When I saw Blue Velvet in the fall of 1986—in a little second-run theater in Hickory, Boone, or Charlotte—I was astounded. So a film, I asked (really, asserted) can do that? Kyle MacLachlan’s Jeffrey hides in the closet of a strange woman he doesn’t know, Isabella Rossellini’s Dorothy. He is playing amateur sleuth, purely out of gee-whiz kid curiosity. He watches Dorothy, who knows he is hiding in the closet, get raped—a transgression she appears to like as much as loathe—by Dennis Hopper’s Frank Booth. During the assault, Frank beats Dorothy, commands her to do things as a general would a soldier (“Don’t you fuckin’ look at me!”), falls into the role of a child (“Baby wants to fuck”), chews on part of Dorothy’s blue velvet robe, violently inhales amyl nitrate, and intimates—all the while, remember, Jeffrey is, unbeknownst to him, playing the voyeur—that he has kidnapped her husband and son. He has already cut off the husband’s ear as a warning to her not to call the police—an ear Jeffrey discovered in a field near his home and that pulled him into this mystery in the first place.
But such scenes were only the beginning of my astonishment. There was the tone, rivetingly ambiguous, by turns deadly earnest, as with the rape scene, and patently silly, as when Jeffrey and his high school teenybopper girlfriend Sandy (Laura Dern) fall into Happy Days badinage in the local soda shop. Usually, though, the tone was a mixture of the ridiculous and the serious. Sandy reports to Jeffrey, rapturously, her dream of robins who can redeem the wasted land, and he responds, sheepishly, “You’re a neat girl.” At the film’s conclusion, an obviously mechanical robin chews on a seemingly real worm on the windowsill of Jeffrey’s family’s kitchen; Jeffrey and Sandy recall cheesily the dream and smile at each other with more treacle in their teeth than prebrush plaque.
And more, I was stunned by the film’s visuals. Highly saturated depictions of flowers and sky, straight out of fifties Technicolor TV, with surreal subterranean visions of teeming glistening insects, viciously crunching and clicking. The entre-deux-guerres Berlinesque cabaret scenes, in which Dorothy as the Blue Lady croons into luridly gorgeous bluish light. Disturbing yet beautiful interiors, as in Dorothy’s dreamily sordid Deep River apartment, with its mauve carpet, black-and-white tile, purplish burgundy walls, and lime green radiator and plant pots. An opening sequence in which a floor-to-ceiling blue velvet curtain slowly waves in muted light, to the rhythm of Angelo Badalamenti’s ghoulish score, in such a way that it looks as though the cloth were alive.
And finally, I had never seen a film using such strange music throughout, not only Badalamenti’s outré sequences, worthy of the opera’s Phantom, but also Roy Orbison’s “In Dreams,” which Dean Stockwell’s character, Ben, lip-syncs into a portable lightbulb, while wearing makeup and suavely dressed in a suit redolent of Lord Byron, with ruffled collar and jacket of satin, printed into swirls of black and gold.
What tantalized me most in each of these cinematic elements was doubleness, the picture’s ability to be stupid and sublime at once, inspiring at the same time tears and laughter. I now realize that this quality—let’s call it, along with David Foster Wallace, Lynchian—is common to all of Lynch’s great films, which means all of his films, except Dune (his only film on which he didn’t have final cut), and that it, this simultaneity of high tragedy and dumb comedy, resembles the art of Elvis in “Milkcow” and Murray in Meatballs but is most similar to the great works of the Romantic age, such as the Moby-Dick of Melville, Byron’s Don Juan, Keats’s great odes. These works share a primary mode of expression: Romantic irony, a subject that I have written about before and that I still find un-put-downably compelling.
Now, there are many different kinds of irony, all grounded on the assumption that something can be both itself and its opposite at the same time. The word comes from the Greek eiron, which means “to dissimulate,” and was often used to describe a stock character in classical—that is, Greek and Roman—comedy, the tricky guy, usually a wiseass servant who pretends to be helping some big shot get a girl but is in fact working all along to get the girl himself. The audience of the play knows this all along, and this of course creates all sorts of comic situations.
Several kinds of irony grow from this structure. There is dramatic irony, occurring when the audience knows something a character in the play doesn’t. Oedipus bellows about how he would bring the source of his city’s plague to justice if the perpetrator lived in his very house, which of course he does: the perp is Oedipus himself, whose horrible crimes of incest and patricide, of which he is not aware, are the source of his city’s woes. There is also Socratic irony, pretending you don’t know anything in order to draw pompous sophists into debate with you so that you can show them that in fact you know a fuckload and they don’t know shit. Verbal irony: speaking ironically and apparently knowing you speak ironically, as Jane Austen does at the beginning of Pride and Prejudice, where “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife” really means the opposite—that is, a single woman in possession of no fortune must be in want of a man who has one. There are other forms, but let’s move on, this not being a high school English class.
The type of irony pertinent to Lynch, as well as Melville et al., is, as I said, Romantic, which the Schlegel brothers and their friend Novalis (aka Friedrich von Hardenberg, for whom see Penelope Fitzgerald’s breathtaking The Blue Flower) developed at the outset of the Romantic period, in 1798. The Romantic ironist believes that the world is too complicated, unpredictable, chaotic, evanescent, mysterious, to ever be accurately described by our words, images, numbers, by any system of human meaning-making. So there exists an ongoing gap between our systems of knowledge and the world these systems are designed to know. And so assertions of knowledge are actually claims of ignorance. This is true for everyone claiming to know anything. What distinguishes the Romantic ironist is that he realizes this and finds creative ways to express it.
This sort of ironist might, like Byron in Don Juan, write about the process of writing, confessing to the reader, for instance, that he begins his poem hungover, a revelation that calls attention to the fictionality of the verse. Far from a disclosure of reality, the poetry is one possible construction among an infinite number of constructions, a construction especially dubious in this case, since it allegedly originates from a booze haze. Or the romantically ironic writer could, turning to Melville, create a character, like Ishmael, who doesn’t tie himself, as crazy Ahab does, to one worldview to the exclusion of all others but attempts rather to experience life from a bewildering number of perspectives, ranging from scientific classification to painting to sculpture to mythology to carving to poetry, more keen on intensity and elasticity than on truth, structure. Or Keats-like, the Romantic ironist might set going a dialogue that will never end, in which the purpose of the conversation is not to reach conclusion but to keep the talk going:
Life: Which is superior, art or life?
Art: Art of course, since it elevates an electric moment above time’s flow, crystallizes this riveting instant, illuminates it for all of our meaning-starved gazes.
Life: But isn’t that rather static? Without the dynamism of time, there would exist no galvanic glimpses mesmerizing the artist in the first place.
Art: Granted, but to place too much value in temporal fluctuation is to suffer only loss of what one most loves; surely it is better to ponder “the artifices of eternity.”
Life: Perhaps. Although that’s an old man’s time-killing activity, moribund. To be alive: that’s to attend to the “sensual music,” “salmon-falls,” and “mackerel-crowded seas.”
Art: Maybe. Sorry I got the Yeats going, when it’s Keats’s nightingale over which we should be jawboning.
And so on, with each turn in the dialogue, like each wider Emersonian circle, expanding, enriching, enlivening.
In each case—Keats, Melville, Byron—the artist attempts to embody in words the way we actually, if we are honest, experience the world: provisionally, doubting while confirming, improvising as much as planning, composing as does an artist in the midst of his drafting, revising endlessly, keeping what works, casting aside what doesn’t, on the lookout for something new to use, or something old to reuse. Self-consciously embracing the process by which we try to understand—as opposed to the final product we might wish our understanding would produce—we become Romantic ironists, affirming and denying at once, asserting, in essence: This conclusion feels true for the present, but I know that it isn’t true for all time, and so it’s true and not true. Now we dwell in the land of autoerasure, Mission: Impossible realm. This message will self-destruct in five seconds.
And Lynch sends gorgeous missives. He persistently intimates that all representations of the world are indeed understandable and at times noble attempts to translate chaos into order, the void into significance. At the same time, he suggests that these representations are silly gropings to achieve what can’t be done: establish legitimate, durable structure and meaning.