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Facing the vortex and "feeling the rapture grow," to expand the world is to darken it. Roses, fences and sky for a red-white-blue Rauschenberg effect, Bobby Vinton's voice giving way to the insectoid cacophony under the grass, pooch and toddler around the collapsed patriarch. (The image is from Hitchcock's The Trouble with Harry.) Lumberton, USA, "where people really know how much wood a woodchuck chucks" and where a severed ear materializes like a seashell specked with ants. The square-jawed preppy (Kyle MacLachlan) investigates, virginal high-schooler (Laura Dern) by his side. His amateur sleuthing leads to the Slow Club chanteuse (Isabella Rossellini) in the grip of a most demonic blackmailer (Dennis Hopper), her ritualistic violation is witnessed from the movie theater of a dark closet. "I don't know if you're a detective or a pervert." "Well, that's for me to know and you to find out." The sacred and the unspeakable, the Cold War sitcom of innocence and illicit kink of Pottersville, David Lynch wouldn't have it any other way. A stroll down the street at night, perfectly wholesome until one notices the sinister aura of tree branches and the chunky background figure in shades walking his dog. "Do you wanna do bad things?" The siren is a distressed mother and her captor is a greaser bully turned gonzo ogre, her lipsticked smile receives his blows in lush close-up. A Diane Arbus bordello, the ideal spotlight for Dean Stockwell toasting with Pabst Blue Ribbon and mincing to Roy Orbison, "one suave fucker." The industrial netherworld behind the postcard, desire's flame from candle to blaze. Gérôme's Vérité covered in cigarette burns, "something that was always hidden," Kienholz's John Doe in yellow suit. Lynch's sustained trance, the single most concentrated explosion of danger and ecstasy in the Eighties. Flaubert's stuffed parrot for the dénouement, the "blinding light of love" alongside the mechanical fowl of normalcy. Demme's concurrent Something Wild is remarkably complementary. Cinematography by Frederick Elmes. With Hope Lange, George Dickerson, Priscilla Pointer, Frances Bay, Jack Harvey, Brad Dourif, Jack Nance, and Fred Pickler.
--- Fernando F. Croce |