Blue Velvet Project
Monday, April 30th, 2012
Second #5076, #84:36
The car has stopped. Jeffrey and Frank and his gang are outside. Dorothy is going nuts inside the car, pleading for Frank not to hurt Jeffrey. Franks orders “In Dreams” to be played. One of the women from Ben’s apartment who’s come along for the ride, climbs on top of Frank’s black Charger and dances on the roof. In a few seconds, Frank will say to Jeffrey:
Don’t be a good neighbor to her [Dorothy]. I’ll send you a love letter straight from my heart fucker! You know what a love letter is? It’s a bullet from a fuckin’ gun, fucker! You receive a love letter from me, you’re fucked forever!
But back to that woman swaying to Orbsion on the car top. Judged by Blue Velvet’s own tonal boundaries, this moment is a failure. It is a failure because it veers more severely into Camp than any scene that comes before or after it. Susan Sontag’s 1964 essay “Notes on Camp” is still the most supercharged articulation of the Camp sensibility:
Camp is a vision of the world in terms of style—but a particular kind of style. It is a love of the exaggerated, of the ‘off,’ of things-being-what-they-are-not.
and
This is why so many of the objects prized by Camp taste are old-fashioned, out-of-date, démodé. It’s not a love of the old as such. It’s simply that the process of aging or deterioration provides the necessary detachment – or arouses a necessary sympathy. When the theme is important, and contemporary, the failure of a work of art may make us indignant. Time can change that. Time liberates the work of art from moral relevance, delivering it over to the Camp sensibility. . . . Another effect: time contracts the sphere of banality. (Banality is, strictly speaking, always a category of the contemporary.) What was banal can, with the passage of time, become fantastic.
In the frame at hand, two things happen that alter, temporarily, our relation to the movie. First, Orbison’s song (from 1963) is used for a second time, weakening the spell of … Read the rest
Friday, April 27th, 2012
Second #5029, 83:49
“Now it’s dark,” Frank has said previously, like some incantation, and now it really is dark. Jeffrey, his back to the camera, is practically swallowed up alive by the blackness, as Frank inhales whatever it is that unleashes his id. There is a flashlight, the dome light of the Charger, and the very small light in the distance that give shape and depth of space to the frame.
For the psychoanalyst and philosopher Jacques Lacan the coherent, unified self is an illusion, a fragile thing constructed gradually during an infant’s Mirror Stage, a stage when the ego or the “I” develops:
This illusion of unity, in which a human being is always looking forward to self-mastery, entails a constant danger of sliding back again into the chaos from which he started; it hangs over the abyss of a dizzy Assent in which one can perhaps see the very essence of Anxiety.
Frank is the id loosed upon the world, his desires uncontrolled by any sort of ego mastery. His rage seems incoherent and secretly coded. And yet Blue Velvet itself is a controlled work of art guided by a steady and sustained vision. Unlike, say, the Dogme 95 films, its depiction of moral chaos is not itself governed by tonal or stylistic chaos. The position of Blue Velvet—the territory it claims—is that of Order. The film is never with Frank aesthetically. Even this frame adopts the general perspective of Jeffrey, the perspective of someone who “is in danger of sliding back again into the chaos from which he started.”
But Blue Velvet never follows this path. Although the word “surreal” is often used to characterize it, the film operates fully within the realm of reason and order, a contradiction that produces a weird tension that makes Blue Velvet something even more disturbing than if it had adapted itself to the pre-ego chaos of Frank’s mind. In fact, only in Inland Empire does Lynch map the film’s aesthetics onto the faltering stream of consciousness mind of its protagonist, Nikki Grace (Laura Dern).
But that’s a story for … Read the rest
Wednesday, April 25th, 2012
Second #4982, 83:02
This frame comes from perhaps the most difficult scene to watch—without flinching or looking away—in Blue Velvet. Frank, getting warmed up for his violent gender-bending abuse of Jeffrey, assaults what is beneath Dorothy’s robe. The viewer is trapped in the backseat with Jeffrey, sutured into his point of view. Jeffrey, who is unable to decipher the meaning of Frank. On one level, Blue Velvet is a post-apocalyptic film, where what has been destroyed is not just buildings but meaning itself. In Brian Evenson’s new novel Immobility, the main character—a paralyzed-from-the-waste-down man named Horkai—considers the devastated landscape as he is being carried to a destination he does not know:
An old rest area, rusty metal rail still in place, the building itself having fallen off its foundations to spill into the parking lot. A sudden unbroken run of telephone poles, most snapped off partway down but a few still relatively intact. And then a few more houses, these almost unpleasantly big, at least if their rubble was any indication. Perhaps condos rather than individual houses, impossible now to say. A triangular sign with the silhouette of an animal—a deer, perhaps—crudely painted on it.
If we look at Blue Velvet slightly askance, and tune into its low frequencies, we can detect the contours of a different genre, a sort of apocalyptic retro-futurism. The apartment buildings and warehouses devoid of residents except for Dorothy and Frank. The odd feeling that the film is not set in any specific historical moment. Frank’s radical disappearing act at Ben’s apartment. The impossibility of Sandy. Her father, Detective Williams, dressed in his work outfit—gun holster and all—at night at home when he’s off-duty. The mechanical robin at the film’s end (echoed, perhaps, in Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, published roughly a decade after Blue Velvet).
But in this frame, it all comes down to Frank’s face, his set-jaw determinism. Although his profile is illuminated it may as well be a void, an absence. At this moment, more than any other, he is the black hole at the core of … Read the rest
Monday, April 23rd, 2012
As author of The Blue Velvet Project—which owes a moral debt to the Dogme 95 movement, whose practice of constraint was an inspiration—I feel obligated to make this public statement of confessions regarding the rigors of the project. This is done in the spirit of Thomas Vinterberg’s confession regarding his film The Celebration.
Despite the fact that I promised Mr. Macaulay, Filmmaker Editor-in-Chief, that I would compose each entry “well ahead of time,” I confess that the following posts were composed the day of posting:
#12
#27
#28
#77
#93
I confess to posting—out of unreasonable affection for the frame in question—on the same frame twice, concocting the flimsy ruse of “part 2” as a means to justify this selfish act.
I confess to the desire to “step frame” the DVD forward to avoid Jeffrey’s eyes being closed in post #73. However, I resisted this temptation.
I confess to knowing well ahead of time that I would use the Comolli and Narboni quote in post #25. In fact, no matter what frame post #25 would have revealed, I was prepared to use that quote, thereby jeopardizing the spirit of surprise and spontaneity that characterize the project.
I hereby declare that all previous Blue Velvet Project entries up to this point have been created following both the letter and the spirit of the agreement between myself and Mr. Macaulay, and that I will endeavor to remain faithful to this agreement for the remainder of the project.
Pleading for absolution, I remain
Nicholas Rombes
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
Friday, April 20th, 2012
Second #4935, 82:15
1. The car has come to a halt. Jeffrey’s crime has been to look at Frank, just as we also have been looking at the film itself.
2. “I shoot when I see the whites of the eyes,” Frank says at this moment, almost directing his stare at us, but not quite. This is either the statement of a psychopath or of a film director.
3. In Don DeLillo’s 1997 novel Underworld, there are these sentences:
There is no space or time out here, or in here, or wherever she is. There are only connections. Everything is connected. All human knowledge gathered and linked, hyperlinked, this site leading to that, this fact referenced to that, a keystroke, a mouse-click, a password—world without end, amen.
But she is in cyberspace, not heaven, and she feels the grip of systems. This is why she’s so uneasy. There is a presence here, a thing implied, something vast and bright. She senses the paranoia of the web, the net.
4. Blue Velvet on the Web, in frozen frames that course through the information system as a fraction of the blood of the thing.
5. Dorothy—“out here, or in here, or wherever she is”—her face turned away from us.
6. The car’s implied dome light giving sculptural depth and shadow to Frank’s face.
7. And finally: the sliver of light on the dashboard between Frank and Dorothy. Is this small object the “In Dreams” cassette tape from earlier, the equivalent of the blue key in Mulholland Drive? A small, fractured piece of horror, the brightest, most glowing object in the frame.
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
Wednesday, April 18th, 2012
Second #4888, 81:28
The red, terrifying beauty of the bridge truss as Frank and his gang take Dorothy and Jeffrey on a joy ride “out to the fuckin’ country.” These shots of the truss underside, bathed in light that may as well emanate from hell, are a sort of reverse-universe visual analogy of the earlier nighttime shots of the underside of trees as Jeffrey walks down his street.
In Robert Bolaño’s novel 2666, in the section “The Part about the Critics,” each of the three main characters has a different and disturbing dream on the same night:
Espinoza dreamed about the painting of the desert. In the dream Espinoza sat up in bed, and from there, as if watching TV on a screen more than five feet square, he could see the still bright desert, such a solar yellow it hurt his eyes, and the figures on horseback, whose movements—the movements of horses and riders—were barely perceptible, as if they were living in a different world from ours, where speed was different, a kind of speed that looked to Espinoza like slowness, although he knew it was only the slowness that kept whoever was watching the painting from losing his mind.
There is a palpable sense of evil to the image here at second #4888. Perhaps this has something to do with the fact that the shot presents a point of view that’s unavailable to any of the characters. This is an unusual thing, this thing that film can do with perspective. In literature, even third-person narration (which is roughly analogous to the narrative prism of most films, with notable exceptions such as Lady in the Lake [1947], The Blair Witch Project [1999], most of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly [2007] and others) often sets the scene from the general, if not literal, perspective of a specific character. Cinema, however, can jar us with a sudden break in narrative mode, which happens in this fleeting, two-second shot of the bridge truss, and which suddenly breaks the spell of the perspective in the car and in the previous sequence … Read the rest
Monday, April 16th, 2012
Second #4841, 80:41
1. The spell is broken. Frank has shut off the song. Ben seems insulted, and punishes Frank with silence. Dorothy refuses to smile. A joy ride is suggested. Paul’s (Jack Nance’s) shadow offers evidence of a hidden light. There is also a folded newspaper or magazine in his jacket pocket.
2. In October 1986, the month after Blue Velvet’s release, Ronald Regan delivered a speech at the Republican Governors Association Dinner. He used the word revolution numerous times, and spoke of permanently altering the balance of power:
But if I could, tonight, I’d like to take a moment or two to consider the theme taken up by this year’s RGA idea book: the second stage of the revolution. Of course, first we need to be as clear as we can about just what it is that’s taken place in the first stage of the revolution. There are the many changes we’ve been able to effect in policy — themselves tremendously important — changes like the lower tax rates and the more limited role of the Federal Government that have led to some 46 months now of economic growth and to the creation of more than 11 1/2 million new jobs, and changes like the rebuilding of our national defenses and the firm reassertion of America’s world role on behalf of human freedom. . . .
Even though this change is already underway, most of stage one of our revolution has taken place here in Washington, as we’ve continued to limit the scope of the Federal Government. Now it’s time for resources, initiatives, and public attention to shift back to the States still more definitely, still more dramatically — in other words, to alter the balance of power permanently in favor of levels of government that are closer to the people. This is stage two of our revolution. . . .
Now, this year we have an historic chance to win back a majority of statehouses for the first time since 1968, to carry the revolution more decisively out of Washington and into the country.
3.… Read the rest
Friday, April 13th, 2012
Second #4794, 79:54
The gap between Frank and Ben, and the more radical gap between the viewer and Blue Velvet. For whom does Ben sing? He begins by singing for Frank, but then he seems to lose himself in “In Dreams,” the same way that Dorothy loses herself in her rendition of “Blue Velvet.” Ben’s face at this moment registers a catastrophic loss, his secret loss, and in this frame he’s more humanized than perhaps any character in the film. His eyes look away from Frank and into something even darker.
In his book The Vital Illusion, Jean Baudrillard wrote:
For nothing is identical to itself. We are never identical to ourselves, except, perhaps, in sleep and in death. Language itself never signifies what it means; it always signifies something else. . . . The probability, in this world, for a total adequation of the same to the same, is equal to zero. Fortunately. For that would be the Perfect Crime—a crime that never happens. In relations between things there is always a hiatus, a distortion, a rift that precludes any reduction of the same to the same.
What Baudrillard describes is pure physics: we are always imperceptibly separate from what we see and experience because light itself does not reach us instantaneously. In terms of faraway objects, this is easy to measure: the sun’s light takes a little over eight minutes to reach us. And the light from a relatively close star—Proxima Centauri—takes approximately 4 years. So, as Baudrillard suggests, we are never entirely present in the world. There is always an infinitesimal lag time between it and us. We experience even what we call “real time” as the fractional past.
In this frame, Ben’s unarticulated loss is perhaps more real to him than the impossible-to-perceive time gap between the light leaving the lamp he holds and the light touching his face. “Nothing is identical to itself.” This is perhaps more true of us, who watch movies as spectator-versions of ourselves, than for the actors in the films. When we look at this frame, for instance, and … Read the rest
Wednesday, April 11th, 2012
Second #4747, 79:07
You, in one part of your brain, know that Ben is not really singing at this moment. But then, Roy Orbison is not singing, either. He is dead, although he was alive at the time of Blue Velvet (and credited the use of “In Dreams” in the film to helping revive his career). You know it’s lip-synched, and yet somehow it’s not. It can’t be. If this seems like a contradiction, then consider that the entire scene is a special case of black magic, culminating in Frank’s literal disappearance from the screen in a few minutes in a radical edit.
There is a stanza in Ben Lerner’s poem “Mean Free Path” (from the book of the same name) that goes like this:
Applause: Speak plainly. Keep your hands
On the table. Do not flee into procedure
Do not wait for a surpassing disaster
To look your brother in the eye and speak
Of love. Make no mistake: the disjunction
The disjunction stays. Do not hesitate
To cut the most beautiful line in the name
Of form. The bread of words. Look for me
At genre’s edge. I’m going there on foot
Those lines—“Do not hesitate / To cut the most beautiful line in the name / Of form”—may as well be the dark secret to Blue Velvet. There is something beautiful and terrifying and severe about Ben singing into the garage light, as his own, one-man garage band. From Ben’s voiceless throat, Orbison’s words become an incantation as frightening as anything real or imagined in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s story “Young Goodman Brown,” as Brown and his wife, at a witchs’ ritual in the night forest hesitate “on the verge of wickedness in this dark world.”
It becomes a moment so super-loaded with information that its binary code spills out of the screen.
There are not enough zeros and ones to express its meaning.
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 … Read the rest
Monday, April 9th, 2012
Second #4700, 78:20
“Donny! Donny! Donny, no! No! Donny mommy loves you!” This is moments after Frank has said, in reference to Dorothy, “Let Tits see her kid.” The tenderness of her hand upon the door molding. A glimpse of a woman in pink in the room with Donny. “What the real world is: that is a very difficult problem” (Haruki Murakami, IQ84). The two lamps in the corner of the room. Who puts two lamps in the same space? Dorothy’s hand, again, the elegant length of her fingers, and the hands of the woman sitting beneath the light switches. Donny’s home is not his home. Ben’s “place” is not a home, although its interior architecture is familiar. Donny is hidden in a home that is not his own.
Freud’s discussion of the uncanny initially focuses on two meanings of the German word heimlich. The first has various associations with the homely, the familiar; the second has associations with the secret, something that must be concealed and kept out of public sight. The two, while apparently unconnected in meaning, are connected by topography: the home encloses and thus gives comfort while the secret is enclosed and thus hidden. (Laura Mulvey, from Death 24x a Second)
The pea-green leather couch, pushed too far in front of the door molding. The empty space of the frame pulling all thoughts to the room’s overlit corner. A thousand reasons for Dorothy to hate Frank. The soft-colored feel achieved by cinematographer Frederick Elmes to contrast with the horror of Dorothy’s reaction to seeing her son Donny. Dorothy’s thoughts, what are they? What atrocities has she seen, has she yet to see?
I did not believe one word of it. I knew I had behaved exactly according to his desires; had he not bought me so that I should do so? I had been tricked into my own betrayal to that illimitable darkness whose source I had been compelled to seek in his absence and, now that I had met that shadowed reality of his that came to life only in the presence
… Read the rest
