The Talkies/Weirdos

...Hell, purgatory, heaven...

...the scripts were the work of other, apparently far less weird, individuals...

...Zach (Tom Waits) is a down-on-his-luck DJ, Jack (John Lurie) is a small-time pimp...

...We ain't changed," Archie says as they leave the Big House in their 1950svintage outfits...

...You're just like me," Frank tells Jeffrey, and Lynch's implication plainly is that, under the skin, anybody with a capacity for deep emotion is just like Frank...

...The conclusion, moreover, is disquietingly ambiguous: when Sandy's father bursts into Dorothy's bloodspattered apartment, gun in hand, and says, "It's all over now," it's hard to tell whether the ensuing happy ending is supposed to represent what really happens or whether it depicts what goes on in Jeffrey's head in the instant before he dies of a bullet from the cop's gun...

...it is what makes them feel important...

...it's as if he has entered another world, as if Mary Poppins had suddenly given way to Un chien andalu...

...one has the fieeling, at such moments, that Lynch takes nothing seriously, that he is just playing with cliches of black comedy and surrealism and experimenting with pseudo-Felliniesque notions oi casting...

...we laugh at their morose self-dramatization, at their tacky ambitions, at the way they let themselves get set up...

...It's dishonest: Kanew and company pretend to be making a case for senior citizens' right to self-respect and self-determination, but at the same time they're shamelessly willing to sacrifice their protagonists' dignity for a cheap laugh...

...Both of these lowlifes are lone wolves, too dumb to get anything out of a human relationship...

...It also recalls Heart of Darkness, with its suggestion that we are all capable of doing unspeakable things to one another, that beneath the tame exterior of civilized modern man lurks a primitive beast...

...Harry Doyle (Burt Lancaster), 72, and Archie Long (Kirk Douglas), 67, two big-time train robbers, are set free on the streets of L.A...

...rough Guys gives us a very different pair of jailbirds...

...Physically, he is in excellent shape, though his face looks a bit strange, as if he's had one too many face-Ufts...

...But on the whole the film succeeds at what it wants to do—which is to say that it is repulsive on a profound level...

...The film is supposedly set in the 1980s, but it feels and looks and sounds more like the fifties...

...but this is not that sort of film...

...But life on the outside has changed, and the movie derives most of its humor from our heroes' reactions to new-wave fashion, the fitness craze, gay bars, black street gangs, and the like...

...Dorothy, at one point in the film, says, "I know the difference between right and wrong," but the whole purpose ox Blue Velvet is to confound our sense of right and wrong, to suggest that such distinctions are simpleminded, that what's thought of as "right" can be inhumanly dull and spiritless, and that what's "wrong" can be passionate, vibrant with life...

...Lii<e Lynch, in short, Jarmusch is out to score a few points against the American dream...

...Incidentally, Dorothy's accent is vaguely European, which seems to suggest that Lynch intends for the two young women to represent a contrast between European experience and American innocence...

...With Sandy's help, Jeffrey does a little snooping, and finds himself drawn to—and, before long, inextricably involved in—Dorothy's smarmy world...

...1 never did go to see Eraserhead...

...Yet the three cellmates are compelled to become friends, after a fashion...

...he hurts her and she, for her part, manifestly wants to be hurt...

...Jeffrey learns that Dorothy is being forced to have sex with a repulsive vulgarian named Frank (Dennis Hopper), who has kidnapped her husband and child...

...The eai, apparently, was the husband's...

...movie reviewer and author of The Middle Generatioa a study of four twentieth-century American poets (Archon Books...

...Jeffrey, in watching this sadomasochistic encounter from a nearby closet, is effectively witnessing a sort of post-adolescent primal scene...

...The catch, needless to say, is that there are other alternatives...

...Blue Velvet may be thought of as posing a question: namely, which is more desirable, to settle for a civilized life of vacuous, superficial cheer, or to allow oneself to sink into the pit of cruel, destructive sadomasochistic passion...

...after thirty years in the can...

...Nor is it to overlook the fine supporting performances by Charles Durning as an aging cop, Eli Wallach as an aging hit man, and Miss Smith as an aging showgirl...

...Both the urban and rural settings are shot in deep focus, with high-contrast dramatic lighting, so that nearly every frame, whether it depicts a slum apartment or the Mississippi delta, looks like an artsy documentary photograph...

...Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires...

...its first third is set in the lowerclass precincts of New Orleans, its second third in a prison, its last third in the Louisiana wilderness...

...So it is that I came to Lynch's new film...

...Crime, we are meant to recognize, is what Harry and Archie do best...

...it is their raison d'etre...

...Likewise, Dorothy herself, a woman of strong earthy passions, is the opposite of the other young woman in Jeffrey's life, the vapid, antiseptic Sandy...

...Carolina, where the picture was actually shot...

...He discovers, from the cop's blonde daughter, Sandy (Laura Dern), that a singer named Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rossellini), who sings "Blue Velvet" in a local night spot, is somehow implicated in the case...

...Lynch served only as director on these films...

...Give 'em hell, Harry...

...He who desires but acts not, breeds pestilence...

...come to think of it, he looks like somebody wearing a Kirk Douglas mask...

...to feel deeply is to hurt (and to be hurt) deeply...

...While Roberto, in a most unlikely way, stumbles upon love and happiness in the middle of the woods, his two companions, eager to shake one another off, part company and head down identical empty roads to identically barren futures—one on the West Coast, one on the East...

...You get the feeling, after a certain point in this film, that you care more about the characters than the director and writers do...

...the only significant contemporary touch— and significant it unquestionably is, considering that the plot revolver: arounc a severed human ear—is the hero's earring...

...But the fact is that without the talents of Lancaster and Douglas—and, equally important, without our affectionate memories of the two actors' past performances, which cause us to feel an instant empathy for Harry and Archie that the script does Httle to stimulate—this film would be a feeble offering indeed...

...At any rate, he certainly doesn't look like a man who's spent the last thirty years in prison...

...Though Jarmusch (characteristically) never shows us how they manage it, they break out of prison together and...

...When I look back now, it seems to me that I spent countless hours at college in the mid-seventies sitting in a dormitory room and listening to my friends extol the virtues of a movie called Eraserhead...

...indeed, the perfectly real flowers and grass look positively phony, Uke the illustrations in a Dick and Jane book...

...Blue Velvet, which he both wrote and directed, knowing nothing about this notorious filmmaker except what I had heard...

...What's most disturbing about Tough Guys is that when the guys get sick of the straight life and recidivate, we are expected to stand up and cheer for them—which is exactly what Harry's retirement home friends do when they hear on the television news about the guys' return to crime...

...it lingers on the mind as an eccentric curiosity, a series of arresting but mute images...

...S ignificantly, it is not on that excellently maintained, sunshiny lawn but in the shady wild grass outside of Lumberton that Jeffrey—whose father has just suffered a heart attack while watering the lawn—finds a severed human ear While he holds it in his hand, the camera closes in on it, as if to enter through it (as through a black hole) an alternate universe...

...crime makes them feel young and tough and most of all important, and is therefore okay...

...And why would any parole officer, even a callow twentyeightyear-old like Richie (Dana Carvey), involve himself in a hopeless, madcap stunt like the one that ends this film...

...Frank calls her "Mommy" and forces her to call him "Daddy...

...This town, clearly, is meant to be perceived as America in microcosm, a place from which, day after day, the Children of Light religiously set forth to tame the dark wilderness...

...This world of primary colors is photographed in bright, even, and shadowless light, with the objects very sharply defined, and the result is that the well-tended flowers and grass are not beautiful but laughable, grotesque, even a bit chilling, as if to indicate that the sort of wholesome, innocent life suggested by this Disneyish setting is nothing but a banal lie, an impossibiUty...

...But, though the odd tone and the striking photography make Down by Law consistently interesting to watch, this stylized, pervasively ironic film leaves the viewer strangely unmoved...

...The film brings to mind several of Blake's proverbs of Hell: "The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom...

...He makes a running surrealistic joke out of the town's name: the call letters of the radio station are W-O-O-D, and lumber trucks keep roaring past in the background while the radio announcer delivers a cheery, hi-ho-hi-ho-it's-off-to-a-day-oftreechopping-we-go aubade...

...The film's hero, a high-school boy named Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan), lives with his folks in a nice white frame house with a big green lawn and a garden containing big red and yellow flowers under a solid blue sky...

...Played against this naturalistic background, the film's surreal action seems even more surreal than it might otherwise...

...As for Lancaster and Douglas, they're the film's strongest assets by far...

...But then, there are a lot of hard-tobelieve things in this movie...

...In the film's opening sequence, Lynch presents Lumberton as a caricature of pure, wholesome, hardworking small-town America...

...only the bland and affectless, like Sandy—to whom love is a superficial, cheerleaderish entity, lightly bestowed, easily transferred, and powerless to inflict deep or lasting pain—can truly lead productive, orderly, and responsible lives...

...Jarmusch (who manages to work Robert Frost's poem "The Road Not Taken" into the filmin Italian, yet) wants to make a cynical point about the illusion of choice, wants to tell us that we don't have any real say in our destinies, that Emerson's self-reliance and Whitman's Open Road are myths, that our only buffer against the random and absurd cruelties of fate is the attachments that we can form with those whom fate throws in our path...

...Everything is just a bit oft^—and creepily, insidiously so, in a manner reminiscent of the ominous, synthetic American-home-town-onMars in Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles...

...Douglas's problem seems to be that he is too embarrassed by his role to throw himself into it entirely...

...But the film's awful effectiveness lies in its ability to make us forget that—for the duration, at any rate...

...What's most disturbing of all, though, about Frank is that, compared to Jeffrey's unbelievably nice-nice world, this sadistic sicko and his grubby team of conspirators have, for the viewer, an uncomfortable realness about them—and it is only a small step from realness to naturalness, from naturalness to rightness...

...The best things never do," Harry replies...

...he's an infant all over again, a babe being introduced to a whole new level of sexual awareness...

...It is not until they are both thrown in prison for crimes they didn't commit that they meet one another— and a goofy Italian named Roberto (Roberto Benigni) whose relentless cheer and chumminess contrast sharply with their wary, glum demeanor...

...Jarmusch's two dense, hapless protagonists are essentially mirror images of one another...

...it is as starkly real (though the only sign of nature in Dorothy's flat is a phallically long-stemmed potted plant) as the grounds of Jeffrey's home are fakelooking...

...it's the sort of acting job you might imagine him giving in a slapped-together, tongue-in-cheek skit at the Friars Club...

...Nor did 1 catch Lynch's subsequent films, Dune and The Elephant Man...

...That world, which is symbolized by Dorothy's gloomy brown apartment, is the antithesis of his own...

...and alas, after Jeffrey delivers the ear to a police detective (George Dickerson...

...His performance has a self-conscious, noblesse-oblige quality about it...

...As far as Blue Velvet is concerned, of course, what I had heard—and what most of North America has also doubtless heard by now—is that the film is not only weird but extremely disturbing...

...Written and directed by one David Lynch, it seemed always to be playing somewhere on campus "It's so weird" my friends would tell me—weird, naturally, being a term of exalted, unqualified praise— "anc it's even weirder when you're high.' Alas, as one who wasn't interested either in "weird" or in getting high...

...Even at their least inspired, they have a presence, a magnetism, a way with a line that most of today's young supericons of the screen could never hope to match...

...To say all this is not to deny that Tough Guys is intermittently very amusing, even (at least in its opening sequences) rather charming...

...his lady friend, played by the ever-lovely Alexis Smith, screams at the TV...

...Lynch leaves the impression that life presents us with only these two alternatives, and that one would have to be less than human not to choose the latter...

...Tkking Dorothy violently on her living room floor...

...For Harry to sit around a retirement home, and Archie to try to hold down a job washing dishes, is undignified...

...What makes it so disturbing to this viewer, however, is not so much any of these things in and of themselves—which are, in any event, less shocking than the reviews and the scuttlebutt would lead one to expect— as the fact that Lynch manages, in this film, to communicate quite powerfully a moral vision that is utterly despicable...

...The film is set in the real-life town of Lumberton, North Carolina, but from the beginning it doesn't/ee/ quite like Lumberton, North CaroUna (or, for that matter, like Wilmington, North Bruce Bawer is The American Spectator...

...The movie's moral logic is pure 1980s Hollywood: it honors its hero'es for striving, not after truth or beauty or goodness, but after notoriety—and for being willing to do almost anything to attain it...

...But, unlike Conrad's novel, Lynch's film ultimately leaves us not with a highly moral lesson in the possibilities of evil but with a vision of life that is, in fact, morally reprehensible...

...The major characters' accents are wrong, and the atmosphere is wrong too: Lumberton, as Lynch renders it, feels more like a mediumsized Midwestern city than a small Southern burg...

...For instance, since Harry and Archie, who were sentenced to thirty years, have served their full term (which in itself strains one's creduUty), what are they doing with a parole officer...

...In a certain sort of way-out farce, needless to say, the lack of logic and credible motivation would be part of the joke...

...It is certainly not a movie for children and—what with the obscenity, the profanity, and the graphic rape, violence, sadomasochism, and mutilation—it may not be a movie for many adults, either...

...to love is to be obsessed as Frank is obsessed (and as Jeffrey comes to be obsessed) with Dorothy...

...He does everything but wink into the camera and say, "Hey, I'm not this pathetic has-been, I'm Kirk Douglas, a big Hollywood wheel, still on the 'A' list after all these years...

...Jack and Zach, however, learn nothing from their experience...

...during their flight through the wilderness, learn to care about each other...

...It is, in other words, a onejoke movie...

...This would not be so bad except for the fact that director Jeff Kanew and writers James Orr and Jim Cruickshank don't keep the joke consistent— sometimes we end up laughing with the tough guys, sometimes at them...

...This is just a picture...

...Visually, Blue Velvet would make an interesting double bill with Jim Jarmusch's Down by LMW...

...Jarmusch's film is in stark black and white...

...In the logic of this film, indeed, love and evil, passion and violence are essentially one...

...Sometimes—for example, when Frank drags Jeffrey, at gunpoint, to a cheap dive where a bizarre little man lip-synchs a pop tune and three fat, garish women stand around watching— the film seems to descend into a broadly campy mode suggestive of John Waters...

...Of the two, however, Lancaster creates the more believable character, this time out...

...Why is Harry, who's been placed in a retirement home, forbidden to have a sexual relationship...