In Blue Velvet, those hidden forces erupt most memorably in Dennis Hopper’s Frank, a furious psychopath who acts his sexual sickness on the masochistic Dorothy (Isabella Rossellini) and also takes the hero, Jeffrey (Kyle MacLachlan), on a bizarre, terrifying “joyride.” “It goes back to an American sort of archetype,” says Lynch of the Hopper character. “He’s the guy in town who’s potential trouble for anyone who crosses his path. Everyone has maybe seen this person, or somewhere inside them they know that kind of person.” Hopper gives a major performance, but the most hypnotic scene in the movie may belong to Laura Dern’s sweet, innocent Sandy, who delivers an extraordinary speech about love and robins. Is Lynch equally possessed by the forces of goodness? “Yes, absolutely. People become, I think, almost more uncomfortable in that scene with Sandy than they do when Frank is doing his thing to Dorothy. Those kind of naïve, innocent, idealistic notions, they’re not so cool, but for Sandy, and even for Jeffrey, too, in their car on the street – you know, you say some goofy things, but I think people still believe those things somewhere.”
It’s the dialectic between light and darkness, innocence and dread, normality and subversive power, that sparks Lynch’s aesthetic. His movies nearly always take off from images of obsessive conformity, which are then flooded, overwhelmed with “textures” of a more monstrous nature. One thinks of the The Elepgant Man’s oppressive picture of Victorian London, and the way John Merrick’s hideous, moonscape head (and ironically gentle personality) pokes through it; of the sunny American town in Blue Velvet, which becomes an ironic backdrop to the hero’s voyeuristic forays; or of that classic surrealist image near the end of Eraserhead – the jellied head of the monster baby suddenly bursting out from atop the hero’s two-piece suit. “I think sometimes these confines, they’re great,” says Lynch, “because it’s like a pressure cooker or something. Things get hotter, and they get stronger: to pop out, they gotta be real strong. Just look at the design of cars back in the ‘50s, and music. There was a lot of really new, very powerful, cool things happening. Lot of power.” A devotee of the ‘50s, Lynch ended up casting a skeptic’s eye on the upheavals of the next decade. “I just don’t like hippies. I don’t like so much leather and hair, and things like that. I’m beginning to like the ‘80s a lot, though. The ‘80s remind me of the ‘50s in some strange way.”
Lynch began his career as a painter, attending several art schools (including, for one year, Boston’s Museum School) and then, when he got to Philadelphia, making some experimental shorts. These included one notorious project in which a tape loop of six people getting sick was projected onto a screen of sculptured human figures. After that, Lynch spent five painstaking years creating Eraserhead, the perverse, snail-paced, astonishingly inventive nightmare film that, in 1977, earned him an instant place in the midnight-movie pantheon. Photographed in dusty black-and-white and accompanied by a soundtrack of awesome industrial roars, Eraasherhead was an avant-garde movie for people who’d grown bored with avant-garde movies. Laden with images that were at once easily readable and mysteriously resonant (the nervous hero’s pencil-eraser hairdo, the Devo-esque Lady in the Radiator, the shocking, organic monster baby), it was a brilliant piece of pop surrealism, and it quickly caught on with late-‘70s college students, who didn’t need stimulants to see it: with its hallucinatory slowness, its end-of-the-world-at-3-a.m. atmosphere, Eraserhead made you feel stoned all by itself.
