Cigarette #9: Double feature - Blue Velvet and a Marlboro Red

NINTH CIGARETTE
At home on the porch

I don't know whether I could in good conscience recommend that anyone anywhere watch Blue Velvet, ever. However, someone who finds himself possessed of the courage to sit through the whole thing will not necessarily regret it in the morning.

Kyle MacLachlan finds a human ear in a field, gets the bejesus kicked out of him by Dennis Hopper, uncovers police corruption, and learns a valuable lesson about the secret rottenness at the heart of suburbia. I cannot describe the plot further, or explain how disturbed I was by it, except to say that at the end of the movie, when Isabella Rosselini shows up stark naked on Kyle MacLachlan's front lawn moaning "He put his disease in me," I felt like he deserved it.

Making a film about the darkness hidden beneath suburbia's veneer of respectability is like making an exposé documentary about professional wrestling, or holding Senate hearings on the sexual content (heaven forfend!) of rock music. As if everyone didn't already know that the smiles are painted on. The interesting thing about this movie is not that the wholesome people are actually insane ("That's a human ear all right"), but that the unwholesome ones aren't, because before there was Maggie Gyllenhaal in Secretary, there was Isabella Rosselini in Blue Velvet. Having discovered Kyle MacLachlan hiding in her closet, she threatens him with a knife, forces him to undress, and then seduces him, saying, "I want you to hurt me! Hit me!" Yikes.

Thankfully, Rosselini keeps the scene from descending into pornography, or meaningless surrealism (Log Lady, anyone?). She has said this of her performance: "Most of the time femme fatales are portrayed as women who know exactly what they want and completely. And sex is portrayed as something that you go out there and choose for yourself. But we know the reality is it just happens to us and we don't know what to do with it or what to make of it."

And that's the Big Idea: love is something that just happens to us, not so different from being knocked around for no reason. The seamy reality of Blue Velvet doesn't allow anyone the luxury of believing the myth that love is pleasant, or that it's something that can be controlled. All love is helplessness; masochism is just helplessness magnified. This is an uncomfortable lesson, and it's worth sitting through all the ridiculous Lynchian dialogue in the world ("The world was dark because there weren't any robins, and the robins represented love") just to see Isabella Rosselini instantiate it.

The parish priest back home used to scold me for saying it was better to love God than to fear Him. "Why choose? They're the same thing!" Isabella Rosselini would have undersood.