DVD REVIEW: Blue Velvet (1986)

After the thorough disaster that was Dune, David Lynch needed a comeback, something distinctive and artistic to remind audiences that he was still capable of an Eraserhead or The Elephant Man. Blue Velvet is what he came up with and it is in some ways the epitome of his style of filmmaking.

A plot synopsis of Blue Velvet will always, at least initially, make the film sound like a movie for young adults. Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan) is an amateur sleuth who begins investigating a mysterious woman, Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rossellini), who may have ties to a group of violent criminals (including Frank, played by Dennis Hopper). He is assisted by Sandy Williams (Laura Dern), who is the daughter of the local police officer (George Dickerson) who has warned Jeffrey to keep out of danger.

The film initially has the feel of a cheesy 1940s film noir and it often approaches a spoof of the genre. The idyllic American suburbia, all white picket fences and waving firemen, is presented in all its wholesomeness (more on this shortly) while Jeffrey’s first meeting with Officer Williams is scripted with all the naïveté and comic frankness you’d expect from an old fashioned crime film. However, one of Lynch’s most interesting innovations here is his inclusion of discordant elements, which play with such simplistic generic markers. Famously, his camera moves deep into the Beaumont’s well-tended lawn to reveal the darkness and violence of the insects living within it. And his first exchange with Officer Williams immediately follows his gruesome discovery of a dismembered human ear, which is much too graphic and sinister for a 1940s potboiler. Or, more humorously but nonetheless equally telling of the morbid side of human nature, his grandmother tells Jeffrey to keep safe while watching a film on TV which features an armed man skulking up a dark flight of steps. Lynch frequently moves back and forth between these two modes – the mystery entertainment and the dark horror – keeping the audience constantly uneasy, unsure whether they are watching something funny or deadly serious. Far from a balancing act, Lynch wants his film to shift awkwardly, to not make sense, these stylistics being only a means to an end.

Blue Velvet is intentionally unclear, but there are certain themes that are clearly represented. Jeffrey Beaumont is an amateur sleuth, a plucky kid who naïvely gets involved in things that are too serious for him to initially comprehend. However, this is not restricted to the crime-story plot (the plot in Blue Velvet is fairly marginal anyway), but also to Jeffrey’s sexual awakening. Sandy makes this clear when she wonders if he is “a detective or a pervert.” In keeping with Lynch’s strategy of employing discordant moments, Jeffrey smiles but significantly does not reassure her about his mental state. As Jeffrey witnesses more and more sexual perversions during the course of the film, it is suggested more and more that he might actually get turned on by it. Just as he unexpectedly proves to be a rather capable detective, he also proves to be a bit of a pervert. In both senses, Blue Velvet can be read as a rite of passage story, in which Jeffrey must chose between a wholesome life with Sandy in suburbia or a perverse one with Dorothy in a dark apartment (as a side note, can each of his visits to Dorothy’s apartment be said to represent a further step in his maturation?).

The film is essentially dreamlike, following as it does the logic of dreams. While the more dreamy moments – the shots of the suburbs, “Blue Velvet” sang by either Bobby Vinton or Isabella Rossellini – are more clearly structured and recognisable, the nightmarish moments appear without warning and often have an unclear connection to the rest of the film – the sudden appearance of Frank and his attack on Dorothy, the visit to Ben (scored with its own love song but this time darkly out of place – “In Dreams” by Roy Orbison) and Jeffrey’s final visit to Dorothy’s apartment. Sandy, introduced in a style that emphasises her goodness and wholesomeness (as well as the 1940s potboilers the film is referring to), talks about having a dream in which darkness is defeated by robins and, in an idyllic ending, Jeffrey and Sandy see a triumphant robin eating one of the violent insects from Jeffrey’s lawn. It is unclear here whether Lynch ends his film on a sincere and optimistic note about the overcoming of evil by good or whether he is merely still spoofing the idealism and hope of the American Dream. Many people prefer to view Blue Velvet as a film about dark impulses, which hide behind white picket fences and carefully manicured lawns, others as a plea for good old-fashioned goodness. Where one extremity is too misanthropic if not nihilistic the other is too optimistic, leaving a gap in the film, which can only be filled by the viewer. As with the best kind of ambiguity, the interpretation that you choose reveals something about you as a person.

Apart from maybe The Elephant Man and The Straight Story, Blue Velvet is Lynch’s most accessible film and offers an interesting framework for deciphering his other work – in this way, it is also his most recognisably Lynchian film. It is a ‘difficult’ film if only in the sense of an artist pursuing his own artistic agenda, unconcerned that the majority of his viewers might misunderstand or misinterpret his work. Though it is unclear whether he is having a laugh or if he is being deadly serious – The Straight Story and Wild At Heart may or may not offer clues here – Blue Velvet is not a slapdash, meaningless film that Lynch’s critics (myself included) claim he can’t help but make, but a challenging, interesting and sinister retelling of the rite of passage story.

See also:

Scanners

From Beyond

The Commander

Bemusement: The Worst Facial Expression in American Cinema

REVIEW: The Master (2012)

Is there much point in mentioning that The Master has divided audiences and that it is the long-awaited new film from a writer-director who has previously offered some of the best films of 1997, 1999, 2002 and 2007? Much better to merely say what one thinks it is all about.

Joaquin Phoenix plays Freddie Quell, a recent WWII veteran in 1950 who is suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. After a series of unsuccessful attempts to return to real life, Freddie jumps onto a yacht and stows away. He is suddenly introduced to the ship’s commander, Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman), a “writer, doctor, nuclear physicist theoretical philosopher” and the man behind “The Cause”, a pseudo-religion that he has doctored up and is touring around the country to promote. Quell is quick to fall under Dodd’s wing, but how will he react when the indoctrination begins?

The links between the film and the life of L. Ron Hubbard and Scientology have been emphasised enough. The Master has its filmic antecedents in John Huston and Orson Welles – two big filmmaking personalities who excelled in 1940s Hollywood, but who also excelled in more outré films in the 1970s. John Huston gleefully played the repellent Noah Cross in Chinatown, a role that could also have inspired Daniel Plainview in There Will Be Blood. Huston’s very strange Wise Blood is also worth mentioning with its links between charlatans and religion. As for Orson Welles, one needs only to have seen his fantastic, mesmerizing F For Fake in order to be able to draw a lineage from the character Orson Welles presents himself as there to the character that Lancaster Dodd almost perfectly embodies – apart from when he is challenged and the whole brilliant façade crumbles into the very lack of restraint and animalism that he so detests. All that having been said, however, one film that exerts a most palpable influence on The Master is Paul Thomas Anderson’s previous, There Will Be Blood. The hype surrounding that film, as well as its own high quality, must have made it a tough one to top and The Master is almost self-consciously similar. One scene, in which Quell and Dodd go off in search of Dodd’s hidden manuscript in a rocky desert, can’t help but bring to mind the similarly harsh setting of There Will Be Blood. Jonny Greenwood’s score is equally an attempt to re-do what he did so well on the previous film. They work well as companion pieces with There Will Be Blood a look at greed and The Master a look at fakery, albeit with less of an emphasis on the perpetrator.

As in There Will Be Blood, the performances take centre stage with much of the film focussing on Joaquin Phoenix’s fantastically driven performance as a traumatized war veteran in search of a family. The film does go some way to revealing how, in the wake of the end of the war and with the influx of damaged veterans back into normal life, that dissatisfaction and isolation grew and a demand rose for such things as The Cause. Philip Seymour Hoffman is equally good as a man whose rampant knack for self-promotion has found him at the head of a movement, the intricacies of which he himself can be caught out on. Initiation into The Cause is marked by a deadening sadism, entrants are harangued into submission by endless repetition of utterly meaningless actions until a personality much stronger than their own tells them to stop as they have discovered the truth. Bewilderment and belief are intertwined irreparably so that when Quell finally sees Dodd for the charlatan that he is (in a scene that is remarkable for the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it quality of the exposition), the first thing that he does is half-heartedly beat up a fellow sceptic before he sits down and starts to cry. Though the film makes clear that The Cause did help Quell for a brief period of time and that more from the sense of belonging that the community gave him than the teachings themselves, the teachings of The Cause are both Quell’s entry and exit from the cult. The film concludes brilliantly with Quell performing a “processing” of his own (that being the questioning which is intended to bring out the true self of the subject and the beginning of their initiation into The Cause), though whether he is in fact becoming a second Dodd or is merely amusing himself, incredulous at how he had previously been taken in, the film refuses to say.

The film is not an easy watch and will probably have as many detractors as it will have supporters. There are too few challenging films that are as widely available and even fewer that are made with such confidence and artistry. Much of the joy of the film is in merely allowing yourself to be taken wherever the film and Anderson want to go, with many scenes being all about the performances and others being pleasingly confounding, safe in the knowledge that you are in the hands of a filmmaker who knows what he is doing. The Master is not as good as Magnolia and There Will Be Blood, maybe because cults and charlatanism is not as interesting as, respectively, loneliness and greed. However, Paul Thomas Anderson has managed to move away from the sometimes too-obvious influence of Martin Scorsese and Robert Altman and has become a rather unique voice in American independent cinema and is probably the only one of that rather hit-and-miss Sundance group not to do a film that could wholly be discounted from his filmography – Alexander Payne aside.

The Master rewards attention and intellectual investment, as well as, of course, emotional investment. There are a lot of things that the film leaves unanswered and an attentive audience can leave the screening with a lot to talk about. Indeed, this review might well be amended, if not entirely renounced, in the coming weeks – just as it took several weeks and a second viewing before There Will Be Blood came together. That said, The Master is a difficult film to recommend as it is entirely up to each individual’s predilection for unconventional and challenging cinema and those intrigued enough have probably already seen it by now. Ultimately, The Master is a difficult film to wholeheartedly like but as an example of how invigorating and rich cinema can still be, it is unsurpassed so far this year – This Is Not A Film maybe being the sole exception.