rawlinson
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Joined: 13/6/2008
From: Timbuktu. Chinese or Fictional.
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305. Blue Velvet
Director: David Lynch
1986
Film
Last Year's Position: 166
After the failure of Dune, David Lynch returned to more personal work with Blue Velvet. A darkness in suburbia offering that takes the film noir into the surreal suburbs. McLachlan plays Jeffrey Beaumont, a college student returning to his hometown of Lumberton to visit his ill father. He discovers a human ear in a field and finds himself investigating the ear, drawing in Sandy (Laura Dern) the daughter of a local cop to get clues. He finds the hometown to be a seedier place than he ever imagined. He also finds himself in a sadomasochistic sexual relationship with Dorothy (Rossellini), a nightclub singer with a connection to the ear. Through Dorothy he also encounters Frank (Hopper), a terrifying sociopath who inflects his odd sexuality on Dorothy. Frank has kidnapped Dorothy's husband and child and is forcing her into sex. Or is he ? Dorothy certainly has an interest in s & m and sexual humiliation, even demanding Jeffrey beat her during sex. When Frank catches Dorothy and Jeffrey together, he forces them to go with him to visit Ben (Dean Stockwell) the man holding Dorothy's son. The most disturbing moment in the film happens during this sequence and Ben becomes as much of a nightmare figure as Frank, following this sequence Frank delivers a savage beating to Jeffrey, and there have long been rumours that the original intention was also rape. The film builds to an eventual showdown between Jeffrey and Frank, as Jeffrey uncovers just how deep the corruption is in Lumberton.
In many ways it's a coming-of-age film, Jeffrey is on the verge of manhood and the film is very much exploring the world between a boy and being a man, complete with sexual discovery. Lynch himself described the film as The Hardy Boys go to Hell, and I can understand what he means (for once) as the film as that adolescent spirit of adventure, it just perverts it. Lynch has admitted to a strong autobiographical element in this film and that McLachlan is his stand-in figure, so it's easy to read it as Lynch's own realisation about the darkness in man. Blue Velvet is also about the dark desires that lurk beneath the surface of an idealised America. Dennis Hopper's Frank represents everything that comes to subvert normality, but some 'normal' things are all too ready to be subverted and corrupted, making Blue Velvet a forerunner for the ideas he'd explore in more depth in the television series, Twin Peaks. Further evidence that Lynch is exploring his own childhood is that the American fantasy here is the kind of picket-fence suburbia so often associated with 50s America. And if Blue Velvet was to be remembered for nothing else, it should be as an example of how to drench your film in cultural iconography while making sure the pop culture compliments rather than dominates the film.
In a spectacular misreading, some critics have accused the film of misogyny, including Roger Ebert, who once again displayed that when he gets it wrong he really gets it wrong. The idea of Rossellini's character having a submissive sexual taste, being someone who thrives on humiliation, is taken as evidence of Lynch's misogyny, or that he thinks that all women like or deserve rape. Which is an incredibly blinkered vision both of the film and of human sexuality. Dorothy is someone who gets a thrill out of sexual power games, as displayed by her own treatment of Jeffrey. There's nothing to say that she likes all of the treatment from Frank or that she likes the idea of rape, or that we should like at Dorothy as a metaphor for all women. Dorothy is Dorothy and she can only be seen as a representative of that character, not of women as a whole, and if Lynch really did feel that way then similar characteristics would be seen in Dern's Sandy. You can only begin to approach making a judgement call on something like misogyny if all or most of the female characters are depicted in the same way rather than just one.
It's true that Dorothy is a real subversion of the femme fatale stereotype usually associated with noir, even twisted horror-noir like this, but despite the vampishness of her nightclub singer persona, Rossellini plays Dorothy as being so fragile she could break at any moment. This femme fatale won't shoot you in the back, but she might just shatter as you touch her and leave you to bleed to death. The pop culture acceptance of Blue Velvet has often revolved around Hopper's Frank, but Rossellini's performance may just be the finest in the film, it's certainly one of the bravest and most daring female leads of the 80s. All of the cast are outstanding though and how Blue Velvet didn't sweep the 86 Oscars is a mystery. Lynch's masterpiece is in no way an easy film, but the world of cinema is a better for its creation.
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ORIGINAL: matty_b
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ORIGINAL: matty_b
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