This guy used that statement as a bludgeon to hit me with, saying something about how (I'm paraphrasing here) every pretentious hack over the last 40 years invokes Lynch's name as a way to justify their own shitty movies. The inference, of course, being that I am one such hack.
I had to think about that for a minute. Is that true? I suppose it probably is — the way people invoke Scorsese when trying to make themselves seem "gritty," or Chris Nolan if they want people to see their movies as all thinky and cerebral.
Lynch is one of those filmmakers who brings a lot of baggage to the viewing experience. If you've seen his stuff before, you don't go into a one of his films really wondering what you're going to get (unless it's something out of left field like "The Straight Story"). And he's become just popular enough, with a distinctive enough vision, that you can refer to a film as "Lynchian" and most everyone will know what you're talking about.
It's a short, slippery slide from archetype to stereotype, from having a distinctive style to being a cliché. And, from there, it's an almost inevitable fall into the abyss of self parody.
I do sort of feel like Lynch has made that plunge. I don't know that I've love one of his films since "The Straight Story," and even more recentish films of his I enjoyed (like "Lost Highway and "Mulholland Drive") did immediately feel a little tired. At a certain point it felt like Lynch was doing Lynch. Because his themes are so opaque and the "narrative," such as it is, so bewildering, it gets harder and harder to look past the stylistic tics and devices to get to whatever substance may be underneath.
But I just have to think back to my first experience with him to remember what he meant to me. When I discovered him in high school, I really had absolutely no idea who he was. I sort of remembered "Twin Peaks," but I didn't really get into the show until much later. I was vaguely aware of "Eraserhead." And I had seen the box for "Wild at Heart" on the video store shelf, but it looked like a girly romance so I had less than zero interest in checking it out.
But then someone (I can't remember who) who knew I liked fucked up movies told me to check out "Blue Velvet." So I did.
I've talked already about certain films — "Jacob's Ladder," "Hellraiser" — that fried my brain pan on first viewing. "Blue Velvet" certainly fell into that category.
The difference, though, was that I was just old enough — and beginning to become just film savvy enough — to want to not just experience the movie on that "holy shit" level, but to study it in a somewhat analytic way. I watched the movie over and over and over again, trying to figure out exactly what the guy was after and how he was doing what he was doing. I'm not sure I ever figured it out.
I dove into his oeuvre (pretentious hack-speak, I know) in the years after that straddling high school and college. I watched "Wild at Heart" and "Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me" back to back. This was pre-DVD, so I had to wait awhile before I could get ahold of "Twin Peaks" the series. "Lost Highway" came out a year or so later, and then I was finally able to get my hands on a copy of "Eraserhead" in a little video store in Paonia, Colorado (My buddy Ryan and I watched that and Romero's "Day of the Dead" in one sitting, which may be the best double-feature ever). I even fell in love with "The Straight Story," which seemed like such a departure until I watched it a few times and was able to discern certain stylistic commonalities with his other work. I loved the manic energy of "Wild at Heart," and I was able to appreciate "Lost Highway" and "Twin Peaks" and "Dune," even if I didn't really love them. But none of them stuck with me like "Blue Velvet" did.
Wes Craven's "Last House on the Left" and Tobe Hooper's "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre" were the first movies I saw that seemed like they might have been made by an insane person (more on those later in this countdown). But "Blue Velvet" was the first film I saw that seemed to encapsulate insanity itself. It wasn't surreal and nightmarish in the way "Jacob's Ladder" was, but it seemed to exist in a world that was just wrong in a fundamental way that I never was able to completely grapple with.
It was maybe my first real cinematic encounter with the idea of the uncanny. What makes "Blue Velvet" so much more haunting than Lynch's other work is that, as strange as it is, it's not that strange. The weirdness doesn't announce itself in quite the same way as it does in "Eraserhead" or "Lost Highway." It exists in a universe that seems to operate on some sort of recognizable logical framework, but uncomfortably heightened and just off. I've never done 'shrooms, but I always assumed the experience would be kind of like watching "Blue Velvet."
And then Lynch will throw something like this at you, and you realize you've just tumbled down a rabbit hole into some weird Neverland that you might not escape from.
The problem with "Blue Velvet" (and, indeed, all of Lynch's work) is that it's really about that first encounter with it. It's hard on a repeat viewing, once you know what to expect, to recapture the experience. Eventually I figured out that all my attempts to analyze and deconstruct the film were folly. It just is, for better or for worse, and that I should just be grateful it's there.
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