Columns
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The Blue Velvet Project, #24
Second # 1128, 18:48 1. “The first thing I need,” Jeffrey tells Sandy, “is to get into her apartment and open a window that I can crawl into later.” As it turns out, this plot line never develops, as Jeffrey spots a key to Dorothy’s apartment which he takes instead. It seems like a minor point, the window, (although in the apartment in his bug overalls Jeffrey does glance twice at the window above Dorothy’s sink) and we soon forget about it. It’s one of those moments in Blue Velvet that only obliquely and in the most obscure ways references […]
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The Blue Velvet Project, #23
Second #1081, 18:01 “There are opportunities in life for gaining knowledge and experience,” Jeffrey has just said to Sandy as they sit in Arlene’s. In 1844, two years after his eldest son died of scarlet fever, Ralph Waldo Emerson began his most radical essay, “Experience,” with these sentences: “Where do we find ourselves? In a series of which we do not know the extremes, and believe that it has none. We wake and find ourselves on a stair; there are stairs below us, which we seem to have ascended; there are stairs above us, many a one, which go upward […]
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Take Shelter — A Hammer to Nail Review
(Before world-premiering in the dramatic competition at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival, Take Shelter was picked up by Sony Classics. It went on to win the Grand Prize at Critics Week, as well as the FIPRESCI Prize, in Cannes. It opens theatrically in New York City and Los Angeles on Friday, September 30, 2011. Visit the official website to learn more.) [DISCLAIMER: I am very good friends with several of the key collaborators involved with the Take Shelter production. Ordinarily, I would absolve myself from writing a review based on far more tenuous connections, but in this particular case, I […]
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The Blue Velvet Project, #22
Second #1034, 17:14 The beauty of hair in the mid-Eighties, curling ironed and a little bit feathered. Sandy’s friends are trapped somewhere between 1956 and 1986, in their long skirts and sweaters. “Don’t you guys dare say anything to Mike, okay?” Sandy warns them, as Jeffrey waits for her in his classic red Oldsmobile convertible. “It’s not what you think, okay? Promise?” For all its references to the past—especially in this scene—Blue Velvet resists the lure of nostalgia. In the best and most obscurely written book ever on postmodernism, Fredric Jameson argued that realism itself was the casualty of late […]
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The Blue Velvet Project, #21
Second #987, 16:27 1. Double Ed to Jeffrey: “If you want to spray for bugs Jeffrey, it causes us no pain.” 2. “The black tradition is double-voiced.” (Henry Louis Gates, Jr., from The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism) 3. Valvoline. 4. Comet. 5. A “Danger” sign. 6. The backroom of a hardware store might be said to be a particularly American place, one whose codes are so obvious they are practically inscrutable. 7. The image at second #987 exists on the level of folklore. 8. One of the Eds is blind; the other sees for him. 9. […]
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The Blue Velvet Project, #20
Second #940, 15:40 “That’s kind of interesting,” Sandy says, laughing, after Jeffrey has—out of the blue—demonstrated the chicken walk. Blue Velvet was the last Lynch film on which Alan Splet designed sound and in this scene, like so many others, it’s as if we are enveloped in an auditory cocoon. “Sound is very important,” Lynch has said, “because it really is half the film. With film, the whole can be greater than the parts if you have the sound, the image, and sequence of scenes right.” At right around second #940, the film cuts to this shot, and the sound […]
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The Blue Velvet Project, #19
Second #893, 14:53 In the early days of silent cinema, text and image coexisted, as intertitles directed viewers how to read a film, literally. In the best of these films, intertitles not only conveyed narrative information, but suggested possibilities of reading that allowed for the viewer to construct her own meaning from the relationship between text and image. In Blue Velvet, the LINCOLN street sign, which functions almost like an insert shot, is its own form of postmodern intertitle. [Christian Metz: “When approaching cinema from the linguistic point of view, it is difficult to avoid shuttling back and forth between […]
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The Blue Velvet Project, #18
Second #846, 14:06 They have walked together in the night for several minutes now, delicately circling the topic of evil, as if talking in code. Finally, Jeffrey takes a gamble: “I, uh, guess you gotta get back home pretty soon, huh?” he asks Sandy. Her reply, as usual, takes the form of another question: “Not really—why?” And then she offers to show him Dorothy Vallens’s apartment, whose weak gravity has been slowly pulling them closer. This is a fiercely political stretch of the film, given the context of Ronald Reagan and his elevation of family to mythic status. In his […]
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Nostalgia For The Light — A Hammer to Nail Review
(Nostalgia For The Light is now available on DVD and Blu-ray thanks to Icarus Films. It opened theatrically in New York City on March 18, 2011. Visit the film’s official page at the distributor’s site to learn more.) Writing about masterpieces is always difficult, yet in the case of Patricio Guzman’s Nostalgia For The Light, it’s almost crippling. On the one hand, there is enough information and emotion contained within this film’s 90 minutes to justify several thick, glowing texts of appreciation. It’s not merely that Guzman guides us on a journey that tackles just about every grand issue known […]
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The Blue Velvet Project, #17
Second #799, 13:19 “Jeffrey can connect different worlds,” David Lynch has said. “He can look into Sandy’s world, he can look into Dorothy’s world, he can get into Frank’s world.” The secret subtext to this scene is Life Begins for Andy Hardy (1941), starring Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland, number 11 in the movie series, where Andy learns that adult life is dark and impure and trip-wired with temptation and so struggles mightily to gear-shift his life into reverse. Andy, in New York, away from his future wife Betsy Booth (Judy Garland), is tempted by the “wolfess” Jennifer Hicks (Patricia […]
