“ Since my return review attracted no abusive letters or legal suits and didn’t actively bring the magazine into disrepute, it was considered that I had basically done a good job. A month or so later I was invited to attend a preview screening of Romero’s Day of the Dead (the official sequel to Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead whose thunder Return had sneakily striven to steal) and felt as though I’d been given the keys to the city.
Despite the fact that I’d had precious little published I now viewed myself as a fully-fledged film critic, ready to swap pithy cinematic epithets with anyone and everyone.
I was sure of my opinions, certain of my judgement, and immutable in my prejudices, both personal and political.
I thought I was the next Barry Norman-in-waiting.
In fact, I was a mouthy know-nothing upstart.
Over the years, very little has changed.
In the TV Movie of My Life, the Manchester years would be represented by those cod dreamy flashback sequences in which you can’t tell whether what you’re seeing is real or imagined but you’re pretty certain that everyone’s wearing a wig.
What I remember most is the sheer intensity of it all – the fact that everything seemed like a Matter of Life and Death. The most emotively fraught battles were in the area of gender politics, with American author Andrea Dworkin’s tub-thumping tome Pornography: Men Possessing Women being required reading for concerned gender warriors everywhere.
Dworkin hung like a dark shadow over the sexual-political landscape of the eighties, a terrifying voice of doom who explained in thunderous Moses-like tones that everything I’d ever suspected about being a worthless piece of crap was essentially true.
If you’ve never read Pornography: Men Possessing Women and you like a good scare then believe me you’re in for a treat – it is one of the most upsetting books ever written, and will leave you wanting to kill either yourself or others.
It is ferociously argued and hectoringly delivered – Leon Trotsky was a lightweight compared to Dworkin. Its central thesis (as the title pithily suggests) is that pornography is not only rape but also the perfect expression of man’s wide-ranging subjugation of women over the centuries – a weapon of war, an act of violence, a tool of slavery.
Over several hundred incendiary pages, Dworkin conjures a history of prostitution, child abuse, torture, imprisonment and mass murder, and relates –not to say attributes –it all directly to the glossy pages of Hustler magazine and the writings of the Marquis de Sade.
By the time she gets to the end of the book she is describing her own soul as having become almost possessed by the demonic presence of porn, and being haunted at night by Gothic apparitions of vile and violent sexuality.
Substantial credence was lent to Dworkin’s polemic in the early eighties by her association with Linda Lovelace, the former star of the seventies porno-chic blockbuster Deep Throat who had since conducted a dramatic volte-face and become a militant poster girl for the anti-porn lobby.
Claiming that her husband/ manager Chuck Traynor had beaten, threatened, and otherwise violently coerced her into prostitution and porn, Lovelace published hair-raising accounts of her ordeals which Dworkin was now helping to publicise.
Together with fellow campaigner Catharine MacKinnon, Dworkin even took the battle against porn to the courts, arguing that it violated the civil rights of women, with Lovelace as one of their star witnesses.
Many argued that Lovelace’s claims were turncoat baloney – that she had been vociferously enthusiastic about making Deep Throat at the time, and that her subsequent renunciations were self-serving and insincere.
But as someone who actually met Chuck Traynor (albeit decades later), let me say that he seemed every bit as unloveable as his former wife had suggested.
When making the Channel 4 documentary The Real Linda Lovelace in 2002, I interviewed Chuck in a hotel room in Gainesville, Florida, having taken the precaution of asking our burly soundman Duncan to sit between Traynor and me in case he tried to thump me – this being a perfectly understandable response when someone asks if you did indeed arrange for your wife to be gang-raped in a Miami hotel room before ordering her at gunpoint to have on-camera sex with a dog, as Lovelace had famously claimed.
[ But only if it were not TRUE -- or likely. ]
In the event Chuck’s response was far scarier – he never batted an eyelid, never flinched, nor blanched, nor recoiled, nor nothing.
He didn’t even deny that much – certainly not that he knocked his wife around, which he seemed to think was perfectly normal.
When confronted with the worst of Lovelace’s allegations, Traynor simply looked at me with ‘aw shucks’ amusement, as if the charges against him simply weren’t that remarkable.
A few months after our interview, Traynor dropped dead, to the dismay of some of Lovelace’s friends and relatives who declared their sadness that they had been denied the chance to kill him themselves.
As for Dworkin (who I also interviewed for that documentary, and who turned out to be really nice and not at all frightening) she surely shed no tears for Chuck who had been living proof of her thesis about the very worst aspects of Masculinity.
Yet whereas Dworkin believed passionately that porn represented an assault upon women, I came to the conclusion that the truth of Lovelace’s life was both more complex and mundane – she wasn’t the victim of porn per se, but of domestic violence.
She married a man who beat her up, battered and prostituted her for the best part of two years, and who ironically only stopped doing so when the success of Deep Throat unexpectedly made her a star.
Indeed, there were those close to her who insisted that without the celebrity which that movie bestowed, Lovelace could easily have ended up as ‘just another dead hooker in a hotel room’.
If there is a moral to Lovelace’s unhappy story, it seems to me to be that porn – which is neither inherently good nor bad – needs to be regulated (rather than outlawed) at the Point of Creation rather than just the point of distribution.
That is something that can only happen if the industry remains legalised and open – perhaps even respectable.
Having always been innately suspicious of censorship (growing up as a horror fan will do that to you) it seems self-evident to me that banning porn won’t make it go away, it’ll just make it harder to Police.
Nor will it stop men beating up women.
It’s worth pointing out that in her 2005 book The Erotic Thriller in Contemporary Cinema, my partner Linda Ruth Williams argued that many soft-core exploitation videos with titles such as Carnal Crimes and Night Rhythms were actually less politically problematic than their more ‘acceptable’ Hollywood counterparts such as Basic Instinct –and often more interesting.
My small role in this book was to transcribe the hours of interviews which Linda had conducted with everyone from A-list Hollywood directors to hard-core sleaze-mongers and frankly the latter often came across as more open-minded on the subject of gender equality.
Linda’s conclusion (which I have since stolen and passed off as my own – as with so much of her work) was that films which look leerily misogynist on the outside can often be deceptively subversive, while the most pernicious gender stereotyping thrives unchecked in respectable mainstream fare.
This mirrors my experience of horror movies, the gawdy trappings of which often hide a level of radical intelligence which critics of the genre simply can’t (or won’t) see.
But despite my early confidence about the value of gore, in the early eighties I couldn’t see through Dworkin’s arguments about ‘damaging’ depictions of women, and as a result devoted many hours to toe-curlingly earnest ‘Men Against Sexism’ meetings which were every bit as breast-beatingly awful as they sound.
We didn’t do very much except sit around and despise ourselves, to which end we were aided and abetted by screenings of feel-bad movies like Not a Love Story: A Film About Pornography and readings from Dworkin and her ilk.
But even in the midst of all our abject angst, we believed fiercely and inarguably that what we were doing was right …
One of the great things about knowing that you’re right is that it removes inconvenient self-doubt.
My mother, who was a GP, once told me that the more she learned about medicine the more she realised just how little we really understand about the human body.
This is not an uncommon conclusion – in almost every field of expertise, the actual extent of someone’s knowledge and understanding can be gauged by the degree to which they are willing to accept that they actually know nothing.
While expertise has been characterised as the art of knowing more and more about less and less, true learning (it seems to me) is all about understanding and appreciating just how much you will never know.
For example, at the age of forty-six, I am just starting to realise how vast and unbridgeable are the gaps in my knowledge of the history of cinema, a medium which has only been around for just over a century.
Even if I dedicated every waking moment of the next twenty years to studying the art of silent cinema, the growth of Indian cinema, the canon of Japanese cinema, and the bewildering marketing expanse of the ‘Pacific Rim’, I’d still be only scratching the surface. I recently read that, at a conservative estimate, something like twenty per cent of the films ever made no longer exist, thanks to the tendency of celluloid to disintegrate over time.
Yet even with one fifth of all movies wiped out by the helpful degradations of time, there’s still no hope of me ever being able to declare myself ‘across’ the history of movies which stretches like Cinerama beyond the comforting borders of the horizon.
Like my mother, the older I get, the less I know I know.
Yet at the age of twenty-three, with a couple of dodgy horror movies under my belt and a copy of Dworkin’s book in my coat pocket, I knew that I Knew Everything.
And it was with this utter sense of blinkered self-certainty that I walked out of David Lynch’s Blue Velvet – a film which I now recognise to be one of the greatest movies of the eighties – and straight into somebody’s fist.
How did this happen?
Let’s start at The Beginning …
I had seen David Lynch’s debut feature Eraserhead as a teenager at the Phoenix, where it played on a regular Friday late-night double bill with George A. Romero’s The Crazies.
The film was described by Lynch as ‘a dream of dark and troubling things’ and became the quintessential midnight movie hit in the US before slowly spreading its diseased spell around the globe.
A surreal nightmare about a terrified man who finds himself in sole charge of a monstrous child, Eraserhead boasted extraordinary monochrome visuals, a hair-raising performance from Jack Nance (‘ Henry’, as previously noted), and a disorientatingly powerful soundtrack cooked up by Lynch and his long-time aural collaborator Alan Splet.
In an early review, the trade mag Variety described it as ‘a sickening bad-taste exercise’ – which sounded like a recommendation to me.
Eraserhead took ages to make; Lynch reportedly started work on it back in May 1972 and didn’t lock the final cut until early 1977.
During the course of the film’s protracted gestation and birth, the director wrestled with marriage, divorce and fatherhood, supported himself with a paper round, and fuelled his soul with sugary caffeine drinks from the local Bob’s Big Boy Diner.
During one hiatus, he completed the short film The Amputee, images from which would later be echoed in his daughter Jennifer’s feature Boxing Helena.
Indeed Jennifer, who was born with club feet, has been quoted as saying that Eraserhead ‘without a doubt … was inspired by my conception and birth, because David in no uncertain terms did not want a family.
It was not his idea to get married, nor was it his idea to have children.
But … it happened.’
Exactly what Eraserhead is about remains a mystery.
Lynch himself has proven consistently unwilling to explain the film, becoming particularly evasive on the subject of the creation of the ‘baby’ (some reports suggest that it is an animated bovine foetus).
The director has, on occasion, claimed that it ‘could have been found’.
All we can be certain of is that the film’s primary register is nightmarish and symbolic – it is not to be taken literally.
Obviously.
The first time I saw Eraserhead was with my friend Nick Cooper, a schoolmate and jazz pianist whom I would enlist to play drums in an earnest post-punk sixth-form school band called the Basics.
When I first met Nick he had a disastrous flyaway haircut and wore flares – an unforgivable crime. After three weeks in the Basics he had a killer crew cut and was sporting skintight Sta-Prest trousers and cool-as-nuts Harrington jackets of varying colours.
It was an amazing transformation, for which I would like to take full credit.
The Truth, however, is that Nick’s straight-legged butterfly emerged from the chrysalis of his eighteen-inch flapping cocoon after he and I went to see The Wanderers at the Barnet Odeon.
The film, which was set in the Bronx in 1963, had such a profound effect on both of us that after the screening we opened up the palms of our hands with a rusty penknife and became blood brothers there and then.
Nick promptly went home and sorted out his fashion mojo, and remains to this day one of the best-dressed men I have ever met. God bless Philip Kaufman.
Dress sense aside, Nick’s judgement on movies was not always on the money. Admittedly he was so scared by The Exorcist (which we both saw for the first time together at the Phoenix) that he had to come back to my house and sleep on the floor, for which he will always retain a special place in my affections.
And he’d been pretty open to most of the early Cronenberg canon, including Shivers and Rabid, both of which were fairly freaky films full of creepy latex mutations and twisted sexuality.
The latter starred porn queen Marilyn Chambers in one of her few ‘straight’ dramatic roles as a woman who becomes infected by a phallic parasite which lives in her armpit and bites people during sex.
Chambers had teamed up with Cronenberg at the suggestion of producer Ivan Reitman and had worked on the movie under the watchful gaze of our old friend Chuck Traynor, who was by then her manager/ husband, and whom Cronenberg significantly described as ‘not my favourite kind of guy …’
Anyway, Nick coped with the sexual monsters of Rabid OK, but when it came to Eraserhead and its journey into the dark heart of man’s most deep-set Freudian nightmares, he just didn’t get it at all. It was easy to tell when Nick wasn’t ‘getting’ a movie because his left leg would bounce up and down in a state of hyper-caffeinated agitation.
The more his left knee trembled, the worse his experience of the film. It was like watching someone review a movie in real time, but from the waist down – even if his mouth said nothing, his fidgeting calf muscles spoke volumes.
The leg trembling began about fifteen minutes into Eraserhead, at around the time that Henry first returns home with the mutant baby whose existence is never explained beyond a general sense of creeping guilt about everything.
As Henry laid the baby on the table, Nick muttered loudly, ‘Well that would never happen.’
At first, I thought he was making some sort of profound surrealist joke, and laughed – it was like looking at a painting of melting watches by Salvador Dali and declaring that ‘they’ll never be very effective timekeepers’.
But Nick wasn’t joking. He was seriously doubting that someone would find themselves in the position of having fathered a bizarre alien baby, and then being required to tend to its needs in a small room which contained little other than a bed and a radiator in which lived a hamster-cheeked woman who sang to you at night whilst squishing extraterrestrial sperm beneath the heel of her tap shoes.
It just wouldn’t happen.
My only comparable experience of this sort of overly literal film criticism came when I took my sister Annie to see Lucio Fulci’s entertainingly revolting City of the Living Dead at the ABC in Edgware.
She was training to be a doctor, and during one particularly gruey scene in which a demonically possessed young woman vomited up her internal organs, Annie turned to me and whispered, ‘Well that’s not scary – they’re all in the wrong order.’
Apparently the offal spewing from the poor actress’ mouth was not biologically accurate and was therefore failing to send a shiver down my sister’s hospital-hardened spine.
As for Nick, he expressed his belief that Eraserhead ‘just wouldn’t happen’ in increasingly irritated tones, his pulsating left leg throbbing to the rhythm of his growing impatience, causing an entire row of chairs to quiver and quake like jelly on a plate. It was like watching the movie in SenSurround.
A year or so ago, whilst broadcasting on BBC 5 Live, I described Nick’s declaration that ‘that wouldn’t happen’ as being the stupidest thing I had ever heard anyone say in a cinema.
Nick promptly texted me to take full credit for the comment and to assert that he still stood squarely behind his original assessment.
This is one of the reasons that I like Nick so much : not only was he the person with whom I had the electrifying experience of watching The Exorcist for the first time, not only was he living proof that a good haircut and a Harrington could turn you from zero to hero overnight – over and above all these things, he was as forthrightly mad and assertive in his opinions of everything as I was.
This was a man who, when everyone else was sporting sunny ‘Nuclear Nein Danke!’ stickers had ‘Peace Through NATO!’ proudly emblazoned upon his windshield.
Politically we were worlds apart.
But personally we really were blood brothers.
Anyway, back to Manchester. My respect for David Lynch had grown with The Elephant Man, which I took as proof that Nick had been wrong wrong wrong about Eraserhead (after all, John Merrick really did happen) and I’d even had a bash at embracing the dismal Dune, which I remember largely for containing a scene in which Sting comes out of an interstellar steam shower with nothing but a pair of silver wings on his knackers.
I could go back to the movie to check whether this scene really happened or whether I’m just making it up but frankly I can’t be bothered – considering Sting’s recent adventures with a lute and his outpourings about tantric sex (not to mention the rotten music he’s made since ‘Roxanne’) I think he deserves to come in for a little un-fact-checked stick.
Oh, and for the record, I thought he was crap in Quadrophenia too. Ace Face my arse!
But Blue Velvet was A Problem.
Firstly, I’d made the mistake of reading a load of press coverage about the movie long before I saw it, something I have since learned to avoid.
According to the reports, Lynch’s latest wallowed in the degradation of women, and featured a central character (Dorothy, played by Isabella Rossellini) who actively colluded in her physical abuse by a psychopathic misogynist kidnapper (Frank, played by Dennis Hopper, who famously told Lynch ‘I am Frank.’).
Reports of a prone Dorothy instructing Kyle MacLachlan’s preppy Jeffrey to ‘hit me’ after she had been raped by a drug-crazed Frank presented a picture of an indefensible male fantasy – particularly to a know-it-all adolescent politico who couldn’t see past the end of Andrea Dworkin’s nose.
So there I was in the Cornerhouse cinema, a head full of dogma, watching Blue Velvet, my overly politicised psyche growing more frazzled by the minute.
We’d got through Dennis Hopper throwing Isabella Rossellini on the floor and screaming ‘Baby wants to faaaaaaaaack’ while inhaling some non-specific gaseous substance, watched through the slats of a closet door by a furtive Kyle MacLachlan who was indeed then instructed to ‘Hit me! Harder!’
It was a bizarre and shocking scene, disorientating and grotesque yet simultaneously orchestrated and absurd, but since I had known that it was coming I was kind of prepared for The Worst.
What I wasn’t ready for was the sight and sound of Dean Stockwell lip-synching to Roy Orbison’s ‘In Dreams’ while cradling a cabin light in his hand like the old lozenge microphones which crooners would caress, a performance which Dennis Hopper’s over-agitated Frank would memorably describe as ‘Suave! Goddam you are one suave fucker!’
Now, being a fan of fifties’ and sixties’ bubblegum pop I really liked ‘In Dreams’, and my response to this unforeseen audio-visual stimulation was not unlike that scene in A Clockwork Orange in which Alex is forced to watch horrible acts playing out on-screen to the accompaniment of his beloved Ludwig van Beethoven.
‘It’s not right!’ screams Alex, and at that moment I knew exactly how he felt.
Without even thinking what I was doing I sprang out of my seat and headed up the aisle, unsure as to exactly which of the movie’s many offences (the violation of women or the violation of pop music?) had really pushed my buttons.
All I knew was that this was a ‘bad’ film.
And I was going to say so.
Which I did, first vociferously in the bar, and then later in print, in the pages of City Life.
Oh, don’t get me wrong, I didn’t get the prestigious ‘first review’ of the film – just a tiny listings round-up during the later phase of its release.
But I badmouthed it in print, rubbishing Lynch’s puerile grasp of complex sexual politics and charging him with several politically incorrect offences against right-thinking right-on sensibilities.
I really couldn’t imagine a situation in which it was justifiable (let alone helpful) to come up with a story in which a woman becomes sexually enslaved by a psycho only to discover that his violent madness is perversely in tune with her own latent masochism – making his madness somehow her fault.
As usual, I was Right, Lynch was Wrong, and that was all there was to say on the matter.
Like I said earlier, it’s amazing just how confident you can be when you really don’t know what you’re talking about.
On the other hand, American critic Roger Ebert did know what he was talking about, and he really took against Blue Velvet too. His one-star review, however, was erudite and well argued (unlike mine) and beautifully expressed his negative reactions to the film.
‘A film this painfully wounding’, wrote Ebert with his usual honesty and candour, ‘has to be given special consideration. And yet those very scenes of stark sexual despair are the tip-off to what’s wrong with the movie. They’re so strong that they deserve to be in a movie that’s sincere, honest and true. But Blue Velvet surrounds them with a story that’s marred by sophomoric satire and cheap shots.’
He proceeded to berate Lynch for flip-flopping between ice-cold sexual horror and cheesy satirical Americana, arguing that ‘the movie is pulled so violently in opposite directions that it pulls itself apart’ and demanding, ‘What’s worse? Slapping somebody around or standing back and finding the whole thing funny?’
Ebert’s insights were right on the money, and I wish I had had the skill and self-awareness to say something half as interesting.
Crucially, Ebert recognised and acknowledged that his problem with Blue Velvet lay in its power, a power which the critic felt almost angry at the director for squandering and mocking. If the film had just been rubbish, Ebert surely wouldn’t have taken against it so staunchly – it would have just been another flawed two-or three-star movie featuring a few distracting set pieces, but little to get upset about.
Yet the fact that the scenes of Rossellini’s assault, masochism, and later public degradation hit Ebert so hard, and indeed seemed to contain some kind of Awful Human Truth, made the fatuous context of their presentation all the more intolerable.
It was precisely the things that Lynch had got right that fired Ebert to berate him for what was wrong with Blue Velvet.
It was a terrific example of a critic taking responsibility for his own reactions to a film. My review had none of that –none of the critical insight, none of the self-awareness, none of the literary grace … none of the doubt.
In Truth, Ebert and I had had a very similar reaction to Blue Velvet, being horrified not so much by the ultra-grim scenes of sexual violence but by the surreal and presumably parodic insanity which surrounded them.
Ebert (who had penned his own sexually violent and parodically insane script for Beyond the Valley of the Dolls years earlier) understood this, and his review manfully owned up to something I had no way of comprehending, let alone admitting.
If, as F. Scott Fitzgerald claimed, intelligence is the ability to hold two contradictory ideas in your head at the same time, then I was the very definition of Stupid. A few months later, me and my stupidity were drinking in the Cornerhouse bar when some oiky art-student type approached me and said, ‘You’re the guy who wrote that review of Blue Velvet in City Life, aren’t you?’
Dazzled by my own local fame, and wowed by my ever-widening sphere of critical influence, I turned proudly toward him and declared, ‘Yes, that was me …’ firmly expecting a warm handshake, the offer of a pint, and ten minutes of stimulatingly self-congratulatory conversation.
What I actually got was this: he hit me.
Now, when I say ‘hit’ I may be exaggerating the actual force and vigour of our brief but unmistakeable moment of physical contact.
To those accustomed to the world of fisticuffs and street brawls, it would probably count as no more than a slap, a light brush, even a mere push.
But to me, who had never been in a fight in my entire life, it was a palpable punch, accompanied by the guttural muttering of the word ‘Wanker!’ just to make sure there was no confusion as to his disagreement with my views.
I stepped back (or ‘was knocked helplessly to the bar’ depending on who’s directing this ‘true story’) and before I had time to respond (oh come on – what was an utter weed like me honestly going to do?) he was gone.
The memory of this altercation did not, however, depart so quickly and played upon my mind for months to come –although surely not in the way that my unexpected adversary had intended.
On the contrary, I took his fleeting recourse to physical contact to be definitive proof that I had been right right right about Blue Velvet all along.
After all, if the movie’s supporters couldn’t fight their corner verbally, then there was clearly no merit in their cause.
Violence begins at the point where reason and discourse end, and I have yet to see evidence that any disagreements may be satisfactorily solved through a punch-up.
Putative pugilists take note – thumping me will merely make me even more obnoxiously smug.
Allowing me to beat myself up however (psychologically speaking) can be devastatingly effective. And as the emboldening memory of that punch started to fade, I fell victim to the sneaking suspicion that I had been wrong wrong wrong about Blue Velvet, a thought which gnawed at my conscience like a guilty secret. What troubled me was the fact that I really couldn’t explain why the film had provoked such an explosive reaction. Oh, I could justify it with a whole load of off-the-peg blather about unhelpful interventions in the ongoing sex war which Dworkin and her cohorts had made seem very real indeed.
But beneath all the rhetoric I knew that wasn’t really the problem at all.
The problem was that the movie had got to me – got under my skin – and was now eating away at my psychological wiring like some Cronenbergian superbug.
Looking back now I can see my uncomfortable and contradictory reactions to Blue Velvet as a crucial part of my critical development, demonstrating that responses to movies are never simple or clear-cut. It’s one thing to admit that all criticism is subjective, but quite another to accept that each individual subject is usually far too confused to understand their own personal responses, let alone anyone else’s.
Those mired in the hoary old traditions of ‘effects theory’ will blithely tell you that audiences respond to movies en masse –that the mythical über-viewer ‘identifies’ with this character or ‘shares the experience’ of that situation.
For decades, such certainty underpinned the actions of the British Board of Film Classification, enabling former chief censor James Ferman to cut and ban movies whose precisely pernicious effect on audiences he claimed to understand. Yet the truth is far more unruly –people respond to movies in ways which are so violently (self-) contradictory that pretending to be able to police their ‘effects’ is at best foolhardy, at worst farcical.
As Kyle MacLachlan’s character says to Laura Dern’s increasingly cracked schoolgirl Sandy in Blue Velvet, ‘It’s a strange world, isn’t it?’
Oh lordy, yes it is.
So as the months went by, and Blue Velvet failed to fade from my memory, the realisation of my own profound fallibility grew by the day.
William Friedkin once told me that he believed the power of The Exorcist lay in the fact that ‘people take from that movie what they bring to it’.
The same is true of Blue Velvet and, in a peculiar way, of Deep Throat, which was variously hailed as a ‘celebration of personal freedom’ and decried as ‘a violation of human rights’ – sometimes by the very same people.
By coincidence, the Cornerhouse cinema, where I first saw Blue Velvet, used to be a porno cinema, enticingly named the Glamour, where furtive punters would gather to quietly choke the chicken in the days before video made masturbating to moving pictures an entirely homespun recreation.
The films that played at the Glamour weren’t ‘hard core’, although a kaleidoscopically edited version of Deep Throat did show up there on occasion under its ‘sex club’ members-only licence.
Years later I would learn that an unusually large number of Cornerhouse patrons had to be thrown out for wanking their way through Abel Ferrara’s thoroughly unsexy Bad Lieutenant, a phenomenon the manager of the cinema told me she ‘struggled to comprehend’.
Perhaps, like the haunted houses of so many ghost stories, the building itself retained a memory of its disreputable past, and decent art-house patrons were somehow possessed by the demonic spirits of the raincoat brigade, desperate to find relief wherever it reared its ugly head. Or perhaps people are just weird.
Whatever the truth, it’s impossible not to conclude that human responses to the audio-visual stimulations of cinema are unfathomable in the extreme.
Was walking out of Blue Velvet any more sensible than attempting to crack one off in Bad Lieutenant?
Was watching Deep Throat, as Linda Lovelace later claimed, ‘an act of rape’ rather than (as she had previously claimed) a ‘blow for liberty’?
Was the Glamour cinema’s ascension from lowly porn palace to church of cinematic art-house chic an indication of the triumph of ‘culture’ over ‘crap’, or just business as usual?
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.
