When I was 14, I first read about this guy David Lynch. I knew about Dune with Sting in the codpiece. I had not yet seen Eraserhead. But there was this movie called Blue Velvet and it was said to be the most brilliant, imaginative movie of the year. I rented it on Betamax and watched it all by myself. Adult sexuality was something I was studying with great interest and very limited experience. I was romantic. I wanted to have a girlfriend and share something sweet. So I’m watching it alone. At first it felt like campy John Waters version of a small town, then, as Dennis Hopper’s Frank Booth says, “Now it’s dark.” There is not just a dark side to this place, there is a dark side to us. Roy Orbison’s “In Dreams” sounds like a desperate song of longing for your beloved. But it’s also a song for a guy who likes the rough stuff. “You’re just like me,” says Frank Booth to Jeffrey. When Isabella Rossellini asks Jeffrey to hit her, he says he doesn’t want to, but he’s also peeping in the closet. When it happens, he feels something. There is a bad boy in him, too.
This was a lot for me to wrap my head around, but it was only when I watched it with a couple of friends the next year that it became a different movie. Everything was really funny. The sweet stuff was funny, the dark stuff was funny. We were quoting lines to each other for a long time after that, and we had to see it again. It was the same movie, but a completely different experience. The innocent stuff was sappy, the evil stuff was over the top. Watching crying Laura Dern’s mouth turn into a W was the beginning of the neverending Dernaissance. The closer I got to adult sexuality—and one of these friends would become my girlfriend—I saw that laughing at these versions of desire was a way of really getting it, even feeling above it. Those people are so ridiculous. Everyone was into Twin Peaks, until they lost patience when it went on too long. I saw Wild at Heart the night it opened—sexy, dark, funny, violent, everything at once. I learned from D.H. Lawrence that you could hate someone and love them at the same time. Innocent times.
High school would end and adult life would present itself. I would read new books, meet new people, discover new things in the world, and Lynch’s films kept coming back. Lost Highway came out when I was 24. It wasn’t Blue Velvet, but Robert Blake calling himself from his own house was Peak Lynch. I think I went to three different screenings, and each time I thought that the first third was brilliant, the second third started to lose me, and the final part was so perplexing, I wondered if if was him or me. But I never questioned that I was in the hands of a genius. You have to come to him, not the other way around.
I got to interview the man for The Village Voice, and since the film editor was off that week, I got to be edited by the great Jim Hoberman, who told me I got much more out of Lynch than he did when he interviewed him. Lynch was not in a great mood, but his criticisms of my questions gave me great answers. The gorge that rose in his voice made me feel like Frank Booth was in my apartment on speaker. We all have the light and the dark in us. Whatever it was that was coming out was a part of me. He was indignant, he didn’t want to answer the questions.
There used to be a repertory cinema in the East Village called Theatre 80 St. Marks. They would show the same double features over and over, and I saw Blue Velvet there, and people were cracking up. I had read that Lynch himself was cracking up at the most violent Frank Booth scenes, which seemed strange at the time, a measure of my innocence at the time. But he didn’t want to talk about that. He wanted to talk about why his films brought out everything in everyone, and that we would all see ourselves in the end. I asked him why people laughed, say, in the opening of Blue Velvet, when we see these Norman Rockwell images of a small town. It’s Leave it to Beaver on top and Frank Booth underneath. I used the word “ironic,” and that really set him off. He spoke in a nasal monotone, but he might as well have been Dennis Hopper going off.
There's probably 100 reasons why that happens. It's embarrassing, in a way, because the cool things are pretty much the opposite of what's good. I don't like the word ironic. I like the word absurdity, and I don't really understand the word 'irony' too much. The irony comes when you try to verbalize the absurd. When irony happens without words, it's much more exalted. The good is real. Those suburban images in the film are definitely real. That's the world I grew up in. People laugh at the good because they don't want to be fools. It's a natural laugh and I understand it 100 percent, but it's still a certain kind of world that a lot of people know about - a real kind of world. Once one person laughs, others have to follow. That's the difference between a single person watching a movie on video at home - with its pitiful picture and bad sound - but you don't get those same kind of reactions. People are so different, even though they're the same underneath.
That person he was talking about was me. I was that 14-year-old, alone in a room with a videotape. I was like Jeffrey—just curious. Then I saw it with a couple of girls a little older me—in those years, that mattered— and we thought it was the most hilarious thing we had ever seen. Lynch said he understood, but think about it. What’s good is the opposite of what’s cool. He said he didn’t like the word ironic. He liked absurdity. When you’re an artist, you could take your pick—the rhetoric of irony of the highway of absurdity. In 2002, Mulholland Drive blew my mind, especially Naomi Watts in tears to “Crying” in Spanish—as pure a musical reaction in film as I’ve ever seen. Then, in 2005, I watched Inland Empire and it completely lost me. The difference was his switch to digital, which he found liberating, but a loss for us. Still, with an artist like Lynch, you never know how you’re going to respond, and you’ll never know if it’s him or you.
Blue Velvet is forever. One day, you’ll find an ear on the ground, and that moment will lead you to a world that is scary and dangerous and irresistible. “People are so different, even though they’re the same underneath.” I guess you have to believe that if you’re going to reach a lot of people. I think it could be the opposite: we have things in common, but some of us are freaks and people have to deal with it if they are going to deal with us. David Lynch is a freak who can also identify with the mainstream. He’s a really normal guy who is not, by any stretch, normal.
Years ago, in a class on popular culture, I taught Blue Velvet along with Susan Sontag’s “Notes on Camp” and Clement Greenberg’s “Kitsch and the Avant-Garde.” I included the Pauline Kael review, which opens with her overhearing someone at the screening say, “Maybe I’m sick, but I want to see that again.” I went to the screening, and some of the moments that were definitively Blue Velvet made me question the wisdom of screening this classic. A few students went up to me afterwards and asked me if I had seen this before.
People are so different, even though they're the same underneath.
Had I seen Blue Velvet before? Am I the same person as I was then? Which person? The innocent one who thought it was disturbing or the slightly older teenager who, in female company, laughed hysterically? Does confronting both selves get me to a higher place, to the Blue Velvet of Blue Velvet, the Lynch of Lynch? Did David Lynch himself tell me something that I was only grasping years later? Cue the radiator lady from Eraserhead:
In heaven, everything is fine
You've got your good things
And I’ve got mine
Maybe I’m sick, but I want to see that again.
A few years back, we used to host a “salon series” in conjunction with the Dallas Museum of Art and Nasher Sculpture Center, right down the street from the school in the “Arts District.” Speakers would come to speak, be interviewed by students, and address questions from the student body, packed into the Montgomery Arts Theater. Some of the guests included Stephen Sondheim, Lauren Bacall, Robert Duvall, Twyla Tharp, Art Garfunkel, Gladys Knight, Marvin Hamlisch, and so on….
Most of the young students had no idea who most of these folks were. (Only a fraction of the student body knew who Sidney Poitier was when I brought him in as our speaker at the Paul Baker Writers’ Conference back in 2000 or 2001, I forget which.)
These events, by the way, were held on the same stage where you, David, spoke so evocatively about Joni Mitchell and performed several of her songs with current students.
For one such event, I was in the theater, reverberating with the cacophony of hundreds of hyped-up students, monitoring the scene and waiting for the salon to begin when a group of very sweet, excited, and histrionic girls ran up to me, vying to deliver the news: “Mr. Davison! Mr. Davison! We’ve found the perfect woman for you! She’s like a female version of you!”
“What are you talking about?” I asked, perplexed but rather amused.
“I don’t remember her name, but she came into our theater class and talked to us for an hour. She was weird – good weird – and fascinating! You two were made for each other!”
Oh, the beautiful exuberance and naïve dreams of the young! Who was this mystery woman, I chuckled to myself?
“There she is!” one of them shouted, pointing toward the stage. “That’s her.”
Our salon guest had just walked out on stage.
Of course, it was Isabella Rossellini.
We need to talk about Twin Peaks The Return. There’s another chapter to write in this wonderful essay.