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.

Lynchathon I, Part I: Eraserhead - Blue Velvet

Towards the end of last year I decided that my new Netflix Project would be to watch the complete works of David Lynch.  (Well, the complete readily available works representing the main thrust of his career; my interest in seeking out examples of Lynch's painting, his music videos, his short films, his comic strip, or the various other things he may or may not consider essential artistic expressions is nonexistant.  I'm interested in the feature films and Twin Peaks.)  A Netflix Project isn't simply my decision to watch a TV show, because that's a contained work with a single plot and cast of characters; I don't consider watching all five seasons of Babylon 5, e.g., to be a Netflix Project.  (And yes, I have done so.  Lots to say about Babylon 5 good and bad [really, really bad] but I think the show raises an interesting quandary that I'll toss out for the moment: if your two best actors, by far, head and shoulders above everyone else, are also the two regulars most saddled with ridiculous costumes and oppressive makeup of the sort that most actors find it difficult to work through, is that on the whole a better or worse thing for your show?)  I have engaged in two prior Netflix Projects: watching all the canonical James Bond films (which at the time did not include Quantum of Solace, though I did later see it in theaters) and watching the films of the Coen Brothers (many of which I'd seen before; this project remains officially incomplete since I keep pushing The Ladykillers down in my queue).  Both of these projects were undertaken and essentially completed before I started this blog.
 
SO:
 
Things I've previously seen by David Lynch:
 
Mulholland Drive.
 
That's it.  So I'm coming at all of this fresh.  I'm also coming at it in pieces, because it's kind of overwhelming and not exactly endearing to my easier aesthetic sensibilities.  So naturally being broken into (at least) three chunks, of which only the first has been completed.  This chunk consists of the five theatrical films made before Twin Peaks.  They are:
 
(1) Eraserhead
 
OK, I have to admit that I kind of fast forwarded through parts of this one.  I am a philistine, I know.  I wasn't really in the right frame of mind to watch it; kind of physically and intellectually tired is not the ideal state for engaging with some really slow moving black and white surrealism.  And I mean really slow moving.  There were things which made me laugh, but ultimately ... look, the film is a classic, and I can see why, and even muster up a "deservedly so" devoid of the condescension sometimes implicit in the qualifier, because you know there's a "but" coming afterwards.  But: especially in his more elliptical and plotless films, Lynch is - as David Foster Wallace, among many, observed - finding ways to transfer his inner emotional/imaginative/psychological state onto a screen for your consideration and, one might hope (though Lynch possibly doesn't give a damn one way or another) sympathetic identification.  Eraserhead would seem to be a very deep transition, which is unsurprising given the elongated, isolated process of filming it, with a tiny cast and crew.  Though it's surely an exaggeration, Lynch seems happy to let you think that for five years, he ate a grilled cheese sandwich and french fries every day, shot Eraserhead in a barn, and then slept in the barn, and when production had to shut down for some reason or another, he probably just faded into limbo until the finances and personnel were in place to continue, at which point he returned to a more reassuringly tangible corporeality and continued to process images from REM sleep with minimal mediation.  There are other works in which I find that I do have an emotional interaction with the projections of Lynch's psyche, but the stuff in Eraserhead just doesn't sync up with my personal wiring - a lot of things Lynch finds fascinating I find either boring or extremely upsetting - so what's left if you don't resonate with the film in that way is a lot of weirdness moving very slowly.  Lynch himself attributed the genesis of Eraserhead to his memories of and emotions toward the city of Philadelphia, where he went to art school; this is by itself enough to let you know that we're in the deep matter of one guy's brain, and how you feel about it is really a question beyond the ken and ambit of critial inquiry.
 
On the other hand, Eraserhead did produce "The Lady in the Radiator Song," the Pixies' cover of which I am quite grateful for.  So I owe it that much.
 
(B) The Elephant Man
 
The thing about David Lynch's lengthy career that I personally find most bizarre and inexplicable: that Mel "Yes, that Mel Brooks" Brooks, who was looking to produce a script about John Merrick, saw Eraserhead and thought to himself, "That's my guy!"  It's actually a pretty startling artistic leap of faith, frankly, to see Eraserhead and think: "This is someone who should make my pet project, an emotional yet emotionally restrained (because British) period film."  Somewhat less astonishing is that he was undoubtedly right.  The Elephant Man is a great movie and worth spending time with.  I have no personal desire to rewatch it at any point - it, again, doesn't really resonate with me, but unlike Eraserhead, where without the resonance I had no purchase, The Elephant Man is sufficiently conventional - maybe the most conventional film of Lynch's career? - that it's easy to appreciate the things one normally appreciates about a film.  Plus it's moving, although I don't know if I'm quite with John Hurt when he says on the DVD that if a person isn't moved by the end of The Elephant Man then he doesn't want to know that person.
 
Positive: Carr Gomm rhetorically asks Treves if he can possibly imagine what John Merrick has gone through in his life.  Treves rather dimly replies that yes, he feels he can.  Carr Gomm (a wonderful John Gielgud) immediately assures him that no, none of them can imagine what it's like.  The look on Treves' face is priceless; Anthony Hopkins throughout this movie delivers a beautiful performance of a man alternately too confident of his nobility and his wickedness.  Also he looks really dashing in a beard.  He was quite the handsome little man back then.
 
Negatives: This film was apparently ground zero for the vogue of using Barber's Adagio for Strings as overbearing musical blanket for Emotional Scenes, especially (though for this Lynch cannot of course be blamed) - as Kyle Gann puts it - "so many muted scenes of handsome young men dying in battle".  Also there's a slightly snotty little note (at least I read it as slightly snotty) distinguishing the film from stage adaptations of John Merrick's life, which is unfortunate because the film takes just as many liberties with his biography as the (unrelated) play does.
 
(Gamma) Dune
 
OhmyGOD you cannot even imagine, without having seen it, how painful Dune is.  It's worse if you've read the novel and worse still if you liked it.  This is like ground fucking zero for some of the things I said here.  You know what?  I can't even really write about this here.  Maybe I'll talk about it and the book(s) some other time.  But to pile on the mindblowingness of Mel Brooks seeing Eraserhead and knowing that he absolutely had to get that guy to direct British actors in Victorian dress, Lynch apparently agreed to do Dune INSTEAD OF RETURN OF THE JEDI.  GEORGE FUCKING LUCAS IS SUPPOSED TO HAVE OFFERED LYNCH JEDI ON THE STRENGTH OF ERASERHEAD AND A PERIOD DRAMA.  This is in its own way actually more explicable; the mind reels at the possibility of actually witnessing the intersection of Lynch and Ewok, but Lynch's comment on the episode is probably correct: Lucas' vision was so firm that Lynch wasn't really intended to be a creative participant, just a technician to hold the reins.  Lucas thought Lynch was a good director and any good director would do, because (a) Lucas's artistic control was viselike and (b) Lucas, clearly, doesn't really understand or respect what it is a director is supposed to do or be, or what he could do or be to a movie, so letting somebody else actually look through the viewfinder would've just been a relief of hassle.
 
(ZOSO) Blue Velvet
 
Yeah so you know this is the Big One, and as far as I can tell it's deservedly so.  David Foster Wallace posited that Blue Velvet's extreme popularity and success vs. other Lynch films is generally indicative of a trend in his work whereby those films with relatively three dimensional, well and "realistically" drawn characters are the ones it's easiest for an audience to (a) sit through and (b) relate with.  Jeffrey Beaumont is the realest of any character in a Lynch film other than The Elephant Man, and what he's going through emotionally is so compelling because universal that it makes what he's going through plot-wise seem halfway reasonable and accessible even though it's actually over the top nuts and doesn't totally make sense.  (At least it doesn't totally make sense explicitly; you can color in the gray areas of the plotline, but the plot is a MacGuffin so why bother, you know?)  It's almost like an artist playing with the fact that to a small child the adult world is huge by exaggerating the effect past what's strictly accurate.  I mean, there are people in the real world like there are in Blue Velvet, although maybe they don't use gas masks as part of their sex play (not in the way Frank does), but the aggressive weirdness of Frank and Dorothy to Jeffrey, combined with the heightened bizarreness of Frank's milieu in general, bolsters the (dis)comfort with which Blue Velvet can be watched as an expressionistic rendering of Jeffrey Beaumont's traumatic entry into adult life, where he finds out that people aren't noble and sex isn't simple.  The Rotten Suburbia thing, hammered in the film's opening moments, is a red herring.  I think Lynch is too smart and too sui generis in his worldview to think it's interesting to go after suburbia as a mythic ideal.  For one thing, Blue Velvet's true target of fear/disillusionment (not the best way to put it) is more daringly and more mundanely (oh ha ha) the adult world itself.  Decay happens everywhere, not just under pristine lawns.  For another thing, we know what it looks like when Lynch ostensibly sets out to process his feelings about a place in an explicit manner - he had a shitty impression of Philadelphia and produced freaking Eraserhead.  Blue Velvet's Lumberton is I think unimportant to the movie overall in that really it could've been set anywhere.  Lynch grew up, I believe, somehwere similar, and I would imagine is just interested in and comfortable with that setting.
 
I just ran out of interesting things to say about Blue Velvet that aren't better served in context with our next film, and besides, more than any other work of Lynch's, this film has been watched, analyzed, and considered both well and poorly for some time.  I doubt I have anything original worth adding to the discourse.