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Dec. 15th, 2011 03:57 amWe picked up Blue Velvet on blu ray at Target down in Buffalo. Don't know when I saw it last, but this time what struck me is how it's a Hitchcock movie. It's basically all later Lynch in embryo, sure, or anyway the self-written or co-written projects, and none of that is Hitchcock, but this is both all of those and Hitchcock. I don't know if he thought of it that way - he's consciously invoking '50s movie pastoral, along the Sirk or Ray line where even the conflicts now seem like pastoral, and then invading all that with slicing ugliness, and we've come to recognize that as the Lynch style, but in retrospect it's also basically peak Hitchcock's take on, or design on, America. Here this is accompanied by Hitchcockian music, stairways, cuts - I'd assume they were references too, but they're throughout, they're the style. Only thing missing is the smirk Hitchcock puts on everything but Vertigo (to the detriment of Vertigo), but where Lynch surpasses Hitchcock most may be his mastery of the smirkless mode, including its comedic possibilities.
I'm not saying Hitchcock doesn't mean it, but he's like one of those people who can always settle back into not looking like they mean it, such that you're never sure whether they meant it. It's like you start one of his movies wondering if he'll kill you. And you catch him sometimes just reading a magazine and sometimes behind you with a knife and you're not sure which is the joke, and that's what's funny, and also whatever the opposite thrill from funny is that gives the name to thrillers, some uneasily vicarious fear. Hitchcock movies are about seeing Hitchcock movies, I verge on saying, though I hate that kind of sentence.
So that's what Lynch didn't carry over, but as for the rest...I guess Rear Window's the biggest contamination - sneaking dry-mouthed into someone else's house may be the master Lynch trope. But maybe Vertigo almost as much, such that deliberate references to Persona in Lynch films might be evasions. Though a clever editor might be able to cut the two into a Lynch movie.
I'm not saying Hitchcock doesn't mean it, but he's like one of those people who can always settle back into not looking like they mean it, such that you're never sure whether they meant it. It's like you start one of his movies wondering if he'll kill you. And you catch him sometimes just reading a magazine and sometimes behind you with a knife and you're not sure which is the joke, and that's what's funny, and also whatever the opposite thrill from funny is that gives the name to thrillers, some uneasily vicarious fear. Hitchcock movies are about seeing Hitchcock movies, I verge on saying, though I hate that kind of sentence.
So that's what Lynch didn't carry over, but as for the rest...I guess Rear Window's the biggest contamination - sneaking dry-mouthed into someone else's house may be the master Lynch trope. But maybe Vertigo almost as much, such that deliberate references to Persona in Lynch films might be evasions. Though a clever editor might be able to cut the two into a Lynch movie.
