Blue Velvet (dir. David Lynch, 1986)
While filming the scene where Frank Booth assaults Dorothy Vallens in her apartment, Jeffrey Beaumont hidden in the closet and unable to intervene without risking his own death, David Lynch would laugh. He couldn’t stop himself from laughing. The most upsetting scene in film full of them, and the man making it is chuckling as Dennis Hopper simulates a violent crime on his then romantic partner Isabella Rossellini. How could he do this? What’s wrong with this man?
Lynch writes in his memoir Room to Dream of filming it: “I was laughing uncontrollably, partly because I was happy. The intensity, the obsession, the drivenness of Frank–and that’s the way it was supposed to be. When people get that obsessed, there’s humor in it to me, and I loved it.”
Rossellini recalls that the reason why Lynch laughed was the sheer strangeness of the scene. She herself can’t watch it without finding it funny now, though apparently that was also the first time that she and Hopper met. You almost have to laugh at that, then. That said, I’ve never understood how anyone can stand recordings of themselves, but that’s some hardwired self-esteem issues talking.
That’s the thing about Blue Velvet and much of Lynch’s filmography. What’s horrifying is often funny either in the same moment or on reflection. On subsequent viewings your reaction be entirely different. On this one, I found myself questioning how, when, and why I found the film humorous.
There’s Lumberton’s dedication to logger kitsch. Its radio station WOOD. Jeffrey’s unfortunate haircut and earring. The fact that Jeffrey becomes involved in all this because he just happened to find a human ear while throwing rocks, put the ear in a brown bag he found beside it, and took it to the police. Jeffrey’s love of Heineken. “My dad drinks Bud.” “King of beers.” That this small Southern town supports an enormous drug economy [1]. That through this ordeal, Jeffrey avoids telling anything to his family, essentially anticipating that Onion headline, “27-Year Old Lies About Every Single Aspect of His Life to Keep Parents From Worrying.”
Part of this is due to the much commented upon juxtaposition of anachronistic 1950s innocence with grotesque crime and horror more befitting of its 1980s setting. The shot near the start of a manicured lawn zooming into scuttling insect carnage is a good example. Another is music, using pop songs by Bobby Vinton, Roy Orbison, and Ketty Lester in circumstances that reveal much darker undertone in them. All of this would be used several years later when Lynch and Mark Frost created Twin Peaks.
And then there’s Frank.
It’s fair to say that almost from the film’s release, the memefacation of Frank Booth was at hand. That wasn’t how it would have been described at the time–lest we forget, Richard Dawkins was once a respected biologist with an interesting thought about how ideas propagate and not a raging reactionary atheist ruining it for the rest of us. Lines extolling the virtues of Pabst Blue Ribbon over Heineken and his claim that he’d “fuck anything that moves” quickly found their way into pop culture. I saw Kevin Smith’s Clerks long before I saw Blue Velvet, but I knew who and what Jay was quoting. One of the best jokes in The Squid and the Whale is Jeff Daniels suggesting that his high school aged son take a date to see Blue Velvet instead of Short Circuit, and then a smash cut to them looking traumatized.
This reaction to Frank Booth isn’t entirely wrong, either. As Jeffrey says, he’s “a very sick and dangerous man,” but he’s also a ridiculous one as well. He’s a manchild given to Oedipal urges, a man who has such poor impulse control that it’s only his audacity and ruthlessness that allows him any success as a criminal. His profane syntax and over-the-top mannerisms are funny until giving way to psychosexual violence. His attachment to crooners, love songs, and the “suave” Ben are so antithetical to the image he presents, it becomes funny. He’s a textbook Freudian nightmare in a world that still gives credence to him.
You’re absolutely right to laugh at him–at least until he reveals just who and what he is: a monster.
Maybe people are just at a loss of what to do with something they don’t immediately understand. I watched First Man in the theater over the weekend. It’s not a spoiler to say they make it to the moon. After landing the lunar module and cutting to the exterior, there’s no sound, reflecting the reality of a vacuum. It’s a moment that should be cathartic for the audience as finally, after all the suffering and challenges and heartbreak experienced over a decade by these characters, they’ve achieved their goal.
And there were nervous titters filling that quiet. I thought I’d had a good read on the room, but perhaps not? On reflection, I realize that they were quietly laughing, because no one anymore knows what to do with silence. The same thing happened with The Last Jedi during a pivotal scene with a few theaters putting up fliers explaining that no, the sound hadn’t cut out: that’s an intentional artistic choice on the filmmakers’ part.
It’s similar in the horror genre. You see something so awful that sometimes the only reaction that makes sense in the moment is to laugh. I’m guilty of it on occasion, though not in the case of Blue Velvet. I remember the first time I saw the film and watched in silent horror like Jeffrey in the closet as that scene unfolded. I can hardly imagine any normal person watching it and reacting any other way, but I suppose filming it is different. Maybe you have to keep some part of yourself out of the scene in order to create something, anything like that.
Still, I’m not sure what to make of Lynch’s comments regarding the production of Blue Velvet. I suppose I should take them at face value, but there’s a disregard and flippancy there that bothers me. Reading his memoir confirmed a few other complicated feelings I have had about the man. While I love his work and enjoy aspects of his public persona, I find some things about him troubling. His treatment of race is kind of appalling. His political comments reveal a man who’s never been threatened by power. He’s entertained 9/11 trutherism, which is never a good sign. While meditation is fine, his attachment to Transcendental Meditation and the cult of personality around Maharishi Mahesh Yogi is a bit ridiculous. His films are intensely concerned with women’s trauma, but I don’t know how to square that with the bad endings of most of his relationships. Interviews with his exes reveal a certain emotional immaturity.
I don’t know. It’s just one of those things that engaging with art and artists forces you to confront.
[1] Well, that’s not so much funny as accurate.
October 16, 2018
oliveresque 