I’d Love To Turn You On At The Movies #221 - Blue Velvet (1986, directed by David Lynch)

Let me start by saying that Blue Velvet has scenes in it that many people would find objectionable. It contains moments of disturbing violence and misogyny. The characters seem to have no redeeming qualities, and the action moves in a dreamy quality where behavior and motivation are unmoored from each other and one is left with a sense of physical and spiritual disorientation. Perhaps this was director David Lynch’s intention. Blue Velvet takes the viewer to a world where things seem comfortable and normal on the surface, but when one looks just below, there is a world crawling with ugliness and depravity. It is in the extraordinary detail that Mr. Lynch pays to both sides of this reality that defines the greatness of his movie.

The central metaphor in the film revolves around main character Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle McLachlan) finding a severed human ear in a field near his parents’ house. The camera leads us into the ear and we do not come out until the story ends. The ear is a literal entry point to a mystery and a symbolic entry into the darkest parts of human behavior. Jeffrey takes the ear to the police, where he becomes reacquainted with the detective’s daughter Sandy (Laura Dern) who happens to be an old friend. Now as an unlikely “MacMillan and Wife” the pair set out to discover the truth about the ear. Of course, the truth is every bit as unsavory as one would imagine. The weird plot is secondary to the overall sense of dread that permeates nearly every scene. Jeffrey and Sandy become embroiled in the lives of a masochistic lounge singer played Isabella Rossellini and her lover/antagonist Frank Booth played with volcanic fury and cruelty by Dennis Hopper. Much of the movie’s fame and notoriety comes from the scenes with these two actors. Rossellini manages to be simultaneously sexy, tragic, dangerous and vulnerable. Her character is tortured by abuse, but seemingly gets sexual pleasure from it. Her behavior seems confounding, but by the end of the film we understand she is another symptom of this cinematic universe where we are constantly just on the edge between the normal “daytime” world and the shadowy underbelly of modern life. The lord of the underworld in this film is Frank Booth. Hopper creates a degenerate for the ages in the gas-huffing, drug dealing, sadistic hoodlum, setting the template for many bad guys to come in the modern age. He is the stereotype of the guy so beyond the law and the standard societal mores that he becomes a moral code unto himself. Hopper was coming off a long dry period in Hollywood, much of it the result of his own real-life Frank Booth-esque behavior, but because of the ferocious intensity of his portrayal his career began its much-celebrated upswing after Blue Velvet.

Ultimately, it is David Lynch who is the star of Blue Velvet. As mentioned, the movie contains scenes of extreme behavior, however Lynch keeps you engaged even as you are repulsed. It is his artist’s sense of the details that make them so indelible. One of the most memorable scenes of the movie involves Frank Booth visiting a drug dealing acquaintance. The scene is shot with garish surrealism as character actor Dean Stockwell pantomimes a Roy Orbison song like a scene from Cabaret. In this scene we are given clues to Frank Booth’s humanity and the underlying sadness of all the characters. A potentially throw-away scene illuminates all the themes running through the film. This type of juxtaposition is Lynch’s greatest asset. For every sun-soaked scene of suburbia there are two shadowy glimpses down dark alleys. As the seemingly straight relationship between Sandy and Jeffrey develops, Jeffrey’s feelings for Rossellini’s threatened lounge singer becomes a twisted love triangle with no satisfactory solution. Lynch’s vision may be upsetting but it is coherent. Not just coherent but, artistically rewarding, intellectually stimulating, philosophically challenging. Does love look the same for everyone? Are we all capable of descending to the lowest depths of depravity? Is there a definitive good and evil? Is there an ugly truth behind every lovely image? All thought-provoking ideas, and David Lynch explores them with a true artist’s touch. His technical skills are all marshalled to the perfect representation of the line between dark and light: capturing the moment it goes from day to dusk.

The final line spoken in the film is “It’s a strange world isn’t it?” Though it is meant in an ironic, almost comic way, director David Lynch puts to film the notion that there is much we don’t know in everyday life. To make seen the un-seeable is the artist’s task, and David Lynch succeeds like few others.

-         Paul Epstein

I’d Love To Turn You On At The Movies #148 – Neil Young’s Rust Never Sleeps and Human Highway

Neil Young gave us the best description of himself and his music in the title of his 1968 song “I Am A Child.” The magic and genius of Neil Young is that the child-like sense of wonder and fun never left him or his music. Not then, not now (listen to his superbly weird new album Earth for proof of that) and certainly not in 1978 when he filmed Rust Never Sleeps and began principle filming of Human Highway. Both of these films are direct references to Young’s childhood. They are depictions of a man-child adrift in a confusing world of corrupt adult motivations. Neil sees himself as a little boy alone in an oversized world of dangerous machines and corrupt values. He wields his guitar and his voice (like the sharp cutting tools they are) against the inconsistencies and absurdities of the world: environmental genocide, slimy record label creeps, military-industrial capitalists, even the double-edged sword of his own fame. The movies outwardly seem like they are totally different, but a close look shows them to be two views of the same scene.

Human Highway was ultimately released in 1982 to little or no fanfare. It was given a brief art-house and midnight movie run and then essentially shelved for a long time. The negative public and critical reception at the time of its release is not surprising because it is a kaleidoscopic mash-up of ideas and images loosely held together with a cartoonish plot about a small town loser named Lionel Switch who…does some stuff and uh, meets some people and uh….yeah - what happens doesn’t really matter because the overall effect of the movie is that of an 80 minute MTV-style video starring Young, Devo and a number of Hollywood B-listers, (Dennis Hopper, Dean Stockwell, Sally Kirkland) romping around colorful sets and singing weird songs and making vaguely political statements about nuclear energy and dangerous militarism during the heart of the cold war. The movie is actually quite entertaining if you like Neil Young, and possibly unbearable if you don’t. Although there are a few set pieces like the hilarious “Worried Man Blues” or Neil and Devo performing a wild version of “Hey Hey, My My,” the movie’s real value is as a backdrop to Rust Never Sleeps, the concert documentary Young was filming at the same time he was working on Human Highway.

Upon release, Rust Never Sleeps was universally acclaimed as one of the best concert movies ever made and absolutely nothing has happened in the ensuing 38 years to do anything but enhance that reputation. It remains a completely riveting portrait of an artist at the height of his creativity; simultaneously reveling in past glory and coming to grips with the historical crossroads that will place him directly in the crosshairs of a cultural battle.

Like many of his generation, Neil Young was viewed with skepticism by the punk rock world, and in turn the baby boom generation that Young had so eloquently represented in his earlier years cast a suspicious eye on the nihilistic tendencies of the punks. But unlike so many others, Young did not shy away from the subject, writing an anthem for that crossroads generation, “Hey Hey, My My” (“Out Of The Blue/Into The Black”), which challenged them (and himself) to either get into it or get out of the way. It was bold and a little shocking to many longtime listeners. He also imbued his latest music, highlighted in the movie, with a manic punk-like energy fans had never seen before. Songs like “Sedan Delivery,” “Welfare Mothers” and “Hey Hey, My My” scream with a fury that belies Young’s status as one of the major figures of mellow contemporary rock. In fact every aspect of the performances in this movie show an artist ready to move forward instead of rely on past glory. Even many of his most iconic songs like “Tonight’s The Night,” “When You Dance,” “The Loner” and especially “Cortez The Killer” are given a reinvigorated treatment.

Rust Never Sleeps doesn’t only succeed as a concert documentary, it is also a high concept film with the narrative again revolving around Neil’s own view of himself as a child in a grown-up world. The normal stage gear: amplifiers, tuners, microphones etc. are all covered with oversized prop versions of themselves which dwarf the band. Neil himself opens the show lying on top of an amplifier in a giant sleeping bag like a kid waking up in the back yard.  The set is peppered with gags about being a child, and soundbites from the movie, Woodstock, which further the agenda of a little boy lost in an oversized environment. From the opening acoustic strums of “Sugar Mountain” and “I Am A Child” through to the final crunching riffs of “Like A Hurricane” and “Tonight’s The Night,” Neil and Crazy Horse deliver like never before. It is an absolute primer on why Neil Young is so great.

Taken as bookends to Neil’s momentous 1978, these two movies present one of the strongest arguments for creative freedom. Given control of his own destiny, Neil Young was able to produce a lasting monument to growth and the creative process.

-         Paul Epstein

I'd Love to Turn You On At the Movies #139 - The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (1986, dir. Tobe Hooper)

In 1974, director Tobe Hooper released The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, a nightmarish and intense horror film about a family of murderous cannibals that, with a budget of less than $100,000, raked in over $30 million in the U.S. alone and now stands high on almost any list of the all-time great horror films. Despite the film’s reputation (and title) its on-screen violence is actually quite mild – the makers had hoped to secure a PG rating – with the very effective result of leaving the more brutal aspects of the film’s violence to the viewer’s imagination. Hooper has long insisted that the film is a dark comedy, but because of the harrowing intensity that ended up earning it an R rating it can be hard for some viewers to laugh – except maybe as a release of tension. The success of the film lead Hooper and his co-screenwriter to start thinking up a sequel, but it kept getting back-burnered, shelved, and otherwise delayed until Hooper scrapped his initial sequel idea, connected with the producers of the notorious Cannon Films, and brought on a new screenwriter to create The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2.

For some reason, this film is decidedly less well-liked by most than the original. Not me though. Situated right in the middle of the 80s as the slasher (and sequel) era was giving way to some great horror-comedy (Re-Animator, Evil Dead 2, Return of the Living Dead, etc.) and featuring a promotional poster that mocked the then-hot film The Breakfast Club and bore the tagline “After a decade of silence… the buzzz is back,” the sequel seemed poised to be a worthy box office draw honoring the original classic. Add to this that it also utilized the talents of screenwriter L.M. Kit Carson (star of the 60s underground hit David Holman’s Diary, writer/director of the Dennis Hopper semi-documentary The American Dreamer, and writer of 1984’s Paris, Texas) and brought original director Tobe Hooper back into the fold along with actor Jim Siedow (reprising his role of The Cook from the original film). Carson took the comedic subtext of Hooper’s earlier film into something that openly satirized things that Hooper had been implicitly referring to – the Vietnam War (and now, its aftermath), The Cook ranting about how hard the competition is in capitalism for a working class chef, and so forth. Both are subtext in the 1974 film but very much on the surface here. And where the performances of the original strove for documentary-like realism, here the murderous family (plus Dennis Hopper as the avenging angel Lefty) are portrayed as over-the-top, seemingly designed solely to bring chuckles – or at least incredulity – throughout. And then there’s the blood – lots of it. This being the 80s, Hooper enlisted special effects master Tom Savini to provide the requisite amount of gore for the film (in addition to subtler work, like the aged face of the 137 year-old Grandpa), distributed in an equally over-the-top show to match the unhinged performances on tap.

And yet – even with its decidedly unrealistic tones, even with its over-the-top gore, even with its satirical flair, the film manages to be nearly as unnerving as the original. And that’s mainly due to our central character, the radio DJ Stretch (Caroline Williams in a mostly thankless role). She’s a late-night DJ who unwittingly overhears a murder by the family and is subsequently stalked by them. Her down-to-earth performance grounds the film from flying off into becoming the “geek show” that Roger Ebert (who hated it) saw in it. When she’s in danger, we’re scared. When a couple of the family members visit her at the radio station, it’s terrifyingly creepy. As the film progresses and she tracks the family to their underground lair it becomes something of an amped up remake of the first film’s climactic scenes (and a flash forward to Rob Zombie’s far less effective homage, House of 1000 Corpses), in which she’s imprisoned, tormented, and tries to escape while pursued by the chainsaw wielding killer Leatherface and his deranged brother. It’s easy to laugh it off if you want, but if you let it the film gets under your skin and becomes nearly as effective as the blunt nightmare of the original film.

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 was plagued with issues during its creation – money to make the film ebbed and flowed with the fortunes of producers Golan and Globus of Cannon Films (a low-budget studio that’s the subject of the entertaining documentary Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films). Hooper delivered a film he figured was in line with the violence quotient of the day but was slapped with an X by the ratings board, choosing to release the film unrated which lead to its distribution being severely hampered in the process. So in the same year that the utterly mediocre Jason Lives: Friday the 13th Part VI managed to draw nearly 20 million out of the pockets of filmgoers, this one – with intelligent (if not exactly artistic) ambitions – barely scraped out enough to make its budget back and make a few extra bucks. Dennis Hopper – right then in the middle of a run of films that included an Academy Award nomination for Hoosiers and other honors for his role in Blue Velvet – is alleged to have said that this was the worst film he’d ever been in. By contrast, Bill Moseley, who had the role of Leatherface’s brother Chop-Top, has named the role as his favorite of his own. I’m definitely in Moseley’s camp – not only does he turn in a truly effective performance, the film as a whole finds the perfect pitch of dark humor and nightmarish terror and stands as one of the highlights of 1980s horror/comedies.

-         Patrick Brown