Overrated Velvet

In heaven, everything is fine! 

.tevleV eulB naht retteb hcum si sihT

I like and respect David Lynch as a director (even more so than as a Stoolbend, VA bartender).  I've thought highly of him since seeing Eraserhead back in the late 90s - this was back when you could only find those sorts of beautifully obscure films via a friend's borrowed Japanese-import DVD (or was it a videotape?) - I have enjoyed the trippy surrealism of Lost Highway and, of course, his magnum opus: Twin Peaks.

So it seemed like a foolish oversight for me not to have watched Lynch's most critically-acclaimed work, Blue Velvet.  After all, Blue Velvet has a 7.8 (out of 10) rating on IMDB, and 91% positive rating on Rotten Tomatoes.  Not so, I found.  In fact, it was foolish for me to have watched this overrated movie, if not foolish for Lynch to have made it in the first place.


Now don't get me wrong, I like surrealism and generally appreciate Lynch's aesthetic.  However, despite Blue Velvet's presentation as a quasi-realistic film noire, few of the characters pursue any well-thought-out course of action.  This is my first criticism of the movie.  As I railed about last week, if you're going to present your material, your themes, your viewpoint, in a supposedly realistic setting, then it is absolutely incumbent upon you to present your characters in a similarly realistic manner.  
Of course, we can forgive somebody like Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper) his irrationality - he's a sex-crazed drug addict and criminal.  But take, for instance, the leading man: Jeffrey Beaumont (played by Kyle MacLachlan).  He is a college student who accidentally finds a severed ear in a field during a return trip to his home town in the Pacific Northwest (Loggerton, I believe).  He takes it to police, but, despite the police officer's exhortations to the contrary, insists on investigating the whole mystery himself.  In the course of trying to figure out who belongs to the severed ear, he gets stabbed (nearly seriously) by the distraught masochistic singer Dorothy Valens (Isabella Rossellini) whose apartment he broke into in the first place.  At this point, you would think Beaumont would leave well-enough alone (his curiosity satisfied) and return to his own affairs.  But you would be wrong.  Evidently young Jeffrey didn't have enough on his plate (his father laid up in hospital, a young potential girlfriend (Laura Dern) and running his father's hardware store), and instead needed to get intertwined in this weird woman's personal affairs which include a kidnapped husband and son, a sadistic "boyfriend" who runs a drug gang ... and a police corruption scandal.  In contrast, the incessant inquisitiveness of MacLachlan's nearly identical character in Twin Peaks, Agent Dale Cooper, makes perfect contextual sense, insofar as Cooper is an FBI Agent.  It was his job to investigate similarly strange, and dangerous, goings on.

Why do I care?

Jeffrey is not the only unbelievable character though, as it is never explained how (or why) Sandy Williams (Laura Dern) takes Jeffrey back as her boyfriend after it is plainly obvious that he had a sexual relationship with Dorothy.  Likewise, why didn't poor Ms. Valens seek police help when her family was first abducted?  And, if we are led to believe that Frank has abducted Dorothy's husband and son just to extort bizarre sex acts from her, why doesn't he just save himself the trouble and visit a prostitute?


Not only are the characters unbelievable, but so are the very plot "twists" and situations they find themselves in.  How does Dorothy wind up naked and beaten on Jeffrey's doorstep?  Neither she, nor her criminal paramour Frank, had ever been to his home to know where it is.  Why would Frank be dressed in a disguise of the "well-dressed-man"?  Why were the corrupt police officer (the "yellow man") and Dorothy's husband beaten and shot dead in her apartment?  None of this is ever explained, but nor did I care.  That is, the characters went so undeveloped in this film, that I really didn't care what happened to them.  It's not that I actively disliked any character (other than the obvious "villain" Frank), but we are offered so little insight into what motivates these individuals, that I just couldn't care what happened to Jeffrey, Sandy, Dorothy, or her son.

But these are not metaphysical questions; they are all practical questions.  And that is my most damning indictment of this film.  Unlike most of Lynch's work, every tiny bit of symbolism and metaphor is explained to death in Blue Velvet.  The worst scene in the movie, is when Sandy and Jeffrey park their car - in front of a Church even - where Sandy recounts a dream she had wherein there was a lot of darkness and evil in the world, and then all these robins fly in, and the robins bring love to conquer the evil.  Do you think Sandy is supposed to represent the purity of unspoiled youth and the power of love? 

The movie Anchorman had deeper symbolism than this. 


When watching a David Lynch work, part of the fun, in my opinion, is that the viewer is usually left with mysterious, if not deep, questions.  Why is there a lady with mumps in the radiator?  What does the man's head being turned in to erasers mean?  Who or what is Robert Blake's character?  What is the Black Lodge?  And, the ever ubiquitous, Who killed Laura Palmer?  These sorts of ruminations in the viewer's mind, holding over like cinematic ghosts long after you've left the theater, or turned off the TV, are what mark these cellophane imprints as something more than "movies", they distinguish the films really meaningful work.


Unfortunately, such significant questions are totally lacking from the aftermath of Blue Velvet; both because all the metaphors are painfully obvious, but also because the characters are devoid of anything really important to say.