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NOTES FROM UNDERGROUND

  And, indeed, I will ask on my own account here, an idle question: which is better—cheap happiness or exalted sufferings? Well, which is better?---Fyodor Dostoevsky ---Notes from Underground There are certain people of whom it is difficult to say anything which will at once throw them into relief—in other words, describe them graphically in their typical characteristics. These are they who are generally known as “commonplace people,” and this class comprises, of course, the immense majority of mankind. Authors, as a rule, attempt to select and portray types rarely met with in their entirety, but these types are nevertheless more real than real life itself. For instance, when the whole essence of an ordinary person’s nature lies in his perpetual and unchangeable commonplaceness; and when in spite of all his endeavours to do something out of the common, this person ends, eventually, by remaining in his unbroken line of routine—. I think such an individual really does become a type of hi
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Blue Velvet (1986)

 



"Love it or hate it, see it you must. Nothing remotely as unhealthy has come out of Hollywood for years but also nothing that so upends our usual expectations of the commercial cinema. And its more than a little acrid fumes, blow away the memory of much fake perfume. Calculated it is, and ultimately perhaps just a little bit hollow. But it’s a major effort to convince us that a popular film need not always indulge us when it indulges itself. It can draw a bit of real blood, too."

 

Now and again Hollywood breaks a barrier or two, generally by mistake. But I’ve no idea what persuaded a major company to finance David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (Lumiere, Chelsea, Screen on the Hill, Gate, 18). It is as resolutely radical in both style and content as Eraserhead and light years ahead of the stodgy botch-up of Dune.

We’re in Lumberton, USA, where an old man collapses watering his garden. The flowers are artificially pretty along the fence but the hose-pipe seems to have a murderous mind of its own, practically strangling him to death. Returning from the hospital, his son discovers a severed ear along the way. Something’s funny somewhere, and we’re not quite certain yet whether it’s funny peculiar or funny ha-ha.

The young man, enamoured of the local detective’s partly pretty daughter, also becomes enamoured of the mystery, tricking his way into the apartment of a night-club singer who is connected with the police investigation. He hides in the closet and watches her undress. When she discovers him, he’s forced to make love to her. Then her real lover arrives, so he hops back into the closet and squints at a sado-masochistic battle royal developing in front of his startled but fascinated eyes. Before long, he’s embroiled up to the hilt in a murderous psychodrama.




The film is smart-looking, incredibly knowing and exists both on a level of absolute reality and out-and-out nightmare. If it is a commentary on the worm-in-the-bud of “ordinary” American society, it has an astonishing capacity to hit below the belt and enjoy it. But I think its real significance lies not in any general comment but in a series of particular observations, concerning our fears about what we might become if our familiar constraints were blown away.

Just as in Lynch’s Eraserhead, where the beastie quite literally gets out of control, so in Blue Velvet curiosity almost kills the cat, showing our hero what he really is. The happy ending to the present tale looks thoroughly unconvincing, and I think it is meant to. The flowers in the garden where the young man wakes are just too pretty to be true. And the final image of an artificial robin with a live bug in its beak confirms our unease.

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2020/apr/09/david-lynchs-blue-velvet-reviewed-archive-1987



    1. Tár scored 7.5 out of 10 on IMDb.
      Tár scored 91 percent on Rotten Tomatoes.

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