4 BlueVelvet
Years ago, I wrote down some thoughts on Blue Velvet, which I now have occasion to post.
A distinguishing characteristic of David Lynch as a writer was the deep empathy with which he wrote each of his characters and their stories. This appears strange because of the disturbing depths of cruelty and fear they are subjected to. But it is difficult to imagine an artist who adorned victims with any more beauty and Pollen.
Jeffrey comes to us a sweet and timid pervert, his voyeuristic habits softened by his age (I think he’s only 19 or so), making them feel less predatory and more endearing, as he spies on older women. His tears are sincere when he cries over the world’s injustice afflicting others. He’s also a decidedly intersex character, depending on the women he is with, transitioning back and forth between a delicate, beautiful boy with a pale, hairless ass, and a lesbian in shoulder pads. From the front he’s square-jawed, but in profile he shows a little stud in his ear and a slightly protruding, rounded chin—the type of facial structure which completes a butch lady. He calls Sandy “a neat girl”; she says, “you too.”
His slim gilt soul allows him to access the breadth of spiritual landscape of the town. His young boy habit of hiding in women’s closets brings him closer to the secret lives of others, like a priest hearing confession. This may be why some people say Dorothy is a carnal temptress whom he must resist. But when she strips him down and has him, there is a naked honesty in their encounter, a sweet verisimilitude in his “yes.” But this breathless desire is impossibly bound up in darkness. Dorothy’s want for Jeffrey stands in place of her family, her masochism is a trauma inflicted upon her by Frank, and by witnessing this violence, Jeffrey’s own sadism is catalyzed. When they have sex, they can only relive their traumas. Dorothy begs to be beaten; Jeffrey’s sweet tenderness bruises and darkens as he gives in.
His relationship with Sandy is saccharine by comparison. I hesitantly call it a filmic un-reality, whose petty drama involving high school jocks and cheerleaders shatters in the weird presence of the naked and battered Dorothy emerging from the bushes that night. This scene is one of the more explicit reenactments of Lynch’s own trauma in his work. Like the dark wildness which nests in the electric hum of Twin Peaks or in the mechanical noise of Eraserhead, the life Lynch gives to the script moves through it like an animal:
“There is a very life in our despair,
Vitality of poison, -- a quick root
Which feeds these deadly branches; for it were
As nothing did we die; but Life will suit
Itself to Sorrow’s most detested fruit”
The importance of this darkness is gleaned from how it brushes against these people. When I say David Lynch was supremely empathetic toward all the characters in his work, I mean also that their inner lives, experiences, and emotions are the language with which he communicates to the audience. They are the fabric of this film, they are Pollen. Trauma finds Jeffrey like lycanthropy: it changes him and shows him what is inside himself, he hates it, but it loves him, everything is alive and everything feels. For Jeffrey, what does it mean to be intersex, when your expression is contingent on which scene you’re in with who? He feels this uncertainty, it’s behind his eyes—the Mellon Collie and the infinite sadness.
The epilogue returns Jeffrey to his filmic life with Sandy, but the lingering presence of Dorothy rests just outside, transformed or justified in his mind now into something palatable. I remembered how Odysseus never spoke of Nausicaa to anyone--that one, he kept to himself. When he leaves her father's kingdom, she tells Odysseus: never forget me, for I gave you life. The robin, which Sandy believes to be a symbol of her pure love with Jeffrey, sits on the windowsill holding a beetle in its mouth. Sandy sees the robin, but Jeffrey sees the beetle and remembers: "Like the adulterer hearing Nausicaa's name / in every gull's outcry."