Lynchathon I, Part II: Wild at Heart, Blue Velvet, and Being Uncomfortably Turned On
The truth is that Lynch's stuff so far hasn't been the best blog-fodder because I don't generally have all that much to say beyond an uninvested critical reaction; there's very little yet that I react emotionally to, or am inspired by in some direction or another. These are by and large good movies - The Elephant Man and Blue Velvet are both at least near-masterpieces in my estimation - but they're not really in my wheelhouse and there generally isn't something I can latch onto as a point of self-indulgent departure. I'm not interested, e.g., in telling you whether or not Bones is a good show - watch an episode and decide for yourself. I write flabby and undisciplined rambles like that because I'm interested in some facet of the show or want to work out some thoughts I have about it beyond the thumbs up or down, and Lynch's first five movies don't dig into my brain in that way, the notable exceptions being the apocalyptic badness of Dune, and various aspects of Wild at Heart.
A lot of what's interesting to me in this film is the comparison it provides with Blue Velvet. Eraserhead was bizarre and completely introverted artistically, The Elephant Man was a well-selected project that nonetheless was someone else's and the least Lynch-like Lynch so far, Dune an ill-begotten catastrophe, and then Blue Velvet and Wild at Heart are near-accessible films with discernable plots and characters, but in a decidedly Lynchian mode. Here is where I recognize (and appreciate) the artist behind Mulholland Drive.
The apt comparison between these two films is once again David Foster Wallace's (all DFW references are cribbed from a several months' old rereading of his "on the set" piece about the making of Lost Highway, which was collected in A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again. It's a great essay as well as a great exegesis of Lynch's major artistic accomplishments as of the mid-90s): Wild at Heart suffers in comparison to Blue Velvet because where the earlier film had distinctly drawn characters - and in Jeffrey Beaumont a relatively grounded protagonist with whom the audience could ally their emotional responses - Wild at Heart has fuzzily drawn characterish entities that are nearly impossible to relate to as recognizable human beings. Good or bad, they're all as inexplicably weird as Frank Booth. Wild at Heart actually has a more conventionally explicable and digestible plot (barring the wizard of Oz riff/detours). A getaway/chase/road movie winds up feeling kind of aimless even before Sailor and Lula (yes, those are their names) wind up stalled and temporarily doomed in Big Tuna, Texas.
There's an interesting, unsettling relationship between two scenes of sexual violation in these movies. Blue Velvet famously has Jeffrey hiding in a closet, watching Frank rape Dorothy. There's a lot of setup that went into the scene; Jeffrey snuck into Dorothy's apartment, watched her come home, watched her undress, and just when it's getting a little too Porky's, she realizes that she's not alone and goes after him with a knife. With Jeffrey at her mercy, Dorothy first chooses to humiliate him by ordering him to undress, duplicating and reversing the violation he perpetrated on her, and then she starts to treat him (still rather demandingly, still with the knife) as a lover. Whether this was a change in Dorothy's mood or if the initial (justifiably) vengeful humiliation was always meant as prelude to sex I have no idea. Dorothy's perhaps a naturally kinky lady, but she's also in a very bad place emotionally and it's clearly fucking up her sexual proclivities - there are people who like violent sex for its own sake, let's say, but I think Lynch wants us to think that Dorothy likes Jeffrey to hit her because her son is gone. Maybe I'm way wrong and oversimplifying, but it's definitely the case that sweet young naive Jeffrey thinks that's the case.
Anyway, after the foreplay but well before the consummation of Jeffrey and Dorothy's affair, Frank comes banging on the door and Jeffrey is sent back to the closet. Frank comes in, demands a drink, and then has sex with Dorothy. It's clearly rape, and it's also clearly a longstanding arrangement; Frank is verbally threatening but doesn't really resort to physical violence, because the threat of hurting her family is sufficiently coercive. He has a particular game he wants to play and she knows what Frank expects of her. Jeffrey watches all this in fascinated horror and, of course, horror at his fascination. He's in some degree titillated, which is discomfiting for the viewer because Jeffrey kind of is the viewer and we'd rather not be confronted with the fact that watching a sex act under these circumstances could be titillating while also morally repulsive.
But now we've got Wild at Heart, and Lula, who's just cottoned on to the fact that she's pregnant, is holed up sick in the motel room in Big Tuna while Sailor is out doing whatever, and Willem Defoe comes in playing the character of Bobby Peru, and he violates her, again without becoming physically abusive but backed by the verbal threat of physical harm (which he's clearly capable of). He touches Lula sexually and insists that she say "Fuck me." When she tries to pull away he grabs her and threatens to kill her, then continues to insist that she say "Fuck me" while continuing to touch her. It's deeply unpleasant to watch. And then Lula makes a gesture with her hand that we've already seen, earlier in the film, to indicate sexual pleasure, and she does in fact moan "Fuck me." At which point Bobby Peru jumps back, makes a joke, and leaves.
I had to stop the DVD and process that for a while. While nobody has any fun playing misery poker, it was simultaneously true that (a) intellectually, I believe what Frank did to Dorothy was much worse than what Bobby did to Lula, and (b) I was much more disturbed by the Bobby/Lula scene than the Frank/Dorothy one. So why?
First because we know Lula better. The scene happens past the halfway point of the movie and she's been on screen for much of that time. Dorothy is still a new character to us when she's raped, and we're less invested in her. Second because Lula absolutely loves Sailor with a crazy devotion and what Bobby Peru takes from her is an emotional violation as well as a physical one; she's clearly horrified that she could feel physically pleasure (and she clearly does) at Bobby's unwelcome touch, and that she emotionally may have betrayed Sailor somehow. Frank uses Dorothy's emotions to get what he wants, but he doesn't demand anything of her emotionally other than that she play the role he requires; he wants her to act, not to feel. Third because while identifying with Jeffrey's horror and a little bit of arousal in that closet was a discomfiting feeling, Jeffrey still provides a distance, a buffer, from what's going on. We're actually not really watching a rape (although we totally are), we're watching a guy watching a rape. In Wild at Heart it's just us in the room with Bobby and Lula in a scene that started with goofy piss jokes and then got real weird on us real fast. And Fourth because, honestly, the scene is kind of sexy, which is the really daring AND upsetting thing about it (and on the DVD Laura Dern is still clearly a little amazed if not that she was asked to play that scene, which apparently didn't really exist in the script, and one gets the sense that it took her a while to get OK with it). The Frank/Dorothy rape is shot from a distance and dispassionately, whereas Bobby/Lula is shot up close, sweaty, sun coming through the slats of the window, insert shots of hands and lips and people shaking while standing perfectly still. Which works - and the scene, and Lula's journey through it are both "believable" inside the film's world - because, frankly, Laura Dern is a Sex Bomb in this movie and there's no way around it. I've now seen six David Lynch films and this scene - two people in a room, no props, no violence, no funny sound design or prosthetics other than Bobby Peru's grotesque dentures - is easily the most disturbing thing, emotionally, that he's put me through. More than the Frank/Dorothy rape (gasmask and all), more than Jeffrey acquiescing to Dorothy's request that he hit her during sex, more than Naomi Watts' character masturbating while crying in Mulholland Drive...if there's a place where Lynch's introverted psyche does have a sympathetic resonance with mine, it's in his presentation of sexuality; not that I identify with it - whatever weird shit I may or may not be into, Dear Reader, I assure you with all honesty that it's not nitrous oxide, or crying, or blue velvet bathrobes, or bad teeth - but that something in me is going to pick up on these vibrations, whereas all the bulbous growths in Eraserhead and Dune just make me glance at something else. I'd already figured this out from Mulholland Drive and Blue Velvet but I was completely unprepared and unarmed for the possibility that I'd find something like the Bobby/Lula scene hot. You win, David Lynch, you made me embarrassed of myself.
And since I'm arriving at this point, I'm going to shift gears and ignore the ways in which that scene totally fucks with the rest of my reaction to the film, and reiterate against my better judgment that Laura Dern is a Sex Bomb in this movie. I can't overstate this; it's astounding. I really shouldn't talk about this because I'm quite possibly guaranteeing that if I ever want a girlfriend again I should keep her from reading this paragraph. What's especially funny is that I think Dern is someone who's steadily grown into her looks; she's got sort of a funny, equine face, but I think it looks more attractive now than it did when she was a teenager in Blue Velvet, and she's still not completely there in Wild at Heart, when she was in her very early twenties I think. So it was weird watching the movie and registering that in her appearance Dern wasn't even as attractive as she was going to be later in life, and nonetheless she's turning in what is absolutely the hottest performance I've ever seen. It actually made me reflect that there are very few honestly sexy sustained performances from women in film (I'm abstaining from a consideration of male performance). There are lots of performances by actresses who are sexy, but few really sexy performances. And actually I've only seen two that can compare: Marisa Tomei in Before the Devil Knows You're Dead and the young lady in the bookstore in The Big Sleep, but she's only got one scene to work her magic with Humphrey Bogart. Note that, on watching this scene in Film 101 in college, my friends and I readily agreed with no debate that it was the sexiest thing we'd ever seen. The key, I guess, is that actresses appear to tend to play "seductress" when they're supposed to be sexy. They're vamping for male attention, which certainly has its distinct charms, but instead consider that bookstore employee or Marisa Tomei in ...Devil... - they don't need to seduce anyone, they're incredibly attractive people who know that they're attractive AND most crucially they're unabashedly sexual beings, and therefore completely free not to try and turn on their scene partner (and thus the viewer) but rather completely free to be turned on. It's so simple I can't believe I never noticed this before watching Wild at Heart; Laura Dern melts my brain because I completely believed that she was turned on for most of the movie, which is a thing I've almost never believed of any actress for more than five minutes at a time, in a real movie or a pornographic one for that matter. Every shoulder shrug and neck stretch and balance shift and hand gesture screams arousal. If I'd seen this movie at twelve I would either have been desperately afraid of it or sprouted considerable chest hair. It's not nearly as good as Blue Velvet, but it made me think more and has stuck with me harder, despite the shitty ending and attendant weirdness. Now I just need to spend the rest of my life pretending not to be hopelessly infatuated with a Laura Dern performance from twenty years ago and I'll be all set.
A lot of what's interesting to me in this film is the comparison it provides with Blue Velvet. Eraserhead was bizarre and completely introverted artistically, The Elephant Man was a well-selected project that nonetheless was someone else's and the least Lynch-like Lynch so far, Dune an ill-begotten catastrophe, and then Blue Velvet and Wild at Heart are near-accessible films with discernable plots and characters, but in a decidedly Lynchian mode. Here is where I recognize (and appreciate) the artist behind Mulholland Drive.
The apt comparison between these two films is once again David Foster Wallace's (all DFW references are cribbed from a several months' old rereading of his "on the set" piece about the making of Lost Highway, which was collected in A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again. It's a great essay as well as a great exegesis of Lynch's major artistic accomplishments as of the mid-90s): Wild at Heart suffers in comparison to Blue Velvet because where the earlier film had distinctly drawn characters - and in Jeffrey Beaumont a relatively grounded protagonist with whom the audience could ally their emotional responses - Wild at Heart has fuzzily drawn characterish entities that are nearly impossible to relate to as recognizable human beings. Good or bad, they're all as inexplicably weird as Frank Booth. Wild at Heart actually has a more conventionally explicable and digestible plot (barring the wizard of Oz riff/detours). A getaway/chase/road movie winds up feeling kind of aimless even before Sailor and Lula (yes, those are their names) wind up stalled and temporarily doomed in Big Tuna, Texas.
There's an interesting, unsettling relationship between two scenes of sexual violation in these movies. Blue Velvet famously has Jeffrey hiding in a closet, watching Frank rape Dorothy. There's a lot of setup that went into the scene; Jeffrey snuck into Dorothy's apartment, watched her come home, watched her undress, and just when it's getting a little too Porky's, she realizes that she's not alone and goes after him with a knife. With Jeffrey at her mercy, Dorothy first chooses to humiliate him by ordering him to undress, duplicating and reversing the violation he perpetrated on her, and then she starts to treat him (still rather demandingly, still with the knife) as a lover. Whether this was a change in Dorothy's mood or if the initial (justifiably) vengeful humiliation was always meant as prelude to sex I have no idea. Dorothy's perhaps a naturally kinky lady, but she's also in a very bad place emotionally and it's clearly fucking up her sexual proclivities - there are people who like violent sex for its own sake, let's say, but I think Lynch wants us to think that Dorothy likes Jeffrey to hit her because her son is gone. Maybe I'm way wrong and oversimplifying, but it's definitely the case that sweet young naive Jeffrey thinks that's the case.
Anyway, after the foreplay but well before the consummation of Jeffrey and Dorothy's affair, Frank comes banging on the door and Jeffrey is sent back to the closet. Frank comes in, demands a drink, and then has sex with Dorothy. It's clearly rape, and it's also clearly a longstanding arrangement; Frank is verbally threatening but doesn't really resort to physical violence, because the threat of hurting her family is sufficiently coercive. He has a particular game he wants to play and she knows what Frank expects of her. Jeffrey watches all this in fascinated horror and, of course, horror at his fascination. He's in some degree titillated, which is discomfiting for the viewer because Jeffrey kind of is the viewer and we'd rather not be confronted with the fact that watching a sex act under these circumstances could be titillating while also morally repulsive.
But now we've got Wild at Heart, and Lula, who's just cottoned on to the fact that she's pregnant, is holed up sick in the motel room in Big Tuna while Sailor is out doing whatever, and Willem Defoe comes in playing the character of Bobby Peru, and he violates her, again without becoming physically abusive but backed by the verbal threat of physical harm (which he's clearly capable of). He touches Lula sexually and insists that she say "Fuck me." When she tries to pull away he grabs her and threatens to kill her, then continues to insist that she say "Fuck me" while continuing to touch her. It's deeply unpleasant to watch. And then Lula makes a gesture with her hand that we've already seen, earlier in the film, to indicate sexual pleasure, and she does in fact moan "Fuck me." At which point Bobby Peru jumps back, makes a joke, and leaves.
I had to stop the DVD and process that for a while. While nobody has any fun playing misery poker, it was simultaneously true that (a) intellectually, I believe what Frank did to Dorothy was much worse than what Bobby did to Lula, and (b) I was much more disturbed by the Bobby/Lula scene than the Frank/Dorothy one. So why?
First because we know Lula better. The scene happens past the halfway point of the movie and she's been on screen for much of that time. Dorothy is still a new character to us when she's raped, and we're less invested in her. Second because Lula absolutely loves Sailor with a crazy devotion and what Bobby Peru takes from her is an emotional violation as well as a physical one; she's clearly horrified that she could feel physically pleasure (and she clearly does) at Bobby's unwelcome touch, and that she emotionally may have betrayed Sailor somehow. Frank uses Dorothy's emotions to get what he wants, but he doesn't demand anything of her emotionally other than that she play the role he requires; he wants her to act, not to feel. Third because while identifying with Jeffrey's horror and a little bit of arousal in that closet was a discomfiting feeling, Jeffrey still provides a distance, a buffer, from what's going on. We're actually not really watching a rape (although we totally are), we're watching a guy watching a rape. In Wild at Heart it's just us in the room with Bobby and Lula in a scene that started with goofy piss jokes and then got real weird on us real fast. And Fourth because, honestly, the scene is kind of sexy, which is the really daring AND upsetting thing about it (and on the DVD Laura Dern is still clearly a little amazed if not that she was asked to play that scene, which apparently didn't really exist in the script, and one gets the sense that it took her a while to get OK with it). The Frank/Dorothy rape is shot from a distance and dispassionately, whereas Bobby/Lula is shot up close, sweaty, sun coming through the slats of the window, insert shots of hands and lips and people shaking while standing perfectly still. Which works - and the scene, and Lula's journey through it are both "believable" inside the film's world - because, frankly, Laura Dern is a Sex Bomb in this movie and there's no way around it. I've now seen six David Lynch films and this scene - two people in a room, no props, no violence, no funny sound design or prosthetics other than Bobby Peru's grotesque dentures - is easily the most disturbing thing, emotionally, that he's put me through. More than the Frank/Dorothy rape (gasmask and all), more than Jeffrey acquiescing to Dorothy's request that he hit her during sex, more than Naomi Watts' character masturbating while crying in Mulholland Drive...if there's a place where Lynch's introverted psyche does have a sympathetic resonance with mine, it's in his presentation of sexuality; not that I identify with it - whatever weird shit I may or may not be into, Dear Reader, I assure you with all honesty that it's not nitrous oxide, or crying, or blue velvet bathrobes, or bad teeth - but that something in me is going to pick up on these vibrations, whereas all the bulbous growths in Eraserhead and Dune just make me glance at something else. I'd already figured this out from Mulholland Drive and Blue Velvet but I was completely unprepared and unarmed for the possibility that I'd find something like the Bobby/Lula scene hot. You win, David Lynch, you made me embarrassed of myself.
And since I'm arriving at this point, I'm going to shift gears and ignore the ways in which that scene totally fucks with the rest of my reaction to the film, and reiterate against my better judgment that Laura Dern is a Sex Bomb in this movie. I can't overstate this; it's astounding. I really shouldn't talk about this because I'm quite possibly guaranteeing that if I ever want a girlfriend again I should keep her from reading this paragraph. What's especially funny is that I think Dern is someone who's steadily grown into her looks; she's got sort of a funny, equine face, but I think it looks more attractive now than it did when she was a teenager in Blue Velvet, and she's still not completely there in Wild at Heart, when she was in her very early twenties I think. So it was weird watching the movie and registering that in her appearance Dern wasn't even as attractive as she was going to be later in life, and nonetheless she's turning in what is absolutely the hottest performance I've ever seen. It actually made me reflect that there are very few honestly sexy sustained performances from women in film (I'm abstaining from a consideration of male performance). There are lots of performances by actresses who are sexy, but few really sexy performances. And actually I've only seen two that can compare: Marisa Tomei in Before the Devil Knows You're Dead and the young lady in the bookstore in The Big Sleep, but she's only got one scene to work her magic with Humphrey Bogart. Note that, on watching this scene in Film 101 in college, my friends and I readily agreed with no debate that it was the sexiest thing we'd ever seen. The key, I guess, is that actresses appear to tend to play "seductress" when they're supposed to be sexy. They're vamping for male attention, which certainly has its distinct charms, but instead consider that bookstore employee or Marisa Tomei in ...Devil... - they don't need to seduce anyone, they're incredibly attractive people who know that they're attractive AND most crucially they're unabashedly sexual beings, and therefore completely free not to try and turn on their scene partner (and thus the viewer) but rather completely free to be turned on. It's so simple I can't believe I never noticed this before watching Wild at Heart; Laura Dern melts my brain because I completely believed that she was turned on for most of the movie, which is a thing I've almost never believed of any actress for more than five minutes at a time, in a real movie or a pornographic one for that matter. Every shoulder shrug and neck stretch and balance shift and hand gesture screams arousal. If I'd seen this movie at twelve I would either have been desperately afraid of it or sprouted considerable chest hair. It's not nearly as good as Blue Velvet, but it made me think more and has stuck with me harder, despite the shitty ending and attendant weirdness. Now I just need to spend the rest of my life pretending not to be hopelessly infatuated with a Laura Dern performance from twenty years ago and I'll be all set.
Labels: Film, Lynchathon
posted by medrawt at
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