It's Only a Movie: Reel Life Adventures of a Film Obsessive

by Mark Kermode

  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 in 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.