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October 12, 2003
 
We had a quiet dinner last night with some friends and then watched a DVD of David Lynch's 1980's film Blue Velvet.
This was my first look at Lynch. I have not seen Eraserhead. nor Mulholland Drive. All I had seen were some of late episodes of the innovative Twin Peaks on television. At the time I thought Twin Peaks looked pretty interesting in terms of deconstructing the naturalist conventions of television.
The others had seen Sam Mendes's American Beauty. From the conversation I presume that this film had little connection with the Grateful Dead album of the same name.
I knew nothing about their American Beauty and they knew nothing about mine. They could see no reason why the film they loved should connect to an obscure album from the 1970s. What has the Grateful Dead got to with anything outside the acid-drenched world of Ken Kesey?
The others see the cinema through the eyes of literature, and so they are most comfortable with the way Hollywood cinema synthesises the diversity of images to narratives, naturalism and characters. They presuppose that the narrative is what is seen from from a particular interested perspective, and this is then connected to their particular world. What is avoided in this assumption, that cinema is pretty much a rewriting nineteenth century novels, is what disturbs. They do not think in terms of what Deleuze calls the movement image.
Suprisingly, no one had seen Blue Velvet. Made in the 1980s, the film is an exposure of American suburbia. It is the cinematic aspect that is so striking; the very organization of the flow of images (the movement image) precludes viewing the film as a single, coherent narrative. This was not film as literature. It was a film that played with the ideas and conventions of cinematic representation. Time is determined by movment.
What I found impressive about Blue Velvet was the different levels or layers. The most noticeable of these was the ironic, deadpan "portrait" of small-town Lumberton, which encourages us to think that the film is some sort of satire. Yet what lies behind this white picket facade is a horror story. So we live in two worlds at the same time, one of which is pleasant, the other terrifying. Underneath the images of everyday suburban life we have the bizarre, surrealistic world underneath the superfical images of everyday life.
Both worlds are expressed in terms of references to old B-grade movies. Yet Blue Velvet was not just horror. The cinematic look was saturated in the stylistics of film noir:---- gloomy grays, blacks and whites, expressionistic lighting, disorienting visual schemes, skewed camera angles and interiors with low-key lighting and dark and gloomy appearances. I marvelled at the film noir intertexutality and the mixing of the genres of horror and film noir.
Another layer is the strong postmodern aesthetic with its self-referential inter-textuality. We have recycling of pre-fabricated images from the past, assembled together in the form of bricolage. The images of small town life, coffee shops and bars were familar. even though I did not recognize the particular films. The film is full of parodied cliches of small town suburban family life: perfect little houses with white picket fences and impeccably manicured yards and teenage romances. It was the clean, conforming, pastoral America of Norman Rockwell. Even though I did not recognize the particular films that were quoted, I understood that Lynch was locating the film in a long cinema tradition. And I realised that the conventional closure of classical narrative was mocked. At one level suburban order is restored, with the father re-established as patriarchal hierarchy, Dorothy is 'cured' of her sadomasochism and the heterosexual couple of Sandy and Jeffrey is in place.
Yet the mechanical robin signifies that is a just representation of reality: it is a film we are watching and it is a simulacrum of reality. Blue Velvet is self-referential since it questioning its own ability, and hence the ability of cinema to represent life and reality and concepts such as good and evil.
My companions, who love to see a lot of contemporary films in the various cinema complexes, said the look of Blue Velvet was very 1980s. It looked so dated now, even though it wouldl have been seen as 'groundbreaking' or innovative in the 1980s. Lynch, they said, was now a star persona, part of the mainstream with a marketable brand as an auteur.
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I must say i dragged myself through the unbearably sombre eraserhead but thought Wild at Heart and Mulholland Drive were excellent though not the kind of movie one would choose to relax with!