Posted By BillHeise on June 8, 2009

In 1986, David Lynch produced his movie Blue Velvet. It wasn’t that I hated it. It was that I thought the film had its priorities out of whack with reality. This essay is my explanation of why.

A Modern Day Masterpiece

The movie’s trailer starts off thus:

From the mind of David Lynch comes a modern day masterpiece
So Startling
So Provocative
So Mysterious
That It Will Open Your Eyes to
A World You Have Never Seen Before

Raised Flags

That sounds interesting. But the fact of the matter was that in 1986 I had just passed through my “I-dropped-out-of-college-and-now-have-had-a-job-in-the-banking-industry” phase. My friends were very excited by the appearance of this movie, which told us about the dark eddies circling beneath our surface world. But the fact was that I had never seen anything like what was portrayed in Blue Velvet. Nor have I seen anything like it since. This made me wonder about the trailer’s claim that David Lynch’s vision would open my eyes to a world that I had never seen before.

Was it true, I asked myself, or was it a load of crap?

[I was not alone. NinjaKnightxX writes on one of these YouTube sites, “I live in Lumberton NC, I have all my life. And I have to tell you it's absolutely nothing like that.”]

The Challenge by the “Artist” Lynch

I was confronted with two possibilities by the challenge of the movie:

1) I was truly blind. I had been living in the suburbs, and I was enjoying it more than academic life; but the “artist” Lynch was peering into the truth more deeply than I. I needed to surrender my superficial vision of what was before me to the artist’s deeper vision of what was not before me but was nevertheless the case.

2) The “artist” Lynch was making things up that were not there. He was supplementing reality with his imagination. By emphasizing his imaginative vision over the realities of the suburbs, the “artist” Lynch only appeared to have the truth in his side, but he was really making it up. His truth was contingent upon getting people to surrender their own minds about the reality before them to his imaginative vision.

My friends bought into the artist’s vision, but I differed with my friends at the time. In my opinion, those who surrendered their minds to the “artist” Lynch were not greater than those who did not. Quite the contrary. I firmly maintained–and would still maintain today–that David Lynch was wrong to portray suburban life this way. I firmly believed then that art should follow truth and that truth wiped away such imaginative extensions into falsehood.

It’s not that the “artist” Lynch does not have the right to portray realty this way. He does. Moreover, it’s not that there’s not some truth in his portrayal of suburban life. There is. It was a matter of his tentative grasp of the facts. He didn’t have a hold of them.

The First Few Minutes of Blue Velvet

Let’s watch the beginning of the movie:

The movie opens with a vision of roses and a white picket fence, followed by a fireman waving happily from a passing fire truck. But it soon becomes apparent that not all is well in the suburbs. A wife is watching a crime show on television, while outside her husband is watering the lawn. Only the hose gets tangled up in the bushes. This, apparently, is enough to almost kill him. He falls over with a heart attack. As he does so, he carefully places the hose over his penis. A dog jumps over him attempting to drink from the spewing hose that now springs from his loins.

I’m not naïve. What happens is that Lynch is relying on a trope: suburban life is dying. It was an instrument he would deploy again in his television masterpiece Twin Peaks.

What’s “Really” Happening

From this insight, he shifts the perspective to a narrower–and he thinks a clearer–focus. He travels beneath the surface world of suburbia to get to the depths of “what is really happening.” There is rot in the system, and the beetles are eating it up. Only a careful observer like the “artist” Lynch, with his better sound equipment, can hear and see this. The rest of us, who live in the surface world of suburbia, cannot.

With another shift of perspective, he brings us back to the world of Lumberton, where we meet the “voice of Lumberton.” This voice gives expression to the surface only. “It’s a sunny, woodsy day in Lumberton, so get out your chainsaws,” it says. This admonition opposes the fruitful world of nature to the artificial world of man, who takes joy only in the destruction of the natural world.

The suburban world is now “ironicized,” in the manner of Andy Kaufman. We have been given a “higher” or “deeper” or “wider” perspective on the world of the suburbs, and we are supposed to follow it.

This is what my friends were reacting to. This vision of the suburbs was, after all, a vision of the American dream. My friends could imagine more for their lives than to follow in the footsteps of their parents. To rob them of that hope was to destroy the American dream itself. So they bought it. They wanted to get back to a state of accord with nature, rather than living in such an unnatural state.

But to my mind, they were willing to believe that there was something wrong with the constructed world of suburbia than that there was something wrong with their idealistic minds.

On Finding an Ear

Soon after the opening clip ends, Jeffrey (played by Kyle MacLachlan) finds an ear in the grass. Now I’m as willing as the next guy to appreciate a guy finding an ear in grass. It was a literal ear, of course, but it was also a symbol for the “artist” Lynch’s more finely tuned hearing.

But I kept asking myself, was it really true?

This was an important question for me, because the “artist” Lynch requires that people run away from their home, from their parents and the comfortable life in the suburbs, only to put them in an imaginative landscape which may not be true. I myself certainly not seen suburbia life this way. I was prepared to surrender my youthful vision of suburban life for a vision like the “artist” Lynch had presented, but I needed more than his word for it. I needed to see it for myself. But I hadn’t seen it. And this was not because I hadn’t tried. I thought that there was something wrong with the “artist” Lynch’s portrayal of life.

The question I posed for myself was different than the question my friends posed. As I saw it, they were following their hopes. I thought I was following my senses more carefully. What was the price of giving up my attachment to the “real” universe, which might be imperfect, for a perfect universe that could only exist in my mind?

The Summary of Blue Velvet

We can see some of the symbolic points of the movie by reverting to a summary of Blue Velvet by another extremely talented “artist.”

The first thing you’ll notice–at least the first thing I noticed–was just how many times, and with how many different inflections, people say “Fuck” in the movie. This is why people are constantly asking throughout the movie “What do you want?” The answer appears to be that they want to fuck. But they are prevented from the fulfillment of their desires by the restraint of suburban niceties.

But Frank Booth (played nicely by Dennis Hopper) is a character from “outside.” He gets what he wants, and what he wants is to fuck, of course, and to inhale some ether while doing it. He surrounds himself with a menagerie of creeps and weirdoes, also outcasts from polite suburban society.

The message of the “artist” Lynch is that we live in a fragile suburban world. At bottom we human beings are animals, sporting animal desires. But suburban life has suppressed our natural instincts. But being suppressed those urges do not necessarily go away entirely. They are simply sublimated into the desire to construct happiness on top of our darkest fears. All it takes is a psychopath like Frank Booth (or an “artist” like David Lynch) to bring the magma of suppressed desires spewing back to the surface. When it does, the suppressed id comes to the fore, the restraints of the suburbs are suppressed, and suddenly murder is as common as an 8:00 AM tee time.

We live in a sunny world, says “the voice of Lumberton,” but in world of the “artist” Lynch, people are constantly telling each other that it’s dark. This is a pattern reversal. That pattern reversal is intrusive into the status quo. It takes the everyday ordinary world and turns it into a strange world.

The Philosophy of Death

My problem was that this story diverged so sharply from my suburban life. It emphasized things I could never find in life, no matter how hard I tried. This story was a fiction. What, if anything, was the factual content of the story?

I have come to view the movie as an imaginative vision of suburban life. My problem was that at this time in my life I was looking for truth in art. I have since given this up, but the question of finding “truth” in an imaginative vision of the world that was not apparent to me in “reality” was important to me then.

The fact was that the “artist” Lynch had given us, not a vision of life, but (by his reversal) a vision of death in life. The reality of death is so common as to make it meaningless. Things are born, and they pass away. It is only a matter of human engagement with death that makes it so important.

We live our lives unaware of death. Instead of concentrating on death, most of us live our lives with our senses, and we fill our sense with other things than the stench of death. The brave “artist” Lynch turns our attention away from the trivialities of life back to more important things of death. This is the philosophical bent of art. The “artist” Lynch is announcing that he has taken the philosophical point of view on suburban life and found it wanting.

It wasn’t culture that was responsible for the philosophical perspective on life and death. The figure of death is involved in art everywhere across cultures and times. If it wasn’t culture that makes that the intrusion of death so important, what was it? It wasa basis feature of human life. I concluded that the “artist” Lynch was reenacting a basic trope of art commenting on human life. This are not what they seem. There is something deeper in life that we have not suspected. Only the “artist” can see. The rest of us are blind.

The Truth of Art

But that doesn’t make death the only subject worthy of art. It makes death only one of a multitude of perspectives on life. What, I wondered, made the “artist” Lynch favor his perspective over all others? What, I wondered, made all my friends so fascinated with something so unreal as finding ears in grasses?

I believe that such art follows from the “artist’s” pursuit of a deeper truth. He has fled his ephemeral existence following the haphazard pursuit of ephemeral desires for a more purposeful, meaningful life following a more a permanent truth. He has fled the superficial world of suburban politeness, and by his vision from afar hopes to draw his viewers into his imaginative id-world filled with ears; ether-sniffing madmen; and women who show up naked, screaming about being filled with disease after having had sex with naïve young suburban boys.

But what if it’s not true? What if his change in perspective is only that, a change from the real constructed world that we build over the id to the perspective of the id itself. What we want is not to have to confront death. The artist makes us face these unpleasant facts. But he also subverts our constructed world as untrue and unnatural. Only the vision of the artist is true.

Art and Imagination

I wasn’t buying it. It seemed to me that what was going on was that the “artist” Lynch had substituted his imaginative vision for the reality of suburban life. Yes, suburban life was flawed. And yes, my friends had fled from following in their parents footsteps. And I would agree that if they could not be happy living the suburban life that they should have fled. But by substituting a vision of suburban life which justified their flight from its reality, they had substituted an imaginative vision for a vision of the truth.

Imagination is the faculty that can make up for flaws in our perception of the universe. But our imaginative vision places us at a remove from reality. I had never seen an ear in the grass, or been confronted by a mad man with a gun and an ether mask, or been hounded by a naked woman screaming about being filled with my disease. Should I be looking for those things in my life? Of course not. They were metaphors.

Metaphors of What?

But metaphors of what? Of a deeper truth? I didn’t think so. I thought it was the vision that we as human beings want to be true. The vision is this: There are artists in the world who can guide us to our ideals. Those ideals are real. Those ideals are available only to the few artists who bravely go into brave new worlds. The rest of us stupid sheep are too frightened to follow the true artist. “The rest of us” continue to live on the surface world.

Imagination has the power to configure the world, not the way it is, but the way we want it to be. That’s a powerful tool, but it has the power to subordinate reality to its imaginative vision. If we find that the artist has made a mistake in his construction of the world in order to make his vision of the world complete, shouldn’t we adjust our imaginative vision of the world to the realities of the world. It seems to me in 1986, as it seems to me now, but this is not what the “artist” Lynch was doing. Rather, he was attempting to subordinate meager reality to his far broader but ultimately imaginative vision.

I thought the whole configuration was a scam. It placed the artist’s idealistic vision over the realities available to the common man. And yet, even among artists, there’s no one who actually experiences the ideal. The feeling of the artist is not that they have constructed the ideal world in their lives, but that at least they are living on the right side of the idealistic equation. If they do not have the truth, at least they are on the side of those who are questing to find the truth. This make them superior in every way to the suburban realists who do not flee their ephemeral suburban lives for a more permanent truth.

I prefer to live in reality without those idealistic intrusions that take me away from what I know to be true to the (admittedly broader) possibilities available to the mind that can be set free from reality. The cost of buying into the imaginative vision at the expense of reality are high.

This causes me to flip the real/imaginative poles of the “artist” Lynch’s world. In my view, it is Lynch who has fled the permanent real for an imaginative flight of ephemeral fancy. What’s more, this flight from the real is not without its consequences.

The End

The final scene of the film allows us to return sadder but wiser to the initial status quo of suburban life.

Frank is shooting mannequins, when he suddenly suspects that there is someone in the closet watching him. It is Jeffrey. Jeffrey who is real shoots Frank, who is the figment of the artist’s imagination. The imaginative lights, whose sound is magnified 1,000-fold as the bugs’ had been, go out. The dream (or nightmare) is over.

We are returned sadder but wiser to the suburban existence. Now the dead ear has been reattached to the living man Jeffrey. He hears the songs of robins as its wearer sleeps. But now he has been conditioned by his experience to “hear” all the sounds of nature in his waking existence. The “artist” Lynch makes this clear by having Jeffrey awake to confront an actual robin.

He walks inside the house and finds Sandy beckoning him to the window to look at the robin of spring. The old woman is appalled when she realizes that the robin is eating a worm.

“I could never do that,” she exclaims. She’s never been through the night journey that makes all apparent. She still believes in the suburban vision of happiness without the ironic stance that makes it palatable for artist to live in the world.

Jeffrey just laughs, and Sandy says “It’s a strange world” one more time.

My Take on the Situation of Blue Velvet

Ultimately, I never believed that there is a “higher” or “deeper” or “wider” perspective on the world of the suburbs. It is what it is. It is a world constructed against our baser impulses which spring from our baser nature. By taking us out of the real and constructed suburban world to the artist’s ideal and natural world, the “artist” Lynch has taken us to the world he can imagine but a world that exists in no one’s mind except the artist’s.

He was calling us to follow him. To the me of 1986, that was not acceptable. I wanted my art to reflect the truth of life, not an imaginative fiction.

Categories: Movies, Philosophy
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