The Edge
- Index
Edited by Chris Rodley
Faber & Faber hardback, 269 pages, £15.99
ISBN 0-571-17833-2
Blue Velvet
Michael Atkinson
BFI Modern Classics, paperback, 80 pages, £7.99
ISBN 0-85170-559-6
Review by Gerald Houghton (1997)
‘It's all in your vision, so you’ve got to keep your eye on the doughnut and not that hole.’
No one's perfect. Certainly not David Lynch. For every masterpiece (a couple at least), there's a project that, were it a dog, you'd have taken it out and shot it: the lumbering behemoth of Dune; sappy docuseries American Chronicles; On The Air, so bad even US TV wouldn't screen it. There are some right stinkers all right.
But David Lynch is so unusual, so extreme, so unique that no matter how bad it got he could never be written off. Not that he'd know that. The normally reticent filmmaker is remarkably lucid talking to Chris Rodley in the latest of Faber's excellent Someone on Someone series. Rodley says at the beginning that the subject himself suggested the question-and-answer format because ‘the questions would probably be more interesting than the answers’. Even a casual reading of what follows belies such modesty.
For, even if you think you'll burst if you hear those down home Eraserhead tales just once more - the five years, the paper route, the roof rack - this book is fascinating. Lynch fills in much needed detail on his early work, his painting, and is genuinely engaging on apparently long-exhausted subjects. Likewise, he's candid about the failure of Dune, and what he sees as the disappointment of Twin Peaks after he left for Wild At Heart. His affection for that marvellous surreal soap is as undiminished as his determination not to explain the unnervingly twisting surfaces of Lost Highway. ‘I keep saying that making films is a subconscious thing. Words get in the way . . . I don't need to talk about it . . . That is phoney stuff. The fine art of Phoney Baloney.’
This self-confessed Eagle Scout from Missoula, Montana reveals much but far from everything. That's for the likes of writer-lecturer Michael Atkinson. His mini-book is both the best of the recent rash of BFI Classics (The Exorcist, The Thing, Blade Runner) and the most infuriating. Why? Because although he picks up on much in the most culturally significant picture of the 1980s, he ignores some elements and misreads others entirely.
Thus, for every salient point (entering the Eraserhead 'planet' and the severed ear), he makes a mistake like claiming the end ‘dissolves to the flower-fire-engine-flower triptych of the opening’. (It's tellingly different.) Similarly, he smartly notes Lynch's using ‘psychedelic exploitation’ icons Stockwell and Hopper alongside Bruce Dern's daughter, then claims Mark Romanek's Static (1985) was influenced by Blue Velvet, made a year later.
A heavyweight US magazine asked in 1991, ‘(Why) Is David Lynch Important?’. Atkinson's book convinces you such a question is worth asking, but it takes Rodley's outstanding one to attempt to answer it.