Just This Darkness

Maybe 15 was too young to see BLUE VELVET. But that’s in the past. And I did see that David Lynch film when it came out, at Yonkers Movieland on opening weekend or close to it in the fall of 1986 and all this was at a point when I wasn’t having trouble getting into R-rated movies anymore. It’s very possible that first time was maybe the closest I will ever come to the feeling of seeing PSYCHO when it first opened back in 1960, like seeing into the possible future of what films might become, revealing something completely new and unexpected. I knew then that it was one of the best films I’d ever seen. I still know it now. Returning to the film each time places it once again in the context of David Lynch’s entire career and every time I revisit a David Lynch film it feels like the one that I’m watching is my favorite. But really, it’s probably BLUE VELVET. And MULHOLLAND DRIVE. And the entire run of TWIN PEAKS: THE RETURN. Regardless, every David Lynch film contains a power that can take me back to that certain time in my life I was first discovering it, the way every one of them causes my brain to explode to make it feel like I’m back in a time when I was first discovering certain films and wanted to do nothing more than talk about them endlessly. BLUE VELVET was one of the first of these for me, one of those key films that I saw around this time (BRAZIL was another about six months earlier) that made me think, ‘this is what movies are?’ and it came at an age when I was open to it as well as lucky I didn’t have parents who were against me seeing a film like this. Or more likely that they had other things going on and weren’t paying very close attention.

And now, in the present, David Lynch is gone. It still doesn’t seem right. Several days after it happened back in January, I was flying out of Burbank early one morning but first stopped off at Bob’s Big Boy in Toluca Lake, so early the sun wasn’t up yet, to see the impromptu memorial that had sprouted there and pay my respects. Much of that week was spent thinking about all those ways his films mean so much to me, how much they affected me, how much they continue to stay with me. As awful as his passing was, the overwhelming response of pure love to that tragedy remains just about the most wonderful thing of this horrible year, a reminder of the beauty he inspires in people as things all around us drown in a sewer. That’s what he shows us. The beauty among the ugliness. The light seen in the dark. The love mixed with the hate. The whole world that’s wild at heart and weird on top. And we still see all that in our dreams.

But back to the past, which is also what BLUE VELVET gets me to think about. The town of Lumberton where it’s set feels like a sort of purgatory for its lead character. One of those periods when you’re not in high school or college, where you might find yourself stranded for some months when things haven’t gone the way you wanted, ready to start your life but you’re stuck there walking certain streets where you used to know people only by then they’re all gone. It all ends. The darkness falls. In your mind, in your memory, that town is always going to be the same. That’s how it is for me and the place where I grew up. To this day, it’s hard for me to ever think anything sexual about that place, it never seemed to exist there which maybe is what you’re supposed to think about the town where you grew up anyway. It’s supposed to be the beginning. Writing something on Facebook after he passed, I found myself typing out, “Seeing a David Lynch film for the first time was like seeing what the world could be.” Not should be. Not what it is. But what it sometimes feels like is there, some sort of power in the air that you weren’t aware of, waiting to be discovered. The world that we know is possible, much as we don’t always want to see it.

When his father is hospitalized, college student Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan) returns home to Lumberton, North Carolina to help and work at the family hardware store. One day after visiting the hospital, Jeffrey is walking home through a vacant lot when he discovers a human ear on the ground. Taking it to the police, he meets Detective Williams (George Dickerson) and soon visits him at home to learn more about the case. There he meets his daughter Sandy (Laura Dern) who tips him off about lounge singer Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rossellini) who may have a connection to what her father is investigating. Still curious, Jeffrey comes up with the idea to sneak into her apartment late at night to learn more and enlists Sandy’s help, but when he gets inside and encounters the woman, he discovers her connection to the terrifying criminal Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper) who may be more dangerous than he ever imagined.

The thing is, so many films fade. You outgrow them, you disconnect from them, they don’t have the power over you they once did. Looking back at it now, 1986 feels like the depths of the decade that was the 80s, some of the biggest films released during that period are forever connected to the cultural rot of the time. BLUE VELVET feels like it’s an integral part of the ‘80s yet defiantly disconnected from the decade, in the dividing line between then and the ‘50s iconography that is there on the edges adding so much that maybe this is the film that should have been called BACK TO THE FUTURE. This is, after all, the film that really has something to say about how one affects the other, how the past wasn’t as sweet as we want to think it was and no matter what has happened since, the future still contains the possibility of hope. On a very basic level the thriller plot of the film is still so enormously effective but the power the entire film holds is so much more than that, still feeling surprising while going so much further than any other film that has tried to do the same and whether the moment becomes a sly joke or the most terrifying sight imaginable the frisson it provides is unlike anything else, all coming together as part of this strange world.

It always feels a little nebulous what stage of life Kyle MacLachlan’s Jeffrey Beaumont is in. Maybe that’s because he’s not sure either. If anything, he’s in a holding pattern, home from school, not sure if he’ll be able to ever go back. Viewing the state his father is in, he needs to suddenly become an adult for the first time and is still trying to put that off as long as possible with this new project he begins for himself. He really has no one to tell him otherwise. You’re older and you suddenly find yourself trying to talk to a father who can’t speak and can’t help while the mother stays focused watching a TV that always seems to contain some sort of noirish crime show playing on it, depicting a life that presumably is far away from the sort of place Lumberton is. And, of course, Jeffrey is bored, just as you’re going to be in a small town, stuck in a place that may as well be a black hole of darkness as seen in the cutaways to the empty sidewalk in front of Jeffrey and Sandy, the trees overhead, the nightmarish darkness of the quiet neighborhood stretching out in front of them forever. The house that he points out where a childhood friend once lived who moved away doesn’t seem to have someone new living there, it just looks abandoned. It’s the end of his childhood and the whole place looks dead to him so naturally he’s going to stumble upon a strange body part lying on the ground. The theme of discovering the ugliness that lies below a tranquil surface almost seems simple now all these years later but it’s something he becomes forced to learn. Maybe in places like that you need to be reminded. “Here’s to an interesting experience,” he says to Sandy as they drink their Heineken at the beginning of it all, when he has no idea what’s coming.

On a very basic level, BLUE VELVET remains an extraordinary film in everything it does, the terror and humor of the world it’s set in, the way things unfold and how far it wants to go. Of course, everything that happens feels like it has some extra level of meaning. At this early stage the idea of narrative is still very much a part of what Lynch is doing. This would become more fractured as time went on and something like LOST HIGHWAY may be a puzzle to decipher but it also is much less of a strict linear plot than this film is. One thing which sets BLUE VELVET apart from all sorts of other thrillers, besides how normal they all seem in comparison, is that Jeffrey Beaumont isn’t thrust into this world against his will. He’s not a Hitchcockian everyman on the run for something he didn’t do, but another Hitchcockian lead like the one in VERTIGO who gets drawn further and further into the story even before he realizes it. Jeffrey didn’t have to get involved with any of this and in that dreamlike way, no matter what he says, it all seems like he does it for some unconscious reason that can never be fully explained. It’s a tone where adhering to a strict version of reality is never the biggest concern so we don’t know specifically what malady befell Jeffrey’s father, we don’t need a scene with a doctor who explains he had a stroke and yadda yadda, just as we don’t know exactly what Frank is inhaling each time he comes into Dorothy’s apartment. We never even have Dorothy explicitly tell us things from her own point of view and how she feels about it. We know enough just from looking at her. It's the imagery and the feeling that matters, not the specifics of the language. And we don’t know why Jeffrey is doing this at first. Maybe he’s just looking for that interesting experience, maybe just wanting to get involved in a Hardy Boys sort of mystery while he’s bored amidst the cheeriness of that hardware store and sitting around at home. Eventually he does say that it’s because this is something that has always been hidden, he’s finding something more than what’s on the surface in his lazy small town where presumably everyone is smiling and cheerful. But he seems to know that the Deep River Apartments nearby over on Lincoln contains a darkness where he shouldn’t go, it’s like that feeling is already inside of him, he’s just never been able to see it up close. When he’s discovered in the closet and Dorothy tells him to get undressed, the framing places her within his raised arm so it’s like she’s already inside of him, and even though we don’t see the full extent of his reaction when Dorothy begins kissing him way down below still holding that knife in her hand ready to use it, we don’t need to. We just know. And she knows what he’s there for.

Dorothy Vallens looks right at home in the beautiful, haunting, alien set of the seedy elegance that is her apartment, where it all gets revealed just as the fantasy she presents singing at The Slow Club. She likes to sing “Blue Velvet,” taking the cheeriness of that song heard at the beginning and turning it into a dark entry for Jeffrey as he wanders into this world, Sandy glancing over at him as he gazes at the older woman, not knowing what he might be thinking, not knowing if he’s a detective or pervert. Whatever Dorothy is ever thinking about seems indescribable, wearing a wig that makes her seem slightly off no matter how much she appears to be the most beautiful woman in the world, absurdly and painfully beautiful, yet there’s something about her that makes you want to look away. Sandy, meanwhile, is the vision of light in another part of Lumberton, introduced emerging from the dark, still going to high school with a presumably normal boyfriend who plays football and for some reason has a Montgomery Clift photo on her wall, making me imagine him turning up on TWIN PEAKS at age 70 if he had lived that long. Sandy has her dreams of love and through that comes her very sincere belief that it can spread into the world but it’s not as easy as she ever thinks, her plan of honking the horn to warn Jeffrey in the apartment is a good one but she can’t warn him about what’s coming. He needs to enter that world on his own. Sandy is the light emerging from the dark, open and honest unlike the cryptic nature of the other woman, willing to fight her way through it and offer forgiveness. When Jeffrey finally hits Dorothy after her protests, it’s what she desperately wants, what she desires, and it turns the two of them into something else altogether. When she’s seen in the light, the only time she’s seen outside during the day, and she still seems unable to keep from thinking of the dark for very long, still forever haunted by what has happened.

Every shot in this film means something, frames of those images in every single scene deserve to be hung on walls, every moment has a power brought to it by Lynch and cinematographer Frederick Elmes that makes almost anything completely haunting, the most off kilter looks at someone’s face become surprising for reasons that are unknown, the most offhand cuts have an indescribably unnerving effect, how the ever-present sound work makes even the smallest things seem ominous, or just something random in the corner of the frame. Whether it’s Dorothy leaning back in ecstasy, everyone lined up in Ben’s apartment, the darkness of Dorothy’s hallway stretching out, all a part of this look at a small town in the service of this version of the time when some people thought American was something it isn’t now. Every look at someone seems to mean something more in particular when Lynch, just as he does in a few other films, gives us close-ups on someone that are almost uncomfortably intimate, in a way that no other director can pull off, and it somehow makes them more hauntingly beautiful than ever. There’s one brief close-up of Laura Dern like this when Jeffrey leaves for the apartment but also so many of Isabella Rossellini, so powerful that maybe they’re what the male gaze is really supposed to be in all its best ways, appropriate for a director who gives us female characters the way he does, accompanied by rumblings in the Alan Splet sound design that come from nowhere making the most beautiful image unnerving in itself just as the music by Angelo Badalamenti and his score gives the movie a soul, whether haunting or angelic, that is almost unexplainable.

The wind blowing in the curtains, resembling Dorothy’s blue velvet robe, makes us feel uneasy for reasons we can’t even express just as so many things in the film do and maybe to fully understand BLUE VELVET you would have to understand why Jeffrey wants to sneak into that apartment and hide in the closet to begin with. That place where he discovers Frank Booth, a nightmare who has come to life, an id, a demon and one who can only come alive in the dark, taking his neighbor out for a joyride. “This is it,” Frank says before a neon sign in the window reading exactly that is seen, one of my favorite offhand laughs in the entire film, and we can only imagine what his relationship with Ben is just as we can imagine the two of them going way back just as we can imagine Hopper and Stockwell knowing each other in Hollywood way back in the ‘50s only adds to this. No moment during the stopover at Ben’s feels in any way rational, just as it feels like the voice responsible for “In Dreams” can only come from the person who appears to be singing it even as we know it’s really Roy Orbison but it still feels possible right up until the spell is suddenly broken. Trapped in this place, it’s easy to believe that the worst can really happen. There’s no way to escape except to continue into the night with Frank and the jump cut removing them all from the frame on his laugh is just as terrifying as that thought. Maybe we all contain this darkness. If someone says they don’t, they’re probably lying. If someone says they don’t, maybe they have it more than anyone. “Now it’s dark,” Frank says so he can come alive. He lives in an industrial area that feels like the literal bowels of the town and even if he is briefly seen during the day, it’s impossible to imagine him or any of these people ever existing before nightfall. There’s so much plot stuff that the movie wisely skips over since we don’t need to hear it and Dorothy’s silent reaction to seeing her son during the “In Dreams” sequence makes it seem like Frank’s entire plan is simply to do the worst thing imaginable, causing a son to no longer love his mother. That’s where the real darkness is. “You’re like me,” which is maybe the most terrifying thing Frank says of all, as if suddenly realizing what Jeffrey is really doing there.

In some ways what the film does is a dry run for what became TWIN PEAKS, a comparison that was obvious when the show premiered and it was easy to imagine Jeffrey Beaumont becoming Dale Cooper, but it’s also a dry run for a lot of things including what kind of filmmaker Lynch was really going to be as the years went on, with the very idea of story mattering less in relation to what he wanted to explore in his art, an idea still developing here even as it feels totally crystalized. The running time of almost exactly two hours gives the impression there was a contractual element to keeping it at such a length but the film is so brilliantly paced and structured that there’s not a moment I would lose. The extensive deleted footage that has appeared on Blu-ray was a revelatory discovery when it first turned up, running about an hour long (the first rough cut was reportedly just under four hours), but as fascinating and as valuable as it all is there’s not a single moment that feels like it should go back in. The film that BLUE VELVET became as it was molded into that two-hour running time, one of the best such jobs ever with editor Dwayne Dunham presumably working closely with Lynch, turned it into exactly what it needed to be.

Even now, even after everything else I’ve discovered in all the years since, it's about as close to a perfect film as I’ve ever seen. The way the story unfolds, the most shocking moments are revealed in a way that lets the viewer find them and understand for themselves what they mean and though it’s also a perfect film to analyze in many ways what the film is also resists doing that since it’s so purely Lynch and what is going on inside his own head so why spoil all the fun. Even after he’s taken on the hellish joyride by Frank, Jeffrey is never really forced to confront all this until the very end when the horror of it all literally shows up in his front yard. On a structural level, when Jeffrey returns to hide in Dorothy’s closet one final time at the end it’s a brilliant way to return to where all this started but it can also be read as symbolic of so many things, a sort of womb to provide a rebirth as a way for him to enter this world that must retreat back to one final time so he can escape. Jeffrey didn’t have to do any of this in the first place, but in the end as he’s faced with the horrific imagery of that tableau of the bodies in Dorothy’s apartment and as the “Love Letters” montage, a love letter coming directly from Frank into the world, brushes past so much plot stuff we don’t need to know, he’s forced. There’s no other way out. In the end the film presents that interesting experience as something he needed to go through, something real which was entirely because of the dreams and desires in his own head. Moving past innocence is inevitable and necessary but it’s always going to be there as a reminder of what the world could be, as it was when we were still children. It’s there in the mirrored perfection of the two families at the end, the fathers and the mothers as well as the two children who are now together as a reminder of this. The robin with the bug in its mouth seen at the end and the strange world it wants to be a part of. Nothing about it seems real but anything from the past we grew up in long ago can be as real in our memories as we want.

Kyle MacLachlan, fully entering the David Lynch universe after his beginnings in DUNE, displays total confidence as Jeffrey showing him as curious and antsy, frightened and determined to enter this world. He’s an everyman eager for things to happen, with a look that makes it seem like he wants to be cooler than this small town drinking his Heineken, and he gets you to believe that he would really attempt to do all this. He carries the film and grounds it, becoming a perfect fusion with Lynch’s view of the world. And the way the phenomenal Laura Dern takes a character who is supposed to be the normal, dull one and gives her passionate life, bringing a level-headed focus that combines rationality and belief in the good. Because of this film and their other work with him, MacLachlan and Dern are like the avatars for the perfect Lynch couple, how he sees all the good in the world. They are the light.

But so much of the talk of the idea of performance here goes beyond simple acting, particularly the way Isabella Rossellini plays Dorothy as haunted and otherworldly, the way she uses her body language, the way she leans forward and reveals her innermost thoughts just by a glance, always compelling, continually fascinating. When Dennis Hopper enters the film for the first time it becomes something else entirely just from the sound of his voice so where he takes this role becomes a place that feels truly demonic even when he suddenly quiets down and no other Hopper performance ever feels truly this dangerous as if the film itself didn’t know he would go this far. Once he’s there, the unexplainable shift that occurs when Dean Stockwell enters makes perfect sense and he clearly belongs near the top of the list of best one-scene performances of all time. Every performance here is a part of such a feeling, no matter how brief. Jack Nance, for the way he tells Jeffrey his name, and Brad Dourif are perfect just as Hope Lange and Priscilla Pointer are in their worlds as well, in each case you know who they are and what they represent immediately. As Detective Williams, George Dickerson underplays his role in just the right way and finds his cinematic immortality in the way he says, “Yes. That’s a human ear, all right.” It’s a steady presence and the sort of thing needed to believe that there might be someone willing to take charge, no matter what’s going on below the surface.

Just like films, memories fade. Some of them stay with you too and they’re not always the things you want to remember. I was lucky. I don’t usually think of my teenage years that way, there was too much to be depressed about a lot of the time and too much to want to escape, but it’s probably true. There was just a lot I had yet to learn. Seeing BLUE VELVET when it first opened all those years ago meant that it gave me plenty of time to think about what the film was, what it meant, plus I got to see it when it was an audience of people going to see the latest critically acclaimed art film, so they weren’t going to approach it with ironic laughter. Nobody told them that’s what people would eventually do, which is what it seems like I hear about every time the film plays in a theater somewhere and I’d rather not find out for myself. Maybe it’s my problem or at least the way my brain is wired so I never think of this film as merely camp and doing that just always seems wrong. Years after I first saw the film, there was the occasional Lynch Encounter around town from afar. A surprise appearance with Laura Dern after a screening of WILD AT HEART hosted by Edgar Wright at the New Beverly, certainly one of the greatest nights ever at that theater. Spotting him at Figaro on Vermont having dinner. Then one day some years back I was walking down Hillhurst, glanced across the street at some people walking into an ice cream shop and realized that one of them was absolutely David Lynch. I crossed the street, went inside and stood behind Lynch with his family as they ordered then got a chocolate cone for myself, thinking about how I had recently seen a 35mm print of DUNE but of course I didn’t say anything to him. I left them alone. And now David Lynch is buried at Hollywood Forever so of course as soon as that news was announced I went over to pay my respects and sit there for a few minutes. I’m sure I’ll stop by again soon. But so much is in the past and it continues to reach out to us. It should never be where we live today but it does help to hold onto that feeling, to remember that these things did happen. These films were made and still mean something to what we became. It's a strange world and it always will be. In the end, try to find love where you can. Find your way out of the darkness.