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 […]
by Nicholas Rombes on Sep 14, 2011Second #752, 12:52 1. Jeffrey has just left the Williams’s, when their daughter Sandy appears slowly out of the shadows, to the swelling of music and the sound of wind moving through the tree branches, in one of the most remarkable entrances in cinema history, asking him, “Are you the one that found the ear?” 2. “How did you know?” Jeffrey says. “I just know. That’s all,” Sandy replies, in her pink dress, with no bra. The frame is overheated with information about light, and Sandy’s face, the way it is turned to Jeffrey, it’s as if she wants him […]
by Nicholas Rombes on Sep 12, 2011Second #705, 11:45 And so here you are, lost in a movie. “It must be great,” the young man says to the older man, referring to his job as a detective. The older man replies, “It’s horrible too.” And you think: this is how life is. Great. And horrible. The detective is at work eradicating evil all the time, even at home where he has not changed out of his detective outfit, because evil does not sleep. You think about the seriousness with which Blue Velvet treats evil in a secular age, and how the most that the detective can […]
by Nicholas Rombes on Sep 9, 2011Minute #658, 7:58 1. Jeffrey, entering the Williams’s home, crossing a threshold that is a doorway. This is Sandy’s castle, guarded by her father the detective, who wears his gun holstered, even at home. Or is Jeffrey the detective? Or—more radically—is Sandy? 2. “Leaving the burning theater behind one begins to ease into a new perspective. The stairway leads to a doorway, the doorway to an alleyway, the alleyway to another door, more stairs, another amber room where one can forget again” 3. “He hacks desperately at the brambles and, as the hedge closes round him like the grasping flesh-raking […]
by Nicholas Rombes on Sep 7, 2011Second # 611, 10:11 This gliding shot, showing the underside of trees as Jeffrey walks the nighttime streets of his neighborhood, loomed large in my imagination after seeing the film for the first time in 1987. I wouldn’t see Blue Velvet again for many years, and in that time these few seconds of footage assumed meaning and feeling wildly disproportionate to their importance in the film. I can’t really account for this and, to be honest, when I set out to do this project I did it with the intention of not writing very much about my own personal stake […]
by Nicholas Rombes on Sep 5, 2011Second #564, 9:24 Jeffrey comes down the stairs of his home. It’s night, and his mother (played by Priscilla Pointer, the real-life mother of Amy Irving) and Aunt Barbara (Frances Bay) sit on the sofa watching a black-and-white crime drama on the television. Positioned on opposite ends, the space between them opens up like some sort of haunted void where someone (or something) else should be. In Lynch’s films, sofas—which seem like the most harmless piece of furniture possible—become uncanny objects, spooky places that are so familiar that they become unfamiliar. There is one more point of general application which […]
by Nicholas Rombes on Sep 2, 2011Second #517, 8:37 Peter Carew, who plays the coroner and who appears onscreen for just under twenty seconds, delivers perhaps the most tilted line in the movie: “We’ll check the morgue records but I don’t recall anything coming in minus an ear.” This either could be the punch line to the whole sordid blood-drenched twentieth century, or else a few words tossed off by a bald man who refuses to look at the characters on screen with him, as if he speaks to (into?) the ear and the ear alone. Blue Velvet was Carew’s first movie in twenty years. Previously, […]
by Nicholas Rombes on Aug 31, 2011Second #470, 7:50 1. Detective Williams greets Jeffrey, who has come bearing an ear in a bag. He stands face to face with the archetypal detective, who wears his holster and gun in the office. He is either a man who has repressed a lot, or a man who is completely open and comfortable with the fact of evil in the world. His eyes are sad and knowing and also suspicious. Actually, Jeffrey is the detective, and he might as well be saying, “I found the ear. This is my case. Stay far away.” 2. Lynch has said that “clues […]
by Nicholas Rombes on Aug 29, 2011Second #423 / 7:03 FOUR ASIDES 1. Holding the brown paper bag with the human ear in his hand, Jeffrey enters the Lumberton Police Station and asks, “Do you have a Detective Williams still working here?” There is a small-town familiarity to this shot, but also a hard-to-define, wavering menace, something you can feel but can’t quite detect. Some of this is generated from the stern, accusatory looks those in power give Jeffrey, as in this scene where the police officer behind the counter stares—his face unmoving—at him as he turns to go to Detective Williams. The same sort of […]
by Nicholas Rombes on Aug 26, 2011Second # 376 (6:16) In his 1932 essay “A Course in Treatment,” Sergei Eisenstein wrote that “only the sound-film is capable of reconstructing all phases of the course of thought” in the mind of a character. In many ways, Blue Velvet’s most radical experiments are in the realm of sound. In this frame, Jeffrey, having just discovered the severed ear, absorbs this fact, the fact of sound. And so: *During the 5:50s, as Jeffrey walks home through the field after visiting his ailing father, the noise is diagetic: the sound of Jeffrey walking, the birds, the insects—all these sounds seem […]
by Nicholas Rombes on Aug 24, 2011