Blue Velvet and A Dream: Remembering David Lynch and William Blake’s puppetry of dreams.
J.A.G. Mabbutt
When giants pass, it’s often left to those smaller and more diminished to witness the space left behind and think ‘what can now fill such a vacuum?’
The same can be said and considered when observing the vacuum left behind in the wake of David Lynch’s recent passing. A true titan of visual arts, Lynch shepherded in a monumental shift in how cinema is both created and perceived. A character sustained by motifs and tropes with a lit cigarette, a silvered chaotic quiff and an enigmatic grin, Lynch, like his art, was marked by symbolism and a miasma of mystery.
Upon hearing of his death, a pictorial conveyor belt of his films began to play out in my mind. They lulled me into nostalgia as I remembered my first screening of Lynch’s brand of surrealism. Deliciously delirious, Lynch’s cult-classic masterpiece, Blue Velvet, throbbed into my consciousness with irresistible effect. A film painted with Lynch’s trademark palette of red, white and blue, Blue Velvet saddled two distinct theatres of American life, suburbia and the subterranean.
Crushed beneath the weight of mundanity, college student Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan) returns to Lumberton and finds himself ensnared within the tenebrous grasp of his hometown’s criminal cabal. Meek, Jeffrey performs a katabasis, retreating to the underworld reigned over by psychopathic gangster Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper), led by temptation and desire. The audience is given front-row seats to Lynch’s assessment of the liminal passageways between the suburbs and urban life, the waking world and dreams, the home and the undergrowth, allowing them to assess the oneiric scope of Lynch’s visionary narrative.
William Blake’s poem, ‘A Dream’ burns with a similar, psilocybin-laced burst of surrealism. Like Lynch, Blake can be remembered as a monumental artistic visionary— a prophetic genius who was equally as capable of conjuring nuance as he was at dissembling the world that existed around him.
Within the poem, Blake describes the interactions between a community of bugs, all bent on assisting an ant who is motivated to find her missing loved ones. The narrator, a visitor into such a strange world, voices an abundance of sympathy for the suffering ant and, with the help of a glow-worm and beetle, decides to help reunite the ant with her children and love. Blake’s poetic tale fosters a unique merging of themes, ideas and maddening images.
Yes, the poem explores the definitive nature of a dream; however, its depths shine with a spirited story that resembles a traditional fairytale. Within both Blake’s poem and Lynch’s film, a friction exists in their shared dominion over the significance of dreams and the liminal spaces that exist within them.
Fundamentally, both pieces of art boast dram-like environments. Lynch’s film is spliced together with moments in which the protagonist is forced to spar with his own perceptions. He ultimately veers into the path of a foreign, hostile society that is increasingly different to his own.
The recurring motifs of a mysterious yellow-coat adorned man, the nocturnal nightclub of lounge-singer Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rossellini), Frank’s narcotic-induced animalism and his ally, Ben’s ghostly lip-syncing of Roy Orbison’s ‘In Dreams,’ all reflect oneiric characteristics. Lynch’s intentions to blur the line between reality and fantasy not only solidify Lynch’s surrealist vision, but also spark our own doubts to whether what we are witnessing is real or is Jeffrey’s own escapist dreams. If we match this to Blake’s poem, we can recognise how both Lynch and Blake have invited the audience to acknowledge the shape-shifting qualities of a dream reflecting our own fantasies. Like Jeffrey in Blue Velvet, Blake’s narrator navigates a new environment beset with an escapist narrative requiring them to assist those in need. Made to become a ‘saviour,’ Jeffrey and Blake’s narrator use their dream-like environments as a lever, uplifting the mundanity of their reality and replacing it with a feigned heroism that elevates them beyond their real-selves.
Jeffrey’s motivation to liberate Dorothy and help her save her husband and child is desire-driven. He both lusts after the mercurial Dorothy, and seeks out the fantasy of flourishing a self-made cape to rescue a damsel in distress. Dorothy, like the ant in Blake’s poem, is chained to remaining an archetype of the dreamer’s design. Their shared ‘need’ for a saviour turn them into mere narrative props whose suffering and sorrow fuels the fiery imaginations of their apparent rescuers.
An entomologist might also take interest in both Lynch’s film and Blake’s poem. Stocked with a cast of creepy-crawlies, Blake’s dream-state is squashed amongst the undergrowth. Interestingly, the poets decision to shrink his narrator and frame him aside the exploits of creatures commonly ignored or shunned, might prompt the reader to realise that dreams can render that which is small with great interest. In Blue Velvet, Lynch begins Jeffrey’s odyssey far from where he might soon traverse. In the opening moments, Lynch focuses his and Jeffrey’s attention towards the undergrowth— the ignored region where most might find little interest.
However, Lynch reveals that amongst its leafy-green blades of grass, the undergrowth of suburbia hoards a whole wealth of artefacts and tokens. A severed ear patched with jade-tinted mould is hidden amongst the foliage of Jeffrey’s neighbourhood. It is Jeffrey’s discovery of such a strange appendage that pivots him towards that journey he takes throughout the film. On the zoomed in shot of the ear, Lynch reveals a parade of ants that scuttle upon the fleshy remains.
Where Lynch and his camera identify the ants as scavengers, parasites on a white-picket bordered lawn, Blake possesses his insects with a more human spirit. Up-lifted and united, Blake’s bugs are browed with a love for their community. In support of the ant, the glow-worm and beetle represent Blake’s hopes for humanity as they all endeavour to be helpful. Might this suggest that Blake’s hopes were indeed limited to being only achievable within a dreamer’s imagination? If so, Blake’s dream is a land of contradictions (a common Blake motif), as he adorns these little-loved creatures with beautiful characteristics.
Lynch’s town of Lumberton also deals in contradictions, but in a messier way. Jeffrey’s disguise as an exterminator tasked with the eradication of pests and insects when attempting to access Dorothy’s apartment, suggests to the audience that a choice of costume can suggest something deeper. Like a dashing knight preoccupied by a quest to rescue a damsel-in-distress from a dragon, Jeffrey’s ‘armour’ is hideously boastful of its intentions to exterminate the parasites feeding off Dorothy, namely Frank and his shadowy crew. Assuming the moniker, ‘The Bug Man,’ Jeffrey’s dream becomes reality and bleeds him dry of the mundanity that had at once seemingly paralysed him.
Hundreds of years separate Lynch's film and Blake’s poem, and such distance often warps with how concepts are presented. Dreams have, for centuries, acted as catalysts the the creative process. They intoxicate those that are in need of escape and save those in need of saving.
Lynch’s surreal portraits of an American civilisation that has become static and sterile are alchemical in nature, providing Lynch ample room to chemically unbalance the way that reality is perceived. Blake does this also, however his augmentation of reality differs in approach and appearance. Studded with celestial iconography, Blake’s dreams act as prompts to remind us how the imagination is integral to creativity, both grand and meagre.
While Blake succeeded in exhibiting the creative value of dreaming, hundreds of years later Lynch exposed how dreams can resurrect not only creativity but our understanding of the self.
David Lynch will forever reside in a pantheon of those lost, yet his art remains within the fabric of the present. Like the smoke that so effortlessly seeped from the end of one of Lynch’s many cigarettes, his impact will perfume visual artistry for many years to come.
