibal Lecter or the stereotypical gay/pervert serial killer, but that’s only a perfunctory tip of the hat to genre conventions (or maybe an indication of what Lynch thinks lies under them, an effort to be serious about the dumb genre villain line “we’re not so different, you and I.”). Frank, like killer BOB or the Mystery Man from Lost Highway, resembles a goblin from German folklore. His real threat is the Roy Orbison line he almost sings to Jeffrey: “in dreams, you’re mine, all of the time.”

Jameson was probably right to call Lynch conservative, but he completely misunderstood the conclusion of Blue Velvet. Jameson makes some good general points that apply to art contemporary with Blue Velvet. There’s a sort of idealized, eternal 1950s that stands in the American imagination for the safe and normal (interestingly in It’s a Wonderful Life the 1890s does the same thing). FJ interprets Blue Velvet as one of many 80s movies where this eternal 50s is threatened by forces that we associate with the 60s and 70s—drugs and scary sex stuff, incarnated by Dennis Hopper from Easy Rider—only for the normal to emerge triumphant. But Lynch was unequaled at bringing out the depths of our imaginary fifties, and Frank isn’t coming to the movie’s world from the outside. Significantly, he doesn’t listen to rock music but is moved to tears by Dorthy’s rendition of “Blue Velvet.” There’s nothing to compare with what Lynch able to wring out of oldies: “Pennsylvania 6-5000” in Twin Peaks, “This Magic Moment”(via an eerie Lou Reed cover) in Lost Highway, “Sixteen Reasons” and “Crying” in Mulholland. Dr. Rebekah del Rio’s heartbreaking Spanish-language rendition of “Crying” in Mulholland Dr is the peak of this style, which has been banalized in a million derivative sequences of gangsters beating somebody up while doo-wop plays.

There are some bright moments in Blue Velvet, mostly associated with the Laura Dern character Sandy. For instance, when she recounts her theodical dream about robins in front of the church—what she actually says is as nonsensical as Frank’s swearing, but all the powerful dialogue in the Blue Velvet is like this. Her dance with Jeffrey to the synth-pop song “Mysteries of Love” contrasts strongly with the 50s music and pseudo-Shostakovich score of most of the rest of the film, and Lynch’s lyrics to that song are an effort to treat the movie’s themes in a hopeful, positive key. Still, it was a lapse on Jameson’s part to see the film’s conclusion as one of these positive moments. Lynch uses some of the most heavy-handed symbolism in his oeuvre to undermine the notionally happy ending. Just before all the hero’s problems evaporate like a dream, Lynch gives us a close shot of a bright light bulb that suddenly goes out. Sandy had said that there will be “trouble till the robins come,” but the robin that arrives at Jeffrey and Sandy’s house to eat the bugs which from the beginning of the film have signified disorder and evil is obviously fake, an uncanny robot-like contraption [I’m told by an alert reader that it was a taxidermy robin operated by puppeteers]. Dorthy’s intense and confused desires, the pathetic and mortifyingly embarrassing neediness that makes her show up naked and beaten-up at Jeffrey’s house (uttering still more incoherent dreamlike dialogue: “he put his disease in me”) all vanish without being resolved. She isn’t even given any lines after Frank’s death, although the film’s last shot is of her, transitioning from a no-lyrics version of “Mysteries of Love” to the last lines of Rossellini’s rendition of “Blue Velvet.”

The anguish which the bad dream has revealed isn’t resolved; the the light which the film had been casting on it has merely gone out. The restored, happy domesticity of the ending is as much a fantasy as the earlier hallucinatory vision of desperate, violent sexuality, but it is a far less gripping fantasy. Lynch isn’t left-wing in the way that would appeal to Jamison because doesn’t see any way out of his eternal 50s of Roy Orbison songs and the hidden depths they conceal. But Jameson is wrong to think Lynch is advocating repression or a return to normalcy in response to drugs or the counterculture. Lynch doesn’t tell us what to make of the distressing mysteries of love which he helps us to spy on, because he doesn’t know himself.

I’m sure Lynch’s awe-shucks public persona was authentic up to a point. (Amusingly it so disgusted Gary Indiana, who interviewed him after watching Eraserhead, that Indiana came to hate Lynch’s later movies. Indiana claimed Blue Velvet was basically Scorpio Rising for heterosexuals, which is a funny line but not really true.) Still, I’m put off by this celebration of quirky old Lynch, dispenser of new-age wisdom who teaches you that it is OK to be weird. Both his personal quirkiness and his eventual embrace of transcendental meditation seem to me almost like coping mechanisms. They helped Lynch to channel a very intuitive kind of art, one mostly governed by images, sounds and his reactions to the personalities of his actors. (There’s also a mostly buried private mythology about electricity and the atomic bomb and criss-cross vinyl plank flooring etc. that helped him to link his images.) The vision he intuits is at once seductive and very bleak.