The movie has two levels of reality. On one level, we’re in Lumberton, a simpleminded small town where people talk in television clichés and seem to be clones of 1950s sitcom characters. On another level, we’re told a story of sexual bondage, of how Isabella Rossellini’s husband and son have been kidnapped by Dennis Hopper, who makes her his sexual slave. The twist is that the kidnapping taps into the woman’s deepest feelings: She finds that she is a masochist who responds with great sexual passion to this situation.
Everyday town life is depicted with a deadpan irony; characters use lines with corny double meanings and solemnly recite platitudes. Meanwhile, the darker story of sexual bondage is told absolutely on the level in cold-blooded realism.
The movie begins with a much praised sequence in which picket fences and flower beds establish a small-town idyll. Then a man collapses while watering the lawn, and a dog comes to drink from the hose that is still held in his unconscious grip. The great imagery continues as the camera burrows into the green lawn and finds hungry insects beneath—a metaphor for the surface and buried lives of the town.
The man’s son, a college student (Kyle MacLachlan), comes home to visit his dad’s bedside and resumes a romance with the daughter (Laura Dern) of the local police detective. MacLachlan finds a severed human ear in a field, and he and Dern get involved in trying to solve the mystery of the ear. The trail leads to a nightclub singer (Rossellini) who lives alone in a starkly furnished flat.
In a sequence that Hitchcock would have been proud of, MacLachlan hides himself in Rossellini’s closet and watches, shocked, as she has a sadomashochistic sexual encounter with Hopper, a drug-sniffing pervert. Hopper leaves. Rossellini discovers MacLachlan in the closet and, to his astonishment, pulls a knife on him and forces him to submit to her seduction. He is appalled but fascinated; she wants him to be a “bad boy” and hit her.
These sequences have great power. They make 9 1/2 Weeks look rather timid by comparison, because they do seem genuinely born from the darkest and most despairing side of human nature. If Blue Velvet had continued to develop its story in a straight line, if it had followed more deeply into the implications of the first shocking encounter between Rossellini and MacLachlan, it might have made some real emotional discoveries.
Instead, director David Lynch chose to interrupt the almost hypnotic pull of that relationship in order to pull back to his jokey, small-town satire. Is he afraid that movie audiences might not be ready for stark S&M unless they’re assured it’s all really a joke?
I was absorbed and convinced by the relationship between Rossellini and MacLachlan, and annoyed because the director kept placing himself between me and the material. After five or ten minutes in which the screen reality was overwhelming, I didn’t need the director prancing on with a top hat and cane, whistling that it was all in fun.
Indeed, the movie is pulled so violently in opposite directions that it pulls itself apart. If the sexual scenes are real, then why do we need the send-up of the Donna Reed Show? What are we being told? That beneath the surface of Small Town, U.S.A., passions run dark and dangerous? Don’t stop the presses.
The sexual material in Blue Velvet is so disturbing, and the performance by Rossellini is so convincing and courageous, that it demands a movie that deserves it. American movies have been using satire for years to take the edge off sex and violence. Occasionally, perhaps sex and violence should be treated with the seriousness they deserve. Given the power of the darker scenes in this movie, we’re all the more frustrated that the director is unwilling to follow through to the consequences of his insights. Blue Velvet is like the guy who drives you nuts by hinting at horrifying news and then saying, “Never mind.”
There’s another thing. Rossellini is asked to do things in this film that require real nerve. In one scene, she’s publicly embarrassed by being dumped naked on the lawn of the police detective. In others, she is asked to portray emotions that I imagine most actresses would rather not touch. She is degraded, slapped around, humiliated, and undressed in front of the camera. And when you ask an actress to endure those experiences, you should keep your side of the bargain by putting her in an important film.
That’s what Bernardo Bertolucci delivered when he put Marlon Brando and Maria Schneider through the ordeal of Last Tango in Paris. In Blue Velvet, Rossellini goes the whole distance, but Lynch distances himself from her ordeal with his clever asides and witty little in-jokes. In a way, his behavior is more sadistic than the Hopper character.
What’s worse? Slapping somebody around, or standing back and finding the whole thing funny?
Body of Evidence
(Directed by Uli Edel; starring Madonna, Anne Archer, Joe Mantegna, Willem Dafoe; 1993)
I’ve seen comedies with fewer laughs than Body of Evidence, and this is a movie that isn’t even trying to be funny. It’s an excruciatingly incompetent entry in the Basic Instinct genre, filled with lines that only a screenwriter could love, and burdened with a plot that confuses mystery with confusion.
The movie stars Madonna, who after Bloodhounds of Broadway, Shanghai Surprise, and Who’s That Girl? now nails down her title as the queen of movies that were bad ideas right from the beginning. She plays a kinky dominatrix involved in ingenious and hazardous sex with an aging millionaire who has a bad heart. He dies after an evening’s entertainment, and Madonna is charged with his murder.
But she’s innocent, she protests—and indeed there is another obvious suspect, the millionaire’s private secretary (Anne Archer), who is also his spurned former lover. Willem Dafoe plays the defense attorney who firmly believes Madonna is innocent, or in any event very sexy, and Joe Mantegna has the Hamilton Burger role.
The movie takes place in Portland, Oregon—a city small enough, Madonna volunteers from the witness stand, that she once dated a guy who dated a girl who dated Mantegna. That’s a typical exchange in the courtroom scenes, which involve Dafoe being reprimanded by the judge for just about every breath he draws.
I don’t know whether to blame the director, the cinematographer, or the editor for some of the inept choices in this movie. One example. Dafoe is addressing his opening remarks to the jury, and the camera pulls focus so that we see an attractive young female juror sitting in the front row. She gives Dafoe an unmistakable look. We in the audience are alerted that the movie is establishing her for a later payoff. We’re wrong. She’s just an extra trying to grab some extra business.
But enough on the technical side. What about the story here? It has to be seen to be believed—something I do not advise. There’s all kinds of murky plot debris involving nasal spray with cocaine in it, ghosts from the past, bizarre sex, and lots of nudity. We are asked to believe that Madonna lives on a luxury houseboat, where she parades in front of the windows naked at all hours, yet somehow doesn’t attract a crowd, not even of appreciative lobstermen. What does she dedicate her life to? She answers that question in one of the movie’s funniest lines, which unfortunately cannot be printed here.