David Lynch, one of the most creative and original American filmmakers we will ever know, died this week and it prompted numerous conversations between my husband and me about his work. They weren’t profound analyses but more reminiscences of our gleeful shared reactions of awe to the signature style and singular way he told stories in each successive piece of work. For us, the first time seeing a Lynch film was always an exciting, brain-breaking experience, partly because there was no telling where he would go or if you could even fully understand where it was he took you after just one viewing.
Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive were his most lauded and our favorites, but there is also something to be said for Lost Highway (Note: Robert Blake popping up from out of nowhere to haunt you takes on new meaning in the 21st century), Wild At Heart, The Elephant Man, Eraserhead (Note: His mind-bending first film, which prompted producer Mel Brooks to recruit and fight for him to direct one of Lynch’s most traditional and excellent movies, The Elephant Man) and The Straight Story.
And where do you start with the original Twin Peaks TV series and all of the various incarnations of that world? Can you imagine that this was a weekly show on ABC in 1990? Before the explosion of cable programming, and at a time when the term streaming was basically used to describe a state of consciousness?
None of my students can, and to this day many of them are huge fans of the show. Though when I try to explain how both its audaciousness and Lynch’s determination to have it remain in a fugue state amid so many unanswered questions that drove network executives completely bonkers, they do usually meet me with a Twin Peaks worthy half-smile.
That is, of course, the real victory. That somehow the idea of this kind of boundary breaking insurgence that so annoys the gatekeepers (Note: Especially when it becomes so provocatively successful) will continue, albeit in a different form.
Granted, that’ll take a bit of time. Which is what must’ve prompted my husband to say at the end of our Lynch discussion, “We should just push pause for the next four years.”
Among other things.
Speaking of which, I decided that the first film my thesis screenwriting students would view this semester would be Blue Velvet, the breakout film that cemented Lynch’s visually alluring, darkly comic and disturbingly dramatic approach to creating a narrative you at times wanted to but couldn’t look away from.
On the surface it’s a boy-meets-girl story that starts when a college boy, who is home visiting his sick father, finds a severed ear among the many blades of grass in a field near his house and decides to bring it to a detective that turns out to be father of said perfectly wholesome teenage, blonde, hometown high school girl.
Naturally, they’re both warned time and time again to leave the real crime behind this ear alone, if for nothing else than the sake of their reputations. But like almost every film before it about such people, they can’t. Sure, they may be good, (Note: Perhaps too good) at heart but that’s the real issue. What Lynch posits is that even the good among us are curious about the bad and, on the right day, might even indulge in a bit, or even a lot, of the bad. Especially when we’re teenagers. So these two decide to take it upon to themselves to investigate and what they uncover in their small town is a whole lot of bad that, up until that point, we’ve seldom been shown in such iconoclastic, nightmarish and yet bizarrely believable detail by a mainstream American filmmaker to, at times, such strangely comic effect.
I was privileged to be at one of the first screenings of Blue Velvet in L.A. 38 years ago (Note: Yikes! And… Yikes!!) I took a friend and we knew nothing about it other than it was a mystery.
And yes, those were the days when you actually could know absolutely nothing about a movie by a major filmmaker.
No spoilers at all but for those who don’t know it begins with slow motion shots of a small town where everything is a bit off and almost artificial, as if John Waters and Fritz Lang had a child, named it Lynch (Note: This would be possible under a full moon in a Twin Peaks adjacent world) and decided to give it carte blanche creative control of an opening sequence.
A lawn mower accident in a 1950s town that exists in the 1980s with period-looking people who speak in halting, stilted dialogue out of a B-movie melodrama? It was hilariously bad in a purposeful way but most of the audience didn’t know what to make of it. Yet my friend and I couldn’t stop cracking up and had to stifle chuckles that we were sure Lynch himself would have approved of because of all the dirty looks we were getting from those around us.
But it didn’t matter because as the film unfolded my friend and I quieted down naturally since what we were seeing was like nothing we’d ever seen before, especially at a Hollywood screening, and, by the end, we were not necessarily sure if we wanted to see it again. Themes of rape, drugs, sadism, violence, with smatterings of raw, offensive language no major studio head would willingly give a green light to. Except, well, it was all to a point, in service of something and, let’s face it, a small group of people…somewhere… had to have approved.
Lucky for all of us.
By the time the film was over not only did my friend and I want to see it again but, after its release, so would millions more filmgoers. Not to mention, Blue Velvet would also go on to win many major critic awards, land on numerous top 10 best lists and become the cult favorite of the year, eventually winning Lynch (who also wrote the screenplay) his second Academy Award nomination as Best Director.
I watched the movie again last night (Note: My fifth or sixth viewing since its 1986 release) and, once more, I was fascinated, upset, amused and extremely uncomfortable. But sadly I also wasn’t sure if any director in Hollywood could get away with it today. Maybe an indie person somewhere, but would it even gain any sort of mainstream acceptance before being deemed problematic, demeaning, offensive, triggering and cancelled?
I’m not sure.
What I do know is that its incorrectness was used to shine a light on the disturbing, the ugly, the tawdry, the overlooked and the self-righteousness of unexamined societal goodness. A David Lynch-told story, to me, always served as a bit of a disinfectant. As if to say, no one and nothing is THIS TRULY GOOD, and yes, the world can be quite that BAD. But none of it will go away if we bury it. We need to confront it – them – the baddies – out in the open and risk our reputations in order to come out the other side with insight. At least that will give us enough familiarity with the bad to recognize it and perhaps prevent it from happening if we ever see it again.
My words, not his.
What I love most about Lynch’s work is that he asks you to give yourself permission to go through the darkness and not be repelled by it. To tolerate the quixotic because, like life, not everything gets instantly answered or is made apparent for you. It needs to be absorbed, over time and through various moods, endured until the totality of it slides open a window of understanding that finally allows you to say, Oh, I get it. Now, I get it.. I finally get it.
This is why I just decided I’m showing Blue Velvet to not one, but two, classes this semester and why I will probably get crap about it from someone. It may not be p.c. on the surface but it’s the most p.c. journey you will take overall. It doesn’t hide what it is but, at the end of the day, is an advocate for good, in all of its tawdriness. Meaning actual, real life good – not some technicolor movie version of it.
Would that our 2025 world could be that way. Well, it can be. Lynch gave us a sort of existential playbook of self-discovery that we can watch over and over and over again to guide us. Though the end of time. As opposed to the end times.
Isabella Rossellini – “Blue Velvet”
notes from a chair 