Blue Velvet Project
Wednesday, February 22nd, 2012
Second #3854, 64:14
“I saw The Yellow Man come out and meet up with a well-dressed man carrying an alligator briefcase,” Jeffrey tells Sandy, as we see him snapping a picture with his rigged-up camera-in-a-shoebox, a strange, analog echo of the Lumière brothers’ early motion picture camera. The sequence is reminiscent of a similar one (also involving doubles) in Brian De Palma’s Dressed to Kill, when Kate’s (Angie Dickinson’s) son Peter (Keith Gordon) has suspicions about Dr. Elliott (Michael Caine) and concocts a camera set-up to photograph the entry to his office. The whole operation is so dead-on: the detective’s determination in Jeffrey’s face, the elaborate string contraption he uses to snap the pictures, the hushed seriousness of his voice as the narrates to Sandy what he’s seen.
What’s easy to forget during this sequence is that what we’re being shown in this frame isn’t what Jeffrey saw, but what the camera filming Blue Velvet saw, as opposed to the shot from the previous post, which actually depicts Jeffrey’s flashback from his point of view. This shot at second #3854 is what we might call implied memory information; it reflects how Jeffrey—as he retells the story to Sandy at Arlene’s later that day—might have imagined himself as he took the photos. It’s interesting: Sandy can’t see these flashbacks. She simply hears what Jeffrey says. But is it implied that Jeffrey can see them? Are we to understand that, as he’s talking to Sandy about what happened, he’s picturing what we, as the audience, are seeing? Or is this visual information outside of both Jeffrey and Sandy, existing for our sake alone, to help give a settled shape and form to the narrative?
In a sense, what does it matter? We are woven so tightly into the narrative fabric of the film that that whether this is an image of Jeffrey remembering and picturing himself or simply a shot originating outside his psychological world (or some combination of both) seems to be a meaningless distinction. And yet, in a film about what lies beneath the surface of things and … Read the rest
Monday, February 20th, 2012
Second #3807, 63:27
1. “Today,” Jeffrey tells Sandy at Arlene’s, as we see a flashback of what he’s describing, “I staked out Frank’s place with a camera. Now, there’s another man involved in all this. I call him The Yellow Man.” These shots, in the bright of day, are some of the most quietly beautiful in the film with their burnt-orange 1940s-era Allied Vans, as if Walker Evans photographs had switched to color.
2. In Derek Raymond’s novel The Devil’s Home On Leave, the nameless Detective Sergeant recalls a terrible dream:
But in the night I dreamed that two figures appeared at the foot of my bed in Earlsfield. The one in front was a thickset, middle-aged man, heavy-featured and dressed in a cap and a thick grey coat. He made as if to chop at me with his hand. Black matter seeped out of his mouth and nose and he had been dead for years. The figure behind was so evil that one glance was all I could stomach. It was very small, a collection of what looked like old peeled sticks wrapped in a sack; it radiated hell’s own malice and groaned to get at me.
3. The frame at second #3807, too, has its own malice, in the form of the black window to the right of the gas pump, its upper pane boarded over, the irrational sense (in the way that nightmares are) that there may be someone inside watching Jeffrey, who is himself watching Frank. The window recalls, as imperfectly as memory, the Man in the Planet at the window in Eraserhead.
4. A few moments after this frame, once Jeffrey has described more of what he saw, he asks, “Now the trouble is, what does that prove?” Sandy’s response is “Nothing, really, but it’s interesting.” Just like a dream, or a nightmare.
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. … Read the rest
Wednesday, February 15th, 2012
Second #3760, 62:40
Jeffrey, having arrived later than expected to pick up Sandy after school, has just been spotted by Sandy’s boyfriend Mike, who is doing a variation of jumping jack exercises with the football team (in full uniform, including helmets) on a tennis court across the street in a scene that oddly predicts the “Do the Locomotion” scene in Inland Empire. We are back in the sunlight now, the deeply coded normalcy of high school, the girls in their long skirts recalling the teenage rebel movies of the 1950s. The frame captures no one looking at anyone. Dead gazes. A frame filled with people and trees and grass and a building and a car. The end of spring. The beginning of summer.
Sandy. The fact of Sandy. In her classic 1974 book From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies, Molly Haskell wrote:
In the penumbral world of the detective story, based on the virile and existentially skeptical work of writers like Hammett, Chandler, Cain, and David Goodis (which found its way into crime films like Dark Passage, The Blue Dahlia, Farewell My Lovely, Double Indemnity, I Wake Up Screaming, and The Big Sleep), the proliferation of women—broads, dames, and ladies in as many shapes and flavors, hard and soft centers as a Whitman’s sampler—was a way of not having to concentrate on a single woman, and again, of reducing woman’s stature by siphoning her qualities off into separate women.
In Blue Velvet, Sandy’s Dorothy is matched by Jeffrey’s Frank. Which is to say: the film is a carefully constructed two-hours of tension which threatens to snap but never does. The movie seems to be about Jeffrey’s fascination with darkness, but what if it’s really about Sandy’s role as the gatekeeper between darkness and light? After all, she supplies the initial information and clues that Jeffrey needs to take his plunge. In any case, this is one of Blue Velvet’s most visually diverse frames, regressing from right to left into the green, green natural world, the same world that existed within the … Read the rest
Monday, February 13th, 2012
Second #3713, 61:53
Jeffrey, having followed Frank to a building, sneaks inside at night to confirm that it is, indeed, where Frank lives. The shot only lasts a few seconds, and serves as a bridge between what has just come before (Jeffrey’s cloaked, nighttime pursuit of Frank) and what will come after (the scene at Arlene’s Diner with Sandy as he recalls to her witnessing the actions of the Yellow Man, the Well-Dressed Man, and Frank).
The frame is pure Expressionism as Jeffrey finds himself searching for Frank’s name on the mailboxes in a low-angle shot whose shadows and lines run in a weirdly menacing way from left to right. The black door, the oblong bank of mailboxes, the shadows on the wall, the window above Jeffrey’s head with its faintly frosted panes, the fluorescent light; all of this adds up to a moment of quiet turmoil. It is one of Blue Velvet’s fearful, haunted places, a corporeal expression of inner violence and darkness.
In his 1966 essay “Typology of Detective Fiction,” Tzvetan Todorov wrote this about literature, which also can be applied to film:
one might say that every great book establishes the existence of two genres, the reality of two norms: that of the genre it transgresses, which dominated the preceding literature, and that of the genre it creates.
Blue Velvet, as it shape-shifts between an array of genres and moods, becomes a mystery not so much for Jeffrey, but for us, who struggle with our collective desires as they unfold on the screen. The power of Blue Velvet in shots like this is how it offers us a glimpse of a space—an apartment building lobby—that is familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. The world is a stranger, less familiar place in the dark, when we must bring forces other than our sight to bear upon our understanding. Which is to stay: the real story of this frame is not that Jeffrey discovers Frank’s name on one of the mailboxes, but rather that the frame itself discovers Jeffrey. The distorted, confused angles and violent geometric … Read the rest
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
