Electric Blue Velvet
EBM HUMPHREYS
Last weekend I was excited as hell to be seeing David Lynch’s as-yet-unseen-by-me Blue Velvet, on the big screen at Electric Palace in the High Street. Despite impulse-buying Inland Empires on DVD when the esteemed director died from COPD-related cardiac arrest in January, I haven’t watched it yet, so have not really immersed myself in his work since watching (the best biopic ever made) David Lynch:The Art Life, twice on mubi. I would watch it again if it was still there – you can get it on BFIplayer for the price of five cigarettes.
David Lynch
Local band Frank From Blue Velvet graced the Electric Palace’s compact stage before the screening, for a short-but-meaty set of perfectly-pitched songs about sinners, gambling, girls hit by lightning, snake preachers and lunatics generally taking over. Besides Lynch’s exemplary death from COPD (“find what you love and let it kill you”), I strongly suspect we have this band (once garage-punk-banjo, now jangling-dark-swing-rockabilly-bluegrass), to thank for the movie being scheduled.
They got their name from an enthusiastic listener who thought they sounded “like Frank from Blue Velvet”, when what she actually meant was that they sounded like the singer of the Roy Orbison song Blue Velvet, featured in the film, sung by Bobby Vinton. I think.
There can be no doubt that this comparison gave them not only a name but a strong identifying aesthetic, so good is the match to the atmosphere of Lynch’s deep and darkside American storytelling.
Guitarist Andrew Davies also told us that Dennis Hopper, while reading the script for the movie, called Lynch in the night yelling “I am Frank!” down the phone: apparently this rather freaked him out, given that Frank is “a man who does bad things to people.” But within this unpleasant character lies my favourite genius-intervention of this film: the stereotype of the evil gangster is portrayed … <spoiler alert> … not only sucking up to his dealer and being just a little bit vulnerable and unhinged, which is not uncommon in the genre, but literally crying for his mummy. Only Lynch could pull that off.
Exalting the sinister side of US small-town life to the surreal, Lynch in his own words tells us: “In a way, this is still a fantasy film. It’s like a dream of strange desires wrapped inside a mystery story. It’s what could happen if you ran out of fantasy.” Let us hope his death won’t mean that.
Catch the next offering from Electric Palace: electricpalacecinema.com/whats-on or see HIP List
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