Deciphering Blue Velvet

Fango talks to David ("Eraserhead") Lynch, a director who defies convention and whose new movie defies description.

By William Rabkin

Director David Lynch explains the intricacies of cult moviemaking to badly bruised star Kyle MacLachlan.

Don´t ask David Lynch what his films mean. Although they´re filled with enough bizarre imagery to sate an entire art school full of struggling surrealists, Lynch does not insist on understanding his imagery before he sets it to a film. The ideas just "pop" into his head and he strings them together without figuring them out. If he already knew what they meant, he says, there would be no point to making the film.

Lynch´s methods have had mixed results. His first film, Eraserhead (1977), is an almost indescribable nightmare. The Elephant Man (1980) is a moving and unsettling film of a very good script (by Christopher DeVore, Eric Bergren, and Lynch). But when Lynch was called on to write and direct the movie version of Dune in 1984, Lynch´s ideas didn´t pop fast enough to keep up with the mammoth story, and he seemed to be floundering in a film that was running out of control.

In his new movie, Blue Velvet, Lynch has returned to the style of Eraserhead. A cross between Body Heat and a 1950s "How to Date" instructional film, Blue Velvet is almost as indescribable as his first feature. While it does include all the elements of a film noir, it can´t be called that; while it is one of the funniest movies of the year, it certainly isn´t a comedy. It has murder, sex, drugs, and some spare bodily parts lying around in a flat field; it stars Kyle (Dune) MacLachlan, Laura (Smooth Talk) Dern and Dennis (Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2) Hopper. Maybe the best way to describe it is to take Lynch´s advice and say "It´s just ... Blue Velvet."

FANGORIA: I was at a sneak preview of Blue Velvet in Tarzana, California, and the audience didn´t really seem to get the film at all.

David Lynch: No, I think it was one of the worst sneaks in recorded history. They hated it. The thing is, I really don´t know what´s going to happen, because so far, the writers and critics who have seen it, have really liked it. Not lukewarm, but really liked it. Then, we had this screening, and I don´t know exactly what it means, but I know for sure they really hated the picture. I don´t know what it means for the film in places like the Midwest or the Valley. I figure the audience is going to be giant for Blue Velvet, but it strikes people in many different ways, and they have strong reactions.

Fango: I wondered the whole time - what did you say to talk Dino De Laurentiis into making it?

Lynch: He read the script. I wrote it before Dune. He went for it as a low-budget film that I would have control over, as long as it was low budget. It was about $5 million.

Fang: It looks beautiful.

Lynch: We had some fantastic people working on it. You can do a lot with that kind of money. I know how things can get expensive, but I don´t really know why they get so expensive.

Fang: There´s a real fascination with the banal in this film and in Eraserhead. What is it that attracts you?

Lynch: That´s the absurdity of life. It hits me.

Fang: I was wondering how you would tell somebody to go see this movie.

Lynch: First of all, I don´t usually like things I do. Sometimes, after years go by, I´ll like it better. One time I saw Eraserhead fairly soon after I finished it, but I saw it with friends in the middle of the day and I was relaxed, and I just clicked in and I went on this trip and I think I saw it the way someone who wasn´t involved with the film would see it, and I just love it. I´ve seen Blue Velvet in a similar situation, and I just loved watching the picture. And I don´t understand why people wouldn´t just love watching this film. It has some many kinds of textures, and it takes you into a place where so many things happen - to me, it falls into a real fantasy picture, a daydream I love to go on.

Fang: When you first came up with the idea for Blue Velvet, how much of it came at once? What was the first thought?

Lynch: Sneaking into someone´s room and finding yourself in the middle of something was the first idea, and finding something in a field that led to that.

Fang: It seems like Blue Velvet is an ´80s film noir, with its passive central character, many of the trademark shots of the noir films, you have the person getting involved with something over which he has no control. Did you ever think about that aspect?

Lynch: I love film noir, but this is a neighborhood film in my mind. It´s still dark and still deals with certain themes that noir dealt with, but I didn´t think "I want to do a film noir kind of picture."

Fang: What do you mean by a "neighborhood film"?

Lynch: It takes place in a neighborhood.

Fango: Are you still trying to do "Ronnie Rocket"?

Lynch: I would absolutely love to have that be my next picture. I don´t know if I´m going to get the chance this time because it´s too abstract and people don´t think it´s commercial.

Fang: What is it?

Lynch: I never say all of what it is. I just say mainly that it´s about a guy who´s three feet tall, has red hair, and has some physical problems. And it´s also about 60 cycle alternating current electricity.

Fang: There seems to be a similar style between Eraserhead and Blue Velvet, while Dune and The Elephant Man seem quite different.

Lynch: I wrote Elephant Man with two other people, based on a true story set in Victorian England, so it´s going to be somewhat different. Dune, we know about Dune. I lived with it for three-and-a-half years. I´m sort of Duned out. So, there have to be some similarities between Eraserhead and Blue Velvet. Even thogh they´re a lot different in my mind, they´re both original screenplays, and they´re both done in an atmosphere where there were very few restrictions on what they should be.

Fang: You were approached to direct Return of the Jedi.

Lynch: Mm-hm.

Fang: Did you turn that down?

Lynch: Mm-hm.

Fang: Why was that?

Lynch: Because it was George Lucas´ picture.

Fang: Wasn´t Dune sort of Dino De Laurentiis´ picture?

Lynch: No way.

Fang: What is it about a script that strikes you as something you should direct?

Lynch: It has to thrill you so much that you can spend the next year-and-a-half of your life working on it. You have to want to go into that world and create it, and it has to fire you up beyond belief.

Fang: What is it about Blue Velvet´s town, Lumberton, that fires you up?

Lynch: I love Lumberton. It´s almost like Eraserhead country. It´s different, but a small American town like that is inspiring to me. There are fantastic characters and many things happening under the surface that we don´t know about.

Fang: Would that be an appealing place for you to live?

Lynch: Yeah, very appealing. Or a factory district like in Eraserhead. I wouldn´t necessarily want to pal around living with Frank, but I wouldn´t mind living in Jeffrey´s neighborhood.

Fang: Everything underneath Blue Velvet´s surface looks ugly.

Lynch: It isn´t always that way. This is a story about one such instance.

Fang: Once all these nightmares bubbling under the surface have been exposed, can Lumberton go back to normal?

Lynch: Oh yeah. It´s like saying that once you´ve discovered there are heroin addicts in the world, and they´re murdering people to get the money, can you be happy? It´s a horrible sort of thing, but I don´t know. It´s a tricky question. Real ignorance is bliss. That´s what Blue Velvet is about in a way. It´s like sensing something and going in to see it and having to deal with it. It´s sort of what like people are discovering now. For me, when I grew up in Spokane, Washington, it was just like the film´s opening shot, so the world is a pretty shocking place to me. And yet, I´m still very happy.

Fang: Blue Velvet´s last shot of the robin of love with the horrible cockroach in its beak seems to suggest that the badness is always present, and maybe is necessary.

Lynch: You could say that. But you could also say what´s the lifespan of a cockroach in a robin´s beak? Not very long.

Fang: Is the ugliness under the surface the reason why Isabella Rossellini is photographed to make her look so chubby and unglamorous in her nude scenes?

Lynch: That´s the whole thing. Everybody who read the script - all the women who read for this part said, "Thank goodness it´s not like a Playboy bunny." Maybe 100 women have the perfect body out of 200 million.

Fang: Even the scene in which Jeffrey watches her from the closet is shot in what it seems to be a deliberately unerotic way.

Lynch: Well, it´s a story about Lumberton. It´s not Madison Avenue.

Fang: You dispose a lot of plot very quickly at the film´s end. Much of what seems to be a very complicated plot is covered with one quick dissolve.

Lynch: That´s not necessarily true at all. You´ve got clues all along, and still it´s not spoon-fed, and there are probably some ambiguities at the end as to what happened, but basically it isn´t all that complicated and you´ve discovered most of it along the way.

Fang: There is a big climax that one expects from this genre of film that happens somewhere offscreen in your movie.

Lynch: No, and besides, you´re saying "this genre of film." It´s not a genre film in my mind. It´s Blue Velvet.

Fang: But, certainly, it sets up expectations ...

Lynch: But the thing is there´s only one expectation.

Fang: Which is?

Lynch: Well, if you talk about the film´s end, then there´s not a whole lot of point to seeing the picture.

Fang: OK, we won´t talk about the ending, but I still would like to know what that one expectation you have while watching the picture is.

Lynch: The question you have all the way through is what´s going to happen to Frank (Dennis Hopper) and Jeffrey (Kyle MacLachlan).

Fang: You keep saying this isn´t in a genre of films, but ...

Lynch: You´re saying it like you find a genre to fit every film into. But you don´t have to obey the rules of a genre. There are many things in Blue Velvet that are against some sort of rules or this normal setup, but even that wasn´t done so consciously. These are just ideas that pop into my head, so I made this picture.

Fang: Your story does set up a great deal of expectation which it seems deliberately to twist. Are you conscious of doing this when you´re writing, or do your ideas just pop up?

Lynch: The majority of the just pop. Then, there´s a surface scrambling to see how one pop connects with the pop before it. That´s happening as one scene connects to another, and then there´s some juggling and you start to see something forming that could cause many more pops. For me, there´s not much manipulating of things. It´s more a beneath-the-surface kind of thinking. I know that once a certain strain of ideas get together, the die is cast and all the other ideas must fit into that family. But most things pop up as very unexpected things, and it´s a real thrill.

Fang: Do you ever worry you´ll stop popping?

Lynch: No. It´s like going deep sea fishing and worrying you´ll run out of fish. There are so many billions.

Fang: Is there something else about Blue Velvet you would like to say, or is it just Blue Velvet?

Lynch: It´s totally Blue Velvet.

Fang: You are not a person who really likes to articulate his ideas outside of his movies.

Lynch: No, because it doesn´t make any difference what I say. It´s like digging up some guy after he´s been dead for 400 years and asking him about his book. His book is what´s there, and what he´s going to say about it isn´t going to change it. You might be curious to know, but most of it is just curiosity. The work has got to go out there and stand on its own. Also, I´m not an intellectual person, and all the things that I go by are things that are hard to talk about.

Fang: There´s something about your films that makes people think you are an intellectual, and will be able to articulate your ideas. I know this isn´t just me, because I remember an interview in the LA Reader in which that interviewer was also frustrated. I guess it´s because everything in your films seems so specific and so fraught with meaning.

Lynch: They are, but not ... Some people work in reverse, where they´ve captured ideas about certain things, they can articulate them tentatively with words, and they say, "Now, I would like to write a script, make a film and show these ideas in cinema, to manifest a certain theme in film and to prove a point or something." They´ve already got the whole thing; it´s just changing forms. It´s not the right way for me to go about it - it has already been done. Why change the form? I don´t get it. There´s no discovery or anything. Film does something so magical that nothing else can do. The whole kick is to get these ideas - don´t worry about putting them in words, worry putting them into this language of film. And it has to be like a little plop of a sound and a little shot of this in a sequence. And then you´ll have this feeling like this idea you had. It´s not something that ever has to go through words, and a script is what kills more films that could be abstract or different. To first put it into words to raise the money is the killer of cinema, because once you can put it into words, that´s almost the end of it right there.

Fang: Do you know more about your pops after you see the film?

Lynch: Oh yeah. I´m still learning so much about myself from Eraserhead that it´s frightening. Eraserhead is so beneath the surface I didn´t understand it. I felt it was honest, so it could be understood at different levels, but I was only understanding at level four, and now maybe I´m at level six, and it scares the hell out of me, because it´s so much of a thing that´s personal to me. I think if you´re really allowed to be honest with the thing, then it could be understood little by little at different levels and still hold true. I think that life is like that, that you can work it down lower and lower and lower and it will always make some kind of fantastic sense.