Room to Dream

by David Lynch

  The ceremonial rape is one of several scenes where Rossellini is violently assaulted by Hopper, and one of the most potent and puzzling aspects of these scenes is that her character enjoys being hit. This made sense to Rossellini, however. “When I was young I once had a boyfriend who beat me up, and I remember that I was so surprised,” she recalled. “While he was beating me up I didn’t feel any pain, and I remember thinking, Oh my God, I see stars like Donald Duck does when he’s hit over the head in a cartoon. I thought about that experience in relation to Dorothy being hit. She was so shocked when she was hit that her anguish would vanish for a moment—sometimes physical pain can interrupt psychological anguish.”

  As with Eraserhead, Blue Velvet had a modest budget and a little had to go a long way. “Everyone was working for scale or less and we had a small crew,” said Caruso. “Instead of four electricians we had three, and the hairdresser on the set had been a hairdresser in a shop in Wilmington the previous day. We used a lot of untrained residents in Wilmington, and they loved us.”

  De Laurentiis was still in the process of building his production facility in Wilmington when Blue Velvet was shot there, so having movie people in town was still a big deal for the locals. Even though major portions of the film were shot at night, interested observers invariably turned up, and the whole neighborhood turned out with picnics and chairs to watch the shooting of a particularly volatile scene where Rossellini wanders into the street battered, clearly in shock, and nude. “David once told me that when he was a little boy he and his brother were walking home and they saw a naked woman walking down the street and he understood that something very wrong was happening,” said Rossellini. “This scene is based on that memory, and it’s not meant to be arousing.”

  The assistant director warned the spectators that the scene about to be shot contained nudity that they might find objectionable, “but they stayed there as if, Oh, that’s a good part of the show!” recalled Rossellini. The next day the police informed the production office that no additional scenes for Blue Velvet could be shot on the streets of Wilmington; De Laurentiis stood by Lynch through this and a few other challenges that were yet to come. “Dino would occasionally see dailies,” recalled Caruso, “and I’d say to him, ‘Dino, what do you think,’ and he’d just shrug his shoulders. But Dino gave David his word that he would have final cut of the movie, and Dino always kept his word.”

  Rossellini’s fearless performance wasn’t lost on the rest of the cast. “I was a little bit in awe of her,” recalled MacLachlan. “And, of course, before we began shooting I was intimidated knowing I was going to have to do these intense nude scenes with her. There’s one scene where I have to get completely undressed in front of Isabella, and when we shot it I kept repeating to myself, ‘You’re not really here, you’re somewhere else at this moment, it’s just a body, don’t even think about the fact that you don’t have any clothes on.’

  “There’s another scene when Isabella asks me to hit her, and I thought, I can’t do this,” MacLachlan continued. “I didn’t actually hit her, but the fact that I had to go through the motion of hitting her was upsetting. When Jeffrey is in his room at home later and realizes what has taken place, he breaks down, and those scenes were challenging. I trusted David to guide me through them.”

  Amid all this mayhem, Lynch maintained a sunny disposition, tooling around the set on a pink bicycle with streamers fluttering from the handlebars, his pockets full of peanut M&M’s. “David is a genuinely happy person, and this is one of the remarkable things about him—I’ve never met anyone as serene as he is,” said Rossellini. “I remember saying to him, ‘You wake up in the morning and you’re happy.’ Is it a gene he has that should be cloned?”

  “David would say meditation is the source of his happiness,” said Laura Dern, “and I’m sure that’s true. He knows who he was and who he became almost immediately after he started meditating, so he’s the best judge of that. I would add, though, that I think part of his happiness has to do with the fact that he places no limits on himself as a creative person. There’s a lot of self-judgment and shame in our culture, and David doesn’t have any of that. When he makes something he never wonders what people will think of it, or what he should be making, or what the zeitgeist needs. He makes what bubbles up out of his brain, and that is part of his joy.”

  Lynch’s modest office on the Wilmington set was littered with plastic toys, drawings scribbled on scraps of paper, and tubes of paint. On the walls were two paintings, in varying states of completion, and a kitsch clock inscribed with the words LUMBERTON FISHING CLUB. On the floor were cartons of popcorn and a photograph of the Chicken Kit he’d made in Mexico. On the windowsill was an orderly row of water glasses holding potatoes in the process of sprouting.

  “Blue Velvet is a story about innocence and the impossibility of it,” said Brad Dourif, who plays Frank Booth’s sidekick, Raymond, “and when I worked with David he was truly an innocent. His innocence manifested as total enthusiasm—he could look at a pair of tennis shoes and get completely excited, and the way he thought of women seemed pretty innocent, too.”

  Caruso recalled, “The mood on that set was happy because David had a great aura—everyone, including the crew, loved him. David’s daily meditation is a key part of his aura, too. When he’d come back on the set after his afternoon meditation, he had this ring of energy around him, and he’d just bring you into it and you’d be calm.”

  MacLachlan said that “David has the ability to lead without making anybody feel bad, and if somebody doesn’t get something, he teaches with humor. As far as how he goes about eliciting what he wants from actors, there are certain phrases he uses—‘it needs a little more wind,’ for instance—that alter the mood of the performance, and I just rolled with those. David’s never given me any direction I didn’t understand.”

  For Rossellini, Lynch’s directing bordered on the nonverbal. “Sometimes when we were shooting close-ups he would be very close to the camera, and even if I had my eyes closed or had to look in another direction, I could feel his presence and knew if he wanted me to do a little more or a little less. Kyle does an imitation of David that captures exactly this quality David has when he’s directing. David directs by expressing varying degrees of enthusiasm.”

  Dourif said, “I do a little dance in the background while Dean Stockwell is singing ‘In Dreams,’ and we improvised that—David was always open to ideas. He’s a painter, and the way he gave direction was subtle. He put his brush on the canvas very specifically at certain times and could be quite exacting about tweaking certain moments.

  “You felt love on that set, too,” Dourif added. “I sat there and watched David fall in love with Isabella. When she was singing ‘Blue Velvet,’ he was just completely taken with her, and she was taken with him, too.”

  As always, Jennifer Lynch spent time on her father’s set, and this time she was hired as a PA. “I was seventeen at the time and I was there for all of the prep but only part of the shoot because I had to go back to school,” she recalled. “I knew my dad was falling in love during the making of that film, but he was always falling in love or looking for love, and he always finds it.” Wentworth concurred that “David’s marriage was coming apart when he was shooting the film, and it was obvious by the end of the shoot that he and Isabella had fallen in love.”

  “For me there was an understanding between us,” said Rossellini, who went on to have a five-year bicoastal relationship with Lynch. “He’s so funny and sweet, and I understood exactly what he wanted in the film—I felt like I could read his mind. I was very wrong about that! But at the time I felt I could read his mind and felt a closeness to him that grew into me falling in love with him. I fell deeply in love with David, so I don’t know if I could’ve helped it, but looking back it must’ve been very tough for Mary Fisk.”

  Rossellini is right about that. “David and I talked every day on t
he phone, and I didn’t feel that our marriage was in jeopardy until I met his leading lady on set,” Fisk recalled. “But think about it: How many wives send their husbands off to work with a woman dressed in a black lace bra and panties? I saw the train wreck coming down the track, and although it didn’t hit until August it was obvious to me the minute I met Isabella, even though David was still telling me how much he loved me. Neither of them was innocent, but something happened between them that I guess you could call chemical.”

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  The look of a Lynch film is largely shaped by Lynch’s unique relationship with time and the fact that he feels no fidelity to historical accuracy in regard to period styles. In Lynch’s realm, America is like a river that flows ever forward, carrying odds and ends from one decade into the next, where they intermingle and blur the dividing lines we’ve invented to mark time. Blue Velvet is set in some indeterminate period where time has collapsed in on itself. At the Slow Club, where Dorothy Vallens performs, she sings at a vintage microphone from the 1920s, and her place in the Deep River Apartments smacks of a 1930s art deco set from The Thin Man. She has a television with a 1950s rabbit-ears antenna, though. Arlene’s, the Lumberton diner where Jeffrey and Sandy conspire, also evokes the 1950s, but Jeffrey’s pierced ear and Sandy’s clothing are distinctly 1980s. Sandy—a teenager in what are ostensibly the 1980s—has a poster of Montgomery Clift on her bedroom wall, and classic American cars roam the streets of Lumberton.

  Lynch’s visual style is freewheeling in certain respects, yet everything in every frame is freighted with intention and meaning. “Half of the shooting schedule was at night, and the lighting in those scenes was complicated,” recalled Elmes of how light was used to enhance the mood Lynch was after. “When you look at the tree-lined sidewalk outside of Sandy’s house, it’s not just a block of trees; it’s green trees with texture and detail, and there are streetlights up in there, and we put all that stuff there. We shot on a street without streetlights, and we had the power company come and put in streetlights—it’s insane they actually did that for us! But they put in poles and we wired them up with lights. The lighting created a richness that David and I really wanted.”

  Lynch’s movies usually include unique props that he makes, often on set. Blue Velvet features a wall plaque inscribed with the word LUMBERTON pieced together out of bits of wood, and there’s a clumsily painted sign outside Lumberton’s police station. There’s also a bizarre sculpture on Jeffrey’s bedroom wall, a pinhole camera he uses when he stakes out Frank Booth’s place, and a nutty maquette of a snow-covered mountain flanked by single trees that sits on a counter in the Lumberton police station. Lynch made all of them.

  “There’s a night scene that has a red-brick building in the background, and the shadow of an oil derrick goes up and down on the side of it,” said Caruso. “Onscreen it looks huge, but there was David on the ground with a pair of scissors and a piece of cardboard, cutting out this miniature derrick, taping and stapling it together, and hooking it up to a piece of string that made it go up and down.”

  Blue Velvet editor Duwayne Dunham recalled finding Lynch on his hands and knees, carefully placing dust bunnies under a radiator in Dorothy Vallens’s apartment, “just in case the camera might pick them up—which it never did,” said Dunham. “But that’s how deep into his storytelling David is.”7

  After graduating from film school in 1975, Dunham was hired as an editor by George Lucas, who employed him for the next seven years. “David planned to cut Blue Velvet at Lucas Ranch, and it’s a small community up there so he knew about me,” Dunham recalled. “I flew down to L.A. and met David at Raleigh Studios, and I told him I found the script for Blue Velvet disturbing and that it wasn’t my cup of tea. He said, ‘You’re just gonna have to trust me on this.’ I kept putting him off and finally he called and said, ‘I’m leaving for North Carolina tomorrow and I need to know if you’re coming,’ and I went, fortunately. It’s an honor to work with his material, because that’s sacred clay he produces.”

  Lynch seems to relish solving the weird creative problems that arise in the making of a film, and a case in point is the robin that appears in Blue Velvet’s final scene. Robins and their nests are protected under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, so it’s not as if you can simply catch a robin and put it to work in a movie. But Lynch needed a robin.

  “Fred Caruso found a trainer who said he had a trained robin, but they brought it to the set and it was awful,” recalled Elmes. “It was a molting robin in a cage that looked so sad; plus, there’s no such thing as a trained robin! We were getting close to the end of the shoot and getting nervous about this. Then, strangely, a robin flew into the side of a school bus and fell down dead. We had our feelers out for robins so we heard about this.

  “Some kids saw the dead robin and decided the biology department at school could use a robin,” Elmes continued, “so they had it stuffed, and on the way back from the taxidermist it took a detour past our set. David mounted the robin on a windowsill and put a live bug in its mouth, and now we had a stuffed robin that didn’t move. So David took monofilament threads, tied them to the robin’s head so it would move, then got down in the bushes below the window and manipulated the threads. He’s down there asking, ‘Is he looking the right way?’ I said, ‘I think you got the puppetry down as good as it can get, but it still looks kind of mechanical.’ He said, ‘Yeah, yeah, that’s it!’ The robin had this unearthly quality, and I think he loved the artificiality of it.”

  Alan Splet worked with Lynch to create a wildly original audio-scape for Blue Velvet. When Dorothy and Jeffrey make love, we hear a groaning roar that morphs into the sound of a guttering flame; Frank Booth erupts with rage and we hear a metallic screech; the camera journeys into the interior of a rotting human ear and the sound of a sinister wind seems to deepen and expand. “David has a wonderful handle on how to combine images and sound,” said Elmes. “There’s a scene where Kyle wakes up in the morning after being beaten, and the first image you see is a close-up of his face in a puddle. All you see is dirt and water and you hear this strange repetitive sound, but you have no idea where you are. Then you pull back and see he’s in a logging yard and that the sound you’re hearing is a sprinkler keeping a stack of wood wet. The quality of that sound is magical. If it had been the sound of birds it wouldn’t have given you anything, but there was something about that mechanical unexplained sound that made it special. David has an understanding of how things go together that’s purely sensory-based, and he knows how to play with sounds and images until they sort of ignite each other.”

  Lynch’s innovative sound effects are interwoven with music in a way that’s unique to him, and beginning with Blue Velvet, music became a primary part of his creative practice. The songs in Blue Velvet are like characters that advance the narrative, and this is particularly true of Roy Orbison’s hit record of 1963, “In Dreams,” a mournful ballad of longing and loss that functions as a kind of key to the door of Frank Booth’s roiling subconscious.

  As torch singer Dorothy Vallens, Rossellini was required to deliver a rendition of Bobby Vinton’s “Blue Velvet,” so Lynch hired a local band to accompany her. “They didn’t understand the interpretation I wanted to give,” said Rossellini, and at that point Caruso called Angelo Badalamenti, a friend from New York. “I told him, ‘Angelo, you’ve got to help me with this girl who can’t sing,’ so he came to Wilmington.”

  Rossellini recalled, “I explained to Angelo that Dorothy Vallens is transported to another world when she sings—I think David named her Dorothy as a reference to The Wizard of Oz, and when she sings she’s transported over the rainbow. So I needed to sing in a languid way that allowed me to savor that world over the rainbow, and Angelo completely understood this. I can’t carry a tune at all, so Angelo took a syllable here and a word there and edited them together to create the rendition you hear in the film, and he did an amazi
ng job. It turned out so beautifully that after the film came out, people would call and ask, ‘Can you come to this gala and sing?’ ”

  Badalamenti’s skillful work with Rossellini led to one of the most enduring creative partnerships of Lynch’s career. Subsequent to their meeting, Badalamenti has scored almost every film and television project Lynch has done, appeared as an actor in Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive, and written and performed dozens of songs with Lynch. “I’m not a trained musician, but Angelo—who’s a great musician—and I had an instant dialogue,” Lynch said.

  Their collaborative relationship began with lyrics Lynch wrote on a napkin for the song “Mysteries of Love,” which is featured in Blue Velvet. “One day Isabella came in with a little yellow piece of paper—I have it framed—and it says ‘Mysteries of Love’ in David’s handwriting, and it’s the whole lyric,” recalled Badalamenti. “I looked at it and thought, This is awful. What the hell am I going to do with this? It’s not a song. I called David and said, ‘Isabella gave me this lyric you wrote; what kind of music do you hear for this?’ He said, ‘Just make it float and make it endless like the tides of the ocean at night,’ so I sat down at the piano and out came the music for ‘Mysteries of Love.’ ”8

  Badalamenti then called Julee Cruise, a vocalist he’d met in the early 1980s when they worked together in a Minneapolis theater company. “We just clicked,” recalled Cruise of her initial encounter with Badalamenti, “and I told him to call me if anything came up. When Angelo explained what kind of performance he wanted for the song he’d written with David, he said, ‘Be really soft; take your high voice and bring it down.’ He wanted it very pure.

  “It’s a widely held misconception that David is weird, but he’s not weird at all—he’s the funniest, most charismatic man in the world,” Cruise continued. “ ‘Mysteries of Love’ was on the Blue Velvet soundtrack, and that led to my being signed to Warner Bros. Records. David launched my career, and working with Angelo and David made me come into my own.”9