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Friday, February 10th, 2012
Second #3666, 61:06
After Frank and his gang leave the Slow Club, Jeffrey follows them. He is a detective, now. The scene is bathed in hellish red. The slow rumble of thunder ratchets up the tension. There is no one for Jeffrey, neither Dorothy nor Sandy. Not now, in the silence of his car. In fact, the movie has carried itself forward without functional dialogue for a while; it’s become pure cinema, where the images and sounds render dialogue obsolete, because of what use is dialogue in the bloodlands?
In 2666, by Roberto Bolaño, a character, Norton,
repeated, in German, there’s no turning back. And, paradoxically, she turned and walked off away from the pool and was lost in a forest that could barely be seen through the fog, a forest that gave off a red glow, and it was into this red glow that Norton disappeared.
The lighted phone booth beneath and between the cursive The Slow Club sign. A person standing there: perhaps David Lynch? Jeffrey’s car, its headlights like an animal’s eyes at night. The awful familiarity of a dirt parking lot, the soft purr of cars across the surface. It is the night, after all, when a different sort of order compels the kingdom, and a different sort of blackness fills Jeffrey’s mind and car. The Slow Club, spooling out in linked letters from left to right, as if chronology itself slowed down inside its doors, a sort of parallel path of time, a clock that runs not thirty minutes but thirty years slow.
Jeffrey, in the red glow of some light source implied by the neon sign but not emanating from it, speeds off after Frank into the black hole that stretches and elongates the sense of time in Blue Velvet, driving from right to left across the screen rather than the chronological left to right, as if the film is asking us to accept what we always-already knew: that time itself orbits around those in power, those dictators and megalomaniacs whose force of will bends the will of others, those Franks who … Read the rest
Wednesday, February 8th, 2012
Second #3619, 60:19
See shot 9 from the previous post (#76).
Frank, here, is someone caught between the hipsterism of the 1940s and the 1990s, his Pabst Blue Ribbon signifying the working man’s authenticity as opposed to the soft, foreign Heineken, the baby-faced college boy’s beer. And yet Frank aspires to suaveness in his soft nightclub shirt and beer poured into a glass, not drunk out of a bottle.
Frank is a slave to a fixed idea. When he watches Dorothy on the stage, what does he really see? What if there’s something in Dorothy that’s only available to him, and what if Dorothy’s fear of Frank is not based on what he has done or is capable of doing, but rather on her knowledge that Frank can see this part of her that is invisible to everyone else? It’s a heretical reading of the film, I know, to suggest that Frank and Dorothy share a secret, invisible bond, a recognition that makes their relationship the most authentic and significant in the film.
He holds in his hands a piece of blue velvet, but it might just as well be a human ear or a chunk of flesh or a blue key or a weapon aimed at Dorothy. He is a leader of men. He has a gang. He commands loyalty through fear and, perhaps, magic. His face in this frame is a measure of his longing and sorrow. He can’t be saved because he doesn’t have a soul.
Over the period of one full year — three days per week — The Blue Velvet Project will seize a frame every 47 seconds of David Lynch’s classic to explore. These posts will run until second 7,200 in August 2012. For a complete archive of the project, click here. And here is the introduction to the project.… Read the rest
Monday, February 6th, 2012
Second #3572, 59:32
Back at the Slow Club, Jeffrey has just poured himself a Heineken, and Dorothy has noticed something that has caused a shadow of fear to cross her face. In a subtle relay of looks captured in nine shots that last just over one minute, this happens:
Shot 1: Jeffrey, having poured a Heineken, watches Dorothy perform “Blue Velvet.”
Shot 2: (second #3572, the frame above) Dorothy sees something in the audience that spooks her.
Shot 3: Jeffrey notices Dorothy’s fear, and turns his head to where she is looking.
Shot 4: We see Frank, the object of Dorothy’s gaze, from roughly Jeffrey’s point of view. He sits in the audience bathed in pale blue light.
Shot 5: Jeffrey again, whose eyes move from Frank to Dorothy, in a way that suggests he has just understood something.
Shot 6: A medium shot of Frank, in rapture to Dorothy’s performance, his eyes slowly shutting and then opening, as if moving in and out of a dream.
Shot 7: Back to Jeffrey, who slowly leans forward with concern.
Shot 8: Back to Dorothy, who finishes her rendition, shooting Frank a defiant look as she puts emphasis on the word tears in “And I still can see blue velvet through . . . my . . . tears.”
Shot 9: Frank, as the camera slowly pans down to reveal him holding a swatch of blue velvet in his hands, rubbing it gently with his thumbs.
Unlike the first time at the Slow Club, Jeffrey is alone now, without Sandy. Dorothy is alone, too, but watched: by Jeffrey, by Frank, by the anonymous audience, and by the piano player, his face bathed in a kind of monstrous, carnivalesque blue. It’s as if we have slipped into a horror film, and in this regard Blue Velvet is perhaps closest to Lynch’s other great (though underrated) horror film Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992). In her fine book Recreational Terror, Isabel Cristina Pinedo suggests that in the postmodern horror film the
boundary between living and dead, normal and abnormal, human and alien,
… Read the rest
Friday, February 3rd, 2012
Second #3525, #58:45
A classic two-shot, Jeffrey and Dorothy looking at each other across the open space of the screen. Dorothy is framed within the frame by the impossible closet (a sort of black screen) in the background. No longer dressed in black, Jeffrey’s character begins to separate itself from the hinted-at idea that he is somehow another, younger version of Frank. Although Blue Velvet is not alone in taking viewers into a sealed-off fictive world, it does so, strangely, by referring to the outside, “real” world (our world) not directly, but indirectly, through archetypes. There is a detective, a police station, an apartment building, a suburban home, a red car, a night club, a dangerous man, a hospital room, a high school. In Blue Velvet, these function as placeholders of things and objects and people rather than representations of “real” things and objects and people. They exist in a kind of second-order reality, detached just enough from the familiar that they take on the aura of the strange and unknown.
In Don DeLillo’s secret-coded 1982 novel The Names, a character says:
The world has become self-referring. You know this. This thing has seeped into the texture of the world. The world for thousands of years was our escape, was our refuge. Men hid from themselves in the world. We hid from God or death. The world was where we lived, the self was where we went mad and died. But now the world has made a self of its own. Why, how, never mind. What happens to us now that the world has a self? How do we say the simplest thing without falling into a trap? Where do we go, how do we live, and who do we believe? This is my vision, a self-referring world, a world in which there is no escape.
In the world of Blue Velvet, too, the flow of signs and signifiers is disrupted, and you can almost see it happening in the open space between Jeffrey and Dorothy in this frame, the actors having forgotten their real names, … Read the rest
Wednesday, February 1st, 2012
Second #3478, 57:58
Jeffrey’s return to Dorothy’s apartment is framed in a shot radically segmented by top-to-bottom of screen vertical lines, such as the door itself, the doorway, the protruding wall, the closet doors. This lends a certain crazy dimensionality to the scene, with Dorothy occupying the foreground, Jeffrey the middle ground, and the hallway wall behind him the background. And yet all this appears on a flat screen. Gerald Mast, in Film/Cinema/Movie (1977) asked whether we
perceive the projected image as two-dimensional at all? The very fact that we call one object in the projected image apparently close to or far away from another implies that there is some kind of mental translation of the two-dimensional image into three-dimensional terms. In the cinema, when we see large and small, we translate our perception into either close and far (based on our awareness of relative distances and the sizes of objects in life) or into not so close or far . . .
There is the small red chair: little Donny’s?
The plants that seem to have multiplied, in pots the same color as the radiator.
Jeffrey stands in a quadrant that occupies roughly the same amount of screen space as the closet, which he had hidden inside of earlier.
The menace of the doorway, like a threshold from one dream into another.
The sense that there is someone in the hallway with Jeffrey, just out of Dorothy’s line of vision.
The impossible space inside the closet, which is on a wall whose other side is presumably the hallway where Jeffrey now stands. There is no closet space within the closet, no room for a person to hide.
Over the period of one full year — three days per week — The Blue Velvet Project will seize a frame every 47 seconds of David Lynch’s classic to explore. These posts will run until second 7,200 in August 2012. For a complete archive of the project, click here. And here is the introduction to the project.… Read the rest
Monday, January 30th, 2012
Second #3431, 57:11
Outside of church (St. Paul’s Evangelical Lutheran Church, in Wilmington, North Carolina), Jeffrey and Sandy prepare to leave. The scene in question is a fulcrum point in postmodern cinema: are Jeffrey’s lament about the presence of evil in the world, Sandy’s monologue about the robins bringing light, and the church itself, shaded with sincerity or irony? For many contemporary reviewers, the “hokey,” melodramatic acting was the sign of a cold tactician at work. In his Washington Post review, Paul Attanasio wrote that “Lynch likes to use wooden acting as a distancing technique, or a kind of joke.”
Perhaps Blue Velvet is an uncomfortable film to watch not because of its depictions of violence, but because it asks us to hold our in our gaze for long periods of time characters’ faces as they work through moral tangles that they happen to view in terms of good and evil, right and wrong. What happens in Blue Velvet is precisely the opposite of that Attanasio called a distancing technique; if anything, the film brings audiences very, very close to its characters. The initial uncertainty about Blue Velvet’s tone probably has a lot to do with the 1980s itself, which modulated between the flat, affectless responses to depravity in novels like Bret Easton Ellis’s Less Than Zero (1985) and the moral severity of the Reagan era. (Reagan had referred to the Soviet Union as “the evil empire” in a 1983 speech, a speech which also contains a serious contemplation of the place of people like Frank in the world. How many presidents have ever used the word “phenomenology” before? “We know that living in this world means dealing with what philosophers would call the phenomenology of evil or, as theologians would put it, the doctrine of sin.”)
But there is the undeniable fact of beauty in the world, too, Blue Velvet whispers to us. The beauty of the outside of that church at second #3431, the tree shadows on its walls and the way the windows hold colors in their secret-code shapes, and the bare skin of Sandy’s arm … Read the rest
Friday, January 27th, 2012
Second #3384, 56:24
1. Sandy’s dream, recounted to Jeffrey:
In the dream, there was our world, and the world was dark because there weren’t any robins. And the robins represented love. And for the longest time there was just this darkness, and all of a sudden thousands of robins were set free and they flew down and brought this blinding light of love. And it seemed like that love would be the only thing that would make any difference. And it did.
2. A few moments earlier, Jeffrey said to Sandy:
Frank is a . . . a very dangerous man.
3. From The Flame Alphabet, by Ben Marcus:
Rabbi Burke never used the word devil. The universal coinage was worthless, in his view. Words that mask what we don’t know. But he spoke about dangerous people who orbited the moral world, building speed around us, rendering themselves so blurred, they looked gorgeous. Burke spoke of refusing dizziness, latching on to these satellite monsters . . . so we could travel at their velocity, see them for what they were.
4. A lighter note: in the Blue Velvet Blu-ray interview, Kyle MacLachlan says that the “chicken walk” sequence was a stunt he used to pull on the set and was probably inspired by Steve Martin or John Cleese.
5. From “Dear Reynolds, as last night I lay in bed,” (with the “gentle robin”) by John Keats:
The greater on the less feeds evermore:
But I saw too distinct into the core
Of an eternal fierce destruction,
And so from happiness I far was gone.
Still am I sick of it: and though to-day
I’ve gathered young spring leaves, and flowers gay
Of periwinkle and wild strawberry,
Still do I that most fierce destruction see,
The shark at savage prey—the hawk at pounce,
The gentle robin, like pard or ounce,
Ravening a worm.
Over the period of one full year — three days per week — The Blue Velvet Project will seize a frame every 47 seconds of David Lynch’s classic to explore. These posts will run until second 7,200 … Read the rest
Wednesday, January 25th, 2012
Second #3337, 55:37
1. Jeffrey, struggling. Working through over and over again the evil equation that is Frank.
2. The sound of sound has come apart. Everything that matters is between his ears.
3. His ear; the fact of his non-severed ear.
4. The haircut to reveal the ear.
5. An actor, preparing to say his next line, or has he forgotten the presence of the camera?
6. The fullness of night, and its comfort.
7. To be drowned in the blackness of introspection.
8. A terrible thought: is Frank supernatural, beyond human agency, beyond human Law?
9. “Look out / The symbols are collapsing.” [Ben Lerner, from Mean Free Path.]
10. As if Jeffrey could weave in and out of darkness without each time losing bits of his soul.
11. The historical weight of the church outside Sandy’s driver’s side window, forcing Jeffrey’s head down, down, into prayer mode.
12. “If she could just catch the Creature by its ugly invisible tail. But then what? She’d just die of fright and disgust. You couldn’t kill It, after all. You couldn’t crush It with your heel. So there wasn’t any point to catching It, really.” [Ludmilla Petrrushevskaya, from There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor’s Baby.]
13. Trapped between the opening and closing credits, Jeffrey suffers.
Over the period of one full year — three days per week — The Blue Velvet Project will seize a frame every 47 seconds of David Lynch’s classic to explore. These posts will run until second 7,200 in August 2012. For a complete archive of the project, click here. And here is the introduction to the project.… Read the rest
Monday, January 23rd, 2012
Second #3290, 54:50
Sandy’s reaction, as she listens to Jeffrey’s theory about the significance of the severed ear. “I think she [Dorothy] wants to die,” he says. “I think Frank cut the ear I found off her husband as a warning to stay alive.” That’s a key sentence, almost lost in the film’s narrative momentum. The severed ear isn’t intended simply to secure a ransom, as might be expected, but rather as a message to Dorothy not to die. As the object of Frank’s furious desire, Dorothy is just another one of his addictions, his fascinations. Sandy’s face, softly lit and framed by the murky glow of the church’s stained glass windows, registers shock not so much at the content of what Jeffrey is telling her, but at how swiftly and deeply he cares about a woman he barely knows. Like a silent film actress, Laura Dern conveys high altitudes and low valleys of emotion with her face, and in Blue Velvet and Inland Empire especially, she performs with her face in ways unmatched in contemporary cinema. She is the slow-burning fuel of the film, the hot ember that never goes away, even when it’s not there. Lillian Gish. Barbara Kent. Laura Dern.
In her essay “The Eye of Horror,” Carol Clover writes that “certainly horror plays repeatedly and overtly on the equation between the plight of the victim and the plight of the audience.” In Blue Velvet, we are over and over again caught in the triangulated terror that runs like electric currency between Frank and Dorothy and Jeffrey and Sandy. Sandy’s face at second #3290 captures our own plight, our own astonishment at what Jeffrey is saying. The difference is, we as the audience have seen what Jeffrey has seen, while Sandy has not. So we have the double pleasures (we are all voyeurs) of experiencing Sandy’s shock as well as recalling the brutal images that Jeffrey describes, images that Sandy has no access to.
In a dream you had, Sandy’s eyes moved. The still frame came alive for one second, long enough for her eyes … Read the rest
Friday, January 20th, 2012
Second #3243, 54:03
“It’s a strange world, Sandy.”
***
“Frank is a . . . a very dangerous man.”
***
“You saw a lot in one night.”
***
“It is a strange world.”
These lines from around the moment of this frame collapse into one meaning, one meaning obvious to Sandy: that Jeffrey has fallen in love with Dorothy. Outside the church, Sandy is about to deliver her “robins” monologue, a monologue that securely nails Blue Velvet to the wall of sincerity. The shot itself is full of menace and beauty: the night, the soft illumination of the car’s interior, the troubling tree shadows on the church walls, the light coming through the stained glass windows.
In Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives, a character named Arturo (a stand-in for Bolaño) describes The Shining to another character:
Do you remember the novel that Torrance was writing? Arturo said suddenly. Torrance who? I said. The guy in the movie, The Shining, Jack Nicholson . . . He’d written more than five hundred pages and all he’d done was endlessly copy a single sentence, in every possible way: capitalized, lowercase, double-columned, underlined, always the same sentence, nothing else. . . . It might have been a good novel.
There’s a truth here, in the absurd way that only truth can be: what if Torrance’s manuscript pages in The Shining really were a novel, and not just pages with repeated lines? What if the meaning was embodied in the repetition, so that the manuscript became a sort of minimalist, experimental novel? And what if in Blue Velvet, this moment outside the church wasn’t just one singular instance of an event, but in fact the event that constitutes the whole of the movie? All the petty and mammoth fixations of the movie are right here on the screen at this very moment, contained in the double-framing (framed by the car windows, and framed by the screen frame) of Sandy and Jeffrey. The vertical lines of the church windows, and the horizontal lines of the car. The way that the light on … Read the rest
