ROBINS

“I had a Dream. 

In fact, it was on the night I met you. 

In The Dream, there was Our World, and The World was dark because there weren't any Robins and The Robins represented Love. 

And for the longest time, there was this Darkness. 

And all of a sudden, thousands of Robins were set free and they flew down and brought this blinding Light of Love. 

And it seemed that only Love would make a difference, and it DID. 

So, I guess it means that there is Trouble until The Robins come.”

“By the time I got up the nerve to watch Blue Velvet a second time, I was far more resigned to the certainty of uncertainty. I had started to understand that it was possible to be enthralled and agitated by enthusiastically expressed views (both personal and political) while still fundamentally disagreeing with them – or at least, remaining sceptical about them. 

Most importantly, I had learned that if you take any fixed set of preconceptions into a movie theatre, then the better the movie the more likely you are to have those preconceptions confirmed. 

You can love bad movies, and you can hate good movies. But brilliant movies are often the ones that you love and hate at the same time. That’s what makes them brilliant. Or so it seemed as I sat in that second screening of Blue Velvet, surrendering to the awful beauty of its phantasmagoria (‘In dreams, I walk with you’ sings Roy Orbison) and being engulfed by a wave of shame and rapture, repugnance and delight which my naïve political correctness could no longer seek to deny. 

While the scenes of sexual degradation and despair remained almost unendurably harsh, an amazing transformation had occurred during those other moments which Roger Ebert had dismissed as ‘cheap shots’. 

Having finally surrendered to the horror of Blue Velvet, I found myself unexpectedly touched and moved by the very elements that had formerly repelled me. 

The real revelation was my reaction to a much-quoted scene in which Laura Dern’s Sandy recounts her vision of ethereal robins, a scene which Ebert doutbtless had in mind when citing the ‘sophomoric satire’ and ‘campy in-jokes’ of Blue Velvet. 

‘I had a dream,’ Sandy tells MacLachlan’s straight-faced Jeffrey as Angelo Badalamenti’s suspended score surges in quietly choral tones. ‘In fact, it was on the night that I met you. In the dream, there was our world. And the world was dark because there weren’t any robins. And the robins represented love. And for the longest time there was just this darkness. And all of a sudden thousands of robins were set free and they flew down and brought this blinding light of love. And it seemed like that love would be the only thing that would make any difference. And it did! So I guess that means there is trouble till the robins come …’ 

Seeing that speech written down it looks like the goofiest garbage any actress ever had to deliver, and indeed the first time I saw Blue Velvet I interpreted it as nothing more than smart-alec satire. 

But the second time, having succumbed to the film’s dark spell, I took it literally … and I bought it! 

My heart swelled, my soul surged, my eyes teared up, and I was gone, gone like a turkey in the corn. 

By the time Dean Stockwell grabbed that cabin light and started lip-synching ‘A candy-coloured clown they call the sandman, tiptoes to my room every night …’ I was buzzing like a horsefly. 

Audiences watching William Castle’s 1959 shocker The Tingler and experiencing the bum-shaking thrills of ‘Percepto’ (buzzers hidden in selected seats, folks) couldn’t have been more vibrantly thrilled! 

Years later I interviewed Lynch for The Culture Show and felt duty-bound to tell him how much I had hated Blue Velvet first time round, and how I’d stormed out and written a review that said it was garbage. 

I meant it as a compliment, although thinking about it now it may have seemed unnecessarily confrontational. Certainly there was a moment in my rambling eulogy when Lynch looked genuinely concerned as to where I was going with all this. 

But, bless him, he stuck with me and by the time I got to the bit about going to see the film a second time and realising that it was a masterpiece after all he seemed to be on board. 

That’s how it looked to me, anyway. 

What I was trying to say was that this really is ‘a strange world’, and somehow my polarised love/hate responses to Blue Velvet perfectly proved that point. 

Lynch seemed to agree, particularly when our conversation drifted into a discussion of Lost Highway which had received some of its best reviews in Paris from critics who had been shown the reels in the wrong order. 

It was amazing, we agreed, how the human mind could impose order upon chaos, seeing patterns where there are none, finding meaning in meaninglessness – and vice versa. 

Tangentially, I had a strangely similar experience with Marc Evans’ psychological thriller Trauma¸ which I saw in the company of Radio One’s long-standing film critic James King. 

The film largely takes place within the mind of its (deranged?) protagonist, played by Colin Firth, and boasts an elliptical structure which mirrors the temporal dysphasia of his inner turmoil. 

Except, of course, it doesn’t; the reels just got mixed up in the projection booth the first time I saw it. I remember with horrible clarity how James complained afterwards that the film ‘made no sense’ and how I berated him for his simplistic demand for a ‘linear narrative structure’. 

I remember, too, the sense of skin-crawling embarrassment I got when receiving a text message from the producer explaining that the film had been projected the wrong way round, and asking if I would watch it again in the right order. 

Worse still was the fact that, after that second screening, I remained convinced that I had enjoyed the movie more the first time. 

To Lynch, who genuinely believes that ‘we live inside a dream’, this all made perfect sense. 

And somehow, through the absurdity of my reactions to his work, and to Evans’ film, and to all the movies that I now claim to love and cherish, we seemed to have found common philosophical ground. 

Plus, Lynch had complimented me on my choice of tie which I took to be the highest accolade since he was a man who used to like ties so much he would wear three at once. Now he wears none. 

Over the years I’ve interviewed Lynch on several occasions, for Q Magazine, for BBC radio and TV, and most recently on stage at the BFI Southbank (formerly the National Film Theatre) in London. 

During that encounter, I talked to him about the ‘sweetness and innocence’ of Blue Velvet – the same film that had sent me storming from Manchester’s former premier porno cinema in a huff of politicised anger all those years ago. 

Back then the film had seemed irredeemably corrupt, the jarring juxtaposition of brutal psychological realism and corny insincere Americana epitomising the maxim that ‘ postmodernism means never having to say you’re sorry’. 

Now here I was waxing lyrical about its utter lack of irony, particularly Sandy’s dream of the robins. 

‘The thing I absolutely love about that scene,’ I told a benevolently smiling Lynch, ‘is that when Laura Dern describes her dream, she’s not doing it in a goofy way, but in a real way. 

This has been written about often as ironic, but to me it seems completely sincere and not ironic at all. 

You do really mean it, don’t you?’ 

‘Oh yes,’ agreed Lynch, in his clipped ‘Jimmy Stewart from Mars’ chirrup. 

‘We all have this thing where we want to be very cool and when you see something like this, really kind of embarrassing, the tendency is to laugh, so that you are saying out loud that “This is embarrassing and not cool!” and you’re hip to the scene. 

This kind of thing happens. 

But we also always know that when we’re alone with this person that we’re falling in love with, we do say goofy things, but we don’t have a problem with it. 

It’s so beau-ti-ful. 

And the other person’s so forgiving of these beautiful, loving, goofy things. 

So there’s a lot of this swimming in this scene. 

At the same time, there’s something to that scene, a Truth to it, in my book.’ Love. Beauty. Truth. All the things Ebert (and I) had thought were missing from Blue Velvet. Yet there they were all along – staring us right in the face. By the time I left Manchester at the end of the eighties, I wasn’t sure what I believed in any more. I had discovered that my judgements about movies were irredeemably flawed; I had learned that doctrine rarely coincided with desire; and I had come to accept that freedom of speech meant allowing people to say the things you don’t want to hear. On the night before I shipped out to London, I trekked to Salford Quays on my own to watch a late-night screening of Clive Barker’s lively horror romp Hellraiser, now widely regarded as the best British horror film of the decade. And as I sat there watching Clare Higgins lusting after the freshly flayed corpse of her reanimated boyfriend and wincing at the sight of giant fish hooks tearing strangulated faces apart, I realised that very little had changed since the days when I took refuge from the horrors of school life in triple-bill X-rated all-nighters at the Phoenix East Finchley. 

When everything else was uncertain, gore cinema never let me down. 

Pass me that chainsaw.