100 MOVIES IN A YEAR: #1 Blue Velvet
I have been in a pretty severe creative rut for the last, oh, I dunno, my entire life. Finding things to force me to write can be difficult; my only gun-owning friend is too busy to come over and press the muzzle against my temple while screaming “BE CREATIVE, OR DIE!”, and that’s about the level of intensity it takes to actually motivate me to do something. I’ve also been in a pretty severe state of depression for, oh, I dunno, [SEE ABOVE JOKE ABOUT IT HAVING BEEN GOING ON FOR MY ENTIRE LIFE] which, for some reason, has made it incredibly difficult for me to sit down and watch media I haven’t previously watched. Why discover new and invigorating art when you can just start watching all of Entourage in order for the seventh time in your life?
In case you’re reading that and thinking “TMI!” or “Tl;dr!” or “CIA!” here’s a shorter version; I’m trying to both watch one hundred movies in a calendar year, and also briefly write about those movies in a Calendar year. It’s both a watching and writing exercise (what about reading? FUCK READING!) that hopefully will help my brain do more of each, without requiring a ridiculously arbitrary exercise to do so.
So which movie did I pick as the first one? Why, none other than David Lynch’s feel good classic Blue Velvet! The movie about a psychopath who kidnaps a woman’s wife and child, and then forces her to engage in degrading sex with him in order to guarantee their safety… and she maybe kind of likes it??????The perfect film to free me of my depressing shackles! To be fair, I am not a big Lynch guy; before this, I’d only seen most of Twin Peaks, as well as the Elephant Man, which isn’t really what you think of when you think “David Lynch film”; I’m clearly not someone who is going to even pretend like he can really speak about the director’s body of work. So, what did I think of Blue Velvet? It was good! It both was both much funnier, as well as not as disturbing as people had talked it up to me as being over the years. If it had been a straight up execution of its premise, then yeah, this probably would’ve been a real dour, brutal affair. The movie seems to have informed Twin Peaks quite a bit; the brutality of the violence is very real, and Dennis Hopper is menacing in such a real and natural way, you’d almost think he spent a great deal of his life terrorizing the women in his life (oh… right) but the way the movie changes when it returns to its suburban origins, with characters speaking in clichés, and almost acting out the relationships that they have between each other, that shit is funny. It’s funny to watch people act the way they think they’re supposed to, but that ends the second Isabella Rossellini shows up, naked and disoriented, crashing the two disparate worlds together. As a counterpoint, however; I’m insanely full of shit, and don’t really know what I’m talking about.
In summation; I really liked it! I was nervous the violence would be too much, or that it would resemble later Lynch creations, and I would find it too isolating and non-narrative, but I honestly feel like it might be as perfect an execution of this vision as possible. A hell of a way to start this whole thing.
