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From Shadows: What It Means to Love David Lynch
Blue Velvet (courtesy of the Criterion Collection) With David Lynch’s passing comes a reminder that, in the words of Thomas Aquinas, the “things that we love tell us what we are.” How simple, how direct, how naturally right this sounds on its face—yet scratch the surface and, whoa, you may find a huddle of rapacious black beetles tearing the hell out of each other. Explain that as a “thing that you love” to your grandmother—which I did, or tried to, during the summer break of my junior year at college, and would have had she not said almost to herself, during the Frank-ritualistically-raping-Dorothy scene, “I don’t know about you, Nicky.” Maybe I was around the same age as Jeffrey in the film? I can’t remember whether we finished watching it. Did I stop the VHS tape right then, afraid to journey further with my grandmother to “You put your disease in me”? Or did we keep watching, and was I thinking of her when Jeffrey said, “Aunt Barbara, I love you, but you’re gonna get it”?
Just how does loving something like Blue Velvet—a film that depicts characters so unlovable that all the Sandys and robins in the world can’t erase them from our memory—tell us who we are? After all, it’s only one solitary beetle at the very end, dying in the robin’s beak; masses of them still exist beneath the surface of everything, a carpet of ever-moving and ever-spreading evil. In 1977’s “Beginning to See the Light,” pioneering critic Ellen Willis worked through her attraction to a new genre of music that, by all accounts she, as a feminist, should not love: punk. Willis zeros in on the especially hateful, misogynistic “Bodies” by the Sex Pistols. “It was an outrageous song,” she writes, “yet I could not simply dismiss it with outrage. The extremity of its disgust forced me to admit that I was no stranger to such feelings.” Such feelings—like love?
Back in 2011, Scott Macaulay opened the door for “The Blue Velvet Project,” with a plan to publish a column for exactly one year. Each week I’d pause the film every 47 seconds and contemplate the frame, no matter what it depicted. The idea—inspired by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt’s Oblique Strategies, the formal constraints of Dogme 95’s Vow of Chastity and the surrealists’ automatic writing technique—was designed to confront Blue Velvet not by deliberately homing in on the parts I wanted to write about, but rather on the moments that presented themselves via a pre-determined timecode. What had my love for Blue Velvet overlooked, I wondered? In the process of this project, might I fall out of love with the film? Could a cold system based on a timecode produce warm results?
The first post in August 2011, on Dennis Hopper’s name in cursive in the opening credits, led me to consider a clutch of associations:
The titles (by Van Der Veer Photo Effects) in their cursive elegance recall a by-gone era and echo the fluid titles of classical-era films such as George Cukor’s A Double Life (1947). Dennis Hopper’s name—itself a tangle of associations serving as cultural knot points in American culture, ranging from his first film, Rebel Without a Cause (1955), to Easy Rider (1969) to Apocalypse Now (1979)—appears against the undulating blue velvet curtain that frames the film’s narrative. The same year as Blue Velvet he would star in Hoosiers playing Shooter, a reverse-image doppelgänger of Frank Booth.
The most surprising moments occurred when one of the every-47-seconds stoppages happened at spots in the film that likewise didn’t present itself as an obvious candidate for reflection: the bridge truss at 81:28, a fragment of Dorothy’s arm reaching into Jeffrey’s closet hiding space at 37:36.
A surprise of a different sort was a detour into a dissolve, prompted by a series of dissolves beginning at 94:47. Maybe when we think of Lynch’s films as being dreamy (especially Blue Velvet, Mulholland Drive and Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me), that feeling comes from techniques like these dissolves, those liminal zones and in-between moments. After all, was this not Lynch’s life work, crossing inherited boundaries between drawing, painting, photography, filmmaking, sculpture, writing? In a recent article about the painter Celia Paul, Karl Ove Knausgaard considers her painting of a simple chair and why it feels alive: “If you are going to paint a man or a chair in front of you,” he writes, “you have to force your way through the whole thicket of inner images, as the painting has to emerge in its own right, and for this to happen it can’t be governed by what was there before, it has to be present in the moment. All art, I dare to affirm, is about getting to that point.” There’s something of the transcendent, the Platonic, in statements like Knausgaard’s “the painting has to emerge in its own right” and Lynch’s notion that ideas are something out there (rather than emerging from inside us) that are available to catch. Perhaps Lynch’s most generous gift to us was not catching ideas that are somehow already out there, but just the opposite: catching ones that are already here and that are common, yet made freshly strange and unfamiliar.
Red roses against a white picket fence.
Yellow pavement markings on black asphalt, illuminated by headlights, at night.
A ceiling fan spinning softly in a suburban home.
A traffic light against a dark sky, shifting in the wind.
A well-dressed man.
In Lynch’s unproduced script for Ronnie Rocket, the evil Hank Bartells is described by one of the detectives on his trail as someone who’s “got the electricity fouled up, reversed or somethin’ so’s it’s around the wrong way and all the power is suckin’ up light … he’s making darkness.” There’s an echo here of Frank Booth’s line in Blue Velvet: “Now it’s dark.”
Perhaps this is Lynch’s legacy: creating spaces for darkness to dwell only so that, miraculously, the light can come—blindingly.
