Cackling at Blue Velvet

A few words about a fallen world

Blue Velvet. David Lynch.

I went to see Blue Velvet yesterday. TIFF brought a 35mm print to the Lightbox, screening all week, and I decided to check it out while it was scheduled on one of the theatre’s biggest screen, with a packed house. I’d seen Blue Velvet on the big screen before, at the Lightbox, during their David Lynch retrospective back in 2019, though at the time it was projected digitally, in its recent restoration. The print I saw last night was old, very slightly discoloured, and ocassionally exhibited damage, but it was gorgeous, and, on that big screen, enveloping.

Lynch’s films, to state the obvious, play like dreams. Blue Velvet begins in something like a fantasy space: ‘80s smalltown America—Lumberton, perhaps the one in North Carolina—frozen in an imagined memory of the ‘50s, both charming and unsettling, and funny in a queer sort of way. Jeffrey Beaumont’s father waters his perfect lawn, with its white picket fences, and suffers some kind of stroke or heart attack, but only after the film, through shot selection and score, implies some evil force flows through the ground, through the hose, almost causing his medical attack, like the force of Death in the Final Destination movies. The film dances between tones, but as its plot—a mystery—wears on, the sense of evil, of rot, like the mould on that disembodied ear in the grass, pervades. Images of lust and terror, of Dennis Hopper and his oxygen mask, Isabella Rossellini and her red lipstick, amount in the mind to more than mere story. Memories of plot specifics fade into a dreamlike amalgalm. Watching Blue Velvet demands succumbing.

Hard to do when people in the audience are cackling at the image of a woman, beaten and bloodied, appearing naked and distaught outside the house of a teenager.

I’d heard horror stories of bad David Lynch screenings. The Music Box in Chicago gained infamy online for its drunken-themed Blue Velvet event, at which some audience members apparently laughed and heckled during the rape scene. The theatre had to release a public statement. I’ve also been to my share of screenings where people were way too prone to laughter. It tends to happen with much older films, though mercifully it’s been a rare experience. The worst, for me, was a screening of Donnie Darko, where people laughed and heckled like they were at a bad, campy horror movie. Extra annoying to hear derisive laughter during scenes that are genuinely really funny. Still, my experiences with Lynch screenings had been good in the past, including Blue Velvet, so I walked in without any concerns.

It took a while before things started to go wrong. The first act of the movie is certainly quirky and funny, and whatever chuckling I heard was perfectly appropriate. In fact, I expected more, but then this happens sometimes, an audience feeling out the tone of a movie. The woman next to me, though, clearly her first exposure to the film, was quietly laughing in some weird spots, but it’s a weird movie, so I took it in stride. And then, as Jeffrey trapped himself in Dorothy Vallens’ closet, just as she was about to be raped, some jagoff a couple rows back began chomping on an apple. Things went downhill from there.

There’s something truly sick about sitting in an audience of hundreds and hearing the loudest, most obnoxious people in the room cackling, guffawing, during scenes of extreme, misogynistic violence. But it wasn’t just them. It was the snickering coming from the woman next to me, and some of the others she was with. Laura Dern giving her monologue about the robins, sounding hopelessly naive but full of love for a world she believes in, soundtracked by Angelo Badalamenti’s beautiful score and the sound of barely-contained laughter from the philistines around me.

Perhaps I shouldn’t be so mean. It's wonderful that so many people ventured out in crappy weather to take in the work of what had been our greatest living artist. Genuinely. Art is a discourse, and discourse requires engagement, and buying a ticket to a challenging film and making the trip is a kind of engagement. But to sit around that kind of laughter is both uncomfortable and upsetting. Uncomfortable for obvious reasons. Upsetting because of what it implies. After the film was over, I overheard the women next to me have it explained to her that Pabst Blue Ribbon is a real beer. She’d laughed at that joke, probably because Hopper makes it funny mostly in delivery, but her laughter was less a reaction to anything intentionally comic, but a lack of understanding. An expression of discomfort that pushes against that which challenges. Shouting about Pabst Blue Ribbon is one thing. A woman crying about her son and the “disease” Jeffrey put in her… That scene, coming closer to the end of the movie, does have a perverse comedic quality about it. The cuts back to Laura Dern’s contorted, crying face verge on camp and practically dare the audience to laugh, but the circumstances are so horrific, and therein lies the challenge. Lynch melds the facade with its underbelly. The robin with the bug in its beak. Another moment people laughed at.

Extrapolating from the behaviour of a few assholes in a crowded room isn’t sound argument, but when I encounter situations like I did at Blue Velvet, I begin to spin out. As parts of the world slip into fascism, I see signs of deterioration everywhere. Maybe people were always like this. Laughter at discomfort is natural, after all. But there’s something else going on here, I fear. It’s a kind of laughter I recognize in its non-audible form, online. A laughter all about distancing oneself from the subject at hand. In more benign form it looks like simple memes. More troublingly, it emerges as trolling. In any case, it’s laughter that denies any real human engagement, where those things in the world that challenge us are met with chuckling dismissal, like they are not real. Nothing in Blue Velvet is unreal save its style. It is among the most real American movies ever made, but as Michael Moore once said, “We like non-fiction because we live in fictitious times.”