The Lip-Synching Scene in David Lynch's Blue Velvet as a Touchstone Transcendent Moment

David Lynch is 76 years old today -- happy birthday!  That made me think about my favorite scene in all of David Lynch's great work, and, for that matter, probably in any movie I've ever scene: Dean Stockwell lip synching Roy Orbison's "In Dreams" in Blue Velvet back in 1986, with Dennis Hopper doing a fine job as that deeply sick guy, who tries to join in the lip-synching, but whose demons won't allow him the succor of dreams.

That scene also represents what I think of as a nexus in popular culture, with several different careers revived and propelled in that one scene.  Dean Stockwell had been a moderately important star, playing angry and sensitive young men, in the 1950s and 1960s.   Lynch had begun using him in Dune in 1984, but his performance in that Blue Velvet lip synching was incandescent and brought him to everyone's attention, including the people who cast him in a co-starring role in Quantum Leap.  Blue Velvet had nothing to do with science fiction, but that Roy Orbison moment would forever and anon and make Stockwell a science fiction icon.

Meanwhile, Orbison's career, which also had been flagging, suddenly skyrocketed in the next few years. His voice in The Traveling Wilburys was one of the most prominent parts of their signature sound, and made them the best supergroup ever, surpassing Crosby, Still, and Nash, the previous holders of that position, in my humble opinion.  Orbison's solo 1989 "You Got It" was also at least a minor masterpiece. And here I always mention Anne Reburn (and her clones)' cover of "You Got It" as a high water mark of music video production.

Science fiction and rock music have been my life's two cultural passions.  Blue Velvet the movie was neither, but it gave rebirth to careers and soaring performances in both,  and made David Lynch an enduring hero well before Twin Peaks and all the rest.

The Kid in the Video Store - science fiction about the 1988 

Roy Orbison and Friends, A Black and White Night concert

Twin Peaks: The Return 1.3.-4: Coffee and Cole

The second installment of Twin Peaks: The Return - aka episodes 3 and 4 - continued tonight in the unmitigated gonzo, steampunk, B-movie style to which we became accustomed last week.

Let me also say that one of the high points - perhaps the highest points - of David Lynch's work have been the singers on stage at one point or another in the narrative.  The Dean Stockwell character lip synching Roy Orbison's "In Dreams" in Blue Velvet, with Dennis Hopper's self-tortured character trying to sing along but taking the needle off the record, and Kyle MacLachlan's character in shock in the small, standing audience in the room, was so powerful that I've wanted to write a book about that scene as a transcendent moment in popular culture for years.  As it is, it's easily one of the best scenes in any movie.

Performances of original songs by unknown (to me) musicians and singers have ended every episode of Twin Peaks: The Return so far, and they've all been excellent.  But that Everly Brothers-like performance at the end of 1.3 was superb and to my ears and eyes already a classic.

Back to Kyle MacLachlan, the central story in episodes 1.3-4 was Agent Cooper's return to this planet.  It's unsurprisingly no easy return.  Part of the difficulty makes sense.  Cooper can't talk or think normally because he's been in that insane, other-dimensional room for 25 years.  Part of it, like all Lynch works, doesn't - or doesn't quite make sense.  Apparently, Cooper was "tricked," and his doppelgänger is still out and about on Earth, though soon locked up.  But the real Cooper seems to be making at least a little bit of progress, responding well to a cup of coffee in the morning, put on his breakfast table by his doppelgänger's wife (played by Naomi Watts, who starred in Mulholland Drive, generally recognized as David Lynch's second-best work - high praise - and I agree).

And speaking of Lynch, it was good to see him return as FBI Deputy Director Cole these two episodes (he was actually an FBI Regional Bureau Chief in the original), which got me thinking: how about Cole as Comey's replacement, now that Lieberman has bowed out?

Hey, if that actually happened, it would be a lot less strange than some of the developments in Twin Peaks: The Return, which I'll be back to offer a few more paragraphs about next week.

See also Twin Peaks: The Return 1.1-2: Superluminal Sans Cherry Pie

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Twin Peaks: The Return 1.1-2: Superluminal Sans Cherry Pie

Twin Peaks was back - therefore also known as Twin Peaks: The Return - last night with the two first episodes of some new seasons on Showtime.   I enjoyed it. But - well, it's a strange and tough narrative to enjoy.

Here's my story about the story so far - that is, the return, and how it relates, after the first two episodes, to the original two seasons (and, for that matter, to the subsequent movie, which was actually a prequel):

Twin Peaks started out as an idiosyncratic, remarkably good, just slightly absurdist whodunnit, as FBI Agent Dale Cooper, who loves a good cup of coffee and a piece of cherry pie, investigates the murder of homecoming queen Laura Palmer, who turned out to have been leading a double life.  There were lots of suspects and bizarre characters and intricate plots, which are resolved - if you can call it that - by a shift into a supernatural, science fictional, insano world of lodges in other dimensions, time rollbacks, doppelgängers (a literal double life) and all kinds of spirits with no real interest in coffee or cherry pie.

Twin Peaks: The Return starts out in and on this superluminal plane (I take faster than light to be the beginning of impossible dark fantasy), and sprinkles in a murder or two just to keep the story's feet on the whodunnit ground.  But this return has little of the detective mystery that drove so much of the original.   Good Agent Cooper is almost completely within the Black Lodge.  He's kissed and whispered to by Laura Palmer, who realizes she's dead, even though she like Cooper look and are 25 years older.  The doppelgänger bad Cooper is mixed up in some kind of criminal business, but the essential point, as told to good Cooper in the Black Lodge, is that he can't get out until the bad Cooper returns, which he has no intention of doing.

My favorite thread was actually a science fiction sub-story right out of the 1950s, which features a young couple about to make love, with the guy taking his eyes off an extra-dimensional device he's supposed to watch (he doesn't know it's extra-dimensional) with dire results for the amorous couple. I especially liked this not only because I was brought up on clunky 1950s science fiction on the screen, but because I'm pretty sure I was actually in a room much like this one myself, when Bill McClane was interviewing me for his 2002 documentary, "The Evolution of Science Fiction" (though it may have been his 2014-2015 "How to Survive the End of the World" series).  I'm not kidding, see the IMDb listings for Evolution and End).

So you get the idea.  If you like Lynch at his Dadaist best - which gave flavor and edge to his Blue Velvet (whose "In Dreams" sequence is one of my all-time favorite scenes in any movie, period), Twin Peaks, and Mulholland Drive - you'll find it in spades, as almost the complete mind-bending story, in Twin Peaks: The Return.  At least, insofar as the first two episodes.

And I'll be back with more next week.


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True Detective 2.3: Buckshot and Twitty

Well, as I was saying last week, True Detective couldn't be crazy enough to kill one of its leading men in the very second episode, could it, as wild and iconoclastic as such a move might have been.  But we discovered in True Detective 2.3 last night - after a fabulous opening sequence with a bizarre but compelling Elvis-like impersonator singing "The Rose" (reminiscent of one of the best scenes in any movie, Dean Stockwell delivering Roy Orbison's "In Dreams" in Blue Velvet) - that Ray survived!  Because Ray was hit with two shotgun blasts, alright - but loaded with buckshot not lead.

Ok, first, I'm no weapons expert, and I wouldn't know buckshot from grape nuts cereal, or birdshot, either, but the point is that kudos to True Detective, that was an excellent feint. And while we're at it, the impersonator was apparently of Conway Twitty - not Elvis - but the two are pretty similar, anyway, and throw in Conrad Birdie there, too.  And one of other thing: the scene in Blue Velvet was a lip synch (not technically an impersonation) - Roy Orbison's voice coming out of Dean Stockwell's mouth - and so, it maybe seems, was "The Rose" in TD.

Interestingly, Blue Velvet's David Lynch was supposed, until recently, to be producing a new slew of Twin Peaks episodes, until he bowed out, so it was especially gratifying to see this Lynchian bow to his work at the beginning of last night's True Detective.  As was the case last year, part of what makes True Detective so appealing is not the storyline per se, but the ambience via which it is presented.   Hey, let's be honest.  It is the shimmering water color ambiguous ambience that truly makes True Detective what it is - like no other show on television, by a long shot, in the combination of its searingly misty imagery and mix of sound and music.

But the story's developing well, particularly at this point with Frank, who is a suitably complex racketeer, able to dish out a beat-down to an associate who foolishly bad mouths him, and take note that Ray is off his booze, drinking just water.  Frank is the too obvious source of the shotgun blasts on Ray - putting someone up to it - but why do that, to frighten Ray?  And the rounds are police issue, which presumably Frank could acquire, but why, to distance Ray further from the police? More likely the shooter is connected more directly to the police, or to Ray's paternity, or some combination.

Frank is not yet as interesting as Tony Soprano, but he's off to a good start, as is True Detective this second season.

See also Season Two: True Detective: All New ... True Detective 2.2: Pulling a Game of Thrones

And see also Season One: True Detective: Socrates in Louisiana ... True Detective Season One Finale: Light above Darkness

 
Like philosophic crime fiction?   Try The Plot to Save Socrates ...

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