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Now, voyeur!
Blue Velvet 16 years later; Group
BY GERALD PEARY

Incoherent artistic works are often justified as being like dreams. How erroneous! Dreams possess a fierce logic, and nightmares frighten us because what happens in them seems so persuasively real. For me, David Lynch’s Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive are as frustrating as they are exhilarating — what the hell is going on? By contrast, Blue Velvet (1986), Lynch’s abiding masterwork, serves up a trancelike journey into the most eerie of netherworlds that somehow makes a crazy sense, beginning to end. It’s the stuff genuine dreams are made of, and it’s at the Brattle this weekend (July 26-28) in an archive 35mm print.

Lynch starts with a corny, old-fashioned detective narrative. Home from college, Jeff (Kyle MacLachlan) discovers a cutoff ear and suspects murder. He and a cute high-school girl, Sandy (Laura Dern), decide to track down the crime and solve it. It’s Frank Hardy meets Nancy Drew, and, gee, what fun! Bypassing the police, a confident Jeff checks out the apartment of a lounge singer, the purged-from-Oz Dorothy (Isabella Rossellini). He discovers that her child has been kidnapped. The Dalí-esque ear? It’s been sliced from the head of her husband, who’s being held captive by drug addict and psychopath Frank (a deliriously out-of-control Dennis Hopper).

"Eagle Scout, Missoula, Montana" is how Lynch once identified himself in a four-word bio. In ways, he remains just that: a plucky Midwestern merit-badge lad, and Jeff is obviously his alter ego. MacLachlan modeled his wardrobe on the straight-looking filmmaker, including a shirt stiffly buttoned to the top. And Jeff, like Lynch, is obsessively drawn to the mysterious. His desire to solve a crime has nothing to do with a passion for justice — it’s an excuse to peer into the Other Side, an alluringly rotten world putrid with kinky sex and rancid violence. Here, crazy Frank lies between Dorothy’s legs, chewing on a piece of blue velvet and punching her in the face — to her masochistic delight. Jeff watches all this concealed in a closet, mesmerized.

Like Hitchcock’s Rear Window, Blue Velvet implicates the filmmaker (and the viewer) as the ultimate voyeur. Again and again, Jeff, like Lynch’s film, climbs the stairs to that apartment, where there’s sordid sex, an often naked woman asking for it, and, finally, blood and death. In Rear Window, Jimmy Stewart is turned on by women — including his perky girlfriend, Grace Kelly — only when he can watch through his camera lens or his binoculars. Not only does Jeff like to look, he becomes a salivating participant, breaking the code of honorable detectives (Raymond Chandler’s abstinent Marlowe, for instance) in sleeping with the chick he’s investigating. And not only screwing her but, finally, Frank-like, smashing her. Do filmmakers have a perverse appetite for sex and violence? David Lynch is saying, you betcha.

A decade and a half later, Isabella Rossellini’s raw, damaged performance as Dorothy still seems one of the most vulnerable and courageous ever by an actress. Blue Velvet’s greatest scene? I’m mad about that loony party at Ben’s place, where Frank’s epicene lipsticked pal (Dean Stockwell) lip-synchs to Roy Orbison’s "In Dreams."

And Blue Velvet’s ending? Frank is dead, his gang smashed by the police; Dorothy is reunited with her child; and Jeff and Sandy are left together, with a red, red robin sitting on the window sill. Fifteen years ago, I saw Lynch’s finale as all irony, all Buñuelian cynicism. Now, I’m less sure, even when I see that robin chew on a hapless insect. How about a mixed finish? Lynch in an interview: "There is goodness in blue skies and flowers, but another force — a wild pain and decay — accompanies everything."

GROUP, which opens July 26 at the Coolidge, succeeds even though Marilyn Freeman has no idea what to do with a digital camera. Much of this indie movie is made up of multi-screen images, lame, arbitrary close-ups of the nine female characters who are participating (this is the whole movie) in the most intense of group-therapy sessions. What makes it work is the way the actresses are wedded to the unhappy, angry, bewildered people they’re portraying. I’ve seen few films where it’s so unclear whether the actors are acting or somehow have gone off into real life. At the top of the list is Carrie Brownstein, the great Sleater-Kinney rock star, who’s brilliant as a post-college girl suffering from depression because her beloved father is threatening to give her a 17-year-old stepmom.

Gerald Peary can be reached at gpeary@world.std.com

 

Issue Date: July 25 - August 1, 2002
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