Delayed Reaction: Blue Velvet

The Pitch: An absurdest neo-noir.

It's only natural to want to be in the "cool clique". I think we all want to be on the same page as those who we consider to be "the gatekeepers". For me, that's the critics. The "legitimate" ones. There's a list of directors who are adored by the critics, who I just don't "get". I'm starting to "crack the code" with Tarantino. I get the love of Wes Anderson on a technical level but not a style or substantive level. David Lynch is one I really want to connect with. He's an interesting guy and his career is certainly unique. I've been introducing myself to him slowly because I was afraid that I wouldn't "get" what he was doing. I still need to see Twin Peaks, for example. I'm saving The Elephant Man, because it sounds like his most appealing work. I was dismayed by how indifferent I was about Mulholland Drive when I finally saw it. I just didn't see the big deal, although I really, really wanted to.

My second foray into Lynch's work is Blue Velvet and I came away from this more favorable. Lynch has a love for finding the weirdness in or underneath the mundane or idealized. Actors like Isabella Rossellini and Dennis Hopper hold nothing back in the movie. I'm a big fan of Angelo Badalamenti's* music. I appreciated that the narrative was more traditional [than Mulhulland Drive], or maybe coherent is the better word.

*I actually knew Badalamenti before I really knew Lynch thanks to an album he collaborated on in 1996 called Booth and the Bad Angel, which is among my favorite albums ever.

I'm still not quite there with seeing the genius of David Lynch. It still looks like a lot of being weird for the sake of being weird. Part of his style is self-aware to the point of making the actors seem amateurish. That's not to say the actors are doing a bad job. It's more like, the characters are acting like they know they aren't in a real world. Perhaps I'm still in the acclimating phase with Lynch's work and it will click when I've seen enough of it. It's perplexing. You know that feeling when you can't tell if you are the smartest or the stupidest person in the room? That's how I feel about Lynch.

Verdict (?): Weakly Recommend